Frodo in your pocket

No, it’s not about a pocket edition of LOTR. This guy has ported Frodo (a Commodore 64 emulator) to the Nokia 7650 (InfoSync). I can’t wait for a Spectrum emulator…

Amidst a lot of PowerPointing, design meetings and conference calls, I’ve been taking what’s called a “Perl Trip”, assembling CPAN modules to piece together a simple (but required to be bullet-proof) service activation platform. To my utter amazement, I have discovered that a “branded” vendor solution we’re looking at is essentially the same thing we’ve cobbled together in the past - only done in around 300MB of Java and supporting setup scripts.

But that’s not important right now - neither is the fact that I got mod_perl to compile and run cleanly under Cygwin (which may find its way to the HOWTO section later on). The background static echoing in the back of my mind led me to check out Blosxom again while I was at it, and I’ve gone back to thinking about LiveWiki and rlogger.

The thing is, PhpWiki works, sure, but it lacks all the “blogger pack rat features” that MovableType has (pings, trackbacks, proper RSS feeds, etc.) and relies on a database for storage - which is a sharp contrast to the clean, sensible (and extremely efficient) your-post-is-a-text-file approach that Bloxsom and rlogger follow.

Perl is also looking more and more attractive as a development language, even though it is (at best) a jungle of CPAN modules. Not to mention that most Wiki implementations based in Perl look like something out of the Obfuscated C Code Contest. It’s excellent as a systems integration language (SOAP and XML are trivial to handle), but I haven’t explored XSLT support well enough yet to feel like implementing LiveWiki or Larvae on it.

There is also the issue of migrating a considerable amount of content (mounting by the day), and, of course, time (which is a scarce commodity).