use Perl

So I'm now the proud owner of a Samsung SPH A460. I like it. It doesn't actually work but I like it :-)

Called to activate the phone and the config menu I'm supposed to get doesn't show up. "You need to take the phone back to the store as it's not working how it should" was the final decision by the Sprint rep.

Too add insult to injury the phone call lasted 1hr 53 minutes. Along with activating the new phone I was trying to convert my existing plan over to one of their "add-a-phone, shared-minutes family plan" thingies. At one point there were 4 people in the rep's cubie trying to figure out why the system wasn't working the way it should. I kid you not, they had the rep, his supervisor and two "experts" ('cause they'd been there the longest) trying to change my account. The supervisor couldn't apologize enough - gave me a decent credit on my account to thank me for being so patient. Good thing too because I was *this* close to telling them where they could stick their fscking service :-)

Anyhoo, my wife exchanged the phone for a new one this morning so (fingers crossed) I'll be able to get it activated and actually use the bloody thing tonight :-)

Lord Of The Rings comes out on DVD tomorrow. Seeing as I was one of the few people on the planet who did not go and see it at the cinema, I'm quite looking forward to renting it actually.

Update: well it's still Monday in my neck of the woods (10:22pm) so to say it's coming out tomorrow is still ok :-)

More Perl fun on my wife's Windows XP box. This time I was creating an images database for her. Got to play with DBD::SQLite which is way cool by the way. She's happy with the programs I wrote for her so that's a few more brownie points for me :-)

...to add to the list of modules today that I've found extremely handy: Data::Dumper.

Ahh, so that's what that nasty HoH looks like, now I can figure out where the problem lies in this code I've just been asked to maintain/fix.

Sweet! (the Data::Dumper part, not the nasty code part!)

You know, foo.cgi isn't exactly the fastest web application on the block is it? Can you make it faster?

Hmm, large application, don't have time to convert it to a "proper" mod_perl handler...

$cd /usr/local/apache/conf
$vi httpd.conf

10 (ish) seconds later...

$sudo /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl restart

If you've been ultra strict in your cgi coding, Apache::Registry is your friend :-)

My bloody tailbone is killing me today for some reason. This makes it somewhat awkward to sit down. Weird I tell ya...

So I started messing around with trying to install Image::Magick on my wife's WinXP box. All previous attempts had failed miserably so I wasn't holding out much hope.

It installed like a charm - first time. Get the bloody flags out.

Then I whipped up a quick Perl prog to resize images. My wife thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread as now she can resize all images in a directory without opening them up one by one in Photoshop. This got me a few brownie points ;-)

Tabbed browsing in Mozilla rocks!

Error message bad:

Missing right curly or square bracket at track_orders.pl line 987, at end of line

perltidy good:

The most recent un-matched '{' is on line 132
132: sub parseTrackFiles {


Simon Cozens on "Why did I really quit Perl?".