One of the more interesting aspects of the web being so universal is that it gets pulled in a lot of different directions, so sites can stop looking like what you think they look like.

One example is the YAPC::NA/OSDC website, where none of the sponsor logos on the website were working for me, but yet it looked fine for other people in the committee.

The problem turned out to be Ad-Block Plus. But more specifically, because the guy doing the website had naturally enough put the images into an /images/sponsors/.

And of course, since tons of ads are in things with the word "sponsors" in it, all the conference sponsors logos were blocked.

We currently have a similar problem on http://search.cpan.org/ with broken gravatars. Because gravatars are most popular in social network type websites, they fall into the "social networking" category of the corporate fun filter here at work, along with MySpace, FaceBook and all that junk.

Result, ugly broken image square on the search.cpan.org module pages :(

So note for future, if you ever use gravatars or other similar systems with social networking background for more serious purposes, always make sure to put a squid proxy or some other form of obfuscation on a serious domain in front of the raw service, so that fun filters won't generate false-positives on them.

Tonight I updated Rakudo's ROADMAP file to reflect the progress we've made since it was last done (August 2008, YAPC::EU). At first I thought there wouldn't be much to update, but it turns out we've accomplished a fair bit.

More importantly, more infrastructure pieces are falling into place so that the remaining items become even easier than they were before. I expect to see good progress during the next month or so.

This weekend many of us attended the Parrot Developer's Summit to plan the way forward to Parrot 1.0 (March 2008). In parallel several of us also made plans for Rakudo's development in that time -- our goal is to have Rakudo on its own release cycle by then. I very much like the way the time-based monthly release cycle has worked for Parrot development, so we will undoubtedly continue this in Rakudo. Development for Rakudo will continue to track the Parrot trunk for a while, and we'll time Rakudo releases to follow a few days after each Parrot release.

We'll put together more details as we get closer; until then we're continuing to work on feature development.

During my airplane travel and at the summit I was able to get a lot of work on fixing lexical variables in Parrot. Unfortunately I've also found several places where Parrot was not properly allocating and freeing contexts, so those need to be reviewed and fixed before we can merge the branch back into trunk. Initial tests show that the design itself appears to work as expected, so now it's just a matter of reviewing and repairing context handling in Parrot. I'm expecting (hoping) to merge the branch back into trunk sometime on Wednesday (after tomorrow's Parrot release), which will close out quite a few RT tickets.

Pm

Tonight I updated Rakudo's ROADMAP file to reflect the progress we've made since it was last done (August 2008, YAPC:: ... EU). At first I thought there wouldn't be much to update, but it turns out we've accomplished a fair bit....

Thursday, 13 November 2008