Slackware, Perl, SQLite and SOAP

I was playing around with a project and decided it would be nice to finally try to do something useful with SQLite (and I threw in a SOAP server just-for-fun). I recently reloaded my system with Slackware 13. I was amazed at how easy it was to add Perl modules with Slackware. This is probably making someone out there go "Duh!" but under Fedora and Ubuntu (and Xubuntu, which I use a lot) installing modules on a vanilla system means configuring the CPAN.pm. That's not a big deal but Slackware must have a lot of the CPAN.pm config finished already. It just took off and ran! I had all of the modules I use downloaded in nothing flat and with NONE of the usual haggling I usually have to do to get some of them to load. You have to see it to appreciate it.

Newly Updated www.perl.org looks great!

Just saw this on Perlbuzz: www.perl.org just got a total makeover. Very nicely organized. I like the layout a lot. The "Learning Perl" link has a list of resources which includes video! I never even thought about that before. For example, here's a video of a presentation on Perl's Object Oriented Module (Moose).

DSEE for Solaris 10x86 on OpenSolaris

Ha! Well, not sure how far I'll get bu the first snag was I couldn't proceed because I didn't have SUNWpl5u installed. It turns out SUNWpl5u is Perl 5.8.4 and I do have it installed: It's just called SUNWperl584core. A simple symbolic link and it passes (for now). We'll see how far we get...

Off Topic Post Today

It's also a bit of a cross-posting. I'm a UNIX systems administrator - a computer geek. I also raise and race pigeons. So, this article really grabbed my attention! It was an article about racing pigeons on SlashDot. Evidently, someone wrote an RFC for the Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. That is, sending data using racing pigeons! Of course, this has been done (for a couple millennium) but they are now applying the standards of TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) to the data. That is, how do you handle packet loss? (Such as interception by Prairie Falcon). Although, it was meant as a joke, they were able to use it. In one example they sent a 4GB SD card by pigeon in 48 minutes.

Okay, I posted this to my pigeon blog but it was not well received. Confused people asked me what it meant. I found the results of this years race on BBC this morning which state it more plainly:

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Okay, it's got nothing to do with Perl but my racing pigeon buddies don't see the humor in the RFC for TCP/IP using Pigeons so I had to post it here. :-)

Wait - I've got it. This blog is for the Perl Ironman - right? That reminds me - "Ironman" Mike Tyson raises pigeons. [sound of crickets] That's all I've got.

Cheap Books!

Wow! This is pretty neat! Too bad I already own both of those. If you didn't catch it - use Perl; says O'Reilly has dropped the price of Learning Perl and Mastering Perl to $9.99 - before other discounts! I have all of the Learning Perl editions! Some are signed by the Author(s). :-p

So what does this mean? I hope it means a 6th edition of Learning Perl is coming out and not something else (remember "cut-out albums"?).

It's tough to say something EVERY WEEK

Man! This is harder than I thought. I don't have any trouble blogging about my racing pigeon training or my catch-all blog (that has revolved around beekeeping lately) . I've got ideas for a couple of other blogs too. But, what to say about my baby-talk Perl that won't be ridiculed? Well, one thing, in response to the co-workers who said "Perl is dead", I thought this news about the new Android phone using Perl spoke for itself!

Am I the only one NOT using "strict"?

An old friend came to town the other day. He's quite a Perl guru. Like me, he was a Perl user prior to Perl 5 and I figured he'd be someone who, like me, NEVER uses 'use strict'; in their code. I was wrong! Man, that's one of the things I like about Perl. It'll let me ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Drive without a seat belt. Go swimming in less than 30 minutes after I've eaten or even run with scissors! I know! I know! These are not good ideas - but short cuts seldom are. It's the price you pay and as long as you know the risks, it's nice that Perl lets you use a variable that has not been declared or invoke $_ with the notion that both Perl and yourself know what you're talking about (in that context). I like that freedom. I guess the other side of the coin is you're also allowed to add "use strict" and "use warnings". I'm just glad it's not the default (yet).

"Parrot even runs BASIC programs"

This might be old news but I was recently told "Parrot even runs BASIC programs". However, when I went looking for examples - I found none. All of the references were from 2002 or so. Then I ran across this: "Parrot BASIC — For the Parrot virtual machine; V 1.0 is modeled on GW-BASIC, V 2.0 is modeled on Microsoft QuickBASIC version 4.5." (see Parrot BASIC under the list of BASIC dialests on Wikipedia.) Wow! I'm probably the only one who would think that was really, really cool! I switched TO Perl from QuickBASIC 4.5! Does anyone know of some good examples of running BASIC programs through Parrot?

Perl 6 ponderings

I wonder when the new Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials will come out? It was supposed to come out yearly. I guess that didn't turn out to be very practical. I'd like to see a "Perl 6 for Perl 5 programmers". The examples I have run across are pretty generic Perl. I guess I should be glad. Perl 6 isn't as scary as it is played up to be.

Finally installed Perl 6

Tried Pugs - had a difficult time with the development framework required. Rakudo Perl 6 went on pretty smoothly once I added the --gen-parrot parameter to the "perl Configure.pl" command. Made a hello.pl6 program that used Perl 5.10's "say" command (without the usual preface in the code to invoke 5.10 stuff). Yeah, pretty weak. Need to look at some more interesting examples. (and now I can!)

use Net::LDAP::LDIF - no, really, use it!

It took me a while to figure this one out. I guess if I had a better grasp of hashes, this would've been more obvious. The LDIF I was reading was HUGE. I found a good example on PerlMonks that showed this VERY useful line:

$uid = $entry->get_value("uid");

I used DataDumper to find the key names of the other values and then I was off and running: parsing an LDIF filled with 40,000 users and running reports on anything I wanted. On my workstation, it only took 24 seconds to generate multiple reports! VERY COOL!

Joining The Perl Iron Man Program

Just noticed the Iron Man blogging Challenge at Enlightened Perl. Sounds fun - promoting Perl by blogging about it. Funny - that came up at work recently. The younger guys at work here are convinced Perl died a long time ago and I should be learning Python. "Have you noticed NO ONE is talking about Perl anymore?!" they chided. One thing that lead them to believe that (I think) was my homepage which had a programming republic of Perl icon which had been linked to perl.com for years. Since I force my web page to be the homepage for every server I manage, they see this site a lot (and they like it!). The Perl icon used to take you to this stale website that had all of the really old post dates plainly in view. (Funny - they have removed the post dates now.) But I wanted to convince them Perl wasn't dead (just Perl.com), so I changed my programming republic of Perl icon to point at a custom page of Perl links I threw together. It had active sites like Perl Buzz, Perl Monks, Planet Perl and Use Perl. I also included the [somewhat] nearby and very active Perl Monger Groups: St.Louis Perl Mongers and Purdue Perl Mongers. The guys here are not convinced yet, but maybe the Iron Man competition will throw Perl back on their radar and make it "fashionable" (to them) once again. Meanwhile, I'll still use it to "get things done". :-p