A new blogs.perl.org or die trying

TL;DR: 1,600 ranting words including F-bombs abound. I am testing out a new theme for this site. Also I am trying to port some content to a new CMS and put up a public test site to get feedback.

Where to begin... how about the latest problem I had. I tried to post a comment saying I fixed a mistake in my last post and it tells me I am not signed in. After logging out and in then trying it a few times with no success I looked to the github issue list. I find the following issues that seem to match my problem #100, #196, and #222. Seeing that this is a known problem I decide to see if I can fix it. I decide to start by setting up a local copy of Movable Type (MT) to experiment with. So beings my tale of woe.

Dribbles from my Brain

This post is a brain drain of ideas that I find myself repeating to people when I get asked advice about technology and the surrounding ecosystem. I give no guarantee that any of this information is going to be helpful.

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Web Services Part 2: Using Joyent

I recently started trying out different cloud providers to find one that meets my Perl needs. I see many uses for cloud computing in the form of on demand, ubiquitus computing nodes that I can launch with a range of "hardware" specifications. This translates directly into saving money, the prices are different for each hardware plan and you pick what you think you need and erase it when you are done. This article is focused on using Joyent to run Perl applications, not using Perl to interact with the Joyent API, that is a future article already in the works.

Web Services Part 1: YouTube playlists

It started off with just a simple problem; a friend recommended some songs from various artists on YouTube. I go and listen to the songs, like them, and start looking for more from the same artists. Browsing around I find some interesting playlists but notice some of them have the same songs and I think "I'll just download the playlists and remove duplicates with a quick script".

Parallel Forking and Process Management

Stop me if you have heard this one before. You have a list of files you need to process in a text file with one item per line. Handling this is fairly simple you read a line in and process it over and over again until you processed the whole list. This works great, but if that list is 40,000 items long and each item takes up to 30 seconds to run it suddenly takes a very long time to finish. In this case processing each item is just a system call to another cli application with no shared resources, thus allowing processing of items in parallel with no fuss. For this task I am using Parallel::ForkManager and here are the important bits: