These are a few of my favorite modules

I was messing around with Xen on Slackware 14.2 and got my system goofed up.  The console worked but the mouse and keyboard would not function in X.  So, after a bit of flailing, I did a distro upgrade (from Slackware 14.2 to current), re-ran liloconfig and,  ta-dah! -Success!

I noticed Perl didn't work however.  It upgraded Perl but the modules were "mis-matched" it said.  After some googling, I ran across several suggested fixes.  The simplest seemed to me the brute force - delete all Perl references and reinstall Perl - which I did. (perl -E 'map {say $_} @INC')

Now I had a NEW problem.  NO MODULES AT ALL.  Began slowly adding modules as I needed them but today that was getting old.  So I did a quick grep of a few hundred of my Perl programs to see which modules I was using and then did a cpan install of all of them.  It's still running...

Which Perl modules you ask?  Well, to satisfy your curiosity and have this list handy the next time I install a fresh Perl - here's my list:

Gimp Gimp::Fu File::stat Time::localtime DBI Net::LDAP Net::LDAP::Bind Net::LDAP::Search MIME::Lite Net::Nslookup Nmap::Scanner Net::SSL::ExpireDate XML::RSS XML::Simple Test::Simple Net::LDAP::LDIF File::Basename CGI::Carp Net::SNMP SQL::Abstract Text::xSV Pod::HTML2Pod LWP::Simple LWP::UserAgent Net::IMAP::Simple Mojo::UserAgent Data::Dumper Date::Manip Net::Twitter DBD::SQLite Net::DNS Net::Telnet::Cisco DBD::Sybase Crypt::GPG File::Slurp utf8 Socket Net::DNS AnyEvent Net::RabbitFoot WWW::Mechanize HTTP::Cookies File::Copy Bot::BasicBot POE::Component::SSLify Config::General Log::Log4perl::Appender::RRDs LWP::Protocol::https

Wow.  That's actually shorter than I thought.  It looked more impressive as one line.  ;-)

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.

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.