Software 2, darky 0

Battled TWiki last night when I couldn’t fall asleep at 0230. Ended up staying awake until like 0530 (only to wake at 1000-ish; I haven’t had my nap yet). While I appreciate all the great work the TWiki people have undoubtedly done: the fucking thing does not run in mod_perl. I’m almost positive that, for example, there’s something lurking around in the code that assigns your user name to a global variable, and then somehow that’s getting kept between requests, so if you keep hitting “refresh” on your browser enough it seems like you’ll get a different users’ session eventually. It’s probably the fault of my SessionPlugin.pm. By the way: don’t use my SessionPlugin.pm! Something is broken, and I’m tired of fucking with it.

None of the other big Wikis like PhpWiki or UseModWiki have user authentication. I’m not even real sure I want user authentication yet, but… I’m pretty certain that I will, or that I’ll want it later. I’ve already devised a simple Perl Wiki in my head which can be backed by a DB and will run cleanly in mod_perl (with any luck). I probably won’t be writing unit tests for anything, though; I’d like to get this done really quickly. We’ll see.

I came home to start work on this Perl Wiki, but then I thought, “you know, my Perl stuff for Emacs doesn’t do auto-indenting as nice as JDE does in Java. I bet it wouldn’t be hard to make it do better indenting.” Next think you know I’m learning how to make major modes. I’ve devised a set of Perl indenting stuff for Emacs which works in my FSF Emacs 21 and works for my indenting style. It only plays with braces, not lining up continued expressions (I think that’d be significantly harder). I’ll post the updates to my .emacs.

So now it’s 1610 and I need to go to sleep. We’re going to Scarowinds tonight at 1900, which means I need to be in the shower by at least 1800, which means I won’t get all too much sleep. At least my Perl indents nicely though. For now.