afongen

The Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examimation of the Eolas patent, apparently in reaction to the W3C and others’ outlines of prior art. Yee-hah.

If this goes well, the only significant lasting result of the patent fiasco will be multiple, concurrent installations of Internet Explorer on Windows.

I haven’t paid much attention to Perl’s Inline modules, which let you embed other languages in Perl programs. I’ve never had a need, and didn’t realize how extensive the list of modules is. However, I think I can find a use for Inline::Java, thanks to Phil Crow’s latest article on Perl.com, “Bringing Java into Perl.” How very cool.

Ars Technica Review of Panther.

I still haven’t installed Panther. I really have to do so Real Soon Now.

The big band concert the other night was great fun. The place was packed, maybe the biggest crowd they’ve had yet, and the food was plentiful and not half bad. The band was fantastic. The only downside with its being a church band is that it gets some random vocalists, who each sing a song or two. Ye gods, some of them are bad. The band’s pianist has a wonderful voice, but everyone else who sang stank. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. Luckily there were not many, and the band itself is so good that I can easily overlook a few minutes of uncomfortable anguish.

On the way out, we had ample opportunity to watch a lunar eclipse, as we were driving straight toward it. Marvellous. I had no idea that there was going to be an eclipse until Kiara wondered aloud, “Isn’t the moon smaller than it was 10 minutes ago?” While she warmed up with the band, I sat in the parking lot and watched the moon.

Owen’s birthday party on Sunday was a good time, too. I’m not a big one for parties so was nervous about having even a modest 11-16 people over, but Owen was having such an obviously good time and it was so good to see family and friends that it was no trouble at all. We’ve got some good photos, I think, so we’ll be passing those along to folks who missed it.

Disclaimer: this is not an official communication from my employer. Minnesota State Colleges and Universities is hiring a Web Communications Coordinator. The job will be in the Public Affairs office, and it looks like they’re looking for someone with a communications/marketing background. For more information, see the job posting.

My impression (which may be off base, as I am not at all involved with the hiring process) is that the job will not be a highly technical one — familiarity with HTML and CSS might be as rough as it gets — but will instead focus on site content and services, on developing the System’s web site to convey key messages and provide services for target audiences and constituencies. Perfect for someone who can write & edit worth a damn and who understands the pecularities and opportunities of web publishing.

Now is a good time to get in on a position like this, as the site is going through a major overhaul of both design and purpose, and the web is being integrated more thoroughly and conscientiously in marketing and communication efforts. I mentioned early this summer how for the first time our internal web team is implementing the design, so we can pay attention to crucial things like accessibility and web standards. This means, among other things, that marketing and IT are cooperating quite amicably. It’s been fun.

I imagine that most webfolk who read this blog either don’t live in Minnesota or are more on the technical side of things, but in case you or someone you know might be interested in the job, I mention it here. You see, I’d rather that they not hire a moron. :-)

Most of the day was spent in preparation for Owen’s birthday party. We’re having it tomorrow instead of his birthday because it was the closest we could come to matching folks’ schedules, and his grandma was in Sweden on his actual birthday (Tuesday). Can’t have his first birthday party without Grandma. His friend Jack came over this morning with his mom, and they helped bake a cake and played with Owen a bit. All in all, not a bad day.

Hopefully no one will notice until it’s too late that we scheduled the party to start at the same time as kickoff for the Vikings game. We are most decidedly not football fans, so didn’t know about the conflict until it was too late. Kiara’s brother already noticed, since he’s flying out to San Diego for the game. Rats.

And now we’re off to Mahtomedi for Kiara’s big band concert. She joined the band when we joined the church a number of years back, and even though we are no longer members (thank god), she still plays with the band because it is kick-ass. No, really. It’s a bunch of long-time musicians, many of whom played with the people who wrote the music. They know what they’re doing. The band plays at the church twice a year, plus a gig or two around town, so the concert’s a special event for everyone. In fact, Kiara played in last year’s fall concert only days before giving birth to Owen. :) We think that’s why he likes jazz and swing so much.

Games at work may be good for you.

Ain’t science great? Thing is, I’d never do this. I don’t like to play games.

My son Owen is one year old today.

Need I say more?

Well, yes, I probably do. But I’m at a loss for words.

I took the day off work and we did some of his favorite things: nap, read, eat pancakes, chase each other around the ottoman, run around so he feels the wind on his face, and laugh a lot. It was a good day.

GPGMail , a GnuPG plugin for Apple’s Mail.app, went 1.0 the other day, which reminded me to install it so I could start using PGP again. First I had to get MacGPG going, but that was a snap. I was up and running in about five minutes. That’s the way it should be.

One thing that I like about the MacGPG apps is that the GUI functions open up a terminal window, so I see the gpg commands. That’s one way to learn ’em. And I really like how GPGMail integrates with Mail. Very pleased, I am.

Gah. I just spent more time than I’d care to admit working on a stupid little bug. I’m writing a module that opens up a socket, sends a request (remote procedure call, really) as XML, gets an XML response, and closes the socket. Simple enough, except that the XML I was getting back didn’t quite seem right. It looked fine if I picked it off the stream byte by byte, but if I just slurped the whole thing up ($str = — it’s just a couple hundred bytes, after all) it was all messed up. At first I figured maybe it was a buffering problem, even though that didn’t quite make sense, but no. I tried to grab the response line by line:

$/ = CR;
while (my $buf = ( {
  $response .= $buf;
}

But no. When I tried to print "$response\n", it was a mangled mess. My tests were fine, but it didn’t look right.

You’re probably seeing the problem already: I wasn’t stripping the carriage return, so it didn’t print properly on Windows or Unix, which use CRLF and LF, respectively. Duh.

$/ = CR;
while (my $buf = ( {
 chomp $buf;
 $response .= $buf;
}

Dumb, dumb, dumb. This is the sort of thing that I would have picked up on right away, were I not scattered across too many projects for me to focus properly. I should have trusted my tests and just moved on. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to print the response to the terminal, in the first place. This’ll teach me.