Weblogs for ajt
A while ago Greg McCarroll gave an interesting talk at the London Perl Workshop on the topic of "JFDI". His example lead to the creation of WWW::LiveDepartureBoards.
I later used this as an example topic for a Perl talk to my LUG: Achieving the Impossible with Perl. At the same time I also supplied Greg with a patch.
Since then Network Rail have started to provide a SOAP interface to their running time data, and there is now a new interface Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards. This has the advantage that it's not a screen scrape, instead it's a SOAP monster...
What I want is a trivial interface, a LiveDepartureBoards::Simple... I suppose now is the time to have a look at them both in detail and see if I can abstract over them to create a drop-dead simple interface that uses either as a back end.
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Some time ago I cobbled together a small application to find duplicate files. It uses hashing functions to help it decided if identical sized files may be duplicates. The current iteration uses an implementation of the NIST SHA1 algorithm. Depending on the number and size of the files to hash it can get quite slow. I picked SHA1 rather than MD5 which other duplicate finders tend to use, because it's supposed to be less susceptible to collisions and it's only marginally slower.
It would be nice to allow the user pick the algorithm to use, and let Perl dynamically load the required module on demand. Previously the Digest module would pick a much slower implementations of the SHA1 algorithm by default so I've not added the feature.
Recently I spotted on Bruce Schneier's blog that he has contributed to a new algorithm for the NIST competition to create SHA3 to replace the now ageing SHA1 and SHA2 algorithms. It's called Skein and there is already a Perl module of it. It's very fancy and apparently quite secure, but from my perspective it's blazingly fast on a 64-bit system.
Digest has now been fixed (at my request - thanks to Gisle) so I may start the process of migrating my code to a generic any module interface.
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A long time ago my first exposure to a MVC system was the Maypole application and the BeerDB. I played with Maypole a bit and had it running for a colleague but it has never been used in a significant way.
Recently I've bought a lot of decent bottled ale and cider. Some I have liked and some I have not. I now really do need a BeerDB to allow me store in a rational manner the good, the bad and the ugly...
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Historically I have not used the KDE IDE tool "Kate" because it was too slow to start and was not that stable. My main general gripe with most IDEs is that they are too slow. For example, Eclipse is very pretty and has lots of features but it takes for ever to start...
As a result I've tended to use GNU nano or Geany for most of my Perl development in the past few years. Since upgrading to KDE4 on my Debian Squeeze box I've found that the new verion of Kate is much faster to start and integrates well with kdesvn.
I think I'll stick with this combination for a while to see if I like it. Perhaps I'll get the long overdue upgrades to my Perl modules out of the door now!
A long time ago I wrote a simple Perl script to find duplicate files for work. Most users can't organise files to save their lives and the company's networked drives were full to bursting at the time. After a few hours running we identified many gibibytes of duplicate PDFs and Word files.
After some extra hacking I packaged a very much revised version up onto my web site: www.iredale.net/p/by-type/code/perl/find-duplicate-files. I've not updated in ages and there are probably better alternatives now.
As I'm off work today, I thought it may be worth actually releasing an updated version (0.4) in case anyone actually uses it.
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I've tried running with locally installed Perls in the past but not with a lot of luck - odd things kept happening. I really need to try it again...
It's been a very good project but I'm very pleased to have a few days off around the bank holiday as I'm getting rather frazzled. So today I went for a bike ride first thing and now I'm going to have a late breakfast before I decide what to do next today...!
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There are two nice mod_perl articles on the DA.org web site. There are a few silly comments posted by anonymous cowards but otherwise they seem to have had a popular reception.
Yet Another Blog!
This morning I noticed that Steve has commented that he has spotted another web site using his version of Yawns. As a long time Perl and Yawns user I just had to join, even if it's only to add this blog entry!
Anyhow, me aside, it's a very pretty site, it's nice to see someone using Yawns and it's nice to see another Perl site.