Unit testing

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....

Southampton

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.)

Conclusions

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....

DebCamp

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....

DebConf9 continues

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....

DebConf9

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....

Blog back

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.

The Techteam Suck

(But so does PyBlosxom for using file timestamps.)

Thinking

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....

Paper

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?...