Lost in Windowsland

For the first time in 15 years, (maybe ever*), I've been working on Windows servers.  I've always found Windows to be uncomfortable.  Lousy shell, few if any tools -and you can't script a GUI. But lately, I've been intrigued by Powershell and have been using it a bit for things.  With the addition of gVim, I am finding Windows to be more and more comfortable.  (gVim is a lifesaver!) 

Another thing I use is Strawberry Perl!  Actually, I use it to write Powershell scripts for large lists of users [add mailbox, delete mailbox, add/del mailContact, etc.]  But I am seeing some pretty cool Powershell tools (import-csv is cool) and someday, I'll just process files in Powershell and won't need Perl (on Windows).  Yeah right!!  And I'll switch to Notepad too.  Ha!

So, I'm pretty much weaned off of Cygwin - yeah, practically a Windows native now except for gVim and Perl.  I guess that okay, eh?

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* I went directly from being the Netware guy to being the UNIX guy and skipped the Windows NT, etc.

Excellent YAPC::NA (for me)

Wow!  A lot has changed since last year.  It seems like this year was an emphasis on Perl 5 (which is fine by me).  It looks like developement on Perl 5 has really picked up.  There is a 6th edition of Learning Perl out which emphasizes Perl 5.14!  (I'm waiting on the Kindle Edition)  I found out that most people are using Perl 5.12.  My old Solaris systems have 5.8 and I'm not even using any of the cool stuff from 5.10 yet.  I'm excited to start after seeing so many examples of things I've been missing out on.  PerlBrew should help with this and I need to start using cpanm.

Notes and reminders: Look into Test::More, Mouse, cpanm, PerlBrew, ZeroMQ, Plack, Dancer, Starman, Mongrel2, Catalyst and, as usual, make a point to spend more time on #perl and PerlMonks.

The interesting thing was Larry Wall's handling of the Perl 6 and the pumpkings.  I have a feeling this year's State of the Onion will be jaw dropping.

Really good conference - even better than last year (for me).  I'm loving the Perl 5 emphasis!

Looking forward to YAPC::NA

I am really looking forward to YAPC::NA.  Looks like it'll be another good one.  I was especially interested in the Plack and Dancer talks (which are not yet confirmed according to the site).  If you see Tatsuhiko Miyagawa or Mark Allen - tell them I'm counting on them! 

Perl, I didn't know you could do that

I happened to be clicking around and saw Perl.com had an entry called Writing on Walls with Facebook::Graph.  Neat!  It was preceded by Facebook Authentication with Perl and Facebook::Graph.  I made a mental note to remember that and then Linux Magazine sent an article called FBCMB: Command Line for Facebook.  Although somewhat unrelated, that sent me off to look for more Perl modules for Facebook only to find someone had already covered it in a blog entry called Writing a Facebook Applications in Perl.

Anyway, if, like me, you didn't know there was a lot of Perl resources for Facebook - now you do. 

CPAN to the rescue

I needed a quick tool to change HTML to POD.  I coulda sworn I had a html2pod utility at the command line - nope - must've been that other Linux distro.  No worries - I just grabbed Pod::HTML2Pod and with very little modification to the example code I had just what I wanted.

Mac OSX and CGI.pm

"I'm NOT a web developer!"  I've been saying that a lot lately.  Even so, because I have done a bit of LDAP programming and they needed a web interface, I wrote a quick hack which turned into a big, long painful project.  The biggest issue is so many things don't work the same (or at all) on Mac OSX.  OpenLDAP, for instance (a whole other story). [It should be noted - I'm also not a Mac guy.]



I tried for several days to get CGI.pm redirects and refreshes to work but kept getting Error 302's.  I found lots of people with the same issue on the Mac.   Finally - someone said "You'll have to write it without CGI.pm because it doesn't 100% work on the Mac (and/or maybe the Apple Apache config was incriminated).  Anyway, I rewrote the redirects without CGI.pm (ugly, inelegant Perl 4ish looking code) and it worked fine.

Since I never exactly found the answer - I want to state for future folks looking for an answer - "IT DOESN'T WORK RIGHT ON A MAC" (this phrase can be re-used for a great many things).  And, if I'm wrong (because, remember, I'm not a web developer) it'd be great for someone to comment with the right answer.

I'll probably get comments such as "You're using CGI.pm for web development?!  Are you from the past?!" To this I would say "Yes I am".

SDL and Perl

I missed this article from Perl.com last month: Visualizing Music with SDL and Perl.  It caught my eye because I've just recently read The Book of Xen (great book, btw) and it mentioned SDL as an alternative to, say, vnc, which sent me off looking up more about SDL.  Anyhoo, the code looks like fun and uses concepts that could come in handy - especially if I ever get around to writing a video game (kidding - not likely to make it down that far on the list in this lifetime).  So check it out - there's still lots of cool things going on with Perl all the time.