beer planet

Updated: January 18th, 2010

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can…

Updated: October 6th, 2009

No matter what programming language you use, there comes a time when you need to search for a file somewhere on the file system. Here, I want to talk about accomplishing this task in Perl. There are many ways of doing so, most of them boring, but I want to discuss the fun and elegant way – using File::Find::Rule.

Let me briefly discuss some of the…

Updated: June 9th, 2009

Problem

While writing a 1093985th Perl script the other day I was facing the following dilemma:

• Let’s say there is a local library, called TheUberLib.pm. It is so uber that most of my scripts, located all over the machine, include it.
• Now, let’s also say that there’s an even more uberly important binary called run_me_now_or_you_will_die but the only way to find it is by using a relative path

…

Hey, I can relate to today’s xkcd! It hits close to home:

And some more traveling down the Perl related memory lane (yeah, these are old, I know):

Updated: November 5th, 2008

I’m learning Python. Since I’m currently primarily a Perl coder, I decided it’d be a good idea to post and keep track of my experiences coming from heavy Perl. I have a few reasons for learning Python, which are:

• to see what else is out there and broaden my horizons.
• to keep my brain active by feeding it new tasty information every day.
• to become

…

Apparently it's not straightforward to install SOAP::Lite, even using CPAN.

Check this out.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

cpan[1]> install SOAP::Lite
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.18)
Going to read /root/.cpan/Metadata
  Database was generated on Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:29:45 GMT
CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.66)
Going to read /root/.cpan/build/
............................................................................DONE
Found 149 old builds, restored the state of 109

…

Updated: October 6th, 2009

I'm sure most Perl coders have to face this annoying problem at one point or another: how do you consistently get the return value out of a system call, be at executed via backticks or system()? Backticks return the output of the program with no error code in sight, while system() returns the error code but prints the output instead of putting it into a variable.

The best solution I…

Updated: April 29th, 2008

Update: The author of the module contacted me the same day and promised to fix it in the next version. Version 0.40 was indeed on cpan as promised, but I haven't tested it yet.

Passwd::Unix will corrupt your /etc/shadow file and rearrange login names and their corresponding password hashes.

The current version of Passwd::Unix corrupted my /etc/shadow upon only
calling the passwd() function. Immediately users started to report not