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Finally got around to putting something on here after several months. Recent news about me includes:
- Moved into a snazzy new fifth floor apartment, and now have as a roommate PM's very own ChemBoy. Update: Left that apartment, moved into an even snazzier duplex condo. Same roommate
- Finally got my hands on a respectable Linux server to play with at work, and I am actually writing my first substantial work-related Perl program (an SQL-based-report-generator-sort-of-thingy). Where by substantial I mean more than a few dozen lines. I don't have "official" management approval to actually deploy Perl code in production, but I plan to make a very good case for it. UpdateThis didn't happen.
- Actually started implementing my first real Perl project for work, a deskop app for Win32 with a combined web/Tk interface. I get to use HTTP::Daemon, XML::LibXSLT, LWP, Tk, CGI::Simple, Win32::GUI*, DBD::SQLite,Text::xSV and
PARall in the same program. HTTP::Proxy helped tremendously with debugging. Woohoo! - Still looking for a nice user image for my home node here. Update: got one! This is a view from the window in my office, captured on my mediocre phone camera. If you know New Haven, you can probably figure out where this is (/msg me to check).
- I became the 400th Saint on Monday 29 August 2005 at approximately 11:30 PM EDT.
Relevant links:
I learned an interesting thing about PerlMonks yesterday. Anyone is free to ask questions, but not all questions (even those that rigorously follow the advice given in How (Not) To Ask A Question ) are of equal merit. It's also important that your question be of interest to at least some reasonable portion of the general audience. After lurking for two years as Anonymous Monk and then spending several months exclusively answering questions, I finally posted one of my own at PAR error on Win32: Can't locate Cwd.pm. At one point its rep was -2, making it my worst node ever! I couldn't think of what I had done wrong. But then I realized the problem - my question offered no opportunity for discussion or enlightenment, and therefore should probably have been asked on a PAR mailing list or some such. A humbling experience, to be sure.
My list of intriguing and/or useful nodes:
- DBI - Oracle 8 - Load many rows into a temp table w/o using SQL*Loader - similar to a problem I have been struggling with at work (how to combine a database query with the results of a separate full-text search engine)
- using CGI on HTTP::Request from HTTP::Daemon - cool way to set up a desktop web application
- GUI with HTTP::Daemon - discussion that inspired me to start the project mentioned above
- Re: Problems posting form info to a .asp site using LWP - saved me from total despair after many hours of trying to coax LWP to post to an ASP script, and
further deepened my feelings of Microsoft suckiness. This was later revealed to not be Microsoft's fault. One of my esteemed colleagues decided to dump a referer check into the common authentication module and not tell anyone, and said check responds with a redirect back to the same address. - Re^2: OT Windows Installers - quick and easy way to produce a nice Windows desktop installer for an app
- Things are not what they seem like. - my favorite obfu on the site. It doesn't try to confuse you with sheer volume of trickery. It has a single ingenious idea; not the sort of thing you think of every day, yet not hard to understand once you read it closely.
(*) In case you were wondering why I would use Win32::GUI and Tk in the same program: Tk is because I like it better and I want my program to be portable, Win32::GUI is because I want the Win32 version to have a taskbar icon.