use Perl

I did some stuff getting windows to launch perl stuff without user intervention on locked down corporate machines a couple of years ago or so. Here are my findings for reference. Some of this might be useful, but it might now.

Here's the appropriate incantation from vbscript to get a .bat file to launch without a command line window. I guess vbscript can also be used to set the icon and stuff too:

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & fso.GetParentFolderName(wscript.ScriptFullName) & "\perlshell.bat"& Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

And here's an ultra-crude "installer" designed for installing single cuser catalyst apps onto locked down corporate machines without admin access:

@echo off
set bindir=%~dp0
set bindir=%bindir:~0,-1%
mkdir "%APPDATA%\MyPersonalHomePage"
echo ...
echo Copying application to hard drive, please be patient ....
xcopy /E /C /Y /Q "%bindir%" "%APPDATA%\MyPersonalHomePage"
echo ...
echo Creating link in startup folder
echo ...
mkdir "%APPDATA%\..\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"
Shortcut.exe /R:7 /A:C /T:"%APPDATA%\MyPersonalHomePage\startmyphp.vbs" /F:"%APPDATA%\..\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\Start Personal Home Page Server.lnk"
"%APPDATA%\MyPersonalHomePage\startmyphp.vbs"
echo Starting server, please be patient
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 10 -w 1000 > nul
start http://127.0.0.1:35900/

singingfish writes "The Perl Survey is now ready for users to complete. The purpose is to gather information about the Perl community at large. Please complete a survey, and spread the word about it to your friends and colleagues who also program using Perl. The survey will take about 10 to 15 minutes of your time.

The official announcement is at the Perl Foundation Blog"
Link To Original Source

Now, I was under the impression that the correct etiquette when placing a turd on someone's doorstep was to put it naked on top of some crumpled newspaper, set light to the paper, ring the doorbell and run away fast.

Yes, I spotted this when we chatted at the book launch last year. I kind of gave up when you couldn't coherently explain your research questions to me I'm afraid. I on the other hand am afraid of programming, which is why 90% of the programming work I do involves gluing other people's work from CPAN into some jury-rigged thing that mostly seems to work.

To all you people making rumblings about marketing effort in the Perl community (I know who you are). I have a Perl Foundation grant outstanding that I intend to complete by the end of this year.

err that would be my tpf grant, which I expect to be complete by the end of this year.

Indeed it is. I think I'm going to run some focus groups for interested people on IRC to try to nut this out a bit.

I haven't committed much to the github repository for this project since my last update, because a lot of what I've been doing is fairly exploratory stuff. Essentially I've been through the original report with a view to replicating the findings of the original survey, and trying to segment ou

Back in January, I started doing work on the Perl Foundation grant for the perl survey. I'd gathered all the data together, and done a fairly sizable job of cleaning it up, when along came a new job and a horrendous set of deadlines for the now imminent Catalyst book. Meanwhile I was waiting for Skud to give me the original

Bloody hell, you're my new hero! You've just got me half way towards obsoleting a bloody awful piece of propietary software for qualitative data analysis. But that's my project for the second half of this year ...

s/it's/its/i

The second Catalyst book (out for OSCON in June) will use Moose (with Squirrel acceptable for lightweight Models and Views) as it's only way of doing OO. I've noticed that Badger has appeared on the perl OO scene, which is great because it show how easy it is to bolt on decent OO into a language as expressive as Perl, but Moose (and it's Squirrel) has significant and sustained first mover advantage in this situation.

I've finally started working on the Perl Survey grant. The first thing I've done is taken Data::PerlSurvey2007 and merged it with the work that I did in late November 2007. Generally the best practice with survey data is to make the data file as two dimensional as possible. So to achieve this, I'm converting the nested data structures in the PerlSurvey2007 module into

I think my non-editorial brain heard a faint alarm bell when I read that sentence. I was just excited about the faintest whiff of legitimacy :)

The Catalyst Advent Calendar is running again this year (2008). The first entry is a summary of the results from the short Catalyst usage survey that we ran a few weeks ago, and there should be a new entry up at mid-day UTC every day between now and the 24th of December.
Link To Original Source