CPAN Module

You may recall my earlier post complaining that Amazon has not created a Perl module to sign AWS REST queries, so I ended up writing my own. It was a good exercise for many reasons; writing your own module gives you a better overall understanding of how the whole process works, and of course helps much later on if you need to debug something. Also, I'm ashamed to say this, but I was never a big fan of OO programming before - generally if I wrote a module, it was going to export functions, because I was just used to my way of thinking (just write functions, export them, and use them with arguments when required). Since I'm not a trained developer, I saw no reason to force a paradigm shift upon myself. Writing a module, of course, forced me re-write my AWS code in an OO way, and now I see the light, or at least I see how for many things that's a better way to go.
Anyway, I wrote this thing a couple of months ago, and I figured it was only a matter of time until Amazon released an official mod to sign requests, but they never did. When I was in NY, Matt encouraged me to submit it to CPAN - if nothing else, it's a resume-builder, plus I'm so dependent on CPAN for everything, it would be nice to give something back. So, I cleaned it up, added a method to create SOAP signatures (since I figured that at least some people would want that), and submitted it to CPAN. Actually getting that module into CPAN, however, was a lot of work: besides creating an account, I had to submit an official request to have the module added, then I had to make sure it was stable and portable, plus I had to write it the "right" way and have it vetted by the CPAN testers. I had no idea it was so much work! But, at the end of the day, I got it in, and until Amazon decides to write their own, I guess I'm the official owner of the Net::Amazon::AWSSign mod. W00t!

Updates

First things first - the vacation was awesome, albeit brief. Clau and I spent as much time as we could enjoying New York, I went to California and Nevada and Clau went to Canada to visit Tatiz. Got to see Adrian, Dottie, and Alistair in Berkeley, then Ted and I went to Reno for two debaucherous days - I had a really, really bad day at the poker table, and although a little voice in my head kept saying "Just leave the table, already" I couldn't really let it go, since I only had two days there. So, not a good gambling time, but nonetheless we still had a great time. After that, went back to Oakland, spent a couple of days seeing Dad, Ania, Neil, and Cora, then back to NYC. Sam had a b-day party with a "white" theme - white clothes, white food, white sangria, white russians, white-themed music. Overall I'd say it was a tremendous success, and also an opportunity to see all the lawyers and other awesome folks that Sam and Matt are friends with. After that, saw our old neighbors in Chelsea and wandered around, then on Monday we flew back. Like I said, far too short, but very sweet. Matt and Sam were wonderful hosts, and hopefully it will be less than another year before we see them again.
Since we got back, I've been having some serious jet lag - can't seem to get my body back to Germany time. I haven't been able to get to sleep until 3am most nights, and waking up at 8 is a bit rough. Slept in till noon on Saturday before getting up to run errands, which in retrospect was probably a good thing, since we went out to Bootie Munich that night. We had a fantastic time, but I have to say the DJs and mashups were not as good as I had hoped. The DJs were all German, which meant that there were lots of mashups with bits of popular German songs, which I actually dug, but they seemed to all be keen on playing lots of recent stuff from German mashup artists. As Pete (the guy who turned me on to Bootie Munich) said "I've got nothing against the new stuff, but I also want to hear the good stuff."
On the work front, we recently had a bit of an organizational shake-up, and the new man in charge of my area (who I like and respect a lot) is doing a re-org, but is taking a little while to get a more detailed picture of what everybody does and how some other folks can better work together. So, right now we're in a holding pattern: no new projects, and since we didn't have anything we were currently working on, it means that we're all taking the time to do documentation and close loose ends.
In semi-related news, I authored my first CPAN module. For the sake of separation of tech- and life-related posts, I'll make that a separate post.