use Perl

I did not make it to YAPC::Europe::2003 ... that is a bit of a sad thing, but hey, my daugther got sick on thursday evening - nothing serious , though - so my wife was very happy having me around. So I guess that not going to YAPC was rather a good thing!

Anyhow ... I'm a bit annoyed with java, although i need to do *stuff* with it for my day job. The last week I've been busy using aspects (AspectJ, http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj) to do some code coverage profiling on file system access. Anyhow, I was a bit thorn away by the fact that the next piece of code does not work:

Integer i = new Integer(5);
i++;

This does not work, neither has the Integer object an add, substract or Integer.doSomethingUsefull() method. Curious not, that a language which was originally targetted to embedded systems has so much trouble getting its primitive types in order. I need to have an integer object, because I needed top keep a hash (HashMap), linking a name to a counter (${$key}++) .... it expects an Object as its key and value paremeter in the put method (HashMap.put(key, value)). Anyhow, a colleague told me he uses an array with one element for this. A straight int type will not work, as it is a primitive integer type and no Integer object.

Johan

I'm having a dilemma here ... I've taken 3 days holiday to go to YAPC::Europe::2003, which starts tomorrow, but I'm reluctant going. I suppose this is because of not wanting to part my wife and daughter. I know it is a bit mellow, but my daughter, 5 months old, really changed my look onto the world.

Anyway, who can give me a few good reasons to go to YAPC::Europe? It is only a 3 hours drive for me, so that should be fine anyhow ...

Johan

I need to write database components for a medium complexity database, I'm talking about a 30 tables here, with a lot of foreign keys ...

The problem being that I don't have time to do it by hand - and also because I'm too lazy to write 30 database classes - so I'm looking for an OO database wrapper. Choice seems to be abundant, tangram, class::dbi, alzabo, ...

Skimming the docs of those I think I need to settle on Class::DBI or Alzabo. I'm not sure which one will fit my needs ... so I'm experimenting with both of them ...

it has been a long time since I wrote something here ... it probably has to do with the birth of my daughter ;-)

Anyhow, I wonder if any Vlaanderen.pm bonzos are going to YAPC::Europe 2003 and what hotel they have booked.

If anybody from Belgium wants a lift to YAPC::Europe, i still have some place left in the car ...

Johan

I just made the reflection that in all projects I've done I always found some use for Perl. Although quite a few projects were completely written in Perl I also seem to have grown the tendency to find *some* usage for Perl in other types of projects.

For PalmOS programming, I've written a script to automate the generation of skeleton code. I also use Perl to generate some of the content for my palm apps.

For my embedded development, it was a bit hard at first to find a usage for Perl. But the inevitable happened ... when developing a wireless application - RF temperature logger - I wrote the server portion in Perl.

Even at my day-job I'm Perling away - if I have the chance - again, using Perl to automate stuff. (for the moment stuff means visualizing test data ).

So ... for me Perl is the ultimate automatron, a tool to automate everything.

Johan

I've bought three books today:
* Designed Embedded Hardware, ora
* Learning the bash shell 2nd edition, ora
* LINUX SERVER HACKS, ora

What do we learn from this:
1) O'Reilly is appealing
2) O'Reilly is dominant on my book shelf
3) LSH probably deserves a top 10 place in my book rank
4) Hmmm, if they all were from Micro$oft, I probably would think different ;-)

Last week I released a module to generate a Palm PDB from an XML description. Now, I've just put a module on CPAN that does the opposite, it creates an XML description from a Palm PDB. This XML::Generator::Pdb module generates SAX events from a PDB and can be plugged into a SAX pipeline to do something usefull...

It should hit CPAN soon.

Yesterday I was browsing one of my backup HDs to look for an old project I want to take back up, when I noticed two small Perl thingies I did last year. I had completely forgotten about them ;-)

One of the projects - Dyns::Client - was a perl module to perform an DNS update for dyns.cx. you know, one of those web applications that provide you with a dynamic DNS update if you have a DSL or cable connection that regularly changes IP addresses ... The difference with this is that is being run by a very good friend of mine and hence deserves some extra attention!

The other project - dynsudp - is a proxy for dynamic DNS updates, written to be used from an embedded webserver (specifically for siteplayer - http://www.siteplayer.com). This device has DHCP and webserver on board, but can only send a UDP request. So it is impossible to do a HTTP request from the device to the outside world. So I build a daemon - based on Net::Server - that would accept a UDP request containing the necessary information to do a dynamic DNS update on dyns.cx. I'm not sure if it has any use in the real world, but I really like the project, because it combines a lot of disciplines ...

Both projects should have hit CPAN by now ...

Regards,
Johan

I just posted a new module (XML::Handler::Pdb) to CPAN which is a SAX handler to generate a PalmOS database from an XML description.

If I find the time I would like to write the counterpart also, XML::Generator::Pdb, a SAX event generator that takes a PDB and generates SAX events.

Anyway, this module was written during the sleepless nights that my baby causes me. I really admire the mums, as they seem to be better baby-stress resistant then their male counterparts.

The module should appear here anytime now ...

I read the TPJ from march this weekend and it carried a good collection of articles this time. The article about fractal images and music was very amusing. The articles about high performance computing in Perl (Moshe Bar) and how to minimize structural code (Simon Cozens) are really very interesting. It is a pity that the magazine is not any bigger, the articles are of a good standard, but are all way too short...

An advertisement in the new TPJ pointed to a collection of 101 articles about Perl. You could buy them for 10$. The articles come from various sources (TPJ, web review, web techniques, ...). I bought the article series, but I've to say it is a bit a disappointement ... although the articles are very good and are worth a place in your Perl-doc collection. The point is that only the text of the articles is included, no images at all ...

Johan