use Perl

Just got home after giving a talk on packaging Perl applications for win32 platforms using WiX.

In my experience, service / daemon initialisation is something best performed by an operating system specific installation package, such as a redhat rpm / debian dpkg / win32 msi. Just about every operating system variant has their own unique twist on the required behaviour of a service / daemon.

Even better, use the TDSDUMP variable when running against DBD::Sybase (the failure) and tsql (the success) and compare the debug logs to find the difference.

First off, if you are hitting memory issues, are you trying to retrieve a text (as distinct from a /(?:var)?char/ field?

Secondly, can you set the TDSDUMP environment variable and post the output? checkout http://www.freetds.org/userguide/logging.htm

I have a application written as CGI scripts that run under mod_perl mode via ModPerl::Registry or if anyone still uses it Apache::Registry. It also connects to a variety of databases, including Microsoft SQL Server via freetds.

Freetds can be controlled via a freetds.conf config file or environment variables.

Dammit, i meant to say

• make sure all of your <form> elements contain 'accept-charset="UTF-8"'

It's difficult for me to tell what's happening, but suggestions follow:

• decide that UTF-8 is going to be your encoding
• read up on the my $decoded = Encode::decode('UTF-8', $encoded) and my $encoded = Encode::encode('UTF-8', $decoded) functions
• encode strings just before they leave your application (just before print, DBI, whatever)
• decode strings as soon as possible (just after read, my $encoded = $cgi->param($name), $sth->fetchrow, whatever)
• make sure your MySQL databases are created with "CREATE DATABASE `$database_name` CHARACTER SET utf8";
• make sure all of your elements contain 'accept-charset="UTF-8"'
• write a test script to prove it all works

For those of us engaged in developing/supporting a web application, testing seems to be an almighty pain.

The state of the art seems to be; put a massive investment into writing test cases in Tool X, which manages (sort of) Browser Y. However thanks mainly to mozilla and khtml, but really opera and explorer are just as capable here, we can never be really sure if someone isn't going to come up with a great new browser.

I've been experimenting with the awesome Devel::Cover, and while it's great fun to use it to improve my test suite, my code also tries very hard to validate all input sources.

Devel::Cover can tell me that the line

$a == $b ? 1 : 0

has been executed and even that both halves of the condition have been executed, but it can't tell me that i haven't tested the case where $a isn't numeric.

$work has been advertising for a new testing position and i've been doing the role of assessment of technical skills of the prospective employees.

i've been a bit surprised when interviewees reach into their bag, pull out a folder of paper and offer to show me documents from their previous/current job.

at $work, we've been timing tcp connections with Time::HiRes and we hit an interesting problem. Time::HiRes was returning ridiculously small times for the tcp ping, approx 1-2 milliseconds, when we knew the time should be approx 30 milliseconds.

After firing up that beautiful piece of software known as (?:ethereal|wireshark), we verified that the traffic actually took approx 30 milliseconds as expected.