July 2014 Archives

Finding unused variables in your Template stash

Quite often companies who use Catalyst (with Template Toolkit) find that after a while, they're over relying on the use of the stash as a global dumping ground. To deal with that, I wrote a highly experimental module to print out unused template variables.

Procedural Quest Generation in Perl

Yes, it's another post about Veure (whose actual name we might finally have chosen, but that's another story), the MMORPG that I've been writing.

There are 117 stars in a 20 light year radius around Sol. There are 544 space stations and currently there are 3,080 rooms in those stations (and that number is growing). That means there's a lot of area, but how do I fill that area? There's a lot of work still left to be done, but I took a quick stab at implementing a procedural mission generator as described in this paper. Surprisingly, the core of the code only took about an hour to write.

Making git bisect more useful

If you've ever used git bisect, you know what an incredibly useful tool this is. It allows you to do a binary search through commits to find out which commit caused a particular error. Many people seem unaware of git bisect run ... which automates this even further, but it has a limitation: it won't let you find a particular error, it detects success or failure, that's all. So I decided to do something about that.

About Ovid

user-pic Freelance Perl/Testing/Agile consultant and trainer. See http://www.allaroundtheworld.fr/ for our services. If you have a problem with Perl, we will solve it for you. And don't forget to buy my book! http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Perl-Curtis-Poe/dp/1118013840/