use Perl

I've spent the past week playing catch up on reading Perl blogs, namely ModernPerlBooks.com.

What chromatic has to say is thought provoking stuff. I'm one of those that maintain his own little part of the DarkPAN. My code will never leave the office. I rely upon many CPAN modules but only for their basic functionality.

If Perl were to upgrade in 5.12 to break functionality, I really would care or really know. I am very comfortable in using an older, known release of Perl. We are looking at 5.10.0 only to offer a recent release of Perl not because any of need my co-workers or I have. I like what I see, but so far I haven't seen a highly compelling need to move forward. POE, DBI, and Class::DBI are doing what I need to get done today.

When we decide to upgrade, we won't rid ourselves of our previous versions of Perl, heck we still have installs of 5.004 being used. What I'm saying is that the Perl community should move forward without worrying overly much about us that have to drive in the slow lane.

For IDEs I decided to try Eclipse after reading so much about it.  Then to program perl with Eclipse, I needed to get the EPIC plugin.  Okay, since I am a member of the Chicago.pm group, and we're working on Kwalitee testing HTML::Tree.  So the current source code control utility of the month is subversion, and perl qa testing is going to use it; I had to get subclipse, the eclipse subversion plugin.

So, these plugins are all working.  I've got eclipse to run perl programs, and run prove on both a single .t or the entire project.

Next will be to see if I can get coverage stats generated as well.

This is cool.

Doesn't get much better than this.

I was thinking I could keep the raw and cooked RDF in the database as TEXT entries and then retrieve them for display on the web page. Well, after an hour of not being able to get quote to quote it correctly, I've decided to fsck it for now and just continue to save it off to a file. I still will use the db for the aggregator.

Before anyone raises the idea that I should d/l and read slash, et al, let me say: This is a project to stretch myself and to learn by doing.

The project is a Sports Club/League managment system, in case anyone was curious. What does RSS have to do with this? Nothing, it's a distaction from the planning I'm doing on this.

That's how long I've been at the new job. One month. It has been a great change for me. The environment is great, the challenges are difficult, and best of all I'm happy to goto work again.

It's been two years since I've been happy to goto work. But now I look forward to the day. I develope and support a large perl codebase of production code. I've already added to this codebase and seen its effects on the user base. I like that. That's not something you get often in a sysadmin shop.

Maybe I should have made this jump earlier. I've just been afraid that my skilz weren't up to snuff and that'd be my downfall. We'll my skillz may not be top notch, but I'm learning that's not all it takes to be a full time developer.

Here I sit, my last day of work. Nothing to do. Desk was cleaned out yesterday. Computers are clean of personal data and files. Boss won't let me leave any earlier than 2:30 (1hr earlier than normal).

I am bored.

It was kinda of odd walking into my managers office and handing him my letter. Never had to do that before. I was expecting him to show me the door, you know. Every where else I had worked, at the time you gave your notice you were walked to the door and told your personal effects would follow. But not here, he even asked if I could push back my last day. I had planned in June to take two days off this week, and he wants me to stay two more days to make up for those. Can you get an idea why I'm not two sad to leave this place?

The next job is a Perl Programmer with Customer support duties. I'm looking forward to it. The customer base is internal and seems to be like all other financial industry customers I have dealt with in the past. The perl is hard-core, and will surely force me to become a better programmer than I already am.

On a completely different note, this past weekend I went on a one-day bus trip to and back from Columbus, OH (8hrs one way) to watch the Chicago Fire get embarassed by the last place team in the conferance. We fielded our second and third string players and lost 2-6, after giving up a 2-0 half-time lead. Yeah, I know we had the season championship already wrapped up, but still there's pride to play for.

The Delta_Days function in Date-Calc croaks on invlaid data. I just hate when modules decide when to stop my program from running. Is it so hard to just return a error code? Am I the only one that is irritated at this?