http://www.butteredham.com/blog/

• Website: www.butteredham.com/blog/

Recent Actions

• Commented on When Perl is not applicable
  I think we all know that C/C++ are significantly faster than Perl. Most of us have probably written routines in those languages when we needed speed for certain tasks, and that is why XS modules exist, after all. But saying...
• Commented on What package provides gdlib-config in your distribution?
  On FreeBSD, it's installed by the graphics/gd port....
• Commented on YAPC through the eyes of a recruiter
  I'll ask the same question from the other side: any tips for freelance Perl programmers on finding recruiters? I've been working with Perl for 15+ years, and I've only been contacted by recruiters twice. I keep hearing that there's a...
• Commented on Ubic - status report
  Since your last post said it's "better than daemontools," I'll ask: if I've been happily using daemontools for years, what does ubic offer that might make me switch? (Besides the coolness of being written in Perl, that is.)...
• Commented on Perl vs Shell Scripts
  I tend to use the shell for manipulation at the file system level: moving files around, deleting, creating directions, changing permissions, etc. Anything beyond that, like dealing with the data inside the files, I'll almost always go to Perl. Or...
• Commented on The Ten Minute Thinking Rule
  Thinking through a problem is a skill that has to be learned, and many people don't have it. I've noticed that the kids I tutor (11-13 years old) frequently ask for help before thinking. If their first guess after glancing...
• Commented on Is there in truth no Perl?
  It does seem like, for me, Perl just came naturally more than any other language. Certainly it has its quirks and complexities, but then so do natural languages. But when I learned Perl, there were a lot more "Oh, of...
• Commented on Extract Mail Adresses from CSV
  Your example should work fine, as long as none of your fields ever contain a tab character. If they do, then in proper CSV they will be quoted in some manner, and sorting out things like that is what modules...
• Commented on New "dot" feature
  I'm not fond of the shift key, but since this trades a nearby shifted key for one I have to reach for ( > versus ~ ), I don't suppose I'd use it myself. And I'm eccentric enough to like...
• Commented on Perl Trolls
  Do *any* Usenet groups still have a good signal-to-noise ratio? I gave up on comp.lang.perl.misc a long time ago because it was just too busy to keep up with, but I seem to remember there was an auto-moderated offshoot of...
• Commented on Perl Trolls
  Oh, I agree that more tutorials are a great idea, however they're presented. Out of curiosity, I looked for Perl tutorials on YouTube recently, and didn't find much. There are some there, but the quality is pretty hit-and-miss (though that's...
• Commented on Perl Trolls
  I've been programming part-time for over 20 years, starting with assembly language and BASIC on the C64, then Unix shell scripting and some C, then Perl, Java, Javascript, PHP (against my will), and probably a few I'm forgetting. Perl remains...
• Commented on Dance with rose in one hand....
  The markup problem in the post is that you have a/ in the closing tag after 'tar ball' instead of /a....
• Commented on Dance with rose in one hand....
  Very nice. As you say, Dancer has good documentation, but working examples of how to do different things -- and different ways to do them -- are a big help too....
• Commented on find and exec
  Yes, find|xargs is almost always superior to find -exec, for me. -exec runs the command for each file, while xargs will take as many files on the command line as the shell will allow, which can drastically improve performance. Also,...
• Commented on Why Perl ?
  I use a few of those tools a lot -- it's pretty common for me to do a 'find . -type f | xargs perl -pie' type of chain to process a bunch of files in a directory tree. But...
• Commented on @perl_jobs
  Olaf, that's a good idea, about pitching in on an existing project instead of trying to come up with something new. I'll have to find something like that. Leanan, that reminds me, I did get one job thanks to my...
• Commented on @perl_jobs
  I'm heartened to hear that there are so many perl jobs out there, because I've never found one. I'm one of those swiss-army-knife guys Mr. Z. talks about. I've never been hired to code perl; I get hired to sysadmin...
• Commented on Here's a stupid bug.
  What Aaron P. said. Isn't a regex (and a complex one with an 'or' pipe in it no less) a lot more overhead than two simple numeric equality comparisons?...
• Commented on Can we afford bad code on blogs.perl.org?
  Unless I missed it, the blogger in question hasn't said why he's posting. Maybe he's just getting started -- or found these code samples somewhere -- and would appreciate some constructive criticism. (I thought I saw comments on one of...

Comment Threads

• Nigel Peck commented on What package provides gdlib-config in your distribution?

  Had the same problem on CentsOS 5.8 just now, installing gd-devel via yum sorted it. Thanks for the post.

• Olivier Mengué (dolmen) commented on Perl vs Shell Scripts

  About "Processing Job Output Lines":

  run some command | while read line
  do
      process each "$line"
  done
  

• hesco commented on What package provides gdlib-config in your distribution?

  This is untested at the moment, but perhaps I can update this in a few minutes after exercising it a bit in my environment. This snippet is from a puppet manifest under development which manages an installation of an in-house application dependent on GD. It is intended to encapsulate the research above. Pretty sure this is the right factor key to test against. If blogs.perl.org permits an author to edit their own comments I will be back to fix any errors introduced here in the puppet and facter code, although in my environment at the moment I will only be testing against ubuntu.

• hesco commented on What package provides gdlib-config in your distribution?

  And of course I mis-spelled the one OS I'm testing against. Worked with a Network Administrator once who told me that he did not make mistakes. He only cut-and-pasted other people's mistakes. Guess I should have run `facter operatingsystem` and followed his advise to avoid that error.

  Otherwise, this puppet syntax seems to work fine.

• mug896 commented on Perl vs Shell Scripts

  In bash you cant set IFS=$'\n' instead of IFS="
  "