[HoustonTx.pm] Re: Welcome Members

[Dave Barnett]

All:

Hey, I'm getting the digests, so this is a new thread in response to other 
posts.

My name is Dave Barnett.  I worked for Geco-Prakla (Schlumberger) before the 
merger with Western Geophysical, and currently work at WesternGeco (the 
merged co.).

When I started with GP 5 years ago, my manager suggested that I find a book 
on Perl, and pick it up.  I picked up "Learning Perl", followed by 
Programming Perl, 2nd ed.

All of my Perl knowledge is from the *nix side of the fence: IBM AIX, SGI 
IRIX, Sun OS, Sun Solaris, and of course Linux.

I've been using Perl in a wide variety of ways:  1) writing scripts to check 
source code revisions for various important bits [copyright, etc.] before 
accepting the code changes, 2) Converting Seismic velocity data from one 
format to another [with a geophysicist telling me what the output should look 
like], 3) General purpose utilities to fill the random user request, and 4) 
my own personal collection of tools.  Some of these "tools" are quick hacks 
to handle system upkeep type requests [deleting old log files, cleaning up 
"scratch" space], and the like.

For the most part, I use Perl to do the jobs that sh/sed/awk/grep would 
otherwise require.......

I'm pretty good with regular expressions, and text based processing.  That's 
mostly what I use Perl for.  I've also written several scripts that process 
various text files and put them into HTML [another text format] suitable for 
web pages.

I don't usually go into the darker corners [sockets, IPC, signal handling, 
etc.] unless I have the need.

My current project involves converting how we build our Seismic Processing 
System from using make to using the "company standard" build product [aka NOT 
make].  As part of the process, we have quite a bit of scripting and custom 
coding to do for validation testing [did the build complete without error, 
can we use the built product, etc.] that I intend to use Perl for.  Wish me 
luck!  No luck needed for go ahead to use Perl, just luck on getting things 
working.

I support no modules on CPAN, but did write one for interal use some time 
back.  I don't think it's really been used by anyone but me, however......

Enough for now.

Cheers,
Dave