An old project (2000-2001), started when I was very new to muds.

mpMUD is a mud server implemented in Perl, with four revisions, starting as a Diku/Circle imitation and diverging. It is capable of running under MacPerl.

The complete source code, notes, test world data, and logs are available.

The RSS feed for this site has been repaired (the embedded URLs referenced an old web host).

The URL of this site's RSS feed is http://home.san.rr.com/lanois/perl/site.xml

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

My hosting provider recently updated the server this site is on, and in that process Perl was upgraded to version 5.8.8. Everything seemed to work fine until I started getting hit by comment spam. A quick investigation revealed that MT-Blacklist had stopped working. Not good.

MT-Blacklist kept causing this error:

Long integer size is not compatible at ../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) line 366, at [path to MT directory]/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 28

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I started the project with two goals in mind: Getting more experience developing real-world Web applications and promoting Chef Moz, a corner of the Open Directory Project devoted to restaurant listings and reviews. Chef Moz offers its entire database under an open license, but no one appears to be doing anything with it.

I'm beginning to understand why. There are a lot of obstacles to overcome when dealing with 134 megabytes of XML data that isn't well-formed, contains hundreds of illegal characters, and isn't in the UTF-8 character set as described in the documentation. (I was so desperate at one point I turned to Perl, which is my language of last resort.)

I'm hoping the project becomes a useful consumer-friendly interface to Chef Moz, which is designed more for project contributors than hungry diners, as shown in this before and after view. At a minimum, it should give me plenty of fodder for programming articles here on Workbench (and future books).
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I've decided to move the hosting for this site over to aspnix soon.   Maybe when CS 2.1 comes out I'll make the move.  Just looking to save some cash at the moment.   I'm got a new skin I've been working on and you might see it before that but I doubt it.

With the exception of what I do for a living I haven't touched a computer for about a week (unless you count my 360 I suppose).   Just haven't been motivated.  I'm on vacation next week, so I might work on the site a day or so, but I  know we are taking the girls to the zoo and maybe, just maybe I'll get to visit an Apple Store and maybe (if my wife lets me of course) come home with one of these.

Yggdrasil is an intriguingpure Perl content management system, based on Text::Template.

Early this week, in an email to a coworker, I mentioned that I made music and pointed her to my site. On Thursday she wrote back and said “cool, you’re even on iTunes!” This surprised me; my two albums were submitted about 3 and 8 weeks ago and hadn’t shown up on iTunes as of Monday or so. But I looked, and indeed, there they both are on iTunes. For those of you who’ve heard the music, I’d appreciate a customer review. For those of you who haven’t, what are you waiting for? :-) Of course there are also old-fashioned shiny discs in plastic cases. Thanks!

Last modified: 24 June 2006, 19:18

The good folks working on HD DVD at Microsoft have started a blog called 'TheHD DVD Insiders' - it's starting out small, but for the Home Theater geekand industry pro alike, I expect this is going to become a popular site to supplementthe AVSForums so many of us enjoy for the insidescoop.  Not much content yet, but Ben and others tell me they have podcasts,interviews, Q&A's and more in store.  Subscribed.

The Pragmatic Programmer suggests learning a new programming language (at least) once per year. Specifically, you should learn a language that changes the way you think about things - learning C# if you know Java doesn't count.

Last year I decided to learn Ruby - a lot of people told me how great it is. At first I thought it was pointless, but I eventually dived in. Man, I'm glad I did! I've since fallen in love with language.

Ruby is an incredibly clean and concise loosly typed OO language - a much purer OO than Java as everything is an object. It has some very nice features such as blocks/closures and the ability to create new types on the fly. But what it really taught me was the power of simplicity. Using Ruby I could solve problems quicker, with far less code which was easier to maintain and well designed. And the code looks so good to - zero fluff. Learning about simplicity was very much a theme for me last year.

On top of that I had to get to grips with maintaining loosly typed code. I never really mastered this in my Perl hacking days which is probably why I love Java so much. However, I've since become test-infected and cannot write a line of code that isn't test first (seriously - I can't - it's annoying sometimes!). The great thing about becoming test-infected is you end up with very very strongly typed code. Effective unit tests show many more problems than the compiler as they actually test the code does the right thing rather than just if it's syntacticly correct. And the tests provide an excellent reference manual for your objects.

So anyway, Ruby has changed the way I think and I really would write business applications in this language (if I could convince the clients I work for).

But it's a new year now and I'm looking for a new language. So what do I learn?

Smalltalk has been recommended but I think I may have already learned some of it's most important lessons through Ruby.

From chatting to colleagues, I've narrowed the list down to:

• LISP (with CLOS and MOP)
• Scheme
• Haskall
• Self

So, which one should it be? How will they change the way I think? What will you be learning this year?