Weekend Adventures

Several things happened this weekend. First we got an e-mail from our landlord saying he was selling the flat. That made me kinda nervous, since we were planning to stay here for 4 more months. I rang him up and he said he'd try to make sure we could stay until July as agreed, so that's nice - I'd hate to try to find somewhere to rent for a month or two, because it clearly just wouldn't happen.

On Saturday morning I wrote a small Eliza bot for PGPlus, in perl. They do already exist, but this was more for a practice of Net::Telnet for when I write the web interface. I stuck the Eliza logic onto the top of the bot just so it didn't seem such a waste of time - that and it brings a bit of life to the talker ;) There is a little extra functionality; it has some admin commands, and I might add some stuff for users to save me messing with the pg+ source. It's been about 4 years since I last got my hands dirty with pg+ code, and it has such messy source you really need to spend some time getting into it - and I just don't have the time at the moment, so hacking a bit of extra stuff into a perl bot seems like quite a good idea.

I then noticed that the bright blue ink from the logo on my highlighters was wearing off all over my fingers and my mouth. I haven't bitten my pens since prep school, but I do still hold them in my mouth for a bit if I'm using several at once. I decided that bright blue lips wasn't a great look for me, so I cleaned all of the logos off with nail varnish remover, and now they look shiny clean. Insight into the mind of a crazy, eh?

Apart from watching a couple of episodes of Stargate, the rest of the weekend was devoted to the Flash work, which is still dragging on. As I've been going through the 21 activities I've been finding lots of little things to check and test, as well as adding features and even rewriting huge chunks of some of the activities; numbers 5 and 7 bear little resemblance to what they were this time last week. It's not that they were wrong - I have just thought of better ways to do them. I am now 112 steps through my 326 point checklist, although I still have 32 new features to add. Still, nearly there.

Comments

Mark S.

80% of the functionality, 20% of the time ;)

Good to hear you are almost through! I love those big long check lists of things - well, when you can start crossing things off it is a nice feeling - even better when there are like 5 things left :)

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