Time::Piece is my preferred perl module for handling dates. Here is how it can be used to convert between UTC and the local time, even for past dates which may have crossed the current daylight savings time status. Assumptions and Restrictions Date conversions can be confusing because there are a number of tools...

My favorite app for creating diagrams is excalidraw. It is a free, open-source, web application that has all the features necessary to quickly create almost any kind of workflow image. The user interface is terrific and easily grokked by anyone familiar with drawing apps. You can export images in either SVG or PNG...

Although it has gotten better over the years, Adobe Illustrator doesn’t automatically produce SVG files completely suitable (or optimal) for websites. This document is an opinionated process for creating suitable web SVGs. A “suitable web SVG” is one that can be easily and quickly tweaked by a developer by editing...

In an August 15 tweet, @iamdevloper, a very funny programmer-humor account, asked which technology you wouldn’t bother to learn over again: JavaScript, Regex, Kubernetes, or PHP. Never mind the completely obvious answer (if you aren’t in operations at Google, you probably don’t need Kubernetes), I was blown away on...

The ack utility uses Perl regular expressions to efficiently search source code, with smart defaults to limit the results to what you expect. One of the ways I use it is to search our Apache web log files. The logs capture all requests, including ones for images, style sheets, fonts, and javascript files. But...

Our install process involves updating the CVS versions of individual files on the staging and ultimately production servers. Web Operations is responsible for manually updating the files listed on an electronic install form. After over ten years of this process, I finally realized that we could automate this...

One feature of almost every modern commercial website is the location finder. Enter in a search address, and site displays the closest locations to it with the distances (as the crow flies). I ran into a couple of peculiar bugs trying to calculate distances in SQL. Floating point math is never easy, and these are...

At work, we use Microsoft SQL Server and IBM AS400 databases. Here’s how I set our Linux boxes to allow them to connect to the databases through ODBC. There are seperate instructions for the Debian and Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL4 and RHEL5) distributions. ODBC connections require...

We’re having an issue with database queries to the iSeries AS400 through Perl using DBI and DBD::ODBC. The issue occurs when the SQL statement contains an outer join and the query returns rows with NULL columns: my $sql_query = qq|select PRSK01, PSTA15 from TESTHA.POLMAST left join TESTHA.P15POLDP on POLC01 = PPOL15...

Here are a couple of tricks to remember when using jQuery’s tablesorter plugin with dynamic tables. These are tables that the user can add or delete from. If the table begins empty (with no rows in <tbody>), you can’t specify a default sort. If there are no rows in the <tbody> section when the page is first loaded,...