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.

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.

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.

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!

Programming for kids

I'm always on the lookout for books to get my kids interested in programming - you know - easy introductions.  I recently found one while following a link off of PerlBuzz called Falling out of love with a language.  In this, the author talks about getting bored with Perl and then discovering Ruby which was described as "Perl done right".  I was intrigued so I googled and found a list of the best Ruby books.  I then ordered this one used from Amazon:

Learn to Program, Second Edition (The Facets of Ruby Series)

I was really impressed with Ruby.  I ran through the 20 minute tutorial and then started reading this book.  The book is great!  The author teaches children so he knows how to hold your attention.  It's fun!  I honestly have never in my life seen a  better introduction to programming for kids or beginners.  So, hopefully, the kids will enjoy learning Ruby this summer.  I'm pretty sure my son will like the idea of programming an old style, text based adventure game.  When they're done with that, I'll show them Perl.

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.

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.