All,
In the spirit of Impress Women and Impress Women II, I am wondering what you have used perl for that has impressed your significant other. I have chosen Meditations for this post because Where should I post X? suggests one of the topics appropriate for this section is 'life as a programmer'. This fits my story nicely since I didn't set out to impress my wife - it just happened as a result of a couple of the 3 virtues (laziness and impatience). So after reading my story, I welcome you to share your own. Your significant other may or may not be a geek and you may or may not have set out to impress them - what is important is that they were impressed.

Shortly after the birth of my first daughter, I created a family website. Despite going with a very user friendly WYSIWYG CMS, my wife doesn't help keep the website up to date. This can be a very time consuming process as we sometimes go more than a month without downloading pictures from the camera. A typical session goes like this:

  1. Download photos from camera to computer
  2. Seperate photos by person in the photo and by date taken
  3. Choose photos to upload with appropriate title and caption
  4. Upload picture to website which consists of:
    1. Logging on to website as appropriate family member
    2. Creating a new photo entry
    3. Setting the title
    4. Setting the caption
    5. Setting the publish date to when (date and time) the photo was taken
    6. Selecting the photo to upload
    7. Clicking on the create button

This process only got longer after my second daughter was born. Not too long ago I became sufficiently frustrated that I wrote code heavily leveraging WWW::Selenium and Image::ExifTool so that my process is now:

  1. Download photos from camera to computer
  2. Seperate photos by just person
  3. Choose photos to upload with appropriate title and caption
In windows explorer, when you right-click on a file and go to the summary tab you can add meta data to that file. With JPEGs, it gets stored as EXIF data which was perfect for my purposes (title and caption). I can also view the images as thumbnails which makes separating them by who is in the photo a breeze. My code then:

  1. Loops over all JPEGs in the current directory
  2. Reads the EXIF data to determine when the photo was taken
  3. If it contains the title/caption meta data it logs on to the website and posts it to the appropriate family members location (using CWD)
  4. Moves the picture to a folder based on when the photo was taken (previously a manual step)

Simple right? After announcing to my wife that I was going to update the website, she took the kids for a walk. When she came back I was sitting on the couch watching TV. She asks "I thought you were going to update the website?" to which I replied "I am". She looked over and the computer, all by itself, is pointing and clicking and updating as if by magic. She was so impressed that she sat there watching it telling me I was "amazing".

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Impressing Your Significant Other III by Limbic~Region

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