use Perl

Recently, I ported some C code to Perl. The reason this was done was purely bureaucratic. I am a mediocre C programmer at best so perhaps my lack of expertise made this process more painful than it would have been otherwise. In any event, I am happy to continue blissfully ignoring C (sorry Parrot).

I found that the LOC was reduced by about 10:1. Some of the issues I ran into were obvious - working with sockets at a low level was challenging because I am used to using abstraction modules like IO::Socket::INET and IO::Select. Some of the other issues might not have been so obvious.

You don't translate C line by line. You read a block of code, figure out what it is trying to accomplish (ignoring how it is accomplishing it) and then write the line or 2 of equivalent Perl. My problem is that I don't have enough experience to ignore the "how". I mentally keep track of each thing happening in turn until I reach the "a ha" line that makes it clear why all the previous steps were necessary.

That sucks.

I live in Maryland. My family is in Maine and my wife's family is in the Philippines. We have two young daughters which makes watching them grow up difficult. To help, I have a family website

http://gatcomb.org/

Recently, updating the website was a major challenge for a number of reasons (it had been two months since I did it, we had a family vacation to Maine with more photos than usual, and I had 4 cameras to deal with). On top of that, I wanted to add streaming video to the site.

Perl to the rescue

One of the first tasks was fixing the EXIF meta data in hundreds of JPEGs. My sister's camera had the wrong date.

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=700009

The next task I had was organizing the photos. I store my photos in the following structure:

<daughter's name>
   <year photo was taken>
       <month photo was taken>
           <day photo was taken>

I have written a little utility that once I bin the photos by daughter's name, it will then further file them into the appropriate directory - creating them as necessary.

Finally, after two years of taking short video clips with the digital camera, I decided to figure out how to do streaming video. The good news is I figured it out, the bad news is I had 2 year's worth of videos to convert to streaming format 1 at a time.

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=700695

I have no idea how many hours perl saved me. I know there are other tools and sites that make this sort of thing easier but this is my site, and I want to do it my way - and perl let's me be me.

that having children leaves you with less free time, consider this:

Before the birth of my first child, over 908 days at PerlMonks I averaged 1000XP every 56.75 days

After the birth of my first daughter, over 836 days at PerlMonks I averaged 1000XP every 83.6 days.

In case you aren't aware what PerlMonks is, XP is a silly number that can't be used to measure anything and really only gives an indication of participation at the site. This is perfect for my purposes since it reflects that my participation dropped dramatically.

There you have it folks - undisputable statistics.

Normally, I would have written all about this here and not in my personal blog. I have chosen not to this time because later I will be posting pictures as well which will make the linking nicer. Right now, it is just text but you can read all about it.

• YAPC::NA 2008 Day 0
• YAPC::NA 2008 Day 1
• YAPC::NA 2008 Day 2
• YAPC::NA 2008 Day 3

I will post another note when the pictures are up.

Following a recent trend, I would like to point out the obvious. This is my perl blog.

I have a personal blog too. It can be found at http://gatcomb.org/joshua.

I haven't had a lot to write about in my perl blog because I haven't been working on anything interesting. Heck, I haven't even been able to keep up with the interesting things others are doing.

What I have been able to do is continue to get things done - and quickly. When your brain is not fully functional because you have been sleep deprived for 5 months, perl is a great friend to have around.

This past Sunday, our second daughter was born. If you are interested in details or pics they can be found at:

http://gatcomb.org/alyssa/

For more than 2 years, I have been collecting research material for a book I wanted to write.

In fact, it was 2 years ago when I pitched the idea to O'Reilly and very nearly reached a deal. I withdrew when the reality of having our first child hit me.

Our second child is due in December and another reality just hit me. It is extremely unlikely that any book will result from this work while it is still relavent.

I have been feeling extremely uncreative lately and this just makes it that much worse.

*shrug*

At work, I am seldom a pleasant person to be around. I often take on an elitist superior attitude and speak condescendingly. When folks ask me for help, I don't fail to remind them if they had followed my suggestion from earlier, they wouldn't need my help now.

I also spend a fair amount of my time in self-introspection thinking about the days events - what I said, what I did, but more importantly - why.

I find it very easy to call myself a Christian but I don't find it very easy to be a Christian.

As a result, I decided to have 1 day a month complaint free. No matter how large my frustration, no matter how painfully obvious a situation is - I will try not to complain. I will try not to raise my voice. I will try not to ridicule. I will try not to offend.

This really is something that I want to do everyday but I am starting with baby steps.

Last night, I woke up out of a sound sleep after my wife yelled "sweetheart". The thing is, she was sound asleep. I went back to sleep.

A few hours later, I woke up again to the telephone ringing. After rushing to the phone and checking the call history, I discovered it hadn't rang at all.

On my walk back to bed the possible symbolism hit me - am I missing my calling?

This is something I am going to ponder.

In perl related news, I worked on a google calendar parser for TPF. It seems to have gone well.