Like the fellow that never read his car’s owner’s manual, I had never read the entire Perl FAQ. I finally did it over the holidays, and these are some notes that I took. Time::Piece – CPAN module that provides object oriented time objects, It also provides date and time addition, subtraction and comparison and date...

When I execute a CVS update command at work, I often get the following error: [caran@mater safetypublic]$ cvs -q update -AdP : No such file or directoryectory /home/cvs/safetypublic/rsvp cvs update: skipping directory rsvp No such directoryectory? What the heck is that?? Most of my colleagues don’t work directly on...

Awhile back we had an issue where a coworker wanted to use one of my Perl CGI scripts inside of her scripts, using the backticks method to have it spit its output to the webpage. But for some reason, my script refuse to recognize the arguments she was passing it. The weird thing was, if we ran her script from the...

For years, I’ve been searching for a suitable terminal emulator for Cygwin, but nothing seemed as polished or had enough features to pull me away from the boring default. I finally found the Holy Grail in a program I’ll call Java Terminator. The authors of this fine program just call it Terminator, but unfortunately...

We have a Perl CGI script at work that acts as a proxy. It grabs a pkcs12 digital certificate file from an internal server and delivers it to a user through his or her web browser. The pkcs12 file is in binary format. Everything worked fine until we put the code on a new server. Suddenly, the files downloaded by the...

Here are some random Perl things I always need to look up: Print the string representation in hex print join( ’ ', map { unpack “H*”, $_ } split( //, $x ) ); Text replacement on a per-file basis perl -pi -e 's/\/business\//\/illus\/business.html/' */*.html -p : Iterate over each line of the file -i : Don’t create a...

Hand history files, like computer programs, are notoriously difficult to read. Software developers use syntax coloring to highlight keywords and contrast different sections of code. I've developed a syntax definition file for the Vim editor that colors both Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker hand history files....

Recently, I was asked by my employer to write an Apache module. The module reads the requestor’s digital certificate and checks it against our database of active users. In this post, I’ll explain how to get started writing Apache modules, especially for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5.2). The best (and possibly...

Splitting a Perl application into seperate files can be trickier than doing it in other languages, like C or C++, but it is still an important part of producing maintainable code. Creating the Package A Perl module is a collection of code stored in a single file. By definition, all variables and function names in...

This is an H2 Heading From Moby Dipsum… Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and...