It's Friday

I'm heading over to the hospital in a little bit because my mom is having a short procedure done and she wants somebody responsible to be there to talk to the surgeon after it's finished. Talking to the surgeon is the only real way to get information about her status in a reasonable time frame. As can be expected, I'm taking my laptop and plan to get a little bit of work done here and there.

I uploaded the Beta 1 version of my Wikibooks editing bot to Slashdot today. This version is miles above the previous version of it. It has a lot of new features, better error handling and recovery, better integration, etc. You can actually log in and out without having to restart the whole program! I was planning to make an installer, but I haven't yet, so I just decided to forget about the installer entirely. It's really not that big a deal, especially not for the first beta, and so I will get around to doing it later. It took me about 15 minutes to package the files and upload them, and most of that was because I needed to look up the documentation on how to upload the files to sourceforge. I just don't make updates regularly enough to have the procedure memorized yet.

Working on uploading the release renewed my interest in the project. I'm going to spend a little bit of time working on a new feature that allows transform queueing. It's a feature that I've been wishing for recently, and maybe now is the time to get it working. We will see how the day goes.

I spent some time yesterday adding some documentation to my Octave implementation. I'm taking a short break from that project while I try to get some ideas together in my head about how to proceed from here. Soon, I would like to get it in a public repository, such as the Parrot SVN, or on sourceforge. Maybe being public will help to draw some attention to it, and I could use all the help I can get. I mailed in my CLA to the Perl Foundation the other day, and I'm probably going to request a commit bit next week.

I posted a patch yesterday for a fix to the PIR grammar. The patch was very short and involved adding a single small line to the Bison grammar file. I'm not an expert on Bison, but I think the solution was very straight-forward and easy to implement. Nobody has commented on it yet, however, so who knows.

I want to work more on my Parrot book, and I think I'm getting ready to start writing my Perl 6 book as well. I kicked around the idea of applying for a TPF grant to work on them, but I'm not sure yet if I want to make that kind of commitment to these projects. The Parrot book especially has been difficult so far because things keep changing so quickly, and it's hard to really nail down what is and is not "current".

Dana is coming out to my place tonight. We're heading out to her place tomorrow afternoon for dinner. She has a bridal shower on Sunday to go to, so I might be home from that early. There isn't a lot of school work or thesis work that I can do right now from home, so I'll probably be doing more Parrot or Perl work.

Speaking of school work, I have two projects that I've been working on but that need to be completed by wednesday. I've already got a third project assigned due next wednesday. On top of that I have a late homework assignment I need to hand in ASAP. So, my week is going to be pretty busy. I'm also getting back the most recent draft of my thesis (110 pages!) from my advisor on Monday, and that should take me into the final stretch for graduation.