I spent the last day and a half writing a vaguely interesting Perl module for testing some code which gives a subtly different answer each time (i.e. incorporates data from time() and /dev/urandom) and has side effects (i.e. writes to the file system). By overriding Perl's built-in 'open' function, it is possible to prefix each filename with the location of a temporary directory, effectively emulating chroot(). I also replaced Perl's time() with one that always returned the same answer....

I have changed jobs, and now live in Southampton, working for SmoothWall. This week I have got married on Facebook, and went out to an "alternative" club until 1am on a weeknight. (Normally it plays heavy metal, but Wednesday night is cheese night.)

Well, I'm nearly at the end of DebConf - I'm missing the last day of talks, so travelling home tomorrow. It's been a really good experience - I mean, DebConf is always fun, but this time I feel like I'm getting more involved myself, and a bit closer to the heart of the community than I did before. In practical terms, the two-week holiday has helped me feel more laid-back - I even got complimented on how I always look relaxed, which was amusing....

This week, I've more or less finished my NM questions; I looked again at a problem in dak which turns out mainly to be caused by some edge cases in debconf (the package), so filed a bug there. Then looked at conglomerate, and came up with patches for a couple of bugs there as well. I'm quite looking forward to just being able to NMU these kind of things. With all this hacking, I've stayed up until around 4:30 for the past few nights - I really didn't mean to, it just happened....

Yesterday I almost updated mdbtools. Then I went to a debian perl team meeting, and promptly spent 24 hours trying to improve the speed of working with 1300+ git repositories. It's a bit tricky. This afternoon, I looked at some pkg-perl RC bugs... but they're tricky as well. I then updated the postgresql-autodoc man page, and sent it back upstream. Hopefully, next release the Debian package will not need any patches....

DebConf is in Spain this year, in Cáceres. Getting here involved a plane to Madrid, navigating the metro system, a 3.5 hour train journey and then a walk to the accommodation at 2am. This year I had actually looked at a map before arriving in the city, although hadn't bothered to bring one with me. Or note the exact address I was heading for... At night, it is still pleasantly warm here....

I have restored all my previous blog entries. I couldn't be bothered to think of a way to restore the post times, but I got the dates out of the path and used hardcodedates.py to overrride the timestamps. If this floods planets, I'm sorry.

(But so does PyBlosxom for using file timestamps.)

I spend (and have spent) a lot of time thinking. I also spent a lot of time reading. Every so often I reach conclusions... sometimes I remember them, sometimes not. A lot of them just got incorporated into my general world-view, I suppose. A long time ago it was thoughts about philosophy... these days I suppose it's mainly psychology. I've been thinking a lot about cognitive dissonance - I think there have been differences between where I am and how I think of myself....

I used to have a pile of paper, with notes/letters/junk going back several years. Piles like this have been sitting around in various corners of my room for as long as I remember. Now it's filed away - all in square-cut beige folders with labels on, in alphabetical order in a metal box. (Most of it got recycled.) I'm not sure what this means. Is "organization" an end in itself, or a means to an end?...