Long overdue for an update. This will thus be scattershot. Our mosaic/collage article was published last month in The Perl Review, and LiveText++ paid for everyone at YAPC::NA to get a free copy with their registration bag-thing. Got a bit of author email, and at the conference a gentleman from Perl Seminar New York found me and gave me a photo collage he found in a travel magazine. (Which, used non-square photos, something I would like to support, but allowed adjacent duplicates.)
YAPC was good this year. I didn't find it as intellectually rewarding as the previous two, but I don't think that's necessarily a reflection on the conference. I'm just not that interested in AJAX, try as I might, and there were a number of AJAX talks. Also, a lot of the cooler things I have seen in previous years. MJD's talk would have been awesome if I hadn't read his book (I sat in for a while - interesting, but familiar.) As with last year, the best talk were pmichaud's Rule and Parser talks. I missed out on the APL talk, though, because I misunderstood the abstract. Ahh well. Overall, still an awesome week, well worth it. A great break, and a change of scene.
I started working on two projects at YAPC, which I've barely touched since coming back ($work has been quite consuming). They are: converting the guts of the mosaic code to use C via-XS. I figure I can likely get a hundredfold performance boost that way. Learning curve is quite interesting. Like everything over the last week, I've just been reading lightly during downtime.
The other project is to write a Huffman compressor in C++ -- part of my longer term goal to write one in ten different languages. I've done it in Perl5 and Perl6 (as much as possible). Would like to do it in PIR, then perhaps some of: OCaml, Haskell, Ruby, Python, Eiffel, Scheme. Part of me is tempted to toss Fortran in there. It's long past due for me to take a world tour of languages. Huffman compression is interesting, yet simple enough. The Perl5 implementation took an hour or two - so add in the learning curve of a new language, and you've got a good sized project. Solving the same problem multiple times has the upside of allowing direct comparison of approaches. I'll be careful to try to approach the problem fresh each time, so that I'm not writing Perl in Haskell, etc.
I didn't mention this earlier, but my article on Sudoku Generation was printed in the Spring edition of The Perl Review. The first page of the article is available in PDF And of course the whole thing is available to download for subscribers. For subscribers only, the actual code from my generator is posted on the TPR website (password required).
I haven't gotten my physical copy in the mail yet, though. I also haven't gotten any author email telling me I'm brilliant or that I missed something obvious. So that is half good news, half disappointing.
I've sort of stalled on my Sudoku Grader project... I did complete the Locked Candidate detector, and flesh out the outer framework of the Grader, but I haven't gotten much farther. I might pick it up again in a month or so. I'm trying to follow AudreyT's approach, and be productive in hobby-coding by optimizing for fun. The big downside of that is that when you hit a patch of boring refactoring, you tend to stall.
Update: When I got home, it had arrived. It looks pretty good, I think.