kerravonsen | Even more status

Guess I'd better give another status report. The Toe is less painful, but it is oozing as much as ever, so I don't know what to think (sigh). I have been working on Perl modules, because it's easier to write Perl than it is to write fiction. I've been extracting the data-file stuff out of my report-generation scripts as separate modules, under the umbrella name of "Tie::FieldVals" because it's a perl Tie object (the perl "tie" stuff is a really nifty concept...). I think I'm going to have to completely rewrite my report-generation stuff again, because it's still too complicated. I've lost track of the number of incarnations this stuff has had, at least five, one of which was a brush with XSLT, which I fell in love with initially but am now disenchanted about, because for any given set of data that isn't small, XML parsers, no matter which one I've tried, are all noticably slower than dealing with straightforward records. And when one has 800+ reviews to process, speed is a consideration. I know, I know, the obvious question is why don't I use a relational database like MySQL? The main reason is that I don't want my data to be at the mercy of my web-host; with a flat file of data, it's completely under my control. With a file of ASCII data, I don't have to worry about binary incompatibilities between systems.

Ah, I am so tired, I don't know why...