It's taken a bit longer than I hoped, but I have finally beaten the CPANTS game. From about an hour ago all of my CPAN modules score 100% and I'm therefore (along with a number of other people) top of the CPANTS league.

Of course, they'll probably introduce some new measures soon and I'll have to start all over again.

Now, given my awesome CPANTS score, who wants to come on one of my Perl courses?

Perhaps I need to travel a little faster. Or more often. Or something.

The new Dopplr profiles are fun.

The Perl training courses that I mentioned ten days ago are now confirmed. They will be running in the week starting 28th July at Venda's London offices.

Some information about the courses is available online and if you want to get the latest news about any training I'm running then please sign up to my Training News mailings list.

I was at Mashed 08 at Alexandra Palace yesterday. Unfortunately I didn't have time to go back today, but I've made some progress on my project from home.

It was a successful day all in all though. Here's what I did.

• Watched Jonathan Tweed talk about the BBC /programmes api. If I hadn't already had an idea of what I was going to do I would have been very tempted to play with this. A year ago, I was working for the BBC on one of the projects that underlies /programmes, so it's great to see it being given a public airing.
• Watched the Guardian's Damian Carrington talk about what the Guardian's enviroment web team are hoping to inspire people into doing. Well, to be honest, I sat in his talk whilst getting my wireless connection working. Sorry Damian.
  
• Met up with a fellow Perl hacker. Last year the venue was full of Perl hackers. Shame there were so few there this year. I suspect many of the cooler kids were at Interesting instead - note to organisers: having two events like this on the same day is all a bit silly.
• Had an interesting conversation with someone from the BBC who is working on the next version of the Radio iPlayer. It sounds as though following the release of this new version, my BBC streams page will be redundant. Alternatively, it might be easy to make it far more useful. And I'll be able to retire all the grungy old HTML scraping code.
• Had an interesting conversation with the O'Reilly UK people. Might be some announcements coming out of that in a couple of months. Oh, and I might have opened myself up to lots of hassle about writing another book.
• Watched Doctor Who on a huge screen. In the wrong aspect ratio. Honestly, you'd thing that if there was one organisation who understood aspect ratios then it would be the BBC.
  

And despite socking up most of the day doing all of those things, I also managed to get stuff done on my own project and the first draft of Political Web is now online. It doesn't do most of the things that I want it to do yet, but it's a good start. Have a play and let me know how it foes.

Update: I should, of course, reiterate that what I've done so far on Political Web is largely just to repackage stuff that's available from from They Work For You. I have plans to add other stuff soon(ish).

Update: Having just got to a Windows PC for the first time for days and tried using Political Web in IE6, I see that it doesn't work for some reason. Probably some Javascript glitch. I'll try to look at it in more detail later on. But in the meantime, use Firefox - you know it makes sense.

When the YAPC::Europe organisers sent out their initial talk confirmations a couple of weeks ago, they accepted two of my talks but asked if they could hold the third in reserve. I, of course, agreed.

If just received an acceptance mail for that third talk. So it looks like I'll be speaking three times in Copenhagen. My talks are:

• Proud to Use Perl
• Ye Compleat History of Ye Perle Mongers of Olde London Towne (Part 1)
• Perl in RPM-Land

I'm looking forward to Copenhagen very much. I've never been to Scandinavia.

Update: The preliminary schedule has been published. All of my talks are on the final day. Which gives me longer to write them :-)

It's the BBC Mashed hack session this coming weekend, so I suppose lots of people are trying to think of a project to work on. I have an idea that involves UK political web sites.

I expect that most MPs have a web site. A far smaller number of them have a blog. Some of them use blog-like software to publish news and other similar web feeds. Part of what I want to do is to build a directory of those URLs. I can't see any way to do this other than trying to track down each of the 646 MPs on the web and poking around on their sites to find all of the interesting URLs. I'm hoping I can get some help with that.

But there are also sites about MPs that are run by other organisations. These ones are easier to track down. For example, They Work For You has a page for every MP. The page for my MP is

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/martin_linton/battersea

So that looks easy enough. You just use the name of the MP and the name of the constituency. Public Whip has a similar mechanism. My MP's page on Public Whip is

http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/mp.php?mpn=Martin_Linton&mpc=Battersea

Then there are the news organisations. The BBC has a page about my MP. It's at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/mpdb/html/35.stm

In this case there's a magic number (35) and in order to construct these URLs for other MPs, you'd need to map these numbers to MPs (or constituencies).

The Guardian has two pages. One for the MP and one for the constituency.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/0,,-3146,00.html http://politics.guardian.co.uk/hoc/constituency/0,,-696,00.html

Again, each of those contain magic numbers that you'd need to get a complete list of. And I assume (or, at least, hope) that these pages will one day be given shiny new URLs like other parts of the Guardian site.

It's this second part of the problem that I want to concentrate on first. Building URLs to external sites pro grammatically. And this is where you, gentle reader, can help me. I have two questions that you might be able to answer.

1. I'm sure I'm missing some external sites. To be honest, I haven't really looked very hard yet. I'd be surprised if some of the other national papers didn't have similar pages to the Guardian. Do you know of any other good sites that have pages dedicated to each individual MP or constituency?
2. Do any of you work for organisations that publish these pages? If so, is there any chance that you could sent me lists of the "magic numbers" that appear in your URLs? What I'd need is something like a CSV file (or whatever format is convenient for you) that maps your magic numbers to a recognisable name for an MP or a constituency. I can then map your data to my list of MPs. I know it's a bit cheeky, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

There's still one part of the puzzle missing. A surprising number of people don't know the name their MP or even their constituency. So an important part of the system will be a search engine. At the very least, I'll need the ability to convert a postcode to a constituency (or MP). All of the sites I mentioned above do this. It would be great if one of them made the look-up available as a web service.

Of, and one last thing. If you're going to Mashed and don't have a project to work on and this sounds interesting to you, then please get in touch. Feel free to link up with me on the backnetwork site.

Update: If you listen, you can probably hear the sounds of my kicking myself very hard because I forgot to check the They Work For You API before writing this entry. It does a lot of the kinds of things that I will need. There's even a Perl module - which makes me very happy.

I was told last week that my current contract won't be extended when it finishes at the end of this month.

I'm obviously looking for a new contract, but I'm also investigating another option.

I'm thinking of running some commercial, public Perl courses in London at the end of July. The plan is basically that I'll book a room for a week and run a couple of two-day courses (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl) and a one-day Advanced Perl course.

It's still far from confirmed, but if you're at all interested in this (or other training courses that I may run in the future) then please sign up to the mailing list in order to be kept up to date with the latest news.

Well that about wraps it up for the Labour Party as far as I'm concerned. Less than three years after they doubled the the amount of time that a suspect could be held without charge, they have pushed through a bill which increases the time by another 50%. If the bill gets through the Lords, you'll be able to be held for 42 days. This is far longer than in any other western democracy.

Like pretty much everyone I know, I've been becoming more and more disgusted with the Labour government. But through it all I clung to the belief that they were the best alternative. And I (usually) still voted for them.

But that's all over now. A party that has so little regard for human rights is not one that I can possibly vote for. I left the party and sent back my membership card in protest over the Ken Livingstone/Frank Dobson fiasco in 2000. I'm beginning to wish that I hadn't as this is a far more important matter to protest over.

The problem is, of course, who do I vote for now? Only the Labour and Conservative parties have a chance of winning my constituency. I've always been physically repulsed by the idea of voting Tory. Is it time to try and overcome that revulsion. Or do I effectively waste my vote by voting Green or for one of the more extreme left wing parties. I suppose I have a year or two to decide.

But this is a sad day in British politics. The modernisation of the Labour Party has gone too far. It's time for "New Labour" to go. We want our party back.

Update: Blimey. A Tory politician with principles. Hats off to David Davies.

We were at our usual weekly pub quiz last night. One of the questions was this:

Who is the current captain of the Starship Enterprise?

I have to confess being rather confused by this question. Given that Star Trek is set two hundred (or so - I'm not a big fan, I don't know the details) years in the future, how can the word "current" possibly have any meaning?

The answer that the questionmaster accepted as correct was Jean-Luc Picard. Is there any way that answer makes sense?

As I understand it, he was last seen as captain in Star Trek Nemesis in 2002. But Jonathan Archer was seen as captain (of a far earlier Enterprise) until 2005.

I hate it when quiz questions are illogical.

Gabor asked for feedback on his proposed CPANTS metrics. Here is mine.

I don't like them.

Well, I don't like most of them. I'm ambivalent on the Test::NoWarnings one.

It's the Debian ones I really object to. I don't like the Fedora ones that were added recently for the same reason. I don't think they measure Kwalitee (or quality) in any meaningful way.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to up package CPAN modules for commonly used packaging tools like rpm. I've done some work in this area myself. I'd really like a system where I can get statistics on which of my modules are being built for popular systems like Fedora and Debian. And getting information about why a particular module isn't being packed (license issues perhaps, or bugs) would also be very useful.

But I don't think this stuff belongs in CPANTS. I don't think it says anything useful about the quality of the module. I don't think that CPAN authors should be forced to care about platforms that they might have no interest in. It would be nice if they did, but I don't think you can penalise them if they don't.

So, for what it's worth, I vote "no" on the new CPANTS metrics. And I'd further like to see the removal of the other Linux distribution based metrics. But I'd really like to see that information made available elsewhere.