New technology I'm Working On

I find that people often think because I work primarily on UNIX/Linux and still use Perl that I'm not learning anything new or that I do not like learning.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I love new technology and I'm always learning something new.

Here's what I've been working on in the last year:

• Solaris Zones and Containers
• Solaris Zetabyte File system (ZFS)
• GNU Screen
• Ruby
• More Perl LDAP programming
• More Perl programming in general 
• Rakudo (a Perl 6 distro)
• PUGS (another Perl 6 distro)
• SQLite3 and Perl
• RCS (Revision Control System) 

Here's the list of what I hope to cover this year VERY SOON:

• Solaris LDOMs (need a lab experiment)
• See how ZFS is implemented under other OS's (e.g. FreeBSD)
• Use More Ruby! (and I'm looking at a Rails book from the library)
• Juniper's JunOS (I like the XML and the idea of scripting with Perl)
• MORE Rakudo!!  (Not so much Pugs) I hope to contribute bug reports
• Sun's Dtrace (especially using Perl and Dtrace)
• Xen and Linux - need a lab experiment
• Btrfs - Linux's answer to ZFS?  Need to explore in a lab.
• Lots more SQLite (I really like that tool)

 And, of course, my on going quests: (not necessarily in this order)

• Python (Because Zope runs on it!)
• Plone (runs on Zope)
• C - need to refreshen my C programming skills - getting rusty
• Java 
• Command line Sun VirtualBox
• I'm sure there's a few more...

Anyway, this list keeps me pretty busy without doing anything much with any Windows projects.  I can get around fine, IMO, on Windows. Just because I don't have any Windows projects on my plate doesn't mean I'm not learning anything new.  Besides - aren't there plenty of others focusing JUST on Windows?

I'm pretty excited about my list (above) and do as much reading and experimenting  as time permits.  It sure seems to me that I'm learning new stuff - Well, I'm learning things that interest me.  I guess because non-Windows things don't interest some I guess it appears that I'm not learning anything (that interests them).  Oh well.  Can't please everyone and I stopped trying long ago.

Perl and SQLite

Finally got around to finishing my little SQLite and Perl program.  To speed things up, I used a shell script with remote SSH commands to grab the data, then used Perl to stuff it into SQLite.  Very cool!   Need to use Perl's Net-SNMP on next version but this was mainly an excuse to use SQLite.  Glad I did.  There's a lot of strangeness - can't get used to putting a dot in front of commands and many of my favorite SQL commands are missing or renamed.  Still - SO COOL to be able to create a database on the fly like that.