use Perl

The weather is gorgeous today. Florida may be humid as heck during the summer, but days like today make it all worthwhile.

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I'm jazzed because Adam Glass of FLUX (Florida Linux Users eXchange) has asked me to do a Debian install presentation. I really enjoy using Debian because all the work is taken out of compiling things. Most people complain because Debian is harder to install than most distros, but once you get past the install its smooth sailing. Not only that, but because Debian is completely volunteer, to upgrade your packages is free (no more downloading and burning ISOs) :)

I've also gotten everyone in the office switch to Debian. At first they gave me crap for even suggesting it, but once I got it installed, they realized how easy it is to maintain and UPGRADE.

My only real goal for the presentation is to open people's mind to the Debian packaging system and show them how easy it can be.

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New pictures of the house. A week later, the second story is up. :)

Our New Home 01-26-2002

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I took the whole idea of the text-to-speech callerid and decided that I wanted festival to announce new mail (in my inbox only and not to any of my lists).

New E-mail From: SENDERS NAME, Subject SUBJECT

This worked great, but because I listen to music while I program, I would only here a muffled version of the the message. So I decided to add another feature that would pause XMMS and then to the text-to-speech on the sender and subject, then unpause my music.

I was suprised to find that it was very simple to do this

use Xmms::Remote;
my $xmms = Xmms::Remote->new();

$xmms->pause; # to pause
# do festival text-to-speech stuff here
$xmms->pause; # to unpause

I'm going to clean up my code and release this to the general public once I work out the kinds. So now instead of seeing a little blinking light every time I get new mail, my computer reads it to me :)

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Awhile ago I came across this perl script that would use your modem as a caller id and would read the data coming in over the phone line and do something with it. Until now, I've been logging my calls to a MySQL database and pulling them up through a web browser here.

This weekend I got thinking about logging my e-mail as it came in to a transparent term at the bottom of my display and make it stack below. I got that working just fine by adding some hooks into my Mail::Audit script that printed the "from" and "subject" of my e-mails to a log that I could tail.

Once I got e-mail logging to work, I though it would be cool to also log my phone calls to the same file. The problem was that the modem was hooked up to my server and the log file was my workstation. It turns out that they guy who wrote this caller id script thought all of this in advance, so build in, is a daemon that requires you to authorize yourself with a user name, password, hostname, and port (the hostname and port is where you plan on listening for the UDP broadcasts).

Now that I have e-mail and my phone calls logging through common interface, I had another fun idea. In the past when I played with misterhouse, I came across festival text-to-speech synthesis and figured it would be really cool if I could add hooks to say a certain phrase for a particular e-mail address or phone number that came through. I decided to do a little hash lookup on phone number or e-mail address that would provide the phrase that I want festival to say.

With the help of Perl I can alert myself of important e-mails and screen calls in style :)

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I've made some progress on getting sofla.pm up and running. Adam Glass, who runs the local Linux users group, gave me a contact for to start a mailing list. The who issue with is that the current owner of sofla.pm hasn't responded to me yet and I just want to get a list up and at least start discussions. Once we have a solid member base we can have our first meeting and hopely get people excited about things to come.

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Since joining the beginners list I've realized that it one thing to understand a concept and its another thing altogether to explain it to someone else. I'm going to make it one of my goals to answer a couple questions a day on the lists. I don't just want to provide the answers, but to explain the how and why of things.

In the past I was lucky enough to have some great mentors that took time out to show me the ropes and now it's mine turn to give a little back.

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We checked out our house Saturday afternoon and they have the walls up to the first floor. Heather and I are excited to get out of our apartment and move into our first home :)

I've posted some pictures at http://www.jbisbee.com/photos/ of both the house and our recent Perl Whirl cruise.

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I decided to create this journal after hearing how Casey West used it @ use.perl.org and figured it would be cool to give it a shot.

I became a "Just Another Perl Hacker" back in the spring of 1995 when I started messing around with the web. I was a sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Omaha at the time and I wanted to make a national web presence for the fraternity I was in. What started off as a small project snowballed into national recognition and I even spoke at two regional conventions and a international convention in Toronto.

I wormed my way into Ameritrade through my self taught knowledge and worked there full time for 3 years while finishing up my Management of Information Systems Business degree. After I graduated I interviewed for about 3 months and flew all over the country picking and choosing over potential employers. In April of 1999, I started with eData.com (now Seisint) and I work with very talented people and our group in very tight knit.

I went to Perl Whirl looking for a spark and I what I found was my passion. I'm not sure what form it will take. I want to start by setting some goals:

• Get the local Perl Mongers up and running. I tried once before, but I didn't try hard enough :)
• Submit some cool stuff I've done to CPAN. I may just consider it play around stuff, but someone else may find it very useful.
• Attend as many Perl conferences as I can and have a Perl training budget that is separate from my normal savings.
• Follow Perl 6! After Damian's Perl 6 talks and literally watching the language take shape before me, I've really looking forward to what the future holds. :)
• Last but not least, ADVOCATE PERL!

Perl Whirl was great and I actually lost weight even though the food didn't stop coming. I worked out as frequently as I could and Heather made sure we got all the great excursions (a couple really wiped me out).

Thank you Casey for the suggestion to start the journal and hopefully I'll be meeting a lot more cool and interesting people in the Perl Community.

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