It's time for a brief update on what I've been nerding out over recently:

First up, I needed to get my Perl skills back in the ring. As regular readers may remember, over the last 8 months or so I've played with Haskell, Python, and Ruby. They're all great in different ways. If I won the lottery I might be tempted to write an MVC framework for Haskell. But Perl is like an old friend. I might sometimes miss the neat moves you can pull off in other languages, but Perl just has its own set of neat moves instead.

So that lead me on to seeing what Perl had to compete with Rails, Django etc. There are a few answers, but the one all the cool kids are hacking on right now is Catalyst.

File structure-wise, it follows the layout of a normal Perl module, so you haven't quite got the simplicity of a Rails app, but then again if you're familiar with Perl module layouts it's all pretty obvious.

It's been described as a "framework for making frameworks", because unlike Rails there's no sense of having a "default" templating language or a "default" ORM. In fact, you don't need to use either. But if you do, then TT, Mason, and Clearsilver (templating) and DBIx::Class and Rose::DB (ORM) are very well supported with Catalyst plugins to integrate them into the framework. And there are plugins to support many other options. I'm using TT and DBIx::Class, despite knowing Mason far better, to write a wee to-do application.

The documentation is copious and well written, but occasionally confusing. But between a very active mailing list, IRC, and Google I haven't had any major issues. And the feature set is very impressive.

Which leads me onto the fact that I've actually been hacking on DBIx::Class much more recently. Stemming from a need to add a couple of missing features to a plugin, I'm now teamed up with another chap to add tree-shaping features (adjacency lists, nested sets and materialised paths, for those that care).

From when I first installed Red Hat 5.1 some time in 1999 through to mid-2004, I was a fixated Linux-head. Oh, I may have had a Windows machine at home for gaming, but it sat next to a Red Hat machine that did everything else, and I used exclusively Linux at work (well, plus a little FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris).

Then... I'm not really sure what happened, but the state of open source desktops seemed (to me) to decline. In a flurry of trying to be high-tech and Windowsy, everything became fragile and difficult. And them Metacity happened, I lost my edge-flipping. Simultaneously, Windows 2000 was becoming an actual stable windows desktop proposition, and XP came along, and I got into Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign... and I found I was no longer using a Linux desktop.

I took it to mean that I'd grown up; that I could pick the right tool for the job without being swayed by zealotry.

How wrong. See, it turns out that I was just denying my roots, and working in a devoutly MS-only shop has really brought that home to me. What was I thinking?!

Well, what I was thinking was, "I really, really need a job", and, "I'm mature enough to use whatever technology is on hand".

Anyway, this prolonged exposure to Windows forced me to do drastic things at home. Firstly, I shoved Fedora Core 5 onto my laptop. It was... kind of nice. Didn't really set my world alight. Then FC6 was released, and I was just on the cusp of installing that instead when I remembered I'd never got round to trying Ubuntu Linux, the South African born, Debian-based, "human Linux" distribution.

It installs easily, based on a "Live CD". Rather than booting up a special installer program like Red Hat, Ubuntu boots the whole goddamn OS off the CD, so you can play with it, and if you decide to keep it, you click "Install" on the desktop and it transfers itself onto your hard disk (with all the usual partitioning and package options, of course).

The feel is immediately friendly. Rather than the business-oriented cold blue colour schemes favoured by RH, Ubuntu is all about the earth-tones, browns and beiges. After seeing so many OSes trying to make themselves look like the set from a 60s sci-fi movie, simple shapes and warm colours are joyful. Yes, there are rounded edges, but just subtly. It doesn't feel like like a brightly-coloured kiddies' ball-pool; more a study that been elegantly constructed without sharp edges.

Software management is very easy. Brilliantly, there's a whole repository of licence-encumbered software, not distributed by default, but accessible with a couple of commands, so you can get the free-but-not-Free bits installed almost as easily as the base OS.

The default desktop is Gnome, but using XFCE or KDE is as simple as installing one package. I'm happy to say, though, that Gnome has really matured in my absence. It's solid, attractive, predictable and rich. Seems the drive to move open source desktops into the future has paid off. This is a good place to work.

And I am so happy to back in Linuxville. It's like coming home.

I asked purl, the Perl irc bot, what she thought of Ubuntu. The link is NOT SAFE FOR WORK but quite funny.

(03:23:26 PM) ned: purl, ubuntu?
(03:23:26 PM) purl: ubuntu is probably http://krunch.servebeer.com/~krunch/vrac/pics/ubuntu-logo.jpg or the ancient African word for "I'm sick of compiling Gentoo.'"