GAVollink's Journal

Hybernation

GAVollink — 2007-03-23T14:46:33+00:00

It's Spring. Time to wake up (fine it's been more than a year)...

It's been a long time, but I'm finally trying to catch up here again.

I was actually starting to get /involved/ once, and then something wonderful and horrible happened. I got a full time job doing... Perl.

I'm going to try to come back online, and make a presence again. We'll see how that goes.

Busy Week Included Speaking, GD.pm and Linux Wireless

GAVollink — 2005-11-10T18:38:54+00:00

Well, not a really big deal, but it was in front of a modest crowd of 11. I gave a 10 minute talk on using GD in Perl. You can view my "slides enhanced for use without my voice" on my web site... http://vollink.com/gary/perl/gd/.

A really good buddy of mine came from Florida to visit me in Minnesota. It was basically a four-day-long "hack-a-thon". One of the things we resolved was "The Best We Could Find" way to deal with Wireless under Debian and Ubuntu.

We both found multiple places to deal with installing a driver for your wireless device, and some of these even discussed the use of the "wireless-tools" deb package. However, none of them really explained how to get your wireless networking to "just work". So, I've written it up, and put in online...
http://vollink.com/gary/deb_wifi.html

All that on top of "Real Life", job hunting, and this pet project that I'm determined to help Andy (petdance) with. I'm also trying to find time to write fiction.

Why is all quiet on the Virus Front?

GAVollink — 2005-10-31T01:20:53+00:00

This is seriously odd... there are no Symantec updates. It's the night before halloween... mischeif night. Symantec has no updates, and there are a mere few additions (MyTob and IRCbot varients) on the ClamAV front. Hmm.

Tomorrow may be a bad day.

Hurricane Wilma

GAVollink — 2005-10-24T15:53:54+00:00

While I'm comfy (though cold) living in Minnesota, I have a lot of friends and family in South Florida.

Look... My buddy sent me video.

http://vollink.com/gary/

Module Questions - Confused but Why?

GAVollink — 2005-10-20T00:22:14+00:00

Modules, and namespace.

I make everything more difficult than it should be. This is something that a lot of tech heads do, and well, this is one of those things.

Without "registering" a module name, is there a 'Reserved' module space where a future module will not clobber something?

Is that even necessary, or am I being an Idiot? I've mentioned before that I'm from the land of C, and in C a module is basically a single file or a library. So, basically - a Module is anologous to a C library... (right?)

Of course, C, has explicit links and whole slew of of other ways to get around name clobbering (although, even there, it can create problems).

Worse, every time I start searching for information about making modules, everything is about making a module for CPAN... except what I'm doing is recurring database calls, that are specific to my environment.. DBD is great, and generic enough.

I'm smart enough to know that CPAN doesn't need another something::Simple

Where was I, oh yeah, Clobbering.

So I know I want to stop copying the same 10 functions between each of my web-programs, but I want to give it a module name that can't be clobbered later (we transition Linux dists often).

How does one go about this? Is there a way to set an Explicit load path for a wanted/required module? Does the naming to Module name convention have to follow the CPAN (Group=Directory)::(Module=filename.PM) mode?

So, I'm willing to read, is there some link you can point me to?

perl-DBD-Oracle-1.16-Ora10.RHEL.3.i386.rpm

GAVollink — 2005-06-09T22:05:26+00:00

I have created an installable (RPM) for RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 for DBD::Oracle that will work against the downloadable Oracle-Instantclient.

If anybody wants it, keep reading

The "explain" functionality of the module (that most folks don't use) requires a whole boat-load of Tk stuff, so I've (forcefully) removed those portions of the dependancy tree.

cpan2rpm --force --no-requires 'libclntsh,perl(Tk),perl(Tk::Balloon),perl(Tk::ErrorDialog),perl(Tk::FileSelect) ,perl(Tk::Pod),perl(Tk::ROText)' --requires oracle-instantclient-basic --version 1.16 --release Ora10.RHEL.3 --make-no-test DBD::Oracle

Anyway, it's here http://www.vollink.com/gary/bin/
Any and all comments welcome.

Search.CPAN seems to be down...

GAVollink — 2005-05-23T16:59:57+00:00

I hope it's very temporary. Argh.

Needing to download Parse::Syslog and Statistics::Distribution, don't know how to get there without going through search.cpan.org.

[additional]
It seems to be back up again... I was able to download the packages I need.

Newbie question though, how often does this happen, and is there a way to get packages without using the search.cpan.org interface?

[Non-Perl] Fun Business Trip

GAVollink — 2005-04-04T17:19:47+00:00

I'm just back from London, well - technically, Ealing and Uxbridge, but I'm not a cartographer... I was there for two weeks coordinating and implementing the technical side of moving my Employer's European operations from Ealing to Uxbridge.

The best part of the trip was the "Four Day, Easter Bank-Holidays" - for which I was handed the keys to a Vauxhall Corsa, and told to return it on Tuesday morning with a full-tank.

For those who have been "lucky" enough to drive a Corsa (or the Opel version), you can stop laughing now.

So, I flew my wife in for the long weekend, and we drove to Winsor, Stonehenge, Bath, Oxford, Banbury and Bristol - and we spent one day in Westminster and London.

London area is an amazing place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there (no offense to those who do). Maybe out in the country...

Code Style - Request for Input

GAVollink — 2005-02-24T14:16:48+00:00

I come from the C - where the styles are called K&R or ANSI, Perlers may call it something different (if so, please let me know).
K&R:

if ($var) { $used++; }

ANSI:

if ($var) { $used++; }

I am aware that Perlers generally seem to prefer K&R style (perhaps because Larry Wall prefers it). I have a tendancy of coding in ANSI style. I note that there are some modules written in ANSI style (though, very few).

Will my preference come to haunt me one day? Anybody have any reasons why I should learn to adopt the K&R style? [ I am aware to follow the style of a given project when hacking in that project ]. Anybody have any reasons why I should stick with ANSI?

Thanks

General Perl Module ettiquette question...

GAVollink — 2005-02-22T23:23:23+00:00

Assuming I entered a bug in rt.cpan.org, and assuming that the POD within the module specifies that bugs should be reported to rt.cpan.org.

How long should I let that bug sit, marked as 'new' before sending the Author a friendly Email, assuming that author's Email is also available?

Now let's assume that no bugs have been filed against that module before (I even clicked 'Show resolved').

Are we talking weeks, or months?

Introduction

GAVollink — 2005-02-21T20:02:21+00:00

Hello, my name is Gary Allen Vollink. I found this site while poking around for information about a module that I found on CPAN.

So, from a CPAN package, to an Author's personal web site, to said Author's
use Perl->Journal();
And just like that, I created an account. I've been known to hang out on Slashdot, and recognized the "slashcode" interface immediately.

Anyway - I've been a Perl user for about 8 years now, although I've only been heavily writing large web-apps in Perl for the last four years (give or take).

There's a fair chance that I'll be doing some patch-work in modules in the near future (well, I've already started - we'll see how the Author reacts). I'm starting a largish project, and I'll be needing to squeeze some extra functionality out of some existing Perl libraries.

Anyway, nice to meet you.