use Perl

Had this interesting hack today, where my supervisor gave me a mbox file filled with (a few thousand) mail from conference participants and I needed to tag who had replied to him and who (out of a list) hadn't.

He expected me to sit down and compile a spreadsheet with neat tick marks. I was given the rest of the week to do it. *cough* I did a quickie search on CPAN and found Net::IMAP::Simple. Of course, there is also the wonderful Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. 30 minutes later ...

Done.

No cookie ? Ok. More work ? *loong pause* Ok.

Can I ask for any more than this ? Woot.

In the meantime, that means that London socializing will probably begin in August, instead of July. I'm still cranking away at the research work.

I noticed with more than a little dismay that Knoppix had decided to drop LaTex support in their latest version of the liveCD. Since I wanted to carry around a liveCD to pop into any random machine and work on my thesis while I'm on holiday in London, a bit of searching for an alternative ensued this afternoon.

The result: Quantian, a Knoppix based LiveCD distro specifically targetted to scientific and mathematical types..just what I needed. They even carry Kile. Woot!.

In the same vein as Gmail.py, I'm trying to make a Perl interface to Gmail. In fact, it will probably be a straight port. Inexplicably, I'm finding the same problem that an anonymous poster discovered... Win32 cookie handling or URL handling seems to be borked in Python. The Python script works fine in Cygwin and on my Mandrake box, but doesn't in Win32.

Ha, thought I. Perl has consistent behaviour between platforms.. well, sorta. Turns out that I get the same (incorrect)response in Perl as in Python. Head scratching time. Set the UserAgent to Linux (just in case they were checking). Nope. Not that either.

Update: It's not cookies. I examined headers from both Cygwin and Win32 versions. Sheesh. Maybe it's line endings or something equally embarassing?
Yet another update: For some reason, the last call to grab the javascript from the server unsticks the session, but only on Win32. Maybe it's time to watch some HTTP packets fly by..hmm. Bleargh. I do begin to wish that Perl had something like Python's SimpleCookie interface. (sacrilege, did I just say that ? I must be sleepier than I thought)

In a proof of concept for writing a better crawler, I noticed that lots of javascript content and dynamically generated links are lost. Cast around a bit and found the Perl module Javascript an interface to libjs

Then, I stumbled on HTTPUnit, an all singing, all dancing Javascript aware (they say there are limitations, of course) Unit testing framework. It's for Java, but it looks so promising that I think I will give it a shot on some link hiding site soon (perhaps this weekend ?)

A friend (rediscovered recently from Orkut, of all places) is learning Python. I introduced him to Golfing. He tells me about his cool script which scans Symantec's web page and downloads the latest update automatically. I golf it down to fewer lines. Now, the challenge is on.

This is fun, because there is absolutely no "my language rulez if I do it in fewer lines" feeling (ok, maybe there is a little). It's all to make both of us discover our respective languages a bit better. If I remember correctly, Python doesn't do regexes as part of the language (you have to use a Java like compile, match syntax) and Python also doesn't have CPAN. I intend to exploit those two advantages to the hilt *grins evilly*

From no Gmail and Orkut two days ago to being in both.. Why ? I don't know. I am still futzing around Orkut (never been in one of this type of community sites before). Many many thanks to Adrian for his Gmail invite. You rock and I owe you :) I didn't need it in the end, the friend I mentioned earlier sent his invite as he saw my mail.

I see some familiar places in Orkut (perlmonks is represented, hahaha and I recognize some of the faces there).. "I hate Java" is amusing. Looks like there is plenty to watch here..A bit surprised at the amount of information that Orkut wants to know on registration, but I guess that's quite normal.

A drastic step forward for me though.. this Orkut business. I've tried reasonably hard to keep my online persona completely separate from my real name, work and so on. It seems a bit awkward now to let that veil of secrecy go..

PS: omg, chaoticset, you look nothing like how I imagined you. I was gaping when I saw your profile pic in a posting.

As per my longstanding policy of buying *only* 2nd hand CDs, that means that I sometimes lose out on stuff I'd really like to listen to..

But I just got my hands on a couple of Nirvana albums, the earlier stuff ("Nevermind" and "Muddy banks") from a guy who was selling his CD collection before moving out.. his loss, my fortune.. Hope my cube-mates in the department don't mind (muted) Nirvana the rest of this week ;)

Firefox update mania :) It seems that the wonderful idea of using update.mozilla.org to validate extensions has met with a small problem. Bandwidth. The site has fallen over, it gets up, gets hit on the head again by the hordes of people rushing to update their extensions and falls over again. rinse, repeat.

If anyone needs a mirror, I found this link in the Firefox forums. It's slow too, but at least it will split the load a bit.