use Perl

There's a reasonable number of those URL shortening services out now. And, irritatingly, they don't all provide the same interface. TinyURL, Shorl, SnipURL and MASL will all generate a code. NotLong will suggest one (preemptively, I might add, rather than after, thus allowing you to set something pertaining to the URL in question). Qwer, you set up front (although I must admit I haven't gone further with Qwer: doesn't work in lynx).

SnipURL allows you to 'restrict' access. Shorl lets you have a password. SnipURL lets you register and have your snurls be attributed to your account. SnipURL and Qwer let you edit your URLs.

All in all, my interface in WWW::Shorten is breaking =) Have to make a new one [keeping the old for backwards compatibility of course]. I just have to remember: keep them all as much alike as I can, and keep the simple case simple.

Mostly so I can play with all sorts of aggregation presenting a unified journal,
I've sortof taken my journal to here.

All perl stuff will still be posted here, mind you. Non Perl stuff there. Perl stuff will
also appear there. For those interested: it's a Mason based Blosxom =)

Woohoo! "Perl and LWP" has arrived in Australia. And I've bought it.

Woohoo! It's finally arrived in Australia. And I've bought it! And it's lovely!

(started as a reply to davorg's journal entry)

I used to send friends 'useless links of the day'. Sometimes amusing, sometimes not. Usually either interesting, useless, or some combination. Occasionally useful ones crept through. These would be disseminated via ICQ or Jabber.

I found I was getting quite a few though, so started a page on my web page. Then I could have an archive, and organise them to some degree.

Not a blog in the sense of journalling, just links. What I can now do, is have a button in Galeon (or whatever browser I'm using on the day), be looking at a page, and click on the button. The button brings up a page that lets me attach a comment or two, a title, and then it can email the link away.

The page in question is a Mason component. Happily uses Cache::FileCache to store the URLs, both in their original form and in Shorl keyword and password form. The Shorl part keeps URLs short in emails, and Shorl also logs hits. (That said, I used to have the web page of links go through a modified merlyn script (from WebTechniques) and thus had statistics that way.)

Future expansion (assuming I get around to it) will see things like sending a weekly digest, sending via Jabber/IRC. And stuff. Naturally, this is all done for my own edification and enlightenment rather than any practical purpose.

So, from little concepts, fun things grow.

But, yes, it does look very easy to create such a URL shortening service. (Just think, purl or scribot could have their own; if they haven't already.) It is, after all, just a mapping of URLs to keys and back again.

Arbitrary semi-historical note: MASL was first, iirc. Then TinyURL which has/had shorter links (not just from the domain name. Then Shorl which allows you to see how many times a given URL was accessed, and uses more memorable keys.

(Iain/Koschei/Spoon/ict/something different every day)

Good news
I convinced XS to le tme export a string with NULs in it. Of course, I had to push it onto the stack myself, but nevertheless I'm happy I worked it out =) Would've seriously hindered tai_pack() otherwise.

Bad news
The machine which collects my mail, and serves my websites, and other assorted things developed a disc fault the other day when some idiot turned it off without shutting it down.
Unfortunately, I didn't notice it had disc faults until the disc was semi-corrupted. As of today, the disc map is hosed. (Regrettably, there wasn't anything much I could do with it in the meantime to fix it; it's not a convenient machine, geographically speaking.)
Thankfully, I had some backups (albeit not too recent with the exception of the web part), and the machine also had two drives (one for / and one for /home --- it's the / one that's buggered).
So I guess I'll be spending part of the weekend reinstalling the system. Joy.
Oh, and it's the machine that the books site was on, so that's definitely going to be a bit delayed until I get the machine up and running. (Although the stuff is on the good drive, it's hard to get stuff off it until I'm physically with the machine and can take it out.)

(Idiots--)

Well, I have the straight implementation of libtai as an XS module. Very dull and it will just let you export various sets of functions. All very procedural.

So, now to redefine it into a lovely OO style thing, since OO fits it nicely.

And I must say, Extending and Embedding Perl is lovely. I've never gotten very far using perlxs and perlxstut, but with this book, I have a sensibly functioning module. Woohoo! (Jenness++; Simon++)

Oh, and more tests. Natch. (petdance++)

I've just read Casey's article on his highway wireless LAN (a fun read), and I just thought: if many cars had wireless capability, and many had routing capability as well, then you'd not have a problem surfing the net during the daily gridlock.

Have a few base stations in strategic locations, have the various cars routing (network) traffic and you'd have something usable, right?

Woo: I used Perlmonks for once.

With any luck I'll get an answer to my question regarding runtime variables and runtime attributes.

Now I just need to convince my gf that 23 is not "old".