testing Text::Clevery

... so far, so good

wondering if there are other Smarty parser in the wild

some command line shortcuts

dig for missed dependencies

egrep -r '^\s*(use|with|extends)\s+' * \
 | awk '{print $2}' | awk '{sub(/\;/, ""); print}' \
 | sort -u

jumpstart a "00-load.t"

egrep -r '^\s*package ' * \
 | awk '{ print $2}'  \
 | awk '{sub(/\;/, ""); print "use_ok(\""$1"\")"}' \
 | sort -u

quick syntax checks

for i in `find ./  | egrep '\.(pm|pl|cgi|t)$'`; do perl -wc $i; done

bad tests

bad tests are worse than no tests, and it's better to have no tests than to have tests designed to pass


there it is, I've said it publicly

sorting utf8 with Perl

What's Wrong with sort and How to Fix It

informative perl utf8 article

use unicode by default in Perl

how to do utf-8 with HTML::Mason

how to do utf-8 with HTML::Mason

4 easy steps to make Mason utf-8 Unicode clean with Apache, mod_perl, and DBI


PerlSetVar MasonPreamble "use utf8;" fixed it for me


yes, I know Mason 2 is live :)

fuck iso-8859-16

... and the ignorant bastards that cannot distinguish between an aesthetic choice when designing font faces and character encoding.

iso-8859-16 is not for Romanian, and the traditional and correct way to write in Romanian is with s+cedilla, t+cedilla ... which means iso-8859-2. Want ş with a tiny comma below the "s" ? Fucking design a new font face and give the rest of us a break. Rumanians wrote with s+cedilla for 150 years and did not lose sleep over it, but now we have to deal with two fucking character sets that don't translate and which look so much alike on screen that you need fucking glasses to distinguish between them.

Yes, you know who you are.

Net::SSH::Perl install

Very nice module but a bit of a pain to install: the pain will be caused by Math::Pari wich fails automatic installation with cpan(m).

To fix it get the Math::Pari archive from CPAN, then ftp://megrez.math.u-bordeaux.fr/pub/pari/unix/OLD/pari-2.1.7.tgz and extract pari-2.1.7.tgz in the same folder where the Math-Pari-2.* folder is, then perl Makefile.PL Configure, make, make install. pari-2.5.0 won't work.

perl code deployment on shared hosting

on perl code deployment on shared hosting

getting started with Perl and BASH

... was asked for pointers in a private mail; here is my quick and dirty answer:


I am no shell expert (have read and modified lots of scripts, but have not written any advanced stuff from scratch); for BASH I recommend http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html;

for Perl: the documentation packaged as man pages is very good (do a "man perl" to get the index), and in book form almost anything from O'Reilly is good (they are the unofficial sponsors of Perl ;) ) , this one is a must http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596000271 , this one is a good place to start http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596520113 , and http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html as soon as you're done with "Learning Perl" .

Anything signed by Randal Schwartz, Damian Conway, chromatic, Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen (and others, but those are the names I remember now) is worth reading, whether in print or on the web.

you can find books online here http://www.perl.org/learn.html , and some other links here http://oreilly.com/perl/

If you're on windows get Active Perl http://www.activestate.com/activeperl or Strawberry Perl http://strawberryperl.com/ , both are very good. Indigo Perl used to be in vogue years ago, might not be a bad choice http://www.indigostar.com/indigoperl.php ... a long time ago I used to use Indigo Perl when exiled in M.S. land, so I am a bit partial to them :), but Strawberry Perl appears to be the "official" Windows port of Perl.

If you know Unix/Linux reasonably well, you could try http://www.cygwin.com/ : you get a lot of unix tools running on windows including perl, or install Linux in a virtual machine (I recommend VirtualBox, but Parallels and VMWare make good tools, too).

interview with Damian Conway

might be old, I just found it

interview with Damian Conway