HollyKing's Journal

I have had a general feeling of… I’m not sure what word to use. I’m not unhappy and in some areas of my life things are outstanding. There’s just this feeling of “more” that I could accomplish. Having spent the last few nights without sleep I’ve had a bit of time to think about goals and how I spend my time.

I spend too much time playing games like WoW and EVE. The problem isn’t playing games, but that MMORPGs like that don’t end so they keep stealing time I could use for more productive things. I can play console games and give up a week or two as a break between projects. And the DS is always good for those times when I’m waiting around and don’t have enough time to unpack the laptop.

Television doesn’t take too much time because I split the time with other tasks. I catch up on some reading or work on the laptop while watching. With the Tivo I can push off watching if I have more important tasks. The number of shows I watch will probably drop as they are not keeping my interest.

With the time I’ve regained my plan is to:

1. Complete my first Perl module, Math::Interval, and upload it to CPAN. The API is set and the tests pass. I just need to write more documentation.
2. Learn about writing XS modules for Perl to expose the floating-point functions in <fenv.h>. In particular Math::Interval could benefit from fesetround() and fegetround(). I’m sure some other modules could use it too.
3. Update Math::Interval to use the floating-point module. The tricky part of this will be creating tests that correctly deal with the inexact nature of IEEE 784 floating-point math.
4. Write up a talk, article or paper on what I learned about writing Perl modules and dealing with that inexact nature of IEEE 784 floating-point math.

After that my longer range plans include getting some quality time with Parrot and Perl 6.