{ Parsed Content };

Sweet Hiatus, I return from thee

2012-01-06T23:18:00.001-05:00

As you can tell, this blog has been a bit dormant since September of last year. Allow me to apologize for that. My day job switched my shifts and it has taken a bit of getting used to. Now that I have a few months under my belt working my new shift, I believe I should be in a better position to continue with blogging activities.

I would like to take a moment to thank my friend Richard McCutchen for his flatteringly awesome #FollowFriday post on his blog. I am the first mention and am quite grateful to him for that. Thanks a million Richard!

Seeing as its currently just after 11pm, it is still friday, so here goes:

Richard McCutchen (@psychocoder): If you have a project that requires the services of a .Net coder, then Richard is certainly your man. His work speaks for itself, as does his kindness.
Benjamin Howarth (@benjaminhowarth): Ben is another .Net coder who deserves a good mention. He is a good friend and colleague who has an amazingly big heart. If your in the UK and looking to hire someone for your coding project, please be sure and contact him.

I know, its a short list, but at the moment its all I can muster. I would like to thank al of our readers for their patience and say that more intriguing articles are on their way.

Twitter, the Missing RSS and the Graffiti

2011-09-16T03:41:00.000-05:00

I was recently setting it up so that the tweets from my ParsedContent Solutions twitter feed would be propagated to my Facebook page of the same name. At first I was trying to figure out the best way to do this. Sure, I could have activated the Facebook integration inside the Twitter account, but it was stating that it would post that to MY Facebook wall, which is not what I wanted, I wanted it to go to my businesses wall.

Well, after some digging and reading, I activated a Facebook application called RSS Graffiti. Its an interesting app because it manages the posting of your feed to your different pages and it handles multiple so its really cool. The settings in the app allow you to tell it where to post what feed and how often to poll for new content.

In setting it up, you have to first give the application permission to post to your page's wall. This isn't a problem since that is what I am wanting. After that though you are asked for your feed url. Now, on Twitter you used to find the atypical orange RSS feed button near the bottom right side of your page. You would have just had to click on it to see the feed url and copy it. Well, I didn't see it and started a bit of a search to try and find it or something else that I could use. I finally found an intriguing article that enlightened me to the fact that Twitter had officially removed the RSS button and feed, but that was only in lieu of their API, which they prefer everyone use.

Yes, this is a break from what standards would dictate, but its their service and you unfortunately have to conform to their way of operating. The article did enlighten everyone to the url that you would need to use for your feed which is as follows:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=username

In the above you would simply replace 'username' with your twitter id. You can test this url by copying and pasting it into your browser's url bar as it will work fine. Once you have it you simply plug it into RSS Graffiti and voila, a feed to pull from.

Keep in mind when that even after putting in the feed URL into RSS Graffiti, I recommend you go through the settings for the app and ensure its posting the way you want it to. There are 3 options for posting:

Standard: This posts the tweet to your wall and states its from the Twitter feed. Recommended for most feeds.
Compact: For publishing shorts from things like Twitter without changing your Facebook status.
Status Updates: This posts the tweets to your wall as if it were a Facebook Status update. You can't even tell that this came from the Twitter feed.

Whatever you choose, test it to make sure its what you want.

OSx and the bashrc

2011-09-14T01:14:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago I purchased my first Mac, a 13" Macbook Pro. I have to say that I am absolutely loving so far. The interface is pretty sweet, but for me the best part is that its got a *nix back end. Learning a new environment like OSx after coming from the Linux world is not a difficult transition, but it certainly has its little speed bumps.

This evening was one such speed bump when I decided to add some things and customize my .bashrc. The first thing I noticed….. there wasn't a .bashrc in existence yet on the system. This simply told me that it was pulling its initial settings from /etc/profile (which in turn sources /etc/bashrc on OSx Lion).

So, I went and created my own .bashrc in my home directory, added my settings that I liked to have and copied some of the stuff from the default /etc/bashrc file. I then saved the file and sourced it with ". ./.bashrc" to test the settings and ensure I didn't break anything. Cool, all looked to be fine. I closed the window, opened another one and that is when I noticed that the changes I made were non-existent.

So, I did a little bit of Google digging and quickly learned that by default, OSx looks for the .bash_profile, not the .bashrc file. That is a bit of a change from Linux as it does look for the .bashrc. To not look for it is a bit ludicrous in my opinion (as rc files are the most common settings files in the *nix world), but this is not a standard *nix platform. So, I did what any geek would do and created a soft link for .bash_profile that pointed to my .bashrc that I had just created. Yes, I just created it and was going to be damned if Apple was going to tell me I couldn't use it. Call me stubborn, but its my environment, not theirs.

So, after that little speed bump, I need only edit my .bashrc and resource to have my changes take effect. Now, on to see what other funky differences I can discover.

Online Cloud Storage Review

2011-09-12T04:42:00.000-05:00

With the advent of things like Netbooks (laptops that either have no hard drive to speak of, instead using a solid state device, or have a small hard drive), cloud storage has become a necessity in this day and age. Cloud storage is nothing more than storage for your files and media, provided by companies that are either able to or specialize in that service.

The storage itself ranges from a couple of gigabytes up to the Terabytes, providing more than enough storage for your average user and their files. The nice thing about a lot of the cloud storage options is that you can typically access your files from anywhere and any computer or device with web access (or an installed app, such as a mobile smart phone).

I personally tend to use the storage for things like my music (in mp3 format) and also for documents that I want to have access to wherever I am. I have had a number of friends ask me about the different options that I knew of for online storage so that got me thinking, "Hello, blog post.".

I went out and did a search for online storage and quickly realized that not only was I getting hits for what I was looking for, which is storage that one could access but others could not see, but also the more 'social' storage options like media fire, where you upload files up to your storage limit and others can see the files that you have uploaded. This did not work for me as I am a bit security conscious and there are plenty of things that I really don't want to share with others. Granted, I don't put the really sensitive stuff online. Things such as credit card numbers, password and other such goodies should never be put into the open like that, unless you are asking for trouble.

So, after weeding through a plethora of hits from my Google search, I made myself a list of the services that I wanted to review. I limited them to having at least 2 gigabytes of storage at a minimum. The features provided by each of these companies varies from site to site, so if you are trying to decide on some storage, please remember to take the time and review all of the features offered. You may find that paying that little bit per month (in some cases) is well worth it for your needs.

A number of these are relatively inexpensive for the amount of space provided. Of course, there are also those that are a bit pricey for those of us looking for the cheapest, yet reliable way to store our data. All in all, do your homework and find something that fits your needs and your budget as best as you can. Worst case you could always invest $129 in a 3 terabyte external drive and store your files locally, yourself. That way you pay one time for the storage and are solely responsible to yourself for keeping your data safe and backed up. For those that want their data online, here is what I found out about the services that I reviewed.

Dropbox: First up is one of the more popular services and one of the primary that I use. A DropBox free account nets you 2 gigabytes (gb) of space when you sign up. The nice thing about Dropbox that most other services don't provide is that you can send out invitations to your friends and family to join as well and any of them that use your invitation to sign up, they get 250mb extra and so do you. The more people that accept the offer the more space that you can accumulate for yourself and best of all, your limit is raised forever, not just for a limited time. The only catch is that the free accounts are capped at 8 gb of storage. So, once you get enough people to join to give you that much space, you are capped and only they get the extra bit. Once you sign up though, you have some signup tasks to complete that will also net you some initial extra space. One thing I really like about dropbox is the application that you download and install onto your system that does all the synching. Upon installation you setup your Dropbox folder. This is the folder where you "drop" anything that you want storred online. Once you drop a file in the folder it is automatically uploaded to the server and available. If you have the application also installed on any other machines, the file(s) you uploaded are automatically synched with them, downloading to their dropbox folder since you would be signed in with the same account. If you want more space, you can upgrade to a paid plan and pay about $10 per month for 50 gb or 100gb for $19.99 per month. The desktop application for Dropbox is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSx.

Spideroak: The free account on Spideroak is limited to 2 gb and unlike Dropbox I didn't see any offers to increase this for free. They have an upgrade to 100 gb for $10 per month, which is 1/2 the cost of what Dropbox wants for 100 gb. When you sign up, you enter your name, email and user name and upon clicking "Create Account" the application you need is auto downloaded to your machine (or prompted to download if you have your settings as such). After the app is downloaded go ahead and install it. When you run it for the first time you will need to first specify a password for your account, after which you go right into the application. In the app you will have to specify the folders that you want to backup. If you want a different folder that isn't listed, just click "Advanced" in the upper right and select the folder you want to use.

Box.net: Box.net only has online access for the free accounts. To get a desktop app you need to have a paid account. The free account allots you 5 gb of space, while the paid accounts are 25 gb for $10 per month. Much less space for the money on the paid account than you get with Dropbox or Spideroak.

Syncplicity: Free account limited to 2 gb of space. Paid account has 50 gb for $15 per month. Again, a touch more expensive for less space. This has an app available for download, but is only for Windows and Mac users. Linux is not supported.

ADrive: The free account for ADrive is set to 50gb. That is an impressive amount for a free account. Unfortunately it was quickly discovered that the upload speed for this service is incredibly slow. I was only getting about 2-3K per second when attempting to upload a small, 2 megabyte file. Also, there are ads in the free account. To get rid of the ads you would have to have one of their paid accounts. There is no desktop app or synching available for the free account with this service. It is completely web based for uploading and downloading. The paid accounts have a desktop app but its only for uploading, downloading and scheduled runs. No synching for that either.

Zumodrive: I said in the beginning that I was limiting this list to services with a minimum of 2 gb of space for free. Well, with Zumodrive you only get 1 gb initially, but upon completing their dojo (tutorial), you get an extra 1 gb added to your allotment. There are paid plans that offer: 10 gb for $2.99/month, 25 gb for $6.99/month, 50 gb for $9.99/month, 100 gb for $19.99/month, 200 gb for $37.99/month and 500 gb for $79.99/month. For their app they support Windows, Linux, Mac OSx, Android, iPhone and even Palm Pre. One nicety about this service is that it claims to integrate smoothly with iTunes so that you can store your music in the cloud and simply download playlists for listening instead of taking up your diskspace with storing the mp3s. If your a heavy iTunes user, that may be something to consider.

iDrive: This service offers 5 gb of space for free. It also offers paid accounts of 150 gb for $4.95/month and 500 gb for $14.95 per month. Considerably cheaper than some of the others. The list of features for this service is quite nice and should definitely be reviewed by those considering it. This service is geared heavily towards being an online place to back up your data, not just store it. They offer a desktop app with scheduling and folder watch/synching and even offer versioning for files (that way you can get an earlier version of a file if needed), but its limited to the last 30 versions of the file.

Mimedia: This has one of the larger free space allotments, coming in at a whopping 7 gb. You can upgrade to a paid account and get 250 gb for $9.99/month, 500 gb for $20/month or 1 Terabyte for $35/month. For the price, this service ranks up there at one of the cheaper ones for "space for your buck". They tout themselves as media storage (audio, video, photos), but also support regular files and backups as well. There is no desktop app that I could find so you are limited to using the web interface with this service.

Skydrive: This is a free service provided by Microsoft, for those users with a Hotmail/Live email account. It provides you with 25 gb of free storage for your Microsoft Office or other files.. There is no desktop app so you must use the web interface. While it doesn't have an app, 25 gb is still a sizable amount of space, and its free.

Amazon Cloud Drive: If you have an amazon account, then you can get access to the Amazon Cloud Drive service. They provide an initial 5 gb of space for free with the option of upgrading to a paid account with 20 gb for $20/year, 50 gb for $50/year, 100 gb for $100/year and so on, up to 1 Terabyte for $1000/year. Initially it seems costly, but those are yearly costs. Divide by 12 and it breaks down a bit more sensibly. The 100 gb allotment is less than $10/month. Like others, there is no desktop app and you are limited to their web interface for uploads and downloads. One nice thing though is that songs purchased through amazon.com can be stored here and do not count toward your space used. Plus, for a limited time (no idea when this promotion ends), they are offering the storage of unlimited music files for free on all paid accounts. This means that it wouldn't effect your storage used. And it doesn't say that the songs had to be purchased through them either, but I would read the fine print to be sure. If they don't require that, then this is a pretty sweet deal for those with gigantic music collections.

Opendrive: This is the final service reviewed. The free account offers 5 gb of space. You can upgrade to 100 gb for $5/month, 500 gb for $15/month or 1 Tb for $35/month. These are some pretty decent rates for the storage amount. The free account is limited to 200K max speed though, so be warned. The paid accounts are not metered. Also, there is no auto synching for the free account.

Well, those are the services that I have reviewed. I hope that this helps you a bit in your decision to choose an online cloud storage provider. As always, check the features and always read the fine print. Make sure of what you are signing up for before you click.

Bookmarks, bookmarks.....everywhere

2011-07-31T10:20:00.001-05:00

I don't know how many people here use a service that is, or is simlar to, delicious.com, but I have been using delicious for a very long time. Long enough that I have about 4700 bookmarks on the site.
With the recent turmoil this year surrounding delicious, specifically Yahoo! doing their a-typical "we don't need this anymore routine", put the delicious site up on the chopping block and looked for a buyer or threatened its shutdown. Users like myself, who have been using it religiously and love it, were a little taken aback by the possibility of impending doom for our beloved bookmarking site.
After following the issue for a couple of days I decided to check the net and see what similar sites existed out there. I found a list of similar sites (or what was said to be similar), but was not really impressed with most of them. My issue with most of the sites I found was that all I was really looking for was a bookmarking site. I wanted something that operated like delicious, but wasn't delicious. The sites that I stumbled upon ended up being what is affectionately referred to as social bookmarking sites that actually allowed you to bookmark a site, but then took it to other levels of sharing by integrating with your other social networks and getting you involved in other ways of sharing your bookmarks. I was not looking for all that though.
Sure, I don't care who sees my bookmarks, that isn't the problem. My problem is that those sites had an excessive amount of features and some were even cumbersome and confusing to look at the demos of. Call me simplistic, but that's kind of what I was looking for.
Now, before you go asking me "Why didn't you look into the firefox bookmarks as they sync online", I did. I tried them briefly, but I found that the syncing was not automatic and it took an excessive amount of time for what I bookmarked to show up. Why? Who wants to wait? Not me and not many in this day and age.
Well, needless to say I found a site that was very up and coming and still in its early infancy. The site is called Grazely. At first glance it seemed new and inviting, and was. I created an account and imported my bookmarks into it, all 4700 of them (approximately). After doing so I took a look at the toutal count of bookmarks on the site and it was just under 20K. So essentially, about 1/4 of the sites bookmarks came from me. I was on the site for about a month and a half when the developers announced that they would be shutting down for about 5 days to do some major maintenance. The maintenance lasted about 2 weeks and ended up being a total site overhaul, redesign and recoding.
I got back in yesterday with a fresh invite (having already had an account previousl) into the Beta launch. They completely changed it, yes and so far, I have not put together an opinion of the site as of yet. The developers apparently changed it to be a secure bookmarking site, where you bookmarks are encrypted. Personally I am not sure how I feel about this yet. I don't see the need right off for my bookmarks to be encrypted. The bookmarks I have are saved because I found the link useful or plan to revisit it and I would love for someone else to find them useful as well. I have a very open source mindset and that comes from me developing with open source, so I do not yet understand their need for security of bookmarks. If I want to have a bookmark that I don't want anyone else to see but me, I just need to be able to mark it private and its hidden. 'Nuff said.
With that, if you use any other bookmarking site and are curious about Grazely, hit me up. I have an invitation to the site to give away and yes, its first come first serve. I don't know how popular bookmarking sites are with everyone, but hey, you never know so I figured I would offer it up.

Thoughts on HTML5

2011-07-23T11:58:00.000-05:00

Let me preface this post by stating that I am one of those coders that believes in doing things the right way. It is absolutely appalling to come across messy, uncommented code that leaves you scratching your head trying to figure out exactly what it does. Its just as appalling to come across a website, look at the code and discover that they used tables for the layout of the site. To top it off, none of their tags are closed making people with my coding beliefs shudder.

I know there are people out there reading this who say "So what? What's the big deal?". There are standards out there for a reason. Granted they are a bit more enforced in HTML when you use the XHTML standard as you are forced to close your tags, but that still doesn't stop people from using tables for the layout of their site.

I have been looking at HTML5 as a means for creating my new website and am finding that there are things I do and don't like about it currently. One of the things that I am non-plused by, but am going to have to live with is that the people responsible for HTML5 regressed and decided not to enforce the need to close all of your tags, as XHTML required.

I found this to be a good thing, forcing coders to make their code a bit nicer and actually pay attention to the details. By opening this up and allowing people to use thier own styling choice, this is going to make supporting someone elses HTML5 code a bit of a headache.

That point aside, I am finding that to code in HTML5, you have to add a lot of checks into your code to see if certain new add-ons are supported in the browser that is accessing your site. For instance, with forms, they have added a lot of new types which make browsers that support them have a bit more intuitive reactions to those fields (like date pickers or color pickers for dates, or even the email type that tells a mobile browser to configure it keyboard to support email addresses specifically). Unfortunately, at this time, the only browser out there that has support for all the forms additions in Opera. While Opera supports a lot of HTML5, not a lot of people use Opera. Its use is dwarfed by that of Firefox and Chrome.

I have been really thinking about whether I want to use HTML5 and write the code to do the tests, but that really isn't going to be an option going forward. HTML5 is out there and is here to stay. The support in browsers will only continue to increase but the concern is going to be users. There are too many people out there using older versions of browsers. Listen people (you know who you are), just because its working for you doesn't mean its right. You are not only forcing a lot of developers to code for the fact that you are refusing to update, you are actually not getting the proper experience out of a lot of websites that the rest of us are.

I guess I will just have to suck it up, code it once and reuse it.

Why Plaxo....Why?

2011-05-22T19:11:00.000-05:00

I have been using Plaxo for some time (a few years now) and the whole time I have had their free account (now referred to as a Basic membership). When I started using the service it was just that, an address book and that was all I really wanted.

Over time, they have advanced and upgraded their system, providing further integration into the world of social networking. With that foray, they have also added different levels of membership. That is fine, and I expected that as such, I would lose certain functionality from the Basic membership, and have. But, there is one feature that I have lost and must say that it is a bit disturbing. With the Basic membership, you are no longer allowed to export your contacts from your address book without paying for their Premium Sync service (even though all you want to do is export and not actually sync with another device or service). I just want to back up my contacts now and again, keeping a copy in case anything ever happened to the Plaxo servers or Plaxo itself.

So, after steaming a bit and having a bit of a livid rant with a friend over the whole situation, I did some investigation into who I could get my contacts out without forking over $$ for the "privilage" of backing up my data myself.

It took me about 20 minutes of looking around but if you go to your main address book page, you will see that there is a complete list of all of your contacts. There is a top line right above the first contact that has a blank check box on the left and a few buttons (email, merge, print, delete and Add to group).

If you click the empty check box on the left of that row, it will select ALL of your contacts in your list. Then, simply click on the "Print" buton. This did two things for me: first, it opened a window relatively quickly that showed the output. This window is HTML based and if you look at the URL bar has a wicked long URL. Second, it opens up another window that has print options. Simply select the option to Print to PDF (if you system offers that) and you can then print them to pdf so you have a copy.

My interest though was in the first option, the HTML output. I right clicked on the HTML and version and selected "Save as", saving the html output to a file. When I examined that file, it was quickly apparent to me that the output was pretty nice and the way they formatted things, it would not be that bad to parse and output to a CSV file. Once I have it in that format, I can then use it to import into other services or even a database of my own.

Either way, I will be working on a script to parse the HTML file and extract all of my information. If I get something relatively usable, I will share it hear for others to use as I am sure that I am not the only one that has been in this predicament.

To Setup Or Not To Setup?

2011-05-03T22:57:00.000-05:00

I know, that is a pretty vague question I pose as the subject of this post. To clarify, I am talking about a mail server. On my new server, I have been setting up a lot of things, but one thing I have yet to setup was a mail server.

I was torn because I really wanted to have mail from my new domain and without a mail server, that just isn't possible. First and foremost is that I have absolutely no experience setting up a mail server. You have to think about things like:

- the installation of the software for mail delivery (ie: Postfix, Sendmail),
- the managing of spam with software like SpamAssassin.
- the increase in traffic on your site due to email

As you can see, there are a lot of things to think about, and this short list is just that, short. So, in speaking with a friend today led to a suggestion which, in a matter of only a couple of hours work, I have implemented.

I have Ben Howarth of CodeGecko to thank, not only for the suggestion that follows, but also for his guidance in setting it up. I also want to thank him for being so infinitely patient with me as I can ask a lot of questions when I am learning something new. You rock, Ben!!!

The suggestion that Ben made was to use Google Apps Standard (Free) Edition. He quickly enlightened me as to the fact that it would use my domain and that all the emails would be for my domain. The sweet part is that Google handled all the email server end of it, which means you get Google's absolutely incredible spam filtering capabilities and scanning for attachments. It also comes with a bunch of free apps such as Google Docs, Google Chat and much more.

A quick search of the internet on setup guides for Google Apps landed me here, which proved to be a good "get you going in the right direction" guide. It at least got me to the sign up site, which it what I needed.

The sign up process was pretty painless and even the verification was cake (upload an html file to your site, visit it and then tell the setup you did it). When it came to the DNS setup on GoDaddy (where I bought my domain), that is where Ben really shined. He gave me a really good set of explanations into the inner workings of CNAME's, MX records and DNS as a whole, helping me to get a better grasp on it than I previously had.

Its hard when you are a geek and all of a sudden have to work with technologies that you have never messed with before, but its wonderful when there are friends who are willing to help.

After all was setup, Ben dropped another Easter Egg in my lap, telling me that instead of the nice long URL that Google gives you to access your email accounts, you can set it up for your domain. I really do owe him about a case of beer now. I have, with his guidance, set it up as a sub domain of my site. Once again, Ben ROCKS!

Once I get it all written up, I will have to post some details on the setup of MX records for Google Apps in GoDaddy as well as CNAME's. I am just having so much fun with all of this. Now off to the next setup and configuration task.

Disabling Account Creation In BugZilla

2011-05-02T16:29:00.000-05:00

I don't know about anyone else, but I am one of those guys who likes to implement what security I can on the server(s) that I have. Recently I have been doing setup on a new machine and have setup BugZilla as my issue tracking software.

I know that plenty of people have plenty of suggestions as far as the different software's that are available for different tasks. I have gotten some earfuls from some of them asking "why the heck would you choose that?". Please know ahead of time that the software I am using, I have chosen because:

#1: It meets my needs
#2: I have either used it or played with it before and am comfortable with it.

I have nothing against other software's, I just have the stuff I like and I use it.

Ok, that said, I have installed Bugzilla on my new server and have it setup with an account for myself. Upon getting it to that point, I quickly decided that I did not want anyone just creating an account, so I looked into how to disable account creation by anyone and here is how to do it.

1. Log in as an Administrator
2. Go to: Administration->Parameters->User Authentication
3. Scan down to the bottom of the screen till you find 'createemailregexp'.
4. Clear out the value in the box
5. Client "Save Changes"

AFter that, log out and ensure that the button says "Login" in stead of "Create Account" and your all set. After that, in order to create an account, you will need to log in as the administrator.

Odd PHP error

2011-04-28T15:51:00.000-05:00

On my new VPS server, I am working on getting a lot of things I need installed and configured. Well, one of the tools I need has minimum requirements. I was checking the PHP version information with the following command:

$ php --version

Here is what it spit out at me:

PHP Deprecated: Comments starting with '#' are deprecated in /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/mcrypt.ini on line 1 in Unknown on line 0
PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Jan 12 2011 18:36:08)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

That line in bold is what bothers me. So, I did some quick Googling and voila!!!

It looks like its a simple bug, but even trying to update the php5-mcrypt module was no help as it tells me its at the current version. So, per the bug page, I edited the mcrypt.ini file (as root of course) and changed the '#' to a ';', as was suggested. After doing that, it just worked, and perfectly, without the error.

The Wonderful World of Setting Up Your Own VPS

2011-04-28T15:48:00.002-05:00

There is nothing like the learning curve that comes with setting up your own VPS. Sure, there are plenty of things that I have had experience in setting up, but there are things that I have never had the opportunity to dabble in. Its actually quite fun, albeit frustrating at times.

For instance, Apache is an amazing web server, but trying to configure it to support a subdomain is a pain in the @$$! I have followed a number of forum posts and tutorials and done a lot of what was mentioned, but still, no joy. Unreal! When it works, its amazing, but when you are trying to do something specific, its a picky pain.

For anyone who is curious, here are the stats on the server that I got:

Hard Disk: 100 gig
Memory: 512 mb (with a burst to 1024 mb)
CPUs: 4
Bandwidth: 1.5 Tb per month.

Here is the page describing the different configurations. To tell you the truth, I looks at a lot of different providers and Semoweb provided the most disk space and bandwidth combination for the price.

Plus, their customer service has been top notch so far, both through chat and on the phone. No real issues, more questions from me. If your looking for a provider, I recommend them. So far I haven't had any issues.

Converting jpg files to svg

2011-04-25T22:16:00.000-05:00

I am by no means a graphic designer. In fact, I am quite far from it. I do however have a need at times to work with images to get the results that I need, and like a lot of developers out there, I don't exactly have the funds to just hire one, nor do I know any (which would be incredibly handy sometimes, gotta say).

Today I was looking at some images online and found one that really liked, but was only able to get it in .jpg format. So, I did some digging and found handy instructions over here that guided me to converting the jpg to an svg (Scalable Vector Graphics) file. Once converted I was able to re-size the image without pixelation or blurring.

The instructions, as were provided, are for doing this under Ubuntu Linux, which I run. If you are on another OS, sorry, you will have to either see if this application is available for your system or find a similar application that will do the job.

To Convert .jpg files to .svg format:

1. Install Inkscape, if not already installed: sudo apt-get install inkscape
2. Start Inkscape after it is installed and then import the image under File->Import
3. Using the arrows on the image, re-size it to the size you wish, then hover your cursor over the image and hit Ctrl-Shift-D. That will bring up the Document Properties box.
4. Click on the Shrink To Fit button to re-size the image desktop to your images size.
5. Client File->Save As to save your image. It will default to a .svg file.

That is it. That's all there is to it. Hope this helps you in your quest, if you had one.

New Perl News Site

2011-03-17T22:14:00.001-05:00

I was browsing Reddit, as I do most days, and I found a posting titled, "New Perl News Site Lauches". Click the link to read their site announcement.

Being a lover and developer of Perl I decided to check it out. The site is quite new and only has a few posts up, but here is looking forward to a plethora of content on a favorite topic.

The new site can be found here.

ssh key validation

2010-12-21T08:42:00.000-05:00

Well, the vacation wasn't as long as I feared. It looks like its back, albeit not full force, but I do feel like writing code again. I guess I just needed to take a break.

At work I support an e-commerce system for a major, world-wide bank. When clients are renewing their keys (SSH, PGP, SSL), they must meet certain criteria in order to be accepted and put into the clients setup(s).

One of the more recent criteria changes is the requirement that all keys be of length 2048 or greater. That's easy to verify with SSL and PGP keys, but what about SSH? The group that is verifying the keys does not have access to a system where openssl is installed and thus, is at a loss for SSH key validation. That is where my development bug kicked in again. I quickly whipped up a Perl script that validates the length of the ssh keys and tells them if they are acceptable or not.

After talking with my boss about how to get it to the group that does the official verifications, it was decided that he would try to get funding for a project (internally) to put it up on our intranet so the group can readily access and us it. Quite exciting for me really as I have not had any of my code hosted like that internally at this company and I am loving the idea.

I am just glad that I could so quickly produce a tool for my group to use for the verifications in the mean time. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Have you seen my development bug?

2010-12-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

I know, it sounds like a strange title for a blog post, but believe it or not its a bit true. I seem to have misplaced and/or lost my development bug. The yearning and wanting to just sit down and code seems to have departed my psyche, leaving me with not much of an inkling at all to write code, let alone think about writing it.

Its really strange because only a year ago I remember sitting her all gungho, writing bits of code and having a blast, yet now, I just don't want to. I have seen plenty of people lose the geek bugs for whatever it was they were good at and even changed careers completely. I could never understand HOW that could happen, but I guess you never do until it happens to you.

I am sure its not forever. I tend to spend a lot of time in front of the computer, sometimes verging on an inordinate amount at times, especially when work calls and I am also working on a coding project. Please don't get the idea that I have lost all my geekiness, its not so. It is just the bug that made me want to code that has taken a vacation.

Also, don't think that this means you cannot ping me with geeky questions, as that is also not true. I am still quite open to helping people out. Yes, this even means if its coding related. Just because the coding bug has left the body for a short time doesn't mean I am incapable. I am more than happy to still help those in need of assistance.

I will still be posting here, and the posts will still be geeky, but it may be a short time before you see anything with code in it. Maybe it I will surprise now and then, but who knows. I do ask that you don't desert me just because I am taking a sabbatical from coding.

To give you a gift, here is an pretty good beginner tutorial on Perl. Not too bad really. Enjoy!

Let's go find some Private keys

2010-09-21T07:15:00.000-05:00

I love it when people use a technology without thinking first. I deal with security software like PGP all day at my job and its ins and outs have become pretty routine for me. One of the first things you do after installing PGP is to create your public/private key pair. Once that is done, you can export your public key and share it with whomever you need to.

Your public key is just that, "PUBLIC". Which means it is fine to share it with the world. But your other key in the pair is your "PRIVATE" key. This keys should NEVER leave your system. It is typically protected with a password and is for your eyes only.

What I love is how many people don't think of this or even read up on the best practices before putting their keys out there.

If you do a search on the internet for the following: "BEGIN PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK filetype:asc" (without the double quotes around it), you will find a plethora of completely unsuspecting people and organizations that have no idea that their private key is out there for the world to download and abuse.

My suggestion to all of you is to create a new key pair and then export your public key, WITHOUT your private key. Because you shared it already, it is now compromised and you cannot ensure the nobody brute force hacked your password.

So long use.perl.org

2010-09-09T07:25:00.000-05:00

In an unexpected post this morning, it looks like use.perl.org is shutting down. I am not sure how many of you reference or read use.perl, but I was an avid peruser of the site. There were always interesting posts to read up there.

You will be missed use.perl, but hopefully you will return once pudge has a job and can find suitable hosting, the site will return. Until then it will be missed.

Refocusing after having time to think

2010-08-19T23:18:00.001-05:00

The past year and a half has been a bit tumultuous to say the least. I say that because its very true. During the events of the last couple of weeks I have had a fair amount of time to think about some things and I have to say that clarity is an interesting thing.

I am not going to recap the events of last year as they can be read about in past posts. The past is the past and there is no use dwelling on things that cannot be changed, as continued venting will not be productive.

During my stint of recent thinking sessions, it occurred to me that its been quite a while since I have done any serious coding. Sure I have done a bit of scripting and one offs, but that doesn't exactly keep one's skills up where they should be.

Once I became re-employed last October at the company that I resigned from in 2007 (to be a developer), I stopped doing most coding and development in order to concentrate on my new job. When I left I was an SME (Subject Matter Expert) on the platform that I was heading the Implementations team on. My return to the company last year has me now supporting that same platform. In the time since I left they have done some reworking and changes to the platform and I needed to concentrate on picking up the little intricacies so that I can efficiently do my job to my fullest capacity. I am quite happy in this job and love what I am doing so I really needed to apply my time wisely and get back up to speed. I am sure you can understand that.

Don't get me wrong though. While I am not a developer for my day job, I still have a love for coding as a whole and love learning new languages and techniques. Becoming a better, more skilled coder is still a part of me and I want to get back to doing it.

See, while I was job hunting last year for almost 7 1/2 months, I realized that being a full time developer with my couple of languages just was not enough. Employers these days want a developer that is extremely efficient in several popular languages, which is something I did/do not have. I knew Perl quite well, at a high Intermediate/very low Advanced level, had a brief realization of PHP (which is to say I trouble shot a couple of minor things) and an advanced knowledge of Bash/Ksh scripting in a Unix environment.

Because of the above fact I resolved that being a full time developer just wasn't in my cards. Instead I am going to continue being a developer, but on the side where I can work my own hours and at my own pace. I don't really consider it settling as I absolutely love what I do for my day job. I love it and the company so much that I plan on retiring from this company.

I have become addicted to this beautiful site called Reddit. I have a need to go through the newly posted articles in the topics I subscribe to, on a daily basis. I have found almost as much through it as I have through StumbleUpon (Another addiction of mine).

In reading Reddit yesterday I found a newly posted article called, "How To Become A JavaScript Badass". I had made a list of the languages that I am highly interested in learning and JavaScript is up there on the list (with jQuery and Ajax), so this article truly peaked my interest.

The article started strong, going quickly into the tips the author had on how to go about becoming the JavaScript Badass the author mentioned in the title. But as I kept reading it was as if the author veered slightly off the JavaScript specific path and ventured down a path of tips that are meant to guide one into bettering themselves as a developer in general. It was almost as if it was a mantra. That article left me empowered and driven and I cannot thank the author enough.

After reading it (three times now) I have started to get myself together and more on a straight path toward learning the languages I want to and becoming an even better developer than I was before. Its like a much needed pep talk and I really recommend that developers read it. Granted its not the be all, end all, but its truly inspiring in my opinion.

Privacy or no privacy.... its your choice believe it or not.

2010-08-19T17:05:00.000-05:00

Today Facebook has released its newest feature, Facebook Places. This is quite similar to FourSquare, if you have ever used that service. The idea is that when you are out and about, you "check in" at the location where you are. There are locations for millions of places and if you can't find it, you add it and check in. You can earn badges for checking in so many times and for many other things. Its just another way to be social on the net.

Facebook's newest feature is quite like that except it is integrated into the whole of Facebook itself. In other words, when you check in, your friends will all know. As with anything that Facebook does though, the privacy 'activists' that are out there are already screaming about this add-on because, as stated in the Facebook blog posting on the topic, "Your friends will be able to share your check-ins with the applications they use to help create new social experiences with location."

Now, for all of you who are privacy concerned out there, here is what the above article states if you don't like your friends sharing your location information: "If you don't want to share your check-ins with your friends' applications, just uncheck the new box in your Privacy Settings under 'Applications and Websites.'"

Yes, Facebook has had just a few issues with privacy concerns in the past and some of them, especially in the beginning, were completely justified. But they implemented it so that each user is responsible for the information that gets shared. You can control this under your Privacy Settings in your Facebook account. The rule of thumb that everyone should remember though is, "If you don't want it known, don't put it out there!". Remember, putting it on the Internet once means it lives forever.

I remember an article from a couple months ago stating that if you went to a link in your front page called "Phonebook", that it would list all of the phone numbers for all of your friends that it could find them for. This was raised as a "huge privacy issue" by the activists and articles were written. I am not defending Facebook, but those numbers were pulled from the profile "Info" page for each of your friends. If they provided it, then it was displayed. Facebook was simply using readily availble info to show you your friends phone info. I heard it worked on all users, but didn't investigate that far. I notice now though that the link is gone from Facebook. This again goes to "Don't share it if you don't want it known".

People have to be wary of what they share on the net. Unfortunately, too many people aren't. I am quite skeptical and generally thoroughly investigate what I am entering and why and how it will be used before giving it. You have too. There are too many unscrupulous people out there.

Ok, off my soap box for now. Go forth and be "social", but be careful with your information. Its yours and is your sole responsibility if it gets out because YOU provided it.

Using Python to Leech Files From an FTP Server

2010-07-08T12:27:00.000-05:00

My friend Chris from MotomaSTYLE just helped me with a bit of Python scripting that I was working on. I have been really hitting the books on Python and have been LOVING it! Chris is really making the process a bit less painful when I hit a road block and I really appreciate that.

Here is a link to the article that he posted, including the code that was produced in the end.

Thanks Chris! You ROCK!

My Geek Code

2010-06-24T18:08:00.000-05:00

As you can see from the right side of my profile, I have a Perl Geek Code defined. Well, I stumbled across the Geek Code itself and generated my code. Here it is:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/IT d-- s+:+ a C++++$ U++++$ P+++$ L+++$ !E--- W++$ N !o-- K- w--- !O !M- !V-- PS+? PE? Y PGP+$ t+ !5-- X R++* tv++ b++ DI+ D+ G e h---- r+++ y+++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Project Update - The Re-Learning speed bumps

2010-04-30T21:46:00.000-05:00

It amazes me how you can stop doing something for a while ( like the web design side of the house ) and you can really forget how things work. I have been working on getting a navigation menu working for the project at work and it took me a good couple of days to figure nut how to get CSS horizontal drop dad written wasn't. own menus working. I was scratching my head till I decided to take a step back, do some reading and then examine what I had done thus far.

I had to start by taking an example menu and get its code working. Then, modified it for the options I needed and voila, working menu. Then, I had to plug it in to the site, where it needed to be and make sure that it was where the other menu was. That was a bit easier.

Once the menu was working, I compared it to my original code and I then saw the structure and quickly figured out what I was missing and why the code I had written wasn't working at all. I just sat there, shaking my head in wonder at what I had forgotten and what I was slowly remembering.

So, onward I push. The next step is to get the search page for the client database, designed, and setup so that I can then code the validation for the entered data and the processing to pull data from the database. I think the only part at this point that I need to figure out is, if I pull information from the database and there are more than one clients returned, how can I have a list presented and then display the page for the chosen client. This is all a new realm to me, so I am venturing into it with an open mind and a willingness to learn.

Project Update

2010-04-18T12:23:00.001-05:00

Well, I have been working on the project actively for a few days now and unfortunately, I am not as far as I would have loved to have been. My experience working with Perl DBI is not extensive, and is limited to the job that I got laid off from last year. What makes that experience a bit lessened is the fact that the DBI code was already written and all I had to do was extend what was already existing.

So, I have these spreadsheets, one in particular which is rather large, containing almost 2000 lines. Each line is the information that we have for a customer/client. I created a database, created a table in the database, and had written some code to parse out the data from its csv file format (which I exported from the Excel format it was originally in.

The problem that I ran into was that the prepare() statement kept throwing an error. So, I posted my question up on to the Bytes.com in my Perl forum in hopes of getting some help, and I got it. One of the experts in the forum was able to throw a couple of ideas my way. RonB was able to throw a couple of ideas my way to get the data initially loaded.

I took a look at what he provided for ideas and decided to do the initial load via the MySQL interface. Doing the load the following way, I specified the file to use to get the data from, the field delimiter (which is a : when I exported the Excel data to csv) and the fields that I needed populated, in the order that the data was presented. I needed to specify the fields because the 1st column of data is a unique ID that is auto incremented. Here is the command that I used:

mysql> LOAD DATA INFILE "/path/to/file.csv" INTO TABLE client_info FIELDS TERMINATED BY ':' (PartnerName,CorporationName,ContactGivenName,ContactPhone,ContactEmailID,CommunicationProtocol,SecurityType,ECID,Source,GEID,GEMatchType,CrossoverWithGTI,ECIDv1,CustomerName,UltimateECID,UltimateName,CostCenter,DomicileRegion,SalesRegion,SalesHead,SalesManager,TMO1SID,TMO1Name,TMO2SID,TMO2Name,BankerSID,BankerName,CSOMgrSID,CSOMgrName,CSOSID,CSOName,CSPSID,CSPName,LOB,SubLOB,Segment,Market,Industry,ClientType,ClientStatus);

This actually seemed to work quite well. See, the script I was working with had a big issue with special characters. Some names contained an apostrophe, names were entered into the original spreadsheet in the format of "last, first middle", which caused an issue when I originally used a comma as the delimeter. The LOAD DATA command in mysql is quite useful, I must say and offers other options for specifying the format of the data. I recommend checking it out.

Now, I have to worry about the interface that we are going to use for accessing the data. I plan on designing it first, so that it is built and operational, then I will worry about things like a login interface and sessions.

I also still need to work on a Perl script to load data from a spreadsheet in the case of updates. Our client base is about to grow astronomically over this year and this needs to be in place soon. The update script will need to compare against the db for duplicates and only load the new entries. So, that should be interesting.

I sooooooo have a lot of work ahead of me, but must say that its nice to have a project to work on that I know is going to be actively used by others.

Catching up.... and a link

2010-04-12T20:45:00.000-05:00

As any code monkey and/or geek can tell you, work can certainly cause you to not have time for much else. Having gone back to the company I was at almost 3 years ago (which I love working for, but had to leave to realize that), I find that I am incredibly busy, but its a good thing.

When I was here before, I was doing client implementations work. I was one of the two original members of the team who ended up staying around the longest and became the expert on the system and the solutions we provided. When I came back this past October (after 7 1/2 months unemployed), I came back on the other side of the wall and am now doing Production support for the platform I was implementing on before.

Don't get me wrong, things have changed a fair amount (while some things remained the same or had gotten worse). To say that I really like my new position would be a complete understatement.... I LOVE IT!!! It is always amazing to be able to walk into a job and already know the platform (for the most part). I just had to learn the intricacies of how my new group works.

Recently, after having a talk with my boss, it was determined that we needed a database of our own with a web interface to it so that we can all access it, and our boss can run his metrics. Far too often do we have to look in a plethora of different databases and sites to try and find all the information that we need. Then, even when we do find it, it is not always easy to get that information in one general place where it can be referenced again later. This project will change that. It will be one place where we can put all the information we gather and have, so that we can reference it and even update it as needed.

That said, the project that I mentioned back in my last post has been modified to be this project. So far, I have gotten a second machine out of it (nice quad processing machine with 4 gig ram and a third flat screen monitor for my desk. (the first two are attached to my dock for my laptop). I have the machine installed with Ubuntu and configured with Amache2, MySQL, Subversion, and Bugzilla.

The initial data that will be populated into the database table(s) is coming from a couple of spreadsheets that I was sent. I am right now writing some Perl code to not only parse the Excel spreadsheets (that wasn't too aweful to do, especially using the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module), but also populate it into the table(s). I am being careful about this code because I want to be able to use it to produce a script for periodic updates. It will need to check for data already existing so as not to duplicate entries.

Ok, the link I promised. I stumbled across this earlier tonight. Its an interesting page where you can look up functions for PHP and JavaScript. It is quite the language reference. It even has a reference for CSS and MySQL. So far, I am really glad to have found it.

New Project in the works

2010-01-21T13:07:00.003-05:00

I have been at my new (old) job for a little over 3 months now, but that is more than enough time for me to see that there is A LOT that goes on every day. That platform that we primarily support is constantly having to be worked on due to bugs or issues that we find. Its like every week we are finding something else that is not right or is just plain wrong, or we are adding instances of an existing but, providing more proof of the bug itself.

Unfortunately, other than the notes that my team keeps in their spiral bound notebooks, we do not currently have any way to track the reports that we make and the bug tickets that get opened.

I have been researching the many (and I mean MANY) issue / bug tracking systems that are out there as a possible way for us to make entries and track each one, and also have the ability for our manager to run a report against it and get his own excel/csv spreadsheet for his weekly meetings.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any system that meets my exact needs. One of the most important requirements, being that I do not own the box where my site is hosted, is that it be wicked easy to install. It can require Perl modules or such, but I do not have root access and I have seen a few systems that require it.

The reporting piece is also an extremely important piece. Most of the systems that have reporting produce things like graphs and charts, but do not produce spreadsheets or csv files. The one that I did find is a Windows based system and I am working on Linux systems.

So, I am at the moment working on a full list of requirements and features that need to be implemented into this new system. This will certainly be one of the biggest projects I have ever worked on if it takes off as I expect. Of course, it will also be a lot of fun to boot.

It makes me sad...

2009-12-30T13:50:00.002-05:00

First, the job is going awesomely well! I have really settled back in quite well and am loving what I am doing. Things on that side are just great!

What is saddening me is Google. I have to say that I have been a Googlephile since Google's inception. I have always loved it and sworn by it and a number of its products. Lately though, I have started to feel like they are concentrating too much on all of their pet products and not the product that started them on their road to greatness..... their search engine.

I have been searching for an article on a particular topic and know what I was looking for as far as the information in the article. I searched Google several different ways and it always came up with the same results. Consistent, yes, but still not producing exactly what I wanted.

I was on my cell phone and in its browser I did a search for what I was looking for and VOILA!!, the result I was looking for. Now, the sad part is that the phones search engine is powered by BING. That is the sad part. That a Micro$oft search engine gave me what I wanted as the first result while Google didn't give it to me at all.

I went back and searched for the exactly same phrasing I did in BING and went through several pages of information, but that result was not there. I guess my question to Google is Why? How is it that a Micro$oft search engine gave me what I needed, but Google couldn't? It couldn't even produce the link in the first several pages of results.

Don't get me wrong, I am not switching to BING. I still have a hatred for Micro$oft and its search engine repulses me, but I am still a bit dumbfounded that my go to couldn't produce the results. I think Google really needs to sit down and rethink how much effort it is putting into its search results processing, otherwise BING is going to steal more of its market away. I hate to say it, but it is inevitably true.

Employment and Some Info

2009-10-18T12:33:00.003-05:00

Hello everyone! I know that it has been a while since I have posted, but my state of mind caused by my lack of employment and almost losing our house played quite the part in my lack of posting. Until recently, I didn't have anything new to post about and the last thing that I wanted to do was to write and complain about being unemployed and unable to find a job. That would just bore everyone and drive you away.

So, without further ado, I AM EMPLOYED AGAIN!!! After seven months of daily job searching every single job site that I could get my browser to display, I am finally working again and earning $$$. The best part is that I have been re-hired by and am happily working again at JP Morgan Chase. I was originally there from December 2000 to May of 2007, when I left to break into the world of being a developer. While that venture afforded me a world of experience in 2 1/2 years, I found over the last two months that far too many employers are now valuing a degree over actual experience, regardless of whether the person with the degree is completely inexperienced and needs a ton of hand holding.

Well, I say their loss!!! I am back at a place that I can and do consider home. I know most of the people at the site where I am, not to mention a plethora of people around the world. This time though, instead of implementing clients on the system that I helped build up, I am supporting them in a Production support role. To tell you the truth, I don't at all mind being in a support role. I know the products and am picking up quickly what is new since I left. Plus, I just simply love being there. I am so very thankful that they took me back. Must say thought that re-instating me as a bank officer again AND re-instating all of my previous accrued time is also a HUGE bonus.

On another note, I am still continuing my developer self, but for myself, at home this time. In my first week at work, I have already come across a few different things that I can work on development wise to help those I work with and am hoping that I can have something working in each instance soon.

I also dug out a book that I have called Pro Perl Parsing and have started thumbing through it. At first glance, I wish I had picked this hard covered beauty up earlier as it is enlightening me into solutions for some issues I have encountered recently and also in the past.

Once I really start playing around with its contents I am sure I will be posting more here. But, in case I don't (probably due to being engrossed in the book), do feel free to get a copy for yourself. I am already seeing it as a valuable addition to my geek library.

Any who, that's all for this episode. Till next time....

Catching up

2009-07-28T01:02:00.004-05:00

I must say that this business of being unemployed (about 4 1/2 months now), has certainly taken a toll on my mental state. I am one of those people who likes working and being I work in a field I love, I generally love my job.

Unfortunately, being unemployed and in a job market that is not exactly condusive to becoming employed again does not do well for ones level of depression. Its not like I haven't had interviews, I have. One of the first interviews I had after becoming unemployed (I think it WAS the first one), was a wonderful experience. I was comfortable in the interview, which is unusual for me as I am not a good interviewee. I tend to get nervous and even though I know my stuff, I tend to freeze because I really want the job. Yes, I did slip up a question, but I got a good vibe from the interviewer. That person, by the way, was the reason for my bit of comfort. He wasn't overly intimidating and that was a relief, plus we had similar backgrounds on some things. Unfortunately that job fell through when the company pulled all Contractor funding. I still have hopes that that will change in the near future and that they will hire on new people as I am still interested.

I had another interview down in Boston at a company that did a lot with SMS. One of their large clients that they run the sms voting application for happens to be American Idol. Well, I went to the interview and all seemed to go ok. I did not get any vibe from either of my interviewers though, so I wasn't sure what to think. A couple of days later I heard that they decided to go with another candidate that had more years experience. Again, back to the job hunting grindstone.

Now I sit here and am going through a butt load of CBT's, learning some new topics. In particular, I am going through CBT's to pick up C#. No, I have never been a .Net coder as I made that decision back in college. It isn't because of my Pro-Linux side either, its valid reason(s). If you want to know, ask me some time, but believe me, it was valid.

Anywho, I am currently going through that training. Also in the CBT's that I have access to is a bunch of Java as well, which I will try and get through to boot. Training is good and it certainly can't hurt.

I just hope that something happens soon. The school year is about to start and we have cars needing work. One of them runs fine (mine), but needs inspection next month and also a minor fix. My wife's, well that is another story. Hopefully the new battery we just bought will fix things. If not, it could get ugly as we'll have to sideline it till I am employed again.

Oh, I know, this is my geek blog and what am I doing venting about life? Well, right now, this is what I have going on. Sorry! I promise a return to the geekiness, but had to get this out of my system. Don't be surprised if this venting stuff happens again. :)

Wireless Printing - SUCCESS!!!

2009-06-13T14:11:00.006-05:00

Up until today, the only printer we have is attached to my wife's Windows XP machine via its USB cable. If I wanted to print a document, which isn't all that often of a need here at home, I would just email the file to her and print it after saving it on her machine. That was a bit tedious, especially when she is on the computer and doing her thing. I don't really like to be a bother and disturb her.

Both of our machines are on the home wireless network and being a network, I wondered how difficult it would be to set up to print, wireless, to the printer attached to her machine. After doing a quick search on Google and a short bit or reading I did the following:

1. Set up file and printer sharing on the Windows XP machine. This was quite easy and walking through their wizard is recommended. Make sure that you have set up the following pieces of information:

Machine Name
Workgroup (I changed this from the default)

2. After setting up the sharing, I went to the specific printers settings and turned on its sharing. Make sure that you give the printer a name as you will need it.

3. I am using Ubuntu 9.04 so I went to System->Printing. Click on New. Once you do that, it will try and find machines. In the next box, I clicked on the Network Printer drop down and selected "Windows Printer via SAMBA".

In the options that appear to the right, you will need to enter the smb address in the following format:

smb://workgroup/machine_name/printer_name

After that, if you have authentication setup, you will need to enter it. I didn't, so I just hit verify and it said it found the printer and it was shared. Jackpot, so far so good. Next, click Forward.

4. Now is the search for drivers. You can do this blindly or be smart about it and do what I did. I have a Brother printer and the options you are provided at the top for selecting your printer are:

a. Select printer from database
b. Provide PPD file
c. Search for a printer driver to download

I figured I would search Google for a ppd file, so I entered the following into a Google search: brother dcp-7020 ppd file

Low and behold, the first link in the search was for the OpenPrinting Database. They basically told me all they knew about my printer and notes it had on it. The best piece though, was it told me which driver was recommended. So, I went to the Choose Driver screen, chose Brother and then Forward and on the next page selected the driver it recommended.

Wouldn't you know but it worked PERFECTLY!!! Isn't Linux just beautiful? :) I think (and know) so.

I hope this helps you setup your printer, wireless, on your own home network. I definitely see the value in print servers and network based printers, don't get me wrong, but when you are unemployed as I am and have no $$$, its awesome to be able to do what you need to, for free.

Chrome for Linux released...... finally!

2009-06-05T20:50:00.002-05:00

I was browsing around when I noticed that a friend of mine posted a link in his Facebook status. I was happily pleased to find that it was a link to a story that said a version of Google Chrome was now available for Linux (and Mac as well, but I am working on the later).

I did some link following and eventually found the page where you can download the software. I now have it installed and am starting to again use it.

Its true that Google Chrome does lack the plug-ins that Firefox does, but the speed of it and its clean nature tend to be a bit inviting. Plus, I love typing a search in the URL bar and having it search Google without having to go there. I know that Firefox has a search bar, but its just another plus in my book.

So, enjoy. I am.

Converting the chm files

2009-04-22T09:45:00.003-05:00

While I am sure that chm files have their use in the Windows world (as help files), I do not find them all that useful on the Linux side. That said, I decided to go about converting some chm files that I have acquired into pdf files, which is a more acceptable format if you ask me.

To do that, you are going to have to install "chm2pdf". I am working on Ubuntu 8.10 and it is a pretty simple install. As root, execute the following:

apt-get install chm2pdf

After that finishes, you will now be able to convert the files you have. It took me a little playing with the program to learn how to use it, but it wasn't all that bad. The manual page gives the options, but you have to run it once to see what is really required.

Here is the command that I used to convert my chm files to pdf:

chm2pdf --webpage -f file.pdf file.chm

The "-f" option allows you to supply the output name. Feel free to play with the command, but this is what worked for me. Happy converting!

A twitter a day...

2009-04-17T21:34:00.001-05:00

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have really become a bit addicted to twitter. I have found a bunch of interesting people to follow with posts that usually pretty good.

With all of the people that I am following, the posts that come in get scrolled off the screen on the twitter site pretty fast. I did some looking around for a twitter client that would allow me more flexibility in my twitting. Well, I found one and it is called TweetDeck.

TweetDeck, by default contains three colums:

All Friends -> This column contains the normal feeds you would see when visiting your twitter home page. The difference is that there is a scroll bar and it is configurable as to how many posts you can see back at one time. That bode well with me.
Replies -> When you make a post specifically at someone, and they reply to you, this is where the reply will show up so that you don't have to worry about trying to find it in the "All Friends" feed.
Direct Messages -> When someone messages you directly, this is the column you will see it in.

At the top of the interface is where you will see the box you can type your status messages and replies into. Right under there though, is a "shorten url" line. This is very nice so you don't have to go to an external site, like tinyurl or any others, in order to get a shorter link to the site you are referencing.

What was a bit weird though was when visiting the TweetDeck site to download the software, the "Download now, its free" link did not work. I am running Ubuntu 8.10 and usually don't have that issue, so I was a bit weirded by that. But, do not fret, under the screenshot on the page is a link titled "version 0.25". Clicking that link will download the software. (Yes, that link is the link to the software.)

WARNING: The software is built with Adobe Air. So, if you do not have Adobe Air installed, you will need to first obtain and install it. Then, once Adobe Air is installed, it has its own program for installing the file you downloaded. One warning though, if you are like me and running Linux, be sure to run Adobe Air program installer as root, or with sudo, otherwise you will not be able to install the software. Just a bit of info to fend off any hairpulling that might cause.

So, even though the software is still only in Beta version AND this is still my first 24 hours running it, I must say I am already a fan.

Where....what...

2009-04-15T12:55:00.001-05:00

My last post here was back in January of this year. I had figured out (with the help of a Google search) how to combine multiple pdf files into one, gigantic file. That was right around when things started to get insanely busy at the job I was working at. It may have been insane, but I really liked what i was doing.

Yes, I am talking in the past tense. On March 10th, the company did its third round of layoffs and my job was one of the positions that was eliminated. I still remember the day. I was continuing work on a bug that had been assigned to me through the Bugzilla software that they use. I had a pretty good idea of what the issue is and how to fix it, and had started to code to fix it. Then I got an email from my boss around 9:26, saying that he wanted to have a quick status meeting in a conference room in 4 minutse (at 9:30).

I didn't think much of it since he was always busy with stuff and getting something like a status update out of the way was nothing new. The room he specified was occupied with a bunch of overwhelmingly loud folks, so I went to the room around the corner. I dialed in to his conference line and he was waiting for me. He wasted no time and told me that my job had been eliminated. He appologized, saying he didn't have much choice as he was pressured to release somone after having everyone survive the previous two layoffs.

After he had told me the news there was a knock on the door and a lady entered with some stuff in her hands. It was my separation package and paperwork that I needed to sign. My boss said goodbye and she took over the meeting. After signing everything she informed me that I needed to pack up and be out of the building asap. Granted, they trust their employees enough that they didn't post a guard over me or anything (no like it was needed, I am not stupid and don't burn my bridges), but man was she to the point.

It took me about 2 1/2 hours to clean out everything and get packed up. I did my rounds to say goodbye to everyone and an email was even sent out by my colleague to let people know. That is when they started to come over more frequently to bid their farewells and say they were sorry for the situation.

I worked with a great bunch of very knowledgeable people and I consider myself lucky to have been there, but considering the current job market, I really wish things had gone differently. Heck, I would have truly considered a pay cut if it meant keeping my job versus being in my unemployed state as I am right now.

I have been actively looking for a job for just over a month now. I have my resume out to tons of places, but unfortunately, no bites yet. While I was at Sonus, I really started working with PHP a lot during the last few months and I started to really like it. So, after being released, I started really picking it up more. In addition, I have begun really concentrating on the Drupal CMS (Content Management System) for my web development. Its a wonderful system and being PHP based, its not too very difficult to extend with your own modules.

Anywho, that is where things stand, and now you know..... the rest of the story. (RIP Paul Harvey! 1918-2009)

Easy way to combine pdf files

2009-01-19T13:20:00.001-05:00

Don't you just love it when you find a good tutorial on something and instead of having 1 pdf file that contains everything, you find that each chapter has its own pdf file. Its more of a pain to have several or more files than one big file.

For instance, I am currently reading "How to think like a computer scientist", which is an excellent introduction into the world of Python programming. This book, by the way is the textbook used for the MIT open courseware course "A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python". The book is fabulous, but after downloading the material from MIT, I found that it contained PDF files of the books chapters, but not one with everything (which in my opinion would have been a lot more helpful).

But, not to fret if you are using Linux (which I am, Ubuntu to be precise), as there is a program called Ghostscript which will make combining the files MUCH easier than going out and purchasing Adobe Acrobat (no need, believe me).

I had stumbled across this method on this website, which gave a very good overview of using ghostscript to combine a bunch of pdf files into one big pdf file.

So, I set about to combine the 13 pdfs into one. The following command was what I issued:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=httlacs.pdf ch01.pdf ch02.pdf ... ch13.pdf

In this command the "..." symbolizes all of the files I listed. Now please know that you have to list the files in the order that you want them combined. The program will start at the first file on the left (ch01.pdf) and work through the list to the end (ch13.pdf). When the command is done running (it took a couple of minutes to complete) I had a nice PDF by the name of httlacs.pdf that contained the entirety of the book. Very nice and very easy if you ask me.

Hope this helps you!

MySQL: Creating a database and User account

2008-12-22T14:39:00.002-05:00

For my next installment, I will show you how to not only create a database (which isn't that trivial), but also how to create a user to access that database and assign their password all at once.

First, the database. So, what we will do here is first, log in as root user:

mysql -u root -p

Hit enter and type in the root password when prompted. There are other ways of doing this, like the following, its just how I chose to do it:

mysql -uroot -p<password>

Just replace <password> with the root user password. Then, at the mysql prompt, create the desired database (that we will call testing for our purposes here):

create database testing;

Now, you will want to access this database with a specific user account (which we will call tester) and give it a password. So, at the mysql prompt do the following:

grant all on testing.* to 'tester'@'localhost' identified by 'password';

This assumes that you are working on the machine where the database is located. Also, replace 'password' with the password you wish to use.

That's it. You should now be able to exit out of mysql and then log in using the new account you have just created. (provided you didn't receive any errors during the above statements.

More database commands

2008-11-06T09:55:00.001-05:00

I mentioned a few articles ago that I am getting some real quality MySQL database experience at my job and I wasn't kidding. I am loving it and having fun.

After writing a Perl function to audit our databases to ensure they were defined correctly, per our pre-defined schemas, I had to start making changes to the databases in question. The first thing that I took care of was the deletions of whole tables and databases. That was easy through the use of the 'drop' command, but now I am into the modifications.

There are fields in tables that have either the wrong name or the wrong defined type. So, I have to change them. The wrong defined type is easy and modified using the following command:

alter table <table_name> modify column <column_name> type;

<table_name> => replace with the name of the table with fields you are fixing.
<column_name> => replace with the column / field that you are fixing.
type => replace with the type that you want to change to (ie: int, bigint, float, varchar(??), etc)

The other type of change is where the name of a field/column is incorrect. In that case, you would use the following command sequence:

alter table <table_name> change column <old_column_name> <new_column_name> type;

<table_name> => the table that has fields needing fixing.
<old_column_name> => the present name of the column you want to fix.
<new_column_name> => the new name for the column you want to fix.
type => while you are not changing it, you still have to specify the type for the column/field. Just look at what it is presently defined as using "describe <table_name>" to see all field definitions.

Now, with the last one, I am running into a bunch of issues where two fields need their names switched. The data is in the correct place, but the names aren't. In that case, you would move one of them to a temporary name (like the new name with "_temp" added on to it) and then moved to its final name after the other field has been moved to its new name.

As I said, its all very interesting and fun to learn, while being quite involving. I have become very acquainted with the MySQL online documentation, that is for sure.

Useful, stupid Unix tricks

2008-11-06T09:41:00.001-05:00

Today on Slashdot there is an article that asks people to submit their stupid, yet useful unix tricks. While there are a number of good ones on there, I did pick up a couple of interesting ones.

One of the things I picked up was to type "ssh username@" and then hit tab and you would get a list of available hostnames to connect to. These are pulled from the machine's hosts file. Now, one thing it doesn't do is get a list from your local, internal DNS, so don't get discouraged if you don't see your host name on there but know you can connect it. That is the reason.

There was also a bit of a heated exchange regarding the use or lack of use of the 'sudo' command. There are a bunch of people that claim, and I quote... "Pshaw! All 1337 sysadmins just live as root!". This is obviously someone who only administers his own system and nobody elses. I would personally be very scared to have this person as a sysadmin. I have done sysadmin work a number of times and at my present job we maintain our own machines, so root is part of the curriculum. But, you won't see us exclusively "su -" into the root account all day. If I need to do anything as root, I either use sudo for a quick job or if its more intensive, I use 'sudo bash', which makes you root as well. But once done, I get out of it and back to my account.

See, what these apparent noobs to the sysadmin scene don't realize is that the root account was not meant to be logged into all day doing all of your work. That is what you have a user account for and the reason you should use your own account whenever you can. Granted, I know that there are people I have dealt with who have systems that ONLY have a root account and that's it, but that would be one of the few exceptions to the rule. To run as root all the time just "because you can" is juvenile, inexperienced and immature. Most sysadmins who have earned their titles know the rules of root and abide by them for a reason. I yearn to be there when one of those "pshaw" kids makes a wrong move as root and looses a TON of needed data that makes them drop to their knees and cry. I don't wish extensive data loss on anyone, but my hopes would be that they would learn their lesson.

Another command I recently discovered before seeing this list was the screen command, which is used during remote access to execute commands that may take a while to run. You can then disconnect from the console and then reconnect later and reconnect to the screen session you had running. Its pretty sweet really and allows your machine to not be tied up on a process. Unix is so sweet like that, always a way to do something!

The [sometimes] trouble with updates

2008-10-24T21:34:00.003-05:00

No, I am not referring to Windows updates. Instead, I am referring to Linux updates. There are mixed views on whether you should do updates or not on your system(s). Here is my view.... if it is a server, update it ONLY when you are absolutely needing to. This means only if there is a security hole that is fixed by a newer version. On the other hand, if it is a desktop system, if you update then it is up to you.

If you do updates though, you really need to watch out. Make sure you know what exactly is happening during the update(s) as things tend to change and also stop working.

I did an update earlier this evening after booting up my laptop. No worries, right? Wrong. When I tried to start my apache web server (which was previously installed and working fine), I discovered that it was no longer working. Strange if you ask me, but it wasn't starting up. It kept giving me the same errors:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
* Starting web server apache2 [Fri Oct 24 22:15:10 2008] [warn] module php5_module is already loaded, skipping
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

I started by plugging in the different errors into Google, but kept going in directions I didn't think were the answer. Then I looked at the last error: "Unable to open logs". That was odd because I hadn't changed anything, but...... then there was the updates.

So I checked and the /var/log/apache2 directory and saw that it was owned by root and had a group of adm. I distinctly remember that being the group root the other day. So, instead of changing permissions (which is someting I was not wanting to do, I decided to add root to the adm group.

I restarted apache and VOILA!!! Problem fixed. So, the lesson.... know what updates are being applied and if something doesn't work afterwards, you will at least know why.

Linux Filesystem Layout

2008-10-12T10:06:00.003-05:00

I was "stumbling" around and I stumbled across a page that showed a graphical layout of the Linux Filesystem. For those that are beginning in their Linux ventures, I can imagine that this will be quite helpful. Without an understanding of the filesystem, a lot of things will be lost in your learning process, so learn it well.

A change to my previous posting

2008-10-12T10:03:00.001-05:00

In my previous posting of MySQL commands, #6 talked about granting permissions to a user on all databases. It should be noted that it is much wiser to first:

- create the user account in mysql first and set the password.
- then, set the permissions that the user has for said database(s).

Some useful MySQL commands

2008-10-02T11:56:00.002-05:00

Lately I have been getting quite intimate with the MySQL database and have been doing things beyond the standard queries and adds. Here is a list of some other useful commands that I have been working with lately. Please know that any options to these commands that are in [ ] are considered optional:

1. Delete a databse:

Format: drop {database | schema} [if exists] db_name;

This command drops all tables in the database and then deletes the database. You need to have 'drop' privilages to do this. *Note: As of MySQL 5.0.2 "schema" is a synonym for database.

2. Delete a table:

Format: drop [temporary] table [if exists] table_name[, tablename, ...] [restrict | cascade];

This command will delete one or more tables from a database. Again, you must have drop permissions for each table.

3. Back up a table to file (in case a recovery is needed after doing something like an alter on a table):

CLI Format: mysqldump --user=<username> --password -B <database_name> --tables <table_name> > filename.sql

This command should be issued from the command line, not from within mysql's interface, as the two previous commands would be. The '.sql' extension on the file tells you that the data inside is for sql. If you open the file, you will see a plethora of sql commands to recreate the table as it was.

4. Restore a table from a backup sql file:

CLI Format: mysql -u <username> -p <database_name> < filename.sql

This will restore the table to its original glory.

5. Delete all data from a table:

Format: truncate <table_name>;

This will erase all data from the table, leaving the defined schema in tact.

6. Grant permissions on database's to a specific user:

Format: grant {comma separated permissions list} on <db_name>.* to `username`@`localhost`;

This will grant whatever permissions needed to the specified user. Now, if the user account in MySQL does not exist, then after the username@localhost piece, you will need to specify:

identified by password `password`;

Now, the tic marks around `password` and `usrename`@`localhost` are all back tics. That is what I tend to use and have never had a problem.

One note of caution, BE CAREFUL using the above commands. They are commands that will cause serious changes to your database and tables. Practice on a test database before doing ANYTHING on a production database. Also, make sure to back up any tables or databases that you work on. As we all know, whatever can happen.... usually will.

Cheap is as cheap does

2008-09-24T12:20:00.000-05:00

The way that the economy is today and how it is driving the price of everything up, its no wonder that people are looking for cheaper and cheaper ways to do things.

One area that people are always looking for a free way to get what they want is with regards to creating a website. To have a website, you typically need a domain name and a place in which to have that domain hosted. Domain names are typically about $8 to $10 per year to register (depending on where you go) and if you are a teenager or don't have a credit card at the present time, then you need some way to get one.

*Note: If you are starting a small business then it is highly advised that you buy your own domain and get a good hosting provider. A free host and free domain are not really the way to go as it may effect your reputation depending on your business and its model. This is especially true for those in any geek related profession.

For this example, I will use Geocities by Yahoo. They provide you with free web space, all you have to do is have an account with them. Granted, you won't have available all of the services of a real hosting provider, but believe me, when you are just needing to have a web presence and don't have a lot of $$$, you cannot just look free in the mouth.

Once you have setup your free site at Geocities, you will now have a domain name that looks like "http://www.geocities.com/username", where username is your account name on Yahoo's system(s). Again, this does not really that descriptive of you, I know. So, how can we get a domain name that we would like, while maintaining the free nature of this article? Why not turn to dot.tk. The provide you with URL re-direction. You simply create the domain name that you would like and tell them where it should point to. That way, you can give out your easier to remember .tk address and it will re-direct the incoming traffic to your Geocities site.

Note: Please know that I am not associated in any way with Geocities or dot.tk. After browsing around and seeing mention of the dot.tk website, I figured I would write this so others would know about it. Please don't read anything into this article as its for informational purposes only.

There is always a catch, isn't there

2008-09-24T11:32:00.000-05:00

I came across a link today that said "Free Domain Name for 1 Year to Small Businesses". So, I clicked it and it brought me to Register.com. At that link is the offer that was in the advertisement.

So, I typed in a domain that I was thinking about and hit "Go". Voila, the domain was available and all I had to do was select that I just wanted the Free Domain, without any extra services, which I did. Next, I was asked to either log in(for existing / returning Register.com customers) or create an account. Ok...

Being the anal person that I am, I decided to read through the fine (light grey) print at the bottom of the page, you know, the stuff they hope you won't notice and read. In there it said that even though the first year was free, you are required to supply them with a credit card number anyway as part of their "standard registration policy".

This is something I did not want to comply with at this time. Why do I have to enter a credit card number if there is no charge to me? I know that a lot of businesses require this, but its ridiculous if you ask me. Why get a card number on file if its not needed? Wait until after checkout, and if there is a balance, obtain it at that time. Is that so hard? Sheesh!!

Needless to say I closed the site and left as I wasn't about to divulge the digits from any plastic I may have. I just wanted to post this so everyone else was aware of this fact before clicking on said advertisement should you happen across it.

A little catch up

2008-09-23T08:27:00.000-05:00

I must say that when you get up at 6:30ish in the morning, spend the entire day working on coding issues, writing code or some kind of sys admin issues (usually all within the same day), come home to two little ones in the evening, by the time bedtime for them comes, you just don't find much energy to blog. Lately, in the evenings, I find myself either "stumbling" around the internet or just playing a mindless game to relax. That is pretty much what I have been doing (and not blogging) as of late.

Every once in a while, like now, it hits me that I haven't blogged for some time and I should really get back to it. Now, this isn't to say that I haven't been learning anything. My, oh my, have I been learning stuff. As of late, I have Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop and have been learning the best, right way to configure it.

I started by downloading MySQL, PHP, and Apache2 and compiled them all by hand, getting them installed the way that I want them, configured with the options I want/need. From there, I have been setting each up. I have learned a ton about the Apache2 config and how it works. Not only that, I have created my own Certificate Authority, created and signed my own key pair and have secured my internal website (on that machine) to have an "https://" alternative. There are things that I am investigating right now, like how to make it so a site or a page is required to be loaded with https vice http. (for security reasons of course)

On the flip side, MySQL has been another bit of knowledge that I have been actively acquiring. Of course it certainly helps that at work they use MySQL for what we do, so interacting with and learning the database is crucial to doing my job. I have wanted to learn it for long enough that I am glad to have this opportunity.

Also, because there are some new sites at work (internally) that use PHP for the pages, I am learning that as well as I am sure I will have to support them or create new pages in the future.

So, to all of you out there who are saying, "Wow, I would love to learn about that technology!", there is no time like the present. Install it, play with it, learn it. If you don't play with it, you won't learn it. You could read the books and absorb what you could, but unless you have a photographic memory and a memory search engine equivelant to Google's algorithm, then you will need to play with everything you can to learn its intricacies.

My Latest Addiction

2008-07-16T12:59:00.001-05:00

Every day you hear about people getting addicted to things like drugs, alcohol or even cigarettes. Being a geek though, I am a little modified in my addictions. See, I don't do drugs (never have), I don't smoke (anymore, gave it up cold turkey 10 years ago) and I only occasionally drink.

Instead, my addictions tend to orbit around computers. My latest however happens to be a plugin for the Fire Fox web browser called StumbleUpon. After installing the plugin and restarting your browser, go into the configuration and select all of the topics that you want to "stumble upon". I warn you though, there are an overwhelming number of topics but you can right click on each and open in a new tab or window to see what the types of sites it finds.

After you are done with the configuration, open a new tab and click the "stunble" button. It will then randomly select a site from the entire list of topics and display it for you. I have been building up my del.icio.us bookmarks for the past few weeks with an overwhelming number of links to things I have found useful and/or interesting. I suggest you give it a try, you might stumble upon something you could use too.

Something New

2008-07-16T12:52:00.001-05:00

Wow, has it really been almost 2 months since my last entry? Believe it or not I hadn't noticed. Work has kept me pretty bogged down during the day with stuff to do (yes, that is a good thing as I am loving my job) and things like blogging have had to take a slight back burner with my nightly exhaustion (that is only enhanced by the activeness off our kids.

Speaking of work, we hired an intern for the summer to take on some work that we need to do. He hails from WPI (Worcestor Polytechnic Institute) and has turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He is going into his senior year there and has a pretty interesting senior project going.

He and I have had the chance to chat it up a bit on a number of topics and during such chats, I have been intrigued by how positively he speaks of coding in Python. I always saw Python as an interesting language and had thoughts of learning it but hadn't settled definitely, until now that is.

For the past couple of weeks I have been actively reading about and playing with, Python on a regular basis. It is actually quite an elegant and neat language. The way that you do things in Python is taking a bit to get used to (as well as having to switch back and forth between Python and Perl), but I can handle it just fine.

I see Python added to my coding arsenal for the long haul and am sure that there will be some posts on it here, in the future.

I will try and put together a post containing links to get you started if you are interested. You will be surprised at how easy Python is to learn, even if you haven't done any coding before.

Help needed to complete the Perl 5 Wiki

2008-05-23T11:29:00.002-05:00

I made my way back to the Perlbuzz website today to catch up on some of the news I had been missing out on for the past couple of weeks. The second article that I came across on the page was titled: Help the Perl 5 wiki get to 1,000 entries - Perl Buzz.

Surfing on over to the Perl 5 wiki will have you finding an indispensable resource for any Perl coder out there. Being that the Perl Foundation does so much for the community, it only seems right that everyone should do their share to help out. So, why not stop over and check out the almost 300 needed (most-wanted) pages and see if you can provide any of them for the wiki. Every little bit helps.

I DID IT!!!

2008-05-14T05:52:00.001-05:00

Well, last night I went ahead and installed Mac OSx on my Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop while I was coding on another computer. The process was pretty easy actually. It started with me finding this website, which gave directions on how to install it. So, following the btjunkie directions (as they were easier), I downloaded the torrent from btjunkie. The download did take a while and I had to let it go overnight, but when I got up in the morning, it was completed and ready to be burned to disc. BTW, since its an image, you can use any software to burn it to disc and aren't required to use Nero. I used Roxio and its fine.

During the install I had to figure some things out. For instance, when it came time to select the media to install to, it didn't show anything. I remembered that I had linux on here, not Mac OS, so the drive format was not correct. So, I saw the menu bar up top and went into the disk utility. This allowed me to format the drive for a Mac recognized format. Once I did this, they showed up automatically. One note though about the disk utility. It looks as if it is only able to format drives, not partition them. I say this because I looked for the ability as I have a 1 gig partition (which was swap for Linux) and a 92 gig partition. That's ok, I can use the 1 gig for storage, but that's not the point.

Anywho, the software installed and when it was done it rebooted. Upon coming up, the video was just screwed!! This was something I had to figure out. I did some research on google and found I needed to get to the filesystem without the graphical interface running. I talked to a friend, Randal Schwartz, online (thanks for the help Randal!!!), and he told me about the -s option to boot, which Mac's us Command-s during boot to activatej. Unfortunately, I am on a dell...... no command button during boot. So, I was playing around with function keys during boot, hit F8 and voila! A boot menu. It allowed me to enter any options for booting. I tried the -s and went into Single User mode (any of you *nix guys know what that is). Once in there, I mounted the main drive and did what I had to do (hid the drivers for my video card that were causing a problem, supposedly).

Upon rebooting, it STILL didn't work, so a little more Google research and decided to boot with the "-x" option, which is like a safe mode. I could not believe it, it worked! Right now, I am staring at Mac OSx, running on my Dell Inspiron 9200. It is SWEEEEEEET!! The only thing so far that is not working is the wireless card, but I will work on that. WOO HOO!!! Sorry, a little happy. Ethernet is working fine though and I am surfing the net.

For those of you interested, there is an HCL for Mac OSx86 which goes through the supported devices and what had to be done to get them to work. It may prove very helpful in your quest.

Perl error is fixed

2008-05-13T08:46:00.001-05:00

I completely forgot to let everyone know that the Perl error I was experiencing was fixed. Albeit not in a manner conducive to learning why it happened and how, or what to do to rectify it, but instead, but installing the latest and greatest version of Perl and re-creating the soft links to point to the new version.

Once that was done, all works just fine now. ***sigh***

On a lighter note, I have downloaded MacOSx(86) and am planning on attempting to install it on to my personal laptop. (vice my work laptop, which would be a no no) The version of MacOSx is 10.4.6. If anyone else is interested in trying this, you can find install instructions here. Also, there is a page that shows the laptops that have had successful installs of MacOSx.

The laptop I have is the Dell Inspiron 9200. Unfortunately, not on the list and from what I can find out, that means either nobody has tried or hasn't reported on it. Hopefully, I can report success soon.

And you thought they were offshoring alot before? Just wait!

2008-05-13T08:40:00.001-05:00

I was sitting here at work today when a friend from EDS (where I used to work before this job) IM'd me, asking me if I had heard the news. Being that EDS was in the middle of an approximately 45,000 person layoff, moving those 45,000 jobs to India, I was expecting new of friends having gotten let go.

While waiting for his response I was scanning the news wires and saw that HP had agreed to buy EDS for 13.9 billion! WOW!!! What a bit of news that is. In talking with another friend, who also used to work for EDS and HP both, the employees thought EDS was off-shoring a lot? Just wait. HP seems to be one of the kings of off-shoring with a fair amount of its workforce living in India and other countries.

I just wish that off-shoring would stop being so cheap, that way the jobs could stay here in the U.S. Heck, maybe the new president will do something about the situation and cut the off-shore companies off at the knees. That would be a very pleasant turn of event if you ask me.

Interesting Perl error

2008-04-28T14:00:00.002-05:00

I installed Fedora Linux, Core 8 inside of VMWare and upon getting to a command prompt I tried to get into the CPAN shell. Well, needless to say (and to cut to the chase, this is what I was presented with:

$ perl -MCPAN -e shell
Can't locate CPAN.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.7/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.7 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8 .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Yes, that kind of left me scratching my head. I have never had Perl just simply hurl like that. So, after doing some checking around and not finding any nice solution, I decided to download Perl 5.10 and am presently doing an installation of it. We shall soon see what becomes of it.

New Servers

2008-04-27T11:02:00.004-05:00

Oh, happy day. I have been waiting for this for a little while now. Whilest my home office is still in the process of being constructed, I am gathering some of the hardware that will make up my main server system for my network.

Yesterday, a good friend of mine who has a plethora of servers and equipment, was kind enough to part with a Sun v280r and a Sun E450. Now, those of you who know your Sun machines are probably not terribly impressed, but when the word FREE is associated with such equipment, you don't exactly turn your nose up at it. I, personally, am open and accepting to whatever is thrown my way. I love computers and all of the hardware I can acquire.

I already have plans for these. The v280r is going to be my main processing server. It will handle all the heavy loads. The E450 on the other hand is going to be my file server. Upon giving me the E450, my friend was kind enough to load it with 20 hard drives. They are all 4.2 gig hard drive (for a total of 84 Gig of storage, but that is hopefully to change. My friend also has a bunch of 18 Gig hard drives in cradles other than Sun (ie: compaq and such) and is going to be unloading them, hopefully into my E450. That would be a sweet addition to my new system.

I already have a Sun 711 storage array with 6 - 18Gig drives, for a total of 108 Gig of space. Another nice addition. So, my network slowly grows. I have an abundance of Ultra2's, some Ultra1's and a couple of Sparc5 machines.

I just had to share. I love getting new toys to play with.

Realization

2008-03-29T22:23:00.002-05:00

Its funny, when you have a love for something like an operating system (say, Solaris Unix), and you have been using it for about 10 years. Then, after a very long time, you get it installed on your laptop for the first time (or any x86 platform for that matter) and it doesn't take but a few days for you to realize that its not really suited for your daily activities.

That was the realization that I came to yesterday. Yes, I know, I put a fair amount of effort into getting some things worked out, but after playing around with it and actually trying to do my day to day stuff on the web, I realized that it really have the support that I needed for some things but Linux did.

Don't get me wrong, Solaris is still my OS of choice when it comes to being a server, but when it comes to the desktop, Linux has it hands down. So, I installed Suse 10.3 last night and have been getting things situated today.

Solaris 10 - Laptop: Update #2

2008-03-24T05:51:00.002-05:00

Well, I had a chat with a very nice Sun employee who gave me the scoop on why its not good for Solaris to start the interface on boot. It slows it down if it does.

Instead, he pointed me to a very nice tool called "inetmenu", which can be downloaded from the opensolaris website, that handles all of your network connections either through a gui or on command line.

So, I have downloaded that and tonight will work on getting it configured and setup for use. (Thanks again Ben!)

I guess its on to the Broadcom driver from here.

Solaris 10 - Laptop: Update

2008-03-23T21:55:00.003-05:00

I DID IT!! For the first time in the 10 years since I first touched Solaris Unix, I have Solaris on the internet....... WIRELESSLY!!! This is just excellent!! Solaris 10 x86 supports my Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 b/g wireless card perfectly!!

Granted, it wasn't a piece of cake and did take some tweaking, but it WORKS!!! For instance, I had to add an entry to the /etc/netmasks file, I had to create the resolv.conf file and I also had to edit the nsswitch.conf file to allow for dns.

Other than that, the software installed fine, plumbed ok, and grabbed an IP from my router. Only issue I have left, is when I reboot, it doesn't load the interface back up again. So, I have to re-plumb and grab an IP from dhcp. Hopefully I will figure that out shortly and be SET!!

Next, I have to install the driver for my Broadcom 10/100 card and I will be doing just fine!

Job Change

2008-03-22T13:12:00.001-05:00

Well, I am no longer working in Boston. I have a new job and am working in Westford, MA for a company that works a lot with VoIP(for those of you who have my LinkedIn profile, you can find out where I am working). Having read the job description before interviewing and even after the initial phone interview with my (present) boss, I really wanted this position.

I cannot pinpoint any one thing that intrigued me about the position, it was instead the position as a whole. The chance to finally learn not only about VoIP but how it all works was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Plus, the scripts that I will be working with are mostly written in Perl.

One thing that does really peak my fancy is learning new technologies, and one of the new things I am working on picking up now is AJAX. I am starting by learning Javascript, since that is one of the foundations of AJAX. Once I am done with that tutorial, I will move on to the AJAX tuturial. There is nothing like a vertical learning curve to keep a geek on his toes. :)

Laptop Trouble

2008-03-22T12:47:00.003-05:00

I had some computer issues the other night. While browsing the Internet on my laptop (under Windows), a whole slew of things happened all at once:

my background changed to a warning that my computer was infected with spyware and that I should "click the link" to scan now. The background ended up being set to an html page. If you click the link, it takes you to a page offering to sell you spyware and virus removal software. A rather cruel, sick joke if you ask me.
A bunch of pop up windows appeared on my machine, all pointing to that same, unwanted offer page. Again, just not right!
Both my wired and wireless network interfaces were not able to get an IP address from my router. I know the router still worked because my wife's machine still worked fine. I don't know exactly what happened to the devices, but they seemed completely locked.
I was not able to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and pull up the task manager. A message appeared saying that the ability to do so had been disabled by my System Administrator and that I should take it up with him/her. Ok, I AM my own Sys Admin!!!

Needless to say, I was totally at a stand still as far as this Windows installation went. A friend at work showed me some really good software for scanning and removing viri and spyware. Unfortunately, it didn't do the trick. The network devices were still effected and the popups came right back after it finished doing its thing.

Well, completely fed up and not wanting to waste any more time on the issue, I decided to re-install my laptop. Now, mind you, I had a dual booted system with Windows and Linux. What I didn't want to do was re-install Windows and have this same thing happen again. So, I made the executive decision and grabbed my Solaris 10 DVD off the shelf and placed it into the drive. After a couple of hours of installation and such, I had Solaris 10 installed and working on my laptop. Mind you, I still have some configuration to do. For instance, Solaris 10 does support my wireless card. So, I have downloaded the drivers, I just have to get it installed and running now. Plus, I have to install the driver for my 10/100 card as well. On top of that, I have to fix the boot manager as it doesn't show the Linux partition as an option.

So, my laptop is Windows free and running two different versions of *nix. ***sigh*** it feels pretty good. The solaris piece will help me get back some of the Admin skills that have become slightly rusty from not really using them since the last time I was a Sys Admin. I am really looking forward to sharpening them up.

Anywho, I will give more updates on the laptop as I make progress. I would love to know what that was that effected my computer, but at this point, I doubt I will find out.

The Life of a Software {Engineer | Developer}

2008-02-05T09:34:00.000-05:00

I was reading slashdot this morning and came across an article written by a software developer, describing what it is like to be one. IMHO, the article is very well written and the author provides plenty of material to tempt your pallet and inform you of a career you may have no idea about.

What I didn't know, that the article mentioned, was that the word "Engineer" cannot be applied to a software developer in Canada as it is not allowed by their standards. To me, this is just fine as like the author, I prefer the term "Software Developer" anyway.

Here is the article in its entirety at the authors own site. Enjoy!

What's the buzz?

2008-01-13T15:38:00.000-05:00

So, what is the Buzz you ask? Funny you should ask. Back in December 2007 (specifically, on the 7th of December, 2007), I was reading the newest entry on the Perl Buzz website. The article was about what the author called, "A Couple of Happy Perl Users". Much to my suprize, the user in the second paragraph was ME! I was taken aback and could not believe it. My blog had gotten mention on Andy Lester's Perl Buzz. How absolutely cool was that?

Well, it made my day yet again when an article I wrote for TheScripts.com was mentioned on Perl Buzz. The article was about how to install Strawberry Perl, a distribution of Perl for Windows. I was overjoyed yet again. The comments on the article began to come in, but they weren't all positive. Since the article was written, you see, Strawberry Perl had released a newer version of their distribution that was based on Perl 5.10. The new version had newer capabilities that the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 version did not. The article that I wrote was based on the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 version and not the 5.10 version, thus, it is not valid for the newer version.

With that discovered, I made a modification to the beginning of the article to mention that it is for the previous version of Strawberry Perl, not the present version. You see, with the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 version, in order to get the CPAN interface working properly, I discovered that I had to install the Windows binary version of some of the Unix tools that were needed by the CPAN interface, and after doing so, all worked fine and still does (since I have not upgraded to 5.10).

In a slight defense to myself though, I did post a comment to the article on Perl Buzz (see comment #3), in order to clear up the confusion that seemed to have ensued. On January 8th, a follow-up article was posted on Perl Buzz that mentioned that the article I wrote was not in accordance with how 5.10 works. I also commented on that and mentioned the version difference. As I mentioned in my comment, I will work on getting the article updated for 5.10 once I have had a chance to update my system.

Happy New Year!!! ( and updates)

2008-01-02T12:23:00.000-05:00

Well, it is 2008 and I can well imagine that we are all looking forward to a hopefully wonderful year. Personally, I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish this year and am hopeful that I will get most of them done.

My biggest project of the new year is to finish my home office in the basement. The construction is still at the point of being bare skeleton (framing) with electrical and network wiring in place, but nothing else accomplished. Most of this is due to the young nature of my kids and the allotted time that I have had to work on it, which has been NONE!

I recently decided that I need a nice powerfull desktop machine that will not only last a while, but will be able to do everything that I need to do, and not worry about clicking on something and waiting for hours for it to happen because of all of the other operations going on. So, at the CompUSA going out of business sale, I picked up and new computer case last weekend. I had researched the case want and decided upon and bought the Antec Nine Hundred. Sure, it is labeled as their "gaming" case, but it has the potential for seven internal hard drives. How sweet is that?

To top it all off, I have already scoped out the AMD Phenom Quad Core chip that I want, as well as the Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 motherboard. The motherboard supports up to 16 Gb of ram, and has 6 total Sata connections internally and 2 Sata connections externally, 6 USB ports, 2 firewire, as well as gigabit ethernet (I know, that's almost a standard on motherboards these days). I plan on loading this puppy up with several large hard drives (500+ Gb), DVD writer(s) and also a 650 Watt power supply.

It will take a while to get the parts (money and all, you know), but when its done, WOW!! will it be a sweet machine!

On the flip side, my venture into Python is going very well. There is A LOT to learn about the language and I am still trudging my way through two different texts. The first is the Dive Into Python (DIP) text that is online, and the other is Beginning Python from Apress. Both are great books. DIP is just what it says, a head first dive, right into the language itself. It pulls no punches and gives you what you need to get going in the language. Beginning Python, on the other hand, provides me all of the insight I need to understand the topics that puzzle me. Magnus Lei Hetland (the author) has done a wonderful job at putting all the details into the book. Hopefully soon I can sit down and start producing some code.

Anyway, Happy and Prosperous New Year to all!!!

Adding to the Repetoire

2007-12-20T12:50:00.000-05:00

I have been playing around with Perl for about 1 1/2 to 2 years. The last (almost) 8 months of that time has been actually doing it for a living and not on my own, outside of work. The work experience that I have gained in invaluable, but having a job as a Perl developer has also allowed me to delve much farther into the Perl world than if I hadn't had the job. Heck, even having a job AS a developer was absolutely beneficial to my development as a developer.

In the past 8 months my knowledge of Perl has grown from semi-beginner hobby coder, to, in my very modest opinion, a moderately intermediate Perl developer. I have a solid grounding in the Perl basics as well as insight enough to know how to find out about modules, which ones to use and how to use them.

That isn't all though. Back in May of this year(2007), I joined up on the the scripts development forum and only after 3 months on the forum, helping out others and learning all that I could, I was submitted to the membership to become a Moderator. On my birthday I was fully promoted to moderator of the Perl form on the scripts. I have since taken on moderation duties in several other forums (about 9 forums in all right now), but maintain Perl as my "home" forum.

As you can see from the above background, I have gotten myself to a slightly comfortable place in my Perl career. Not at all to a point where I will stop learning, but instead, to a point where I feel comfortable enough about my knowledge that I can now take on learning another language.

There was a toss up as to which language to learn next. I was trying to decide between Ruby, which is extremely popular, Python, again, extremely popular and from what I had heard and read, easy to learn, and something like C#. I know, why C#, its a Micro$oft language? Well, it may be, but you can code C# with the Mono project on Linux and its somewhat interesting.

I thought about it for a little while, trying to decide. C# was actually ousted from the lineup first. I had done some VB at one point and even touched some Java in one of my college courses and I wasn't all that plussed by it. So, that truly helped me make that decision.

Ruby is a very interesting programming language itself. It was touted as powerful and quite popular. Plus, the added benefit of Rails for making web development with Ruby much quicker.

Well, I had to decide, so I chose Python. I didn't have an overwhelming reason why, its just that it appealed, almost called, to me. I liked that everyone said it was pretty easy to learn and the user base was growning steadily. Besides, that would leave me with Ruby as the next one to learn.

So, for almost a week now I have been trudging along at a steady pace through one of my Python books, learning the basic ins and outs. So far, they were right, it is easy to pick up, but I am not going to count my chickens yet. I will give myself some time to get a lot more into the language, but I am quite confident that I will have a similar love for Python that I do for Perl. If that is the case, then I will be a doubly happy person.

Miscellaneous Updates

2007-12-06T14:29:00.001-05:00

I think it best to start with an update of how things are going with my new find (see last post). Strawberry Perl has been running FINE now for almost a month. I have installed a bunch of different modules and have run a lot of scripts using it and it is running flawlessly so far.

That, was a lead in to my next update. I have a web site which I have paid a membership to so that I can access their information. The web site provides PDF documents (A LOT of them) that contain stamp albums that are created by the site owner. I am a philatelist and to not have to spend, literally, thousands of dollars on stamp albums makes a collector a very happy person.

Well, I said there were a lot of files and I was not kidding. There are a little over 200 countries in the world and each country is split up into multiple pdf files, each containing sections of the full album (this is done for a reason). To be exact, there are 2,137 files.

Now, wanting to get the most of my $20 (yes, its pretty cheap), I figured that instead of trying to download ALL of the files by hand that I would try and write a perl script that would do the job for me. So, that is just what I did. I was reading up on the different modules that I could use and I decided upon the WWW::Mechanize module written by Andy Lester.

It took me about 2 days to get the script coded, working and tested. The O'Reilly book "Spidering Hacks" definitely lead me down the right path with their hack(s) on WWW::Mechanize. I have to credit the author for the examples as I used some of his code in the script as well. After working out the typo's and little mistakes, plus, since I had never used this module, I had to figure out how to do the Authentication that was required in order to download files.

I did some searching around the internet and found a link to a page that has a couple of examples of how to do authentication, with one of the examples using WWW::Mechanize. This was PERFECT. It worked like a charm and before I could smile I was downloading all 2137 files from the site.

I must say, perl is a very complex and at times, complicated language but if it there is one thing I can say, it is that I LOVE PERL!!!!

No More Perl Monopoly for Active State

2007-11-13T11:48:00.000-05:00

As anyone who code's Perl on the Windows platform knows, the choice that you have (had) for Perl on Windows was Active State. It worked great for your scripting but when it came to installing modules it wasn't always the easiest thing in the world. Granted, the graphical installer was a godsend for those who don't like command line, but what about when you couldn't find the module you needed to use?

In the past few months I have found a few modules that I was wanting/needing to use in a project and they could not be found anywhere in the PPM (Perl Package Manager - this is what Active State Perl uses). If you investigate further, you will find that PPM does not use CPAN directly (as I think it should) but instead uses the Active State PPM repository by default. There are a couple of others out there as well, but they only add a few hundred packages (modules) to the mix.

Well, I did some inquiring to see if anyone knew of a complete repository to use for PPM, but instead was thrown a link to something completely new. Strawberry Perl! My curiosity peaked and being completely intrigued, I decided to download this new offering and see if it actually worked.

From what I was told, Strawberry Perl used the CPAN interface that most of us are already familiar (or quite intimate with) from the Unix world. That said, for those of you who remember (no matter how vaguely) the CPAN initial setup, the configuration manager looks for the existance and path's of specific utilities in order to be able to do its job.

Well, I made a list of the utilities that it requires and have provided those below for your reference:

The following utilities are located at the gnuwin32 website (or use the gnuwin32 listing page):

bzip
gzip
tar
unzip
wget
less (my favorite pager)

When you download the above utilities, be sure to grab the binary packages. When you unpack the first one, it should go into c:\Program Files\gnuwin32
That is the base path that you should then use for extracting the other 5 utilities as they have the same directory structure internally (ie: bin director, etc)

Here are other utilities that you will need (each is a link to its URL):

curl
lynx
ncftpget (and ncftp) - Both are installed with the same single download. Be sure and grab the client software (version 3.2.1 as of this blog entry).
gpg

It is up to you whether or not you put each utilities path into your system path, but if you don't, you will have to enter the path to where each utility is located manually during the CPAN setup, just as I did. Once you get all of these installed, and also have Strawberry Perl installed, you can then run the CPAN configuration by entering the following command:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

That will kick it off. I simply took all of the defaults, with the exception of the utility paths that were not displayed, I entered them manually.

Once I had completed the software installations and gone through the configuration, I entered the following command from within the CPAN shell environment:

install Bundle::CPAN

This confirmed to me that everything had worked as it installed beautifully. I then installed a few modules that I needed and ran a few scripts that were around from when I had Active State Perl on the machine (yes, it was uninstalled before installing Strawberry Perl. Sorry for not mentioning that earlier).

Anywho, I hope that those of you that code Perl on Windows will do your due diligence and go against what used to be a Perl / Windows Monopoly and switch from the limitations of Active State over to the freedom and (IMHO) superiority of Strawberry Perl.

Organize......UPDATE

2007-10-29T21:38:00.000-05:00

About a year (or so) ago, I blogged about a neat little program called Incollector. I have been using the program regularly since then and have really grown to love it. The whole purpose of the application is the organization of information. You enter it, you tag it, you maintain it. The program has really come alive and been an excellent part of my daily arsenal of "toys and tools".

The reason for this update though is not just to again let people know about it, but to also let you know that Incollector has now released its 1.0 version.

If you are wanting to organize those bits of data you have scribbled down on post-its and papers, need a place to store all your serial numbers, have code snippets you need to save, then this is the place to store it. The database is exportable and can be imported between Linux and Windows versions.

Download it, install it, play with it, and enjoy it. It is an incredible tool!

Its been that long?

2007-09-28T06:58:00.000-05:00

I was sitting around this morning, checking news and catching up before delving into my work (usually hip deep in perl code) when I remembered, "oops, I have a geek blog I haven't updated in a while.

Well, here is my update. I have been particularly busy this month between my daughter's birthday, projects at work and the finding of the online learning tools here at work. That has been of particular interest to me since it is the same system that I was using to learn a bunch of topics at my last job (before my access was pulled due to me terminating my employment by resigning).

Well, I have finished up the Perl courses on CGI that I had been taking and am working to become a lot more familiar with that aspect of Perl coding. It is rather handy when it comes to Web Development to be able to understand the inner workings of CGI. Having that down pat is a huge advantage in the job market as well. The next course(s) that I am taking is/are all about XML. That is another thing that I have been wanting to learn more about and learn to parse with Perl.

Unfortunately, they do not have any courses on Perl DBI but I have a book I am reading/studying that is teaching me what I need to know. Once I get all that figured out I can go ahead and start working on a website that will help me carve the CGI and DBI knowledge in stone into my brain.

I had a project placed into my lap earlier this week and was told that it is something that needed to be done in short order. Ok, I have no problem with that. I was also told that there was another project for the same client that could be cloned to get this new project up and running quicker. Now, having a project to clone is great, so long as the code used in that other project isn't about unmaintainable. I emailed my colleague the other day to say that between coding the project from scratch and trying to figure out the cloned code, I would rather code it from scratch as it would take less time and also be correct.

My colleague came back and gave me the thumbs up to just code it and said that he usually didn't touch the old code because of its unmaintainability. (Then WHY would you tell me to use it if you knew it was like that?) Thankfully my colleague is understanding and flexible (not to mention easy going about things, so long as things happen and get done). Well, after a day of mulling over my keyboard yesterday I completed the initial coding of the project and even whipped out an estimate for another job that is coming down the pipe.

Anywho, that's what's been going on.

A post about Perl?

2007-09-11T10:18:00.001-05:00

Ok, so its been a while since the word Perl was in a blog posting here. He he, more like almost a month. For those of you yearning, I am sorry. I have had a bunch of things happening and haven't really gotten around to sitting down and posting some Perl code here. I will shortly though, don't worry.

Please know though, that this IS a geek blog and not limited to Perl alone. I did just want to let everyone know that I am still doing Perl most of the time. In fact the amount I do has increased, if it can that is.

Anywho, keep watching.

How to save that flash file you really like

2007-09-09T14:45:00.000-05:00

I don't know about the rest of you, but every once in a while, I come across either some flash animation or a flash video/movie that I would really like to download and archive. This way, I can show it to others and share the wealth.

Well, one thing that I always hate is not knowing how to do something that should not be that trivial. One of those things that I had resolved earlier on was how to save a flash file to your hard drive from a website. Believe it or not, its really not that difficult.

NOTE: I am only going to show you how to do this in Firefox as I refuse to fire up that crap program called IE. If you want to know how to do it in there, then you figure it out. I don't use it and I am not going to use it even just to find this out.

That said, the first think you should do is to load the page containing the flash animation that you wish to download. Once you have that done, you now have two choices of how to do this, which I will explain here.

The less geeky/nerdy way:

Once the page is loaded, in your Firefox menu bar, go to "Tools -> File Info". This will bring up a box with a few tabs. One of the tabs is "Media". Click on it. You will see anywhere from one to a bunch of files listed in the Address section of the Media tab. What you want to do is scan through and click on the ".swf" file that you are wanting. Then, once you have done that, simply click on the "Save as" button and select a place to save it on your computer and click "Save".

Believe it or not, thats it.

The more geeky/nerdy/power user way:

Again, once the page is loaded, you want to open a new tab (Ctrl-T for those not in the know). Then, in that tab type the following in the URL bar: about:cache?device=disk

This will bring up a list of EVERYTHING that is in the Firefox cache on your computer. Simply browse it for the file you want. It will have the path to the website it is hosted on. All you have to do is right click and click on "Save as" and save the file wherever you want on your computer.

Again, it is that easy.

So, the next time someone asks about saving flash files, you can prod them in the right direction on how to do it.

The New Printer

2007-09-07T15:26:00.000-05:00

The wife told me the other day that she wants a printer here in our "temporary" computer room that used to be a full fledged dining room. (this because my two kids have their own rooms and I am in the middle of creating a home office in my basement that I haven't had a second to touch in about a year. **UGH***) Anyway, going on what she wanted, which was a printer that could print relatively quickly and print well I began to asses what we had in "storage". I have a Canon photo printer. Sure, its capable of printing text, but it is MUCH better at photo's, I must say. The only other printer that I have is a HP Laserjet 1100 which needs a new roller assembly since the present one likes to take in every sheet of paper fed into it all at once. So, you cannot put more than one sheet into it at any given time. This is quite an annoyance when you want to do some heavier printing.

So, I remembered the Sunday ads and that Best"Try" had an HP Laserjet on sale for $99 that printed 15 ppm and was relatively small. So, last night we went to look at it. Sure it was quaint, and I was about to see if they had any in stock when the wife says, "Hey, check this one out, its even a copier." Well, far be it for me to not look at another model. It was a laser printer, copier and color scanner all in one. It was nice and it was a "Brother".

We tested it and it seemed to work great, printing 20 ppm. So, we talked and decided to go with it. Sure, it was double the other one in price, but we could now use it to print out copies of stuff from kids books for the kids to write and color on without destroying the original. Plus, printing was quicker and a breeze.

Well, got it home and last night I hooked it up and were printing in only a few minutes. Gosh I just love new toys. Now I have to hook my Linux laptop up to it and see if I can get it printing.

New Status: Moderator

2007-08-31T18:46:00.000-05:00

This is AWESOME!!! Not only is today my birthday, but I was given an unexpected present today.

I have been actively posting and participating in the Perl forum on thescripts.com since about May of this year. I have only posted one or two questions myself, but spend 95+% of my time on their answering others questions as some of them challenge me to research and learn before answering.

Well, I made a bid to the main Moderator for the Perl forum about a week and a half ago to join him in the duties. Well, he put me in for it the other day and this morning I was delighted to find that I had been awarded the honor.

This is GREAT!! I have since been cleaning up posts, moved one posting, and just all around having a blast with my new found moderator status. No, I am in no way abusing it, but I am trying to keep up on all the goings on so as to keep the forum running as smooth as possible.

Happy Birthday to ME!!!

Opinions, opinions

2007-08-21T14:11:00.000-05:00

We have all seen the postings on almost every single forum that is out there. You know what I am speaking of, those postings that read, "What is the best IDE for BLAH language?". If you have read any of the tirades.....er.....responses to those questions, then you are fully aware that it is a "my opinion is better than your opinion" atmosphere.

You may get a couple of responses in the beginning, where people are telling you what IDE they use, the pros, the cons, and why they think it is so wonderful, but then it starts. You get this multitude of fascist dictator types that absolutely insist that "there is no better IDE than (input editor here) and that all other editors are crap in comparison!". You even have the old school folks, some of whom can remember creating punch cards, who believe that command line editors or vi are the best editors.

If you are one of those that is getting ready to ask that time-(de)tested question of "Which IDE is better for ...?", then just DON'T!

Here is what I believe, and no, I am not going to go and follow the masses, preaching what I think is the best editor. Instead I am going to sum it up with this..... try them all. Download and install a number of editors. Play with them, write code with them, debug with them, get to know them. While you are doing this, take notes on what you like and dislike about each one. Then, when you are done, compare all of your notes. You have to not only look at the notes, but you have to think to yourself, "will I still like this editor in a 6 months? a year? " The answer may very well be, I don't know.

I am old-school unix. I believe that the command line rules and vi is the best day-to-day editor. All of the coding that I have learned has been by hand. I prefer not to learn with a fancy, shmancy do-it-all-for-you editor as I won't learn anything. I like learning a new language in an editor like vi because I get to debug my code by hand and not rely on a program to tell me what is wrong. This allows me to assess the errors and get my coding (by hand) down to a science. After I am more than comfortable, then I migrate to a more comfortable editor that will save me time.

While vi will always have a place in my heart and my editing world (being the first editor I used on Unix), I must say that I have leaned toward Active State's Komodo for my day to day coding in Perl ( and other misc languages, including HTML). Yes, some will tell you it is a beast and clunky slow. Personally, it takes a minute to start up, but after that, I don't have any issues. I don't have this insatiable need to have my editor at my fingertips within a nanosecond of clicking on the link to launch it. I am patient enough that I can wait the 30 or so seconds that it takes to launch. I use it because I like its syntax highlighting, code sense (hints, kind of like Micro$oft's Intellisense), and overall comfortable feel.

That my friends, is what I think the key is..... comfort! You have to pick an editor that you like and not listen to the skewed views of the mass critics out there.

In a posting to the Boston Linux User's group, Uri Gutman wrote, "so my main point is that coders need to be smarter about their analysis, architecture and design and less caught up in tools like IDE's and syntax highlighting. you can have the greatest IDE in the world and
still come up with crappy code and solutions. whereas a good software design can be written and debugged with any set of tools."

That is one of the best statements that I have read on the subject and it is something that I have believed in for some time. If you aren't able to write good code and be able to debug it thoughtfully, then no editor in the world is really going to help you!

Happy coding!

Things that I learned yesterday

2007-08-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

If there is one thing about being a geek that keeps me going every day, is that saying, "You learn something new every day!". Why? Because it is so true. Being a Perl developer has me writing more code than I can keep up with, and I love it. But the best part is, through all of the coding that I am doing, I seem to learn a minimum of one new thing with each program I produce. Now, "1 new thing" seem pretty low, and don't worry, it is as lately it has been a few new things each time, but learning 1 new thing every day keeps the mind in good shape.

For instance, I was working on a script last week that took a file and parsed out of it a string that was ocourring ( that should not have been there). Well, my script removed said offending lines to another file for "safe keeping", while outputting the good lines to their own file. To make sure that everything worked correctly, I had to balance the new file to ensure that ONLY the offending lines were removed and all other lines ended up in the new file.

So, I delved into the File::Util module, which has a function called line_count() in it, which takes a file as input and outputs the number of lines in the file. What I discovered was that the function was working fine with the first file processed (the original file), but on each subsequent file ( the offending lines file and the new outputted file), the counts were totally off, even so much as the offending lines file's count being zero (0).

So, I emailed the developer who produced the module to get his advice and see if there was an issue with the module. After he did his typical tests and did not discover anything wrong, he came back to ask me to ensure a couple of things:

1. That I ran the close() function on each file handle before actually acting upon the file that each file handle was referencing. Well, this was definitely an issue. I had the close routines after everything was said and done. So, I migrated them to close the file handle(s) before doing the line count.

2. He asked me to turn off buffering for I/O. I was a little new to that and asked him to explain further. He said that all I had to do was to set the variable "$|" to any true value:

ie: $| = 1;
$|++;

This would tell Perl that, instead of storing date in memory, that the data going to file handles would go directly to the file handles and not get stored in memory. This not only ensures that all data is written to the file handle(s) as it should be, but also has the added benefit of clearing up any memory usage from the stored information. Also, one other note, you need to set this variable at the beginning of your script so that everything in the script is effected.

So, after modifying the auto flush variable and closing all file handles, the function seemed to work just fine and outputs everything perfectly.

Many, many thanks to Tommy Butler, the author of the File::Util module on CPAN. Without his help, I would probably still be scratching my head over the issue. Now though, I have a bit more knowledge and experience with which to draw upon with my next project.

Checking for duplicates

2007-08-01T14:23:00.000-05:00

If there is one thing that I love about Perl, it is that there is always something new to learn. In my case, I like it to be a few things every day, but that is just me.

In my last post, I mentioned about one liners and that I was working with some code that was rather puzzling to figure out. Well, I figured it out and with the help of Learning Perl, 3rd Edition. I have said it many times before and I will say it again. As much as the Camel book is famed as the "Bible of Perl", I tend to keep the Learning Perl book much closer to my keyboard.

There one liner that I was working on figuring out was as follows:

perl -e '$count=0; while (<>) {if (! ($var{$_}++)) {print $_; $count++;}} warn "\n\nRead $. lines.\nTook union and removed duplicates, yielding $count lines.\n"' ./file1 ./file2.txt > ./combined.txt

This code is supposed to take in the two files (file1 and file2) and combine them into one file (combined.txt), all the while, removing any duplicate entries. What puzzled me was HOW IS IT DOING IT? Yes, if you are wondering, it does work. Any Perl guru's out there are already nodding their heads as they probably already know how.

The magic of this code is in the "$var{$_}++". What happens is this, the code takes in the first file and reads it line by line. It then takes each line in turn and creates a key in the hash with it, but it is UNDEF as there is no value assigned. This ends up being a true test. The next line is read in and again it creates a hash key with the line as the key, only this time, if the key already exists, then the test is false as it is already existing and undef, so, the line will not be added to the output file. Its a little confusing, I know, but it works and it is how it was designed to work. Personally, its a great, short system for removing duplicates.

If you still have questions, I recommend you look at the example on page 153 of Learning Perl, 3rd Edition. Yes, I know they are up to 4th Edition, but I have my 3rd edition copy with me at the moment.

Happy Coding!!

Bring on the one liners!

2007-07-31T12:31:00.001-05:00

I have been playing with Perl for a couple of years, off and on, not really that intensely. About 6 months ago I really picked up the pace when my last job released its online training courses. I ended up taking the 3 main Perl courses and learned A LOT, all at the companies expense. Almost 2 months ago I landed the job I am in now, as a Perl Developer, and watch as my learning curve took a sharp incline towards the ceiling. I love it when it does that and I really into what I have to learn.

Since getting this job, I have written a couple of scripts for work here that are a few hundred lines long and others that are only a couple hundred lines in length. Not too shabby and they work great.

Recently though (starting last week), I have been working on a Production issue. I did a fix for the issue but have since then been learning how the scripts work. The project is mainly shell scripts, but one of the scripts that is called is a ".sh" file that only contains... yup, you guessed it... a Perl one liner. This one liner is supposed to compare two files and return the lines that aren't duplicates.

Well, in my examination, I will be darned if I can find any where that the one liner is actually doing a comparison. To me, it looks like the script just simply outputs the first file and then appends the second file.

Anywho, that issue aside, during the whole research that I have been doing, I have had the opportunity to really delve into how to do one liners in Perl. It is really rather interesting. Granted, its not my favorite way to code Perl, but for the quick dirty job that takes seconds, it is definitely the way to go.

Heads up --> Opinion Ahead

2007-07-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

A buddy from work and I were talking this morning regarding a project that they are wanting to build. He came right out and asked me about Perl's capabilities. I guess that the project that they have to build would be for system management and notifications to distribution lists. It would be databased and they would like a gui for it as well.

"Ok", I said, so what is the issue? I guess that one of his colleagues make the comment that Perl just isn't the way to go for such an application. And I quote: "The database interface is "eh" and the graphical capabilities are not that good either. Perl is really only good for text modifications."

I somewhat choked. Sure, text is what Perl was designed for, but to make a statement so completely confounded without first seeing what has changed with the language is just lame!

It seems that this guy hadn't touched ANY Perl in well over 10 years. Ok, 'nuff said. That means that:

#1. He really hasn't seen Perl lately
#2. He really hasn't seen Perl lately
#3. Perl 10+ years ago and Perl today are two completely different beasts.

Yes, I know #1 and #2 are the same, that was completely on purpose. I listened to the list of requirements for the application and they sound totally feasible for Perl. I cannot divulge them here as it is work related ( I am sure you understand), but believe me, Perl wouldn't have many, if any, issues. Granted, the coding would be a little intense, haveing to use TK, DBI and other assorted modules, but aside from that, it sounds like it would be a sweet application.

The big plus for Perl is that it is a language approved and used inside the organization, so no having to get approval for it. That should make them lean in the right direction.

An Enigma machine on eBay....Oh My!

2007-07-19T08:49:00.001-05:00

If you are a cryptography buff or even an aficionado, then I can imagine that your eyebrow raised at the mention of one of these beauties actually being auctioned off.

It seems that someone in Italy is trying to cash in on a bit of history by offering one of these machines to the public. If this turns out to be a true Enigma machine, then this is an incredible find. I can only imagine how lucky the winning bidder will be feeling.

Here is the link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270146164488

Granted, in my opinion, something as monumental as the Enigma machine definitely belongs in a museum. My only hope is that, whomever buys it does not keep it locked away, but instead puts it on display for others to see and enjoy.

Of course, if you happen to be a hobby cryptographer, and a handy one at that, then you could always build your own Enigma machine in your workshop. That is definitely an interesting prospect for a project. Hmmm.

Anywho, enjoy the auction. It will be interesting to see how high the bidding goes.

Watch that punctuation

2007-07-06T14:43:00.000-05:00

I'll tell you, there is nothing like coding all day and having a really good time doing so, and then, right around mid-afternoon you hit an error that just stops you. You can't figure it out for the life of you.

I am working on a script to automatedly download ALL of CPAN. ( I know.... WHY? Because I want to, that's why. Plus, my laptop isn't always able to get online and when I need a module, if I have it readily available, I can manually install it.)

Basically, the script fetches a copy of the CPAN modules list, and I am then parsing out of the HTML that was returned, the paths to the modules, including the module names. Here is the section of code that was bugging me:

if($line =~ m/\.gz/)
{
@elements = split(/"/, $line);
print PATHS ("$elements[1]\n");
}

I was really wanting this to work ( and the code above does), but when I IM'd Merlyn (Randal Schwartz), he noticed that I was missing a double quote in the print path. Man, after all day coding, I don't blame myself for missing that one. Thanks Merlyn for the second set of eyes on that one!

Once I have the code completed I will post it here.

[TAOREs] File or Directory from a listing

2007-07-03T13:19:00.000-05:00

Welcome!! This is the first article in my new column on regex's, where I will cover regex's that I have written or found(obviously giving credit where credit is due) and also lessons on writing regex's. I know that I am starting this column without even a lesson on regex's, so if you are new to regex's and really don't know much or anything about them, then this will seem quite foreign and I appologize for that. Please know that the lessons will follow shortly. Without further ado, lets jump in feet first.

I was working on a script a couple of weeks ago where the script had to FTP into a server, grab a directory listing from a specific directory, and then send an email to a distribution list if a file was found in the directory.

Seems pretty straightforward, but I quickly realized that this was an opportunity for me to get a little practice writing regex's. The remote server was windows, so when the FTP connected and ran the "dir" command, the output had the usual FTP banter, but also a line similar to the following when a file was found:

drwxr-xr-x 7 Administrators group 0 Jun 04 22:07 myfile.txt

This is the typical output format for FTP on a Windows machine. Yes, it is the same format as the long listing provided by an "ls -l" on a unix machine. So, knowing that, I quickly set out to write a regular expression to match just the "myfile.txt" file name of that line.

Here is the regular expression that I came up with to match the file name in that line:


     m/^.+\s+\d\s+\w+\s+\w+\s+\d+\s+\w+\s+\d+\s+\d{1,2}:\d+\s+(\w+\.\w+)$/

This is pretty straight forward (if you know something about regex's). Let me break it down with the regex formatted slightly differently:


    m/          # start the match
    ^             # start from the beginning of the line
    .                    # match any single character
    +                   # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                  # match preceding element one or more times
    \d                 # match a digit
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \w               # match a word character
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \w               # match a word character
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \d                 # match a digit
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \w               # match a word character
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \d                 # match a digit
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \d{1,2}    # match a digit, at least once, but up to twice
    :                     # match a colon
    \d                 # match a digit
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \s                  # match a space
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    (                     # Start subexpression group for capturing
    \w                # match a word character
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    \.                    # match a period, yes, this needs to be escaped as the period is a regex character too
    \w                # match a word character
    +                    # match preceding element one or more times
    )                    # End the subexpression group for capturing
    $                    # match the end of line
    /                    # end the regex

I know, it seems a bit messier, but this is one way of writing a regular expression so that you can annotate what is happening. Personally, I like the first version better.

Now, with this regex, if your file name (or directory name) was in a different format that something like "myfile.txt", then you would have to edit the regex to reflect that difference, or risk the code not working.

In the above though, the part of the regex that is enclosed in ( ) will be placed in the special variable $1 so that its value can be referenced elsewhere in the script.

The Art Of Regular Expressions

2007-07-03T13:03:00.000-05:00

I have been playing with Perl now for the last couple of years, somewhat actively. My playing turned into a job when I accepted the position that I am presently in. Before I found this job though, my last job was kind enough to offer online, self-paced CBT type training that you could do in your own time. So, I took a gander at it and they had a number of Perl courses.

Now, I am ALWAYS learning and can usually be found with a computer book somewhere in my vicinity pretty much most of the day. I never miss a chance to learn something new if I can help it. That said though, I still will admit that there is nothing like some of the training you can find that gets right down to the nitty gritty without beating around the bush. This is especially true when you are trying to get a solid base in the basics of whatever you are learning.

The CBT's that my last job provided me access to did just that. Not only did they give me a really good understanding and grounding in Perl basics, but they also gave a really good lesson on Regular Expressions.

Regex's (as they are also affectionately referred to) can be some of the most elusive topics to get a grasp on in Perl. I am no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but the course that I took gave me an incredible head start into the world of regex's.

Before that course, I knew a fair amount about using pattern matching in Unix. I was quite adept at shell scripting and could write an awk script or two to do what I needed to. But, when it came to Perl's regex capabilities, I was lacking. ***BAM*** Then came that course. It truely opened my eyes to the overwhelming beauty and seductive power that Perl regex's have.

With a little "to-the-point" training and guidance, I think anyone can easily get a grounding in Perl regex's. In fact, I think I am going to add on to this blog and start a column regarding regex's. I will not only post some mini lessons on regex's, designed to further your knowledge in how to assemble regex's, but also examples of regex's that I have written as well, that work for the purpose they were created. Hopefully all of that will provide you a new route for reference when trying to use regex's.

I think I will call the new column "TAOREs" (for The Art Of Regular Expressions). I hope that you enjoy and also contribute any suggestions that you may have as well.

The Art of the Automated Download

2007-06-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

How many of us have found a site that ended up having a whole bunch of files on the site, for download, that you really wanted? Well, I found a site just like that. Too many sites use PHP or something else, to where it used ID's and other codes to refer to the documents, instead of just putting links into their web pages. Once in a while though, you do come across a site that DOES put the actual links to the files on the page.

In the case of the site that I am referring to, there are a little over 2000 files that I wanted to grab. The thing is, I didn't want to have to site there and "right-click-save as" for each and every one as that would have taken "days" to complete. So, noticing that all of the files had actual URLs that led right to them, I looked at the page source. There it hit me. Perl!

So, I copied the source and quickly drummed up a regular expression which grabs all the URLs of all of the pdf files on the page. After I grabbed the URLs, I put together some code which quickly went out and grabbed each and every one in turn and saved it to my hard drive.

This sounds all simple and stuff, but for someone like me who still considers him a novice in the Perl world, it did take a couple of hours of research. First I tried to use the "WWW::Mechanize" module and was able to retrieve a complete list of the pdf files and their paths, but not the actual files. I tried other packages and such, delving into LWP itself, but I could not for the life of me get this code to actually download the files.

I found "lwp-download" and gave it a shot. Wow! It looked like it was working, up until the 904th document, where it died. I couldn't figure it out nor understand what was going on. Why was this dying at the same point every time. Well, I did eventually figure it out and was able download ALL of the over 2000 files to my hard drive. I couldn't believe it, but the routine I used only took a few minutes to download all of the files (granted, I have 15 Mb FiOS for my internet, so please bear that in mind as well).

Just as an FYI (and you can get this looking at the code, I used the LWP::Simple::getstore() routine to download the files. It was a lot easier than going through the process of figuring out why my WWW::Mechanize wasn't working, believe me. I will figure that module out later, but for now, this did exactly what I wanted.

This is probably a bit much and others would more than likely have a better way to do it, but here it is. Here is the code I used to parse HTML code for its links and download them.


#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Basename;
use LWP::Simple;


#############################################
# Read the entire HTML file into an array, line by line so that we can
# parse out the information we need, one line at a time.
#############################################
my @code = `cat /home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/code.txt`;

if (-e "/home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/files.txt")
{
    `rm /home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/files.txt`;
    `touch /home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/files.txt`;
}


foreach my $line (@code)
{


    ############################################
    # The following code takes the site's html file(in this case, it
    # is the stampalbums.com download site) and parses out all of the
    # downloads URL's.
    ############################################
    if($line =~ m/^\s+    {
        my @splitLine = split(/\"/, $line);

        ##############################################
        # Now, open the file in which you will store all the URL's to
        # the files and write each URL on a seperate line.
        ##############################################

        open(FILES, ">>/home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/files.txt");
        print FILES ("$splitLine[1] \n");
        close(FILES);
    }

}

###########################################
# Open the file containing all of the URLs
###########################################
open(FILES, "< /home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/files.txt");

###########################################
#  Do the download of the files
###########################################
foreach()
{
    my $localdir = "/home/jlk/development/perl/stampAlbums/albumPages/";
    my $path = "$_";
    my($filename, $directories, $suffix) = fileparse($path);

    LWP::Simple::getstore($_, $filename);
}

Further IP Validation information

2007-06-06T14:20:00.001-05:00

After yesterday's posting on one way (of many) to validate an IPv4 address, I have some more information for those interested.

I had posted a question at one point to thescripts.com Perl forum, regarding an issue I was having. One of the more knowledgeable users over there (he goes by Miller), enlightened me as to a CPAN module that does the same thing without re-inventing the wheel. Please don't think I regret writing my script. On the contrary, I am very happy I did as I learned a couple of lessons in doing so.

Anywho, the module mentioned above actually validates IP addresses for you to check validity just as my script from yesterday does, it just does so slightly differently.

I thank Miller for his gracious input and the link to the CPAN module!!

IPv4 Address validation

2007-06-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

Well, in my quest to learn Perl and practice putting together regex's, I took on the task yesterday of putting together a script which validates if an IP address is valid or not. Now, when you say "is valid", what exactly does that mean?

Well, there are two criteria that IP addresses need to really meet:

1) They need to have 4 octets, each octet containing from 1 to 3 digits.
2) Each octet's digits must make up a number between 0 and 255.

With that in mind, I went directly after the first of the two, validating the format of the IP address entered. The regex that I initially came up with is listed in #1 and the other two regex's came from the "Mastering Regular Expressions" book:

#1 m/\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}/
#2 m/\d\d?\d?\.\d\d?\d?\.\d\d?\d?\.\d\d?\d?/
#3 m/\d(\d\d?)?\.\d(\d\d?)?\.\d(\d\d?)?\.\d(\d\d?)?/

What is so great about Perl is TIMTOWTDI, which affords us being able to have 3 different regex's that come to exactly the same solution.

You may be asking yourself, what do I do with the regex(s) above? Well, you can take them and use them in your code to validate an entered IP address, or put it into a loop to test an entire file full of IP's to test their validity.

Here is an example of how to incorporate the above regex(s) into some code. Please know that this is only how I do it and my differ considerably from how you implement it:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
 
print("What is the IP Address you would like to validate: ");
my $ipaddr = ;
chomp($ipaddr);
 
 
if( $ipaddr =~ m/^(\d\d?\d?)\.(\d\d?\d?)\.(\d\d?\d?)\.(\d\d?\d?)/ )
{
    print("IP Address $ipaddr  -->  VALID FORMAT! \n");
    
    if($1 <= 255 && $2 <= 255 && $3 <= 255 && $4 <= 255)
    {
        print("IP address:  $1.$2.$3.$4  -->  All octets within range\n");
    }
    else
    {
        print("One of the octets is out of range.  All octets must contain a number between 0 and 255 \n");
    }
}
else
{
    print("IP Address $ipaddr  -->  NOT IN VALID FORMAT! \n");
}

Well, there you go, IP address validation. No, this script obviously does not take into account IPs that are reseverd such as the 192.168 or 10.246 addresses, but you can test for whatever you need to given the grouping in the regex that provides the $1, $2, $3 and $4 variables.

Happy Perl Coding!!!

Update on curing the hunger

2007-06-04T09:20:00.000-05:00

You know, it is never a good idea to make rash judgments. They always tend to lead to something you didn't want or expect. That is one reason I said in my previous post that I would look into the Podcast idea.

Over the weekend, I listened to an older Perlcast that Josh McAdams made, where he interviewed Randal Schwartz. Whether or not that was made before or after Stonehenge started supporting Perlcast is for them to know. Either way, in the interview, Josh asked Randal his opinion on Perlcast and what he said was that he actually really like Perlcast and the idea of reporting the Perl Community news for all to listen to. He also mentioned that it wasn't trying to do Perl instruction over an audio feed, which Randal did not find any use in.

Hearing that I thought longer and harder about what I was leaning towards and realized that he is completely and totally correct. You have to see code to learn it, that is why there are so very many resources and documents on the web and also so very many books on the topic of Perl.

I am one of those people that when I come across something I want to know more about or if I somehow think of an idea for a pet project, I write it down somewhere. These scribblings are actually gathered into lists. Yes, I do eventually get to them, but sometimes it takes a while. Usually if I need something and its on a list or if I get bored I tend to reference my list(s) for something to do. I took a look this weekend at my list of pet projects and did see a couple on there that would afford me the opportunity to delve into some modules that I have been wanting to play with. So, that is where I will turn to to cure my hunger pangs, instead of trying to create a podcast that wouldn't be all that useful. (sure, a video podcast would do the trick, but I have neither the resources nor the hosting to hold the files, so that is definitely out of the question at the moment)

Any who, back to work at learning Perl. Happy Monday everyone!!!

The hunger and thirst for everything Perl

2007-06-01T09:35:00.000-05:00

I have been playing with perl for about 2 years. I wrote a Perl script at my last job that just set up some directories and created some log files, nothing extravagant about it. Unfortunately, my last job really left little time for coding or learning to code Perl for that fact, given the insane and overwhelming workload that we were faced with. Even attempting to pick up some Perl while on lunch proved to be a daunting and sometimes impossible task. The only time I could really focus and learn some Perl was while at home after the kids were in bed asleep. Then and only then was I able to concentrate, was I awake enough to do so after being mentally fried from all of the days events.

Thankfully, the new job that I started a couple of weeks ago has afforded me nothing but the opportunity to code in Perl. Most of what I do is Perl coding and I am happier than a clam. I have learned so much in the last two weeks that I am beside myself at my adjustment to the learning curve. Before starting the job I had obtained Brian D Foy's "Student Workbook" that accompanies the Llama book (Learning Perl). The Llama book has questions and exercises at the end of every chapter, but the Student Workbook contains more exercises to assist with getting you in a better Perl state of mind.

Well, having completely turned my 'learning' attentiveness towards the realm of Perl, I have been thirsting for everything that I can get my hands on to satisfy my burgeoning hunger for Perl knowledge. One of the resources I turned to in hopes of "data....input" was podcasts. Upon searching though, I only found one true podcast related to Perl and that is "Perlcast". Don't get me wrong, Perlcast is absolutely AWESOME, even having a very prominent members of the Perl community, Randal Schwartz, as the roving reporter reporting all the Perl news that's fit to report. Other than reporting the latest Perl news, Perlcast also does interviews with members of the Perl community and segments from conferences.

For me though, this just isn't enough. I want MORE! I have searched a fair amount of the web and unfortunately cannot find any other Perl related podcasts. What was I hoping for? beleive it or not, I was hoping for a podcast on Perl that covered a different topic in each episode. Maybe go over topics such as:

Scalars
Arrays
Hashes
Modules (creating)
many different episodes that each time choose a different module and go over it in detail
Regular Expressions
and so on, and so forth

There is such a multitude of possible topics, that the number of episodes could and would be immense.

Sure, some are out there probably saying, "So why aren't you producing these podcasts"? I have thought of that and believe it or not, I am still thinking about it. My biggest issue would be where to host it as I would need enough space to hold all of the podcast files. Yes, this area would be new to me and I don't have much expertise in creating these, so please bear with me. If anyone has any information, such as software recommendations for creating podcasts(OSS preferably) and also a good place to host it or share it as well would be great.

No, this is not an "I will do it", this is more of a "I will look into the possiblity". This would benefit me as well as I am still up and coming. I guess there is no better way to cure your hunger than to make your own meal(s).

What a difference a job makes

2007-05-23T17:49:00.000-05:00

Well, after 6 1/2 years at the same job, I finally decided to get off my duff and see what was out there. Now, I am not one of those people who likes to hop from job to job because I like the stability and the stature you get from being at a job a long time. At my old job, I had quite the distinction of not only being the only true implementations Subject Matter Expert(SME), but I was also the only remaining 'original' member of the team. There was only two of us in the beginning and it was like that for quite a while, but as people left for other positions, I remained and held the product together. I wrote much of the original documentation for the project, maintaining it throughout my tenure.

Thing with my old job had steadily changed. The workload steadily increased (which isn't a bad thing), but with it came the stress of that increase. The clients would come into the queue and inevitably, the higher ups that were associated with the project would push my manager to assign the project immediately because they waited too long to get us involved to implement the project in a normal time line. The stress level really counts for a good percentage of my reason for leaving, not to mention that after our most recent merger, that ended up with the company we bought literally taking over the place, a whole slew of cutbacks were made in order to save everywhere they could. Now, cutting back is part of the large corporate environment and its expected. But, when they are cutting and cutting and then hiring a 'ba-zillion' middle managers because their organization believes in the "how many tiers can our organization have" approach with the "too many chiefs not enough indians" side effect that goes along with it, then you have raise a questionable eyebrow.

Sure, stopping the purchase of things like tissues and other goodies that made life a little easier is piddly because you can supply those yourself, but when things in the organization change so much that you are watching people walk out the door every week, even those with 20+ years, you get to thinking about #1.

So, I did and I took a look at what was out there. Believe it or not, it wasn't very long before I started going to some interviews, but the interview I was most anxious for was for the position I am in now.

I went from doing client implementations at a large bank, on an e-commerce platform with solutions such as AS2, HTTPS, SFTP, FTPS and a couple of other miscellaneous solutions, to working AT a client site for a company that does most of that companies tech work. What I am doing now it Secure FTP development using Perl.

The biggest pluses to my new job are that not only am I working what so far seems to be a great bunch of people, but I am doing coding with Perl almost every day. I have come to really like Perl in the last couple of years and to have a job that allows me to code in it is just INCREDIBLE!!!

Granted, there are those out there who do it every day and are either tired of it or are skewed by their development experiences who have told me not to be so excited about it, but I cannot help it. Try to remember back when you were excited about it, nobody could stop you from talking about it or keep you from your keyboard or the Perl forms. That is the state I am in now, just Loving what I am doing.

Of coding Perl in relation to Ksh scripting

2007-05-16T18:28:00.000-05:00

I know that there are many differences between shell scripting and Perl, I am reminded of that daily while I constantly switch between the two. Although today, I ran across a difference that I wanted to share with everyone.

In scripting, you can do something like the following:

##### begin code #####

myVar = this

myNextVar = ${myVar}andthat

print $myNextVar

##### End Code #####

The output of this would be: thisandthat

The point above is that you can enclose the variable(except for the dollar sign) in curly braces and it is interpolated to its value and then whatever comes after the curly braces will be appended to the name.

Well, this becomes impossible to do as shown above as the curly braces are used for other things in Perl. So, I did some thinking and figured that I could use the concatenatin character to solve my problem. Here is the above code as how I would have written it in Perl:

##### Begin Perl Code #####

my $var = "this";
my $nextVar = "$var" . "andthat";

print $nextVar;

##### End Perl Code #####

The output of the above Perl code is exactly the same as the shell script, but as you can see, we have to put things together in a slightly different way.

Happy Perl coding!

What drives OSS?

2007-05-07T09:25:00.000-05:00

It was recently posted to slashdot that boredom is what is driving open source developers. This may be true, but isn't it just one of the things that drives OSS development?

How many of us have researched for a production that does what we want, only to find that the software that does EXACTLY what we want is so far out of our price range that you would have to take out a loan to afford it? So, that said, isn't cost another thing that drives OSS? Most of the software out there is free, but if you want support, that is where you pay $$$, or find an online community. That is the advantage that OSS has over commercial software is even though you could pay for support if you wanted to, the community is large enough that you can normally find the support you need in a forum.

So it is boredom AND cost in my opinion, that drives OSS software developers. Granted, I have searched for a product and not found the features I would want. If I were a full fledged OSS developer, I would take to developing my own software in that case, leading to a third, albeit a little less immediate source of drive, but still another source that needs mentioning.

All in all, it is not just one thing, but many things that drives OSS developers, just like innovation.

Module Installation(s): UPDATE

2007-04-28T10:45:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I emailed Dan Sully, the author of Crypt::OpenSSL::X509, with regards to the errors that I received when trying to install the module.

Well, Dan was kind enough to respond( and quickly I might add), telling me that it didn't look like my system had the OpenSSL Development libraries and headers installed.

Having recently switched to Ubuntu I have been finding out how much I truely take for granted with distro's like Suse that let you pre select the software to install. Ubuntu just installs a base system and lets you configure it from there. It is one thing that would lead a newbie to Linux to absolutely drink, but it doesn't bother me, I am just learning what the OS's needs are.

Anywho, I installed the dev libraries for OpenSSL, deleted the unpacked module from the "~/.cpan/Build" directory and did a re-installation of the module. This time, after the libraries and headers were installed, the installation went flawlessly.

I did get curious though and tried to do the same to the OpenSSL module ( even though the documentation is.... well..... less than adequate) and it failed miserably as expected. Yes, I have given up hope for that package and suggest nobody else try to install it until it gets some MAJOR updates done.

So, my thanks go out to Dan Sully for his assistance with my missing libraries and headers! Thanks Dan!

Perl Module Installation Woes and Lessons

2007-04-28T09:24:00.000-05:00

If you have been programming in Perl for even a short time and have used modules in any of your scripts, then you more than likely have had some experience with installing the modules that you need. When you find out that you now have to learn how to install a Perl module, the first question that enters your mind is..."How?". Well, hopefully, this will help a little.

Thankfully for the lot of us, Perl modules are kept in one standard repository called CPAN(which stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and is located at cpan.org. You can use the search page on cpan in order to search for Perl modules related to your specific task.

For instance, say you are working with X509 based keys, you could search for X509 modules on CPAN. Funny, but that topic is what led me to write this post. I am working on a script that will examine X509 certificates and parse them for their expiration date, returning the certificates that expire within a certain time frame given by the user.

Upon my first searching for x509 on cpan, I came across the "OpenSSL" module, which includes a number of sub modules for dealing with different aspects of OpenSSL. One specific module is "OpenSSL::X509".

To install a perl module there are typically two routes that you can take:

1. using the command line you issue the command:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install moduleName'

replacing with the name of the module you want to install. In this case it is OpenSSL or OpenSSL::X509 to be more specific.

2. using the cpan interface. To access this, you need to type "cpan" on the command line and hit enter. This will bring you to the cpan prompt where you simply type:

cpan> install moduleName

Please be warned that with both of the above methods, if you have never run either of these, that you will need run through the initial configuration that it brings up in order to use it. The configuration has information in it, but personally, with the exception of a couple of questions, I simply took the defaults.

***Note: I am running on Ubuntu and since a lot of stuff is done using sudo, I typically use sudo at the beginning of either of the two above commands as cpan tends to install things where only Root can create items. So, it is recommended that you use it, unless your installation directory is a place you have full access to.

Now, after the cpan interface is configured, you may be warned to install the Bundle::CPAN module. This is a necessity as it has a number of updates to the different packages it comes standard with, so install it before continuing.

When installing the OpenSSL module, I ran into a whole slew of errors. After looking around for a while and not finding the files it was complaining about, I emailed the Perl Beginners mailing list with the issue to see if they could help. Well, Tom Phoenix was first to respond and informed me that modules below version 1.0 are typically considered pre-releases. That said, the module I was installing was pre-release. Not only that, look at all the documentation of your Perl module you are trying to install. The README of this module was haphazardly written with cursing and did not seem complete. I examined the README at the suggestion of Mumia W on the Perl Beginners mailing list.

All in all, the module is not even close to finished and is completely unusable. So I began a search again and came across Crypt::OpenSSL::X509, written by another author, but, ended up with the same issues and same errors. I believe it may have been written around the other one but is at an even lower version number than OpenSSL.

So, after more research and reading, I came across Crypt::X509. The module looked to be extremely well documented with examples and explanations. Not only that, it was a module specifically for parsing x509 certs. I did the install and there were no issues.

So, my lesson most important bit of advice, before actually installing a Perl module, is to do your research. Read all the associated modules in your search and try to find one that is well documented and also does almost if not exactly what you want to do. Crypt::X509 is only version 0.32, but at least it is fully functional from what I can see ( from the installation). Only coding will tell I guess.

Thanks to Tom Phoenix and Mumia W on Perl Beginners mailling list for all the input on this issue. It really helped guide me to an answer.

If you are a beginner to Perl, I highly recommend that you join the Beginner's mailing list. It is quite a handy resource!!!

Ah yes, now I remember..... I have a blog.

2007-04-26T22:43:00.000-05:00

Yyeeeaaahh, I have not been the most studious person this year when it comes to keeping up on my blog(s). I admit it, but if you know me, you know the insanity that I have been going through and been putting up with.

It ends up being a mixture of work, kids and generally life that are the causes, but I am dealing and doing what I have been wanting to.... update my blog.

Well, some of you may remember that I was playing with Ruby a short time ago. Well, the back burner(on an extremely low flame) is where that language headed. I found myself truely delving feet and head first into Perl. I have always had a soft spot for Perl and love the language for its power and versatility. I have always wished I could just do more with it.

Well, I finally started about 1 1/2 months ago by taking some Perl courses online that my work has. They are really good at giving you a solid base and I plan on taking that to the next level( and the next, and the next).

I will elaborate in my next post where I am going technically, right now, I must recharge. Night!!!

What...Where....... I'm Back.......

2007-03-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

I know, strange title. I just wasn't sure what to call this post so why not put the questions that people would ask.

What have I been doing? Well, going stir crazy would probably sum it up pretty good at the moment. Between work, family and other craziness, its been since January 15th that I last posted. I thought about it yesterday and couldn't believe it had been so long. **hangs head**

On an update note, I was learning Ruby, but due to my work actually having an online training site again, I have signed up for a bunch of Perl courses. I love Perl and structured training being a better way to learn than OYO (On Your Own) for some things, I am quite pleased that they have available the courses that they do. I have put my Ruby learning on hold so that I can take the courses I signed up for.

The courses are actually quite good and give a lot of examples and coding tips/tricks. Yes, the information is in books like the Camel book and Llama book, but without the extraneous stuff. I have been going through the courses and learning the straight up basics and also reading the Llama book on the side. Learning all of the syntaxes and how to use the control structures, sub routines, and functions ahead of time make understanding what Llama book is putting forth a lot easier to take in without having questions flow through my mind about how something actually works or its syntax since those questions are already answered.

I just finished the part of the course that covered Regular Expressions and I must say that I understand them a LOT better now than I did before. Now, delving into the Mastering Regular Expressions book is more enjoyable because I have a basic understanding of how to assemble a regex to match what I need to. Granted, I am no professional regex'er, but I can wing it while I get more experience doing so.

The training site also has other interesting course such as a number of XML courses that I will definitely be taking. So, Ruby is kind of back-burnered until I finish the other training.

Where have I been? He he, either at work or at home watching the kids while my wife is at work. And to think that this is all due to bills. Once we get all those pesky credit cards paid off, she won't have to work so much, but that is still off in the distance.

With any luck, I will now have the time to make more regular updates to this blog, and maybe even post some useful code snip its that I have picked up.

Oh look.....an update.

2007-01-15T18:20:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah. I know, its now 2 weeks into the new year and I am finally getting around to posting. Believe me, it has nothing to do with laziness, that is for sure. The holidays were an insanely crazy time and my wife has taken on another job and has been working many nights. Thus, I have been watching the kids and putting them to bed (almost) every night. Usually I am spent enough by the time that they go down that I just grab my pick axe book (Programming Ruby) and head to bed to read and doze off.

So, a belated Happy New Year to everyone and yes, its about time that I continued my postings.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

2006-12-25T22:34:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a wonderfully Happy New Year!

I know this is an extremely short post, but it is 22:30 and I am wicked tired. Bed has a lasso around me ans is drawing me in quicly.

Good night everyone, and Happy Holidays!

What a gem

2006-12-11T12:50:00.001-05:00

As some coders out there know, when it comes to coding, sometimes a project requires you to pick up another language. I have been actively playing with Perl for a little while now and have been working on a couple of scripts for work. Recently though, my Web Development job (outside of my day job) has had a realization regarding a project that we have in the works (sorry, cannot divulge any details). We are trying to figure out some of the details, and one of them is, what language would be best for the project. Well, in talking with my colleague ( who happens to own the company ), we are presently looking at Ruby as the language to code in.

I started looking at Ruby last week and must say....Wow....that is quite the interesting language. It is completely Object Oriented and written almost like you would speak (kind-of). My wife works at Barnes & Noble, so I utilized her deeper holiday special discount to pick up the "pickaxe" book at an incredible price.

I know that most people in the geek community have pretty much heard of Ruby, but in case you have had any incling of curiosity surrounding the language, here is the online version of the "pickaxe" book. This book would be the equivelant of the 'camel' book for Perl.

Here are some other good links that I have found (Ruby related), that I would like to share as well:

1 http://tryruby.hobix.com/ --> This is a small intro as well as a an interactive Ruby shell session to allow you to experiment. its pretty nice really.

2. http://www.rubyquiz.com/ --> This site has a bunch of quizes to which you will have to produce a solution. Nice way to practice your skills.

3. http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html --> A good Ruby language quick reference guide.

4. http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ --> Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. Another online "book-like" reference to ruby. There are some cartoons to make the learning a little more fun, but similarly good information.

5. http://www.rubyonrails.org/ --> The Ruby on Rails website. Rails is a framework for creating web based apps and interfaces.

6. http://rubymanual.org/ --> The Ruby reference manual.

I know that there are some developers/coders who are strictly loyal to their languages, and I fully understand that, but I also believe in learning all that I can, including other languages. So please, no flames or flame wars over this please as I just want to share what I have found.

I hope that you have found this interesting and informative. Please feel free to comment with your additions to the Ruby knowledge links.

Tis the season

2006-12-05T10:25:00.000-05:00

Well, it is that time of year again. Time for egg nog, holiday parties, gift wrapping, shopping for gifts, and yes......... the advent calendar. This year's "Perl Advent Calendar" is available here for your viewing.

What's nice is that each day has a perl tid bit inside of it for your coding enjoyment. What's also nice is that you cannot skip ahead as the future dates are not allocated until their time comes.

Happy Holidays everyone!!!

In Defense of (Perl) Programming

2006-12-01T15:05:00.000-05:00

Nobody can deny the fact that the Internet is absolutely flooded with information. If you want to know about it, you can more than likely find a link to it on the net. Being an aspiring Perl coder, I am always on the lookout for interesting articles on Perl coding.

Today I ran across the article called "Defensive Perl Programming" and found it to be quite good from the perspective of a beginner (so to speak). I know that there are some real Perl hackers out there and each believes in a particular style of coding, as does each of us. In fact, Randal Schwartz ( Merlyn ), wrote a book titled "Perl Best Practices", that I believe to be quite the bible of what to do and what not to do when coding.

It is with the assistance of resources like these, that one can learn to be a better coder and JAPH.

Yet Another Novell Update

2006-11-28T18:15:00.000-05:00

My last update on the Novell sell out was back on November 11th, where I elaborated on the facts of the situation and added my own commentary and thoughts. I have seen quite a number of posts on my local LUG mailing list surrounding Novell and Micro$oft and today was one that was completely blog-worthy.

Bruce Perens has written a letter from the Open Source community to Novell, in a calculated, well thought out response to Novell's "deal" with the Evil Giant that is Micro$oft. If you are as insanely upset with this deal as the rest of us, then please, read the letter and sign it because it is also a petition to Novell to say that none of us are pleased with what they have done.

Even if you don't sign it, the letter is definitely worth a read as it points out some interesting points. One of the most intersting is that even though companies like Micro$oft and SCO feel it necessary to sue Linux companies to get what they want (whether that be $$$ or control of what they cannot control (in Micro$oft's case)), patents exist, and there are so many patents related to the software industry that if those who own them constantly enforced them, the industry would come to a screeching halt. People like the aforementioned corporations are just using their patents as a strong arm technique.

I would say to any other companies, "Stand Your Ground!?.

MPAA Nonesense

2006-11-28T07:10:00.000-05:00

OK, the last time I checked, so long as I purchased a movie legally, I was able to play it in my own home.... on my own television.... without anyone trying to level their own conglomerate beliefs and restrictions into MY HOUSE!

Yes, if you are wondering, the MPAA has taken steps to now try and limit HOW you can view the movies you buy. Here is an article I found on Slashdot ( /.) that describes the MPAA's latest idea.....If you have a TV that is over 29" AND, if you have "at least two comfortable chairs, couch, or futon" then you must pay some silly $50 registration fee to register as a "home theatre", thus, bending to the MPAA's silly, confused ways.

Personally, in my honest opinion, the MPAA can stick it up their A$$!!! What I do in my own home and how I view my movies is my business. If I want to have a few friends over to watch a movie, SO WHAT!!! Who gives a rat's ass?!?!! So long as I don't charge admission ( and who the heck would), I don't see how you can say that I am running a "theatre". This definition in order to level a fee is absolutely confounded and ridiculous. I highly doubt this will be able to be enforced, its an invasion into my privacy and my home.

Oh, and to go along with this new "registration", should you get caught, they want a minimum "$500,000" fine per movie shown". HA!!! I paid my $$ to buy the movie, and that is all you will get out of me. KISS MY LILY WHITE ASS! There is no flippin' way that anyone is going to bend to this strong-arming. This is NOT a communist nation and you cannot just impose any will you want upon us.

I mean come on, isn't the almost $10 average movie ticket price enough? Heck, its the reason I refuse to go to the movie theatre anymore. Stop paying actors those ridiculous salaries and bring them back to reality and you might have more money in the bank and may be able to lower ticket prices. Hell, get an original idea for a movie instead of remaking everything that has been made, and maybe more people will see them. Yes, I am sure that piracy is cutting into your golden pocket liners, but tacking that cost back onto the average home viewer is NOT THE ANSWER!! If you want to fight piracy, go ahead, but leave those of us who buy the movies for our collections, ALONE!

The art of convincing the (perspective) client

2006-11-17T11:29:00.000-05:00

One of the things I enjoy most is doing web development. I enjoy designing websites and I love getting engrossed in the back end development as well.

Most of my experience as a web developer has been working for a friend's company as his senior web developer. All the clients that needed sites designed had already been convinced to go with us and were ready for development. Up until now, I have never been involved in the process of pitching to a client to convince them to purchase your services to design and build their website.

Well, I went last night and pitched to my first client, outside of my friends business (he is all for it as I work for him on a contract basis). The site I would like to design is for a restaurant that a bunch of people I know, frequent, and is popular in the local community. When I talked to the owner about whether he would be interested in a website to display his menu and draw in new business, he was very weary. He didn't know much about the Internet and hadn't really experienced it before.

Yes, this has/had me worried. I didn't know if I could even get him interested in this venture. Well, I did have him agree to let me do a 1-2 page mock up to see what I could do for him. To me, that is a step in the right direction considering how difficult it may be to get this sale.

I talked to my friend (yes, the one I work for) and he actually gave me very useful insight on how I can convince him to purchase the site.

You see, with someone like this, someone that isn't really computer or for that fact, Internet, savvy, you may need to do a little work with the hard copy world as well as soft copy. It is suggested to me that I do the mock up and the do color print outs of the site to hand to him. I will also explain to the client that granted, they do a fair amount of business and have a lot of very loyal customers, but wouldn't it be nice to draw in more of a crowd/business by putting his menu and directions online for everyone else to see.

So, I am going to be working on the mock up of the site and then, going to pitch it to him in a sit-down meeting. Hopefully, with any luck, I can convince him to go with this project.

Wish me luck!

Much ado about Novell

2006-11-11T10:47:00.000-05:00

You can consider this post an update on my previous posting regarding the deal between Micro$oft and Novell.

Within a couple of days it was released that the deal between M$ and Novell included a payment to Novell of $385 million. So, yes folks, the sell-out is complete, they have accepted money. I got curious to see if this would effect the Linux community with more than just the loss of a really good distribution ( imo) of Linux. What I ended up finding is that Novell, unbeknownst to me, had acquired Ximian a short time ago. As some of you well know, a couple of years ago, Ximian acquired the Mono Project, which is an open source port of the Micro$oft .net development architecture.
So, in one foul swoop, Micro$oft has managed to not only take from us an awesome distribution, but they have also managed to get its evil claws into a project that I am sure really urked them. I mean come on, someone except Micro$oft put .net on Linux, that must have been blasphemous to ol'Steve, but now he must be happy as a lark.

Granted, I am sure I could rant for days and days about this, and others could as well, but I think we need to sit back and see what happens and hope that M$ does not put any evil influence into Novell's release of its product for that would definitely taint everything. If they don't....awesome. If they do.....well...its been fun Suse (Novell), but we will have to take our leave of you.

And the sellout is..............NOVELL

2006-11-07T17:00:00.001-05:00

I would say that the recent announcement by Novell of their new found partnership with Micro$oft has left me speechless, but that would be totally correct. In fact, I am more than a little up in arms over the deal. Micro$oft has made no attempt to hide their overwhelming dislike for Linux and all that it stands for, and even after seeing all of that over the years, Novell (Suse Linux) has gone and partnered with them.
All this is part of a deal so that Micro$oft wouldn't sue Novell for patent infringement over code they claim is in the Suse distribution. Kind of deja vou if you ask me with SCO's filings and lawsuits over quite similar claims. But the difference is, those that were sued by SCO stood up to them and WON!!

It makes me wonder what Novell is so incredibly scared of. Are the claims by Micro$oft valid? Does the questionable code actually exist in the distribution? I guess we won't find out any time soon considering they are now in bed with the big bad giant of the software world. I just hope that considering this loss to the Linux community, no other distributions are weak enough to fold to this pressure.

That's right, I called this a loss. Up to right now I have been really taken with Suse as a distribution. The fact that a lot the functionality that I was looking for ( ie: cd/dvd burning, cd/dvd image creation/ripping to name a couple) simply worked right out of the box has a lot to say about a distribution. Granted, not everything worked the way it was supposed to. I have been trying to learn Apache 2.0 better so that I can get the httpd.conf file setup correctly to support cgi scripting as it seems that the file I have by default differs greatly from the file that is default on other "working" systems, like Fedora. Also the directories where things, like Apache, are installed are different from the default in the software's documentation ( unlike that of distro's like Fedora which stuck to the vendor's defaults).

Those things aside, Suse is a generally good desktop OS, but now, with the advent of Micro$oft being involved with them, I give the distro two years. Two years and it will be almost non-existent, that is if Micro$oft has its way. I don't think they would make a deal like this unless there was a lot in it for them. Ballmer is to much of a Linux hater to make a deal that was beneficial to the Linux community.

If you look at the Novell website, you will see the title "Bridging the Divide" right on the front page. That is an extremely weak bridge, possibly made of doozer material. Personally, I will not be venturing across and I don't advise anyone else to either.

Meanwhile, over at the evil giant's website, there is NOT ONE MENTION of the fact that this deal ever happened. Of all the information on their main page, the deal with Novell isn't even hinted at. So, while Novell feels the need to announce the deal to the world, Micro$oft chooses the null approach. Makes you wonder how important it really is to them.

To Mr. Ballmer and his organization I say, "Enjoy Suse, its yours now". To the rest of the Linux community and to advocates like myself I say, "Let's sew up this would and go on. Its only a scratch and a scratch never killed a movement".

At this point, I am in the process of downloading the DVD of Fedora Core 6. As for my Suse 10.1 DVD and SLED 10 discs, well, I was looking for some good cup holders.

GO LINUX!!!