Lonely Lion

I joined the HTML::Mason list a while back, but just realized that all the messages were being blocked by my junk mail filter. I’m looking through the list, there’s a ton of HTML::Mason / Bricolage jobs out there. Kind of interesting. Amazon is hiring a bunch of HTML::Mason people. It seems like Mason is pretty big business. Now, if I could only get it working…

There seems to be a pretty significant problem with the default RPM installation of Apache and mod_perl. It seems that Apache 2 (the default Redhat RPM) isn’t ready for mod_perl. At least, that’s what the folks on the Mason list say.

Hmmm.

Anyway, I’m going to keep working on it. I may switch back to Apache 1.3 in the near future.

http://mcavoyrobot.lonelylion.com

The logs are kept in an XML file. I’m parsing the file with Perl, and chucking it up on that page. I’ll work on making it look prettier soon. I’d also like to collect some stats, and be able to isolate specific conversations.

This was my first successful XML parsing excercise. I used XML::Simple, as the name implies, it’s mostly pretty simple. I had some trouble trying to figure out what kind of variable structure it was putting the file into, but got it eventually. It’s a hash of hashes, with array’s thrown in there as well.

ONLamp.com: Cooking with MySQL [Nov. 21, 2002]

I have been beating my brain trying to find a way to grab all the possible choices from a particular table in MySQL. I have a 14k+ table of backup jobs, all the jobs that have run since ~ January. I thought I was going to have to get all kinds of weird meta-data from the backup server.

Then, I saw that link. There’s a SQL thingee called DISTINCT. How did I miss that? Sometimes computers just kill me.

Perl Programming guidlines/rules

Geez. Nerds sure can get all rabid on each other. Lots of good ideas. Use as applicable.

O’Reilly Network: Red Hat 8.0 and D-Link DWL-650 (and other Prism II) wireless LAN cards [November 19, 2002]

A good log entry. Covers wireless in RH8, as well as a mention of the linux-dell-laptops FAQ

Setting up an All-Linux Wireless LAN

I decided to blow away FreeBSD on my laptop based wireless access point, in favor of Redhat. I’ve been very impressed with Redhat of late, and have been pretty upset at the performance of the Orinoco driver for FreeBSD. It dies on file transfers greater than 75 Mb. It doesn’t appear as if it’s going to be fixed anytime soon. The above link is a very brief introduction to how to set up a wireless AP with linux. There’s some more detailed docs here.

php|architect

Pretty cool article. This website is, I believe, a new one.

register_globals was set to On in every installation of PHP that I’ve used up until recently. The new LonelyLion server is built on Redhat Linux. I used the standard Redhat RPM’s, which worked like a champ. There was one smallish problem. register_globals was set to off in the RPM distribution.

I’ve taught myself programming, I learned Perl and PHP from O’Reilly books. The books that I’ve read have been pretty strict about variable scope. They all recommended limiting the scope of variables to within distinct blocks of code. At first, I didn’t understand why. That’s when I wrote a huge chunk of the IO administrative interface. When the Redhat RPM turned globals off, all my scripts broke. For now, I’ve turned globals back on, but I’m going to re-write everything to not have to use globals.

I started to get into the habit of strictly scoping variables after reading Perl Monks on a regular basis. use strict is at the top of every one of their examples. It taught me to pay attention to scope, and to really understand how my variables are being used. I can’t remember where I read it, but here it is, “there’s no reason to sit on bad code, just because you were learning how to do it at the time. Apply the lessons you’ve learned going forward, as well as stepping back and correcting your mistakes. It’s an important lesson, one that I plan on using to go back and fix the IO Admin pages.

PeerCast

Another P2P broadcasting tool. I’m going to try it out this weekend.

Blosxom

I got this working in about two minutes last night. It’s an interesting concept for a weblog management system. It’s a script that reads a directory tree, and makes a log out of it. Kind of cool. It’s written by Rael Dornfest. He’s a researcher for O’Reilly, the guy that wrote Meerkat.

Worth a look.