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.

Perlcast had a drawing for access to the "Rough Cuts" version of Perl Hacks. This morning I found out that I was the lucky listener! I wonder if I could get publius_ovidius to sign my PDF... ;)

Having a bit of free time and wanting to get out of dodge hollyqueen and I went up to nerdvana early to help with the prep for the New Year's Eve party. I had some problems sleeping Friday night and spent the time working on resurrecting my movie collection web page. Between the night and other free time I was able to get the code in a usable state. Tonight when we got home I spent a few hours updating the database and sorting the movies on the shelf. So now you can view my movie collection.

If you go view the collection here is a short explanation of what you'll see:

• The three frames on the left are:
  1. Keywords: I have created a list of keywords and assigned them to movie titles. You can see how many movies have a given keyword by the number after the keyword. In the future clicking on a link will display only the movies with that keyword.Decades: This breaks down the collection by the release year in decades. In the future clicking on a decade will show you what movies were released in that decade.
  2. Media: My collection consists of movies in various formats. This section lists the number of movies in each format. Clicking the format will eventually display the movies in that format.
• The center frame is the list of movies. The fields listed for each movie are:
  1. Title: Do I really need to explain this one? If the database has the IMDb information the title is a link that will take you to the appropriate IMDb page.
  2. (Release Year): Again this should be pretty obvious. Clicking the year will, eventually, limit the display to movies that were released in the same year.
  3. { Format }: This is a list of what format I own for each movie. For some of the movies I have copies in more than one format. Clicking on a format will, eventually, display the all the movies in that foramt.
  4. [ Keywords ]: If I have associated any keywords with a movie they are listed in square brackets. Clicking on the link will, eventually, list all the titles associated with that keyword.

Right now the formatting is rough because I haven't actually created any formatting. I just whipped the page up real quick to test the features I want to include. My existing todo list for the page is:

1. Decide if I want to track any more fields in the database. Right now I'm considering adding the MPAA rating and running time. I would be interested to see how my collection breaks down by ratings. I'm not so sure if anything else would be very interesting.
2. Finalize the layout and format of the display page.
3. Finish the various filter links.
4. Add a way to sort the movie display. Right now the display is alphabetical by title, but I want to add be able to sort by year as well.
5. Create a script to save the decade, media and keyword counts each week.
6. Use the weekly counts to generate graphs showing how my collection changes over time.
7. Create some the web pages and code necessary to update the database. Right now the update process is a very error prone manual one.

8. After the movie collection pages are working it will be time to tackle the book collection. Egad, that's going to be huge. Not that the database or web pages will be any more difficult, we just have so many books. I've stopped myself from buying books the last few times we've been in a store because I can't remember if I had a copy already.