That's Research?

I wrote a fairly substantial post about SQL formatting and SQL Pretty Print on the unprofessional sister site. It turned out to be slightly less unprofessional than the norm over there. Head on over if you're interested in that sort of thing. If you like the software, though, before deciding to buy a license, keep in mind that the company appears to be unreachable at the moment.

After wasting days fighting module dependencies and other issues while trying to reproduce a Catalyst installation on a new laptop, I gave up and decided to switch to Mojo and its associated web application framework Mojolicious. Mojolicious is another "Perl on Rails" framework and its claim to fame (over Catalyst) is that it has no dependencies other than a base Perl install.

The major down sides to using Mojolicious over Catalyst are that it's more or less completely undocumented and that it has very little functionality above dispatching and rendering templates. None of the fancy functionality that was available in Catalyst, bundled or installed separately, is available in the base install. Modules providing extra functionality to Mojo also require the application to hook in to them explicitly rather than implicitly hooking in at load time like Catalyst plugins, which is a trade-off that leads to a small bit of extra work for the application developer in exchange for vastly simplified code and a much more manageable dependency list.

While this means that I have to do a lot more work to get going, especially while still in the early days before the expected proliferation of Mojolicious-related modules on CPAN, at least I can get going on development rather than sit and wait for (or fix myself) any number of integration problems that are presently preventing the installation of the Task::Catalyst metapackage.

As for documentation, there is some, scattered across the web. Here are two blog entries that I found useful:

• Mark Stosberg, Review of Mojo 0.8.7, a new Perl web framework
• Steve Comrie, Getting started with Mojolicious - The New Perl Web Framework - Part 1

While rebooting the space trader game under Mojo, I decided to create a glue layer between Mojolicious and the application-specific code. This glue layer is responsible for setting up the environment nicely so that the context object can access session variables, a DBIC (DBIx::Class) model, and whatever else I end up needing, much like Catalyst did automatically. I'm still tweaking the interfaces and determining where things should go. More on this later.

Since gcc header dependencies were cleaned up in 4.3 lots of software has been failing to build from source. When I needed to install a new front-end for an older version of MythTV, 0.20.2, I found that it wouldn't build as a result of this change.

It was a simple but somewhat time-consuming matter of adding back the old implicit dependencies and tweaking a few things for other changes that have occurred since this version was released. If you need to build this particular old version of MythTV with a recent version of gcc, you may find this patch useful.

Note that this has been fixed in newer versions.

For quite a while now, I've been playing with the idea of making a casual persistent-universe web game in the theme of being a worker in an exaggerated version of the IT world. I don't want to get into the design just yet, but it might give you some idea of what I'm putting together if I mention that Jones in the Fast Lane and The Kingdom of Loathing were heavy influences. This game is what I had in mind while imagining the Comet framework which became the Halley project, though in the end I don't think I'll need Halley to get the level of interactivity that I want for this game. In fact, I don't yet have a really solid game design, but I do have a lot of competing ideas floating around. It'll have caffeinated drinks! And bad managers! And choices on whether to go to grad school or get out into industry! And a chance to get rich or go broke on the ponies stock market! Or maybe it won't.

For a variety of reasons, I have migrated this site from WordPress to Drupal. Since I didn't have too much content, or too many links coming in to the site, I decided not to bother fully supporting the WordPress permalinks. Most work, but some don't. If you got the 'page not found' error when you thought you were going somewhere, then sorry, I'm afraid you were caught by this. Please search for whatever you were trying to reach.

Update 2009-01-06: It looks like the WordPress import failed to take offset from UTC into consideration. All nodes older than this one are marked 7 or 8 (and maybe 6 or 9) hours later than they should be.