Author Archive

Recursive Dependencies in CPAN

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

I’ve been quiet lately, as I’ve had hardware problems and haven’t done much development on my spare spare machine.  Finally got a new one, and am installing everything.

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Autovivification bit me today

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

For the first time in more than five years, I got bit by autovivification.  It’s one of those odd quirks of Perl that I’d read about, and heard the problems with but never bumped in to them.

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Perl People are Great!

Friday, May 15th, 2009

I have been reading the Catalyst mailing list for a while.  I’m also subscribed to the DBIx::Class mailing list.  These are reasonably busy lists where converstations range from incredibly techincal arguments about ways to refactor the cor to new and confused people sticking their head in and asking questions.  Usually they’re polite and well thought posts from intelligent people.

This is a little different from a lot of Open Source projects!  (more…)

Debugging Catalyst

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

My last post discussed figuring out how part of Catalyst worked.  I had to put debug code in to a library and watch it run. How do you do tht?

It’s actually pretty easy, but it wasn’t obvious, at least to me.  It is on the debugging page of the Catalyst tutorial, but I missed it the first dozen times I read the page.

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Catalyst and local configuration files

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

This just took me two hours to debug, so I thought I’d go ahead and turn it in to a post…

Summary

Catalyst supports reading a config file. usually called myapp.conf.  You can also add extra configuration, but figuring out where it goes took me ages.

In a nutshell, Catalyst will read myapp.conf and myapp_local.conf.

You can change what the ‘local’ part in that is by setting an environment variable called MYAPP_CONFIG_LOCAL_SUFFIX or one called CATALYST_CONFIG_LOCAL_SUFFIX.

If MYAPP_CONFIG_LOCAL_SUFFIX is set, CATALYST_CONFIG_LOCAL_SUFFIX is apparently ignored.  (You don’t get two additional config files, just the one.)

MYAPP_CONFIG_LOCAL_SUFFIX applies only to MyApp, where CATALYST_CONFIG_LOCAL_SUFFIX will be applied to any Catalyst app.  Be careful with it. (more…)

Modern Perl and I

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

I’m working on several projects.  Lately, my language of choice has been Perl because it lets me get things done quickly and because I can usually depend on the CPAN to have tools to make it easier and more correct.

Along the way, I’ve tripped over some really smart people doing some amazing work to make Perl more modern and more usable.  They seem to be people with great ideas who didn’t want to wait for Perl 6 and went and did something.  That’ been great to find and I’m learning a ton of things.

Maybe it’s interesting to hear how a competent Perl programmer found these new things, and that’s what I’ll start with today.

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It’s a BLOG!

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Many of my friends have suggested I set up a blog and write some things.  They’ve made this suggestion for some time now, and I’ve ignored them.  Well, they can all be happy as I have finally done something about it.

I did post some rambling “deep thoughts” on another web page, but they weren’t very organized.  Maybe I’ll repost them here, if they still seem interesting when I re-read them.  Other than that I’ve not bothered much with this new-fangled blogging thing.

What has finally gotten me to go to the effort of setting up a blog and maybe actually writing something in it regularly?

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