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.

Really good Perl book under a secretive title

Since I've been doing a lot of LDAP programming lately, I finally broke down and bought O'Reilly's LDAP System Administration.  I found a used paperback for $4!  While I was waiting, I got impatient and bought the Kindle version for my Android phone.  I just bought it for the LDAP ACL info but I was thrilled to see chapter 10 was devoted to Perl-LDAP.  It explained a lot of things in the Perl-LDAP example code that I hadn't seen explained before (I'm sure it's out there but the author has done a nice job of digging it all up and putting it together).  Anyway, if you're looking for a nice LDAP book, this is looking like a good one so far (still reading).

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.

Nifty Perl Hack

I threw together a tiny bit of code with the example code from Net::IMAP::Simple to make a program that watches for Mailman unsubscribe messages, logs them, then deletes the message.  It was a 5 minute job (except for the part where my iteration was off by one and kept deleting the wrong message).  Perl is so handy for things like this.

Juniper Switches and Perl

We have some new switches at work - Juniper.  I had a few scripts that could look at a Cisco switch and I could configure and modify Cisco switches.  I had heard that the Juniper switches used Perl.  Looks like they do.  There are quite a few Juniper OS (Junos) Perl modules so maybe this won't be too bad. 

Jr. High Math - Perl to the rescue

My daughter needed a calculator to check square roots last night.  I couldn't believe it - we didn't have one!  Well, I had my beloved HP 15C from engineering school days.  RPN is cool - right?!  Yeah, you can imagine how that went over.  So, then I grabbed a slide rule.  I know!  You guessed it - worse reaction than RPN.  So then I grabbed her Dell netbook, which was running Ubuntu Linux , and wrote a Perl hack that was basically

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   print "Enter a number\n";
   $number = stdin;
   chomp $number;
   $root = sqrt $number;
   print "The square root of $number is $root\n";

Ha!  It worked and she used it.  Perl to the rescue!