lately

A few random things I’ve been working on lately:

• Started migrating this blog into ikiwiki. Stuck on a problem with file create/modify times not being preserved, which makes complete sense but is annoying. I think a plugin is required, much like one I wrote for blosxom once upon a time.

• Made progress with Test::MockTerm. The terminal itself works, with open() and POSIX::isatty() being overidden correctly. I’m currently planning the interface for sending and handling control characters (and from there emulating Term::ReadKey). Its hairy.

• Made a new release of XML::Quick after a couple of years. The test suite now runs (the were bugs in the suite itself) and an ancient bug was taken care of to boot.

• Dug out XML::Spice, something I started a couple of years ago as an answer to Python’s stan XML generation library. It already has some funky magic in place that lets you call the generator function to create some piece of XML which totally complete and usable, but then call the generator again with that returned chunk as one of the arguments to have it embed that chunk into another chunk of XML. At this point both are valid, but it can do some funky stuff like move and reprefix namespace declarations to make the result more concise without changing the semantics. It does this without having to reparse the original XML. You have to read the tests to find out more. In any case, its not finished yet and perhaps never will be since I’m long over XML.

• Also dug out HTML::Calendar::Render (no link yet), which you give a bunch of events and it creates a calendar using HTML tables. This was done for work, at a time when we temporarily needed an alternative view to our corporate calendar system. Producing calendars in HTML is nothing new, but this is prettier than any of others I’ve seen on CPAN. It works really hard to produce stuff that looks like your calendar in something like Outlook, where overlapping events appear next to each other at half-width. This one I’m kinda interested in getting into some kind of release quality. The plan is to split out the tree generator from the renderer itself, so you can add modules that might render it with or without HTML tables, in PDF, or via cairo. Coming soon I guess.