From slashdot's Is Comcast Intercepting Packets? to the comment Re:I work for a phone company (Score:5, Informative) a passing mention of perl being used (in readmore below), that I thought was cool, which brings me to a question, now questions, (which might have been asked before):

What Cool use for perl do you know of?

and How do you participate?

How useful, if at all, is this use?

And how profitable?

And finally, How does, whoever is using perl for cool purposes, support perl?

... The rule is if you can’t use a blue box on your phone line, then you are traceable down to that specific phone. Digital Switch = Trackable.

p.s. For those who wonder, The system is Called NTU, Network Transaction Usage. We use Perl to gather data off the switches, not every switch is alike, including the os they run and the data needs to be parsed for the database. A HP/UX demon is used to process rules, and sort out how they should be poked into the database. While an oracle database floating on 36 partitions in a huge raid system is used to house the data while it lives. The machine NEVER goes down, even it does go down, monitor machines can quite literally mirror the drives and swap out so no data is ever lost. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen was my cowboy boss walk over to this multi-billion dollar a year machine and say, “Time to test the emergency backup units.” These machines are located in other states altogether btw. Then he just pulls the power cord out of this rack mounted 8 by 8.

 
______crazyinsomniac_____________________________
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

  • Comment on (possibly *too* OT) A Phone Company uses perl

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Re: (possibly *too* OT) A Phone Company uses perl
by simon.proctor (Vicar) on Feb 14, 2002 at 09:40 UTC
    At my last job I was in charge of a project to rebuild an ecommerce transaction system in Perl.

    This invloved a Perl based server cluster (i.e: servers written in Perl communicating with each other), CGI apps running under apache and various security and reporting tools. The CGI calls went in and around the servers and through to the database or to the banks to process the credit card.

    The cluster had (at that time) 4 tiers of operation with each tier able to communicate to the tier on either side.

    Additionally, the whole admin and reporting system used HTML::Template (at the time I was there).

    This system provided the technology for the core part of the business which was to process credit cards. Hence without this system there would be no business.

    I don't know how they support Perl at that company as I no longer work there but I suspect that apart from buying books and advocating the language to clients/workers there is little else done.
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