2010-04-03: Tie::ShadowHash 1.00
This is a Perl module that lets you stack multiple hash-like data sources
together and treat them like a merged hash. Queries on the hash are
satisfied by the first hash in the stack that has the desired key and
iteration through the hash iterates through each in turn. You can store
or delete elements from the hash and those changes are reflected in later
uses, but the underlying data sources are not changed; all modifications
are kept as local overrides. There's also some convenience support for
treating text files as hashes.
I wrote this module eons ago and have always been fairly proud of it, but
so far as I knew, no one ever used it. It was going to be used in a new
version of News::Gateway, but as long-time
followers of my development work know, that module is kind of cursed. So
I'd mostly forgotten about it.
Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Wiki::Toolkit started using
it, and then someone wanted to package it for Debian! I found out about
that because of a discussion on debian-perl about how to name the package,
since I always used to abbreviate my CPAN distribution names and it was in
CPAN as ShadowHash.
This release dusts the module off, converts the VCS from CVS to Git,
updates the coding style and documentation, fixes the test suite to use
Test::More, and fixes a few long-standing bugs that I noticed when reading
through the code with fresh eyes. It also now has a proper 1.00 version
number, since I don't expect to have to make backward-incompatible changes
to it.
You can get the latest version from the Tie::ShadowHash distribution page.
2010-04-12: spin-rss 1.22
A very short update to my program for generating RSS feeds to correctly
handle links to the base URL for a particular feed. When I make sweeping
changes through my web site, like the recent broken link cleanup, the only
relevant page to link to is the top-level page, but a link of / was
adding a double-slash to the end of the top-level URL. Special-case a
link of / to just link to the base URL.
You can get the latest version of spin-rss from my web tools distribution page.
2010-04-13: C TAP Harness 1.2
I'm getting ready to do some more software releases (hopefully several),
which means doing new releases of the underlying support libraries. And I
never want to do a release without taking a few things off the to-do list.
So, this afternoon, I finished the last major bit of the TAP protocol I'd
not implemented: accepting the test plan at the end of the test output
instead of the beginning.
It turned out to be just as easy to accept the test plan anywhere during
the test output, so that's what the TAP driver now does. And, since the
driver supported it, I also added lazy planning to the C and shell TAP
libraries. If you do lazy planning instead of regular planning at the
start of the test, you don't have to declare how many tests there will be,
and the library will take care of automatically printing the plan at the
end of the test program. I don't recommend this since everything can
appear fine if the test exits in the middle for some reason, but it makes
writing tests faster and I suspect some people will like it.
I also added diag and sysdiag functions to the TAP library which report
warnings prefixed by the # character required by the TAP protocol
and did some coding style and data type cleanup.
I've been starting a revision of the style for my software distribution
pages to add a sidebar with the key links to the top of the page, since
otherwise one has to scroll down to the bottom to get the download link.
That's now done on the C TAP Harness distribution page, joining the pages
for remctl, wallet, and pam-afs-session.
You can get the latest version from the
C TAP Harness distribution page.
2010-04-22: rra-c-util 2.4
This release fixes a brown-paper bag in the krb5_free_error_message
replacement function and adds Autoconf macros for the PCRE library. It
also updates the package to the recent
C TAP Harness 1.2 release. I'm
hoping the next release of the package will include a utility library for
PAM modules, but I haven't finished that work yet.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2010-04-29: Hugo nominee haul I
I'm sure you've noticed that I've not been posting much lately. I'm
hoping to start changing that soon as well as providing an update; suffice
it to say for the moment that it's been a hell of a month, with some
obnoxious happenings at work, but I'm about to go on a much-needed
vacation.
It's getting close to Hugo season, which of course is time for more book
orders. I made the first of two expected orders to pick up the Hugo
nominees for this year as well as a few other things that looked
interesting, even though I've not been doing well so far this year at
reading. The contents of this order:
Steven Brust — Iorich (sff)
Pamela Dean — The Secret Country (sff)
Pamela Dean — The Hidden Land (sff)
Rosmeary Kirstein — The Steerswoman's Road (sff)
Ellen Klages — White Sands, Red Menace (mainstream)
Michael Lewis — Panic (non-fiction)
Sarah Monette — Corambis (sff)
Cherie Priest — Boneshaker (sff)
Robert J. Sawyer — WWW: Wake (sff)
John Scalzi — The God Engines (sff)
Catherynne M. Valente — Palimpsest (sff)
I'm hoping to get a lot of reading and reviewing done over the next week,
but I'm hoping more than that to do absolutely anything I feel like
doing.
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