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<TITLE>Meeting Minutes: 2003_02_11</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Last night's meeting was attended by: Stephen Clouse, Garrett Goebel, Michael Morgan, and Doug Sparling.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Before everyone had arrived, Doug describe some fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants late night coding sessions under high-stakes deadlines. Once we figured everyone who was coming had arrived I launched into puzzles...</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>We quickly went over last month's "100 Monkeys" puzzle, and I also presented "100 Monkeys Redux" for this month. The winners of last month's contest were Gene Daschel and Paul Kulchenko. Congratulations! I'll post the winning answers separately, and get with the winners to see about getting them their books. I'm still fiddling with the best way to award prizes to encourage participation. So this month, one of the prizes will be given by selecting one entry randomly from the pool of all entries which succeed in producing the correct result.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>I'm seriously trying to figure out ways to attract more people and more activity to our meetings and mailing list. In that vein, please consider copying your fellow perl coders in on the monthly puzzles. For instance, I've just hooked one of my co-workers on this month's puzzle, who hasn't coded much perl since perl4. Other's who aren't concerned with producing the most elegant solution to a particular problem, may be happy submitting something that just plain works with a reasonable chance of winning a free book. Time to step back down off that soap box... and get on with the minutes ;)</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Doug gave a fine review of Manning's Graphics Programming with Perl (GPWP). I wasn't quite as prepared myself to review Web Services with Perl (WSWP). So I made do with an overview and a promise of a more thorough review next month. Stephen thought that WSWP might just be the thing to help out with a work related request to publish a portion of his company's web application server's interface via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) with Web Service Definition Language (WSDL).</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Michael Morgan mentioned an interesting problem which I urged him to present on the list. But now that I've brought it up, I'll go ahead and beat him to it. The question was how to write a script which will read in a list of all image files in a particular directory, rename them using an ordered sequence of 1.jpg .. 10.jpg, and resize each image to 640x480. It sounds like a problem many of us have faced at one time or another. If anyone would like to post partial or complete solutions to the list, I and I'm sure Michael would appreciate it.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Along similar lines to Michael, I've been playing with Barrie Slaymaker's AxKit Image Gallery tutorial (<A HREF="http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/09/24/axkit.html" TARGET="_blank">http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/09/24/axkit.html</A>). After the recent birth of my son Ethan, I figured I'd use the tutorial to come up to speed on AxKit while also providing a neat way to distribute baby pictures to my co-workers. Unfortunately, I ran into a snag when Apache via the AxHandleDir directive invokes a fast handler on the directory holding the images. This percolates up to Apache::AxKit::Frovider::Filter before throwing a qq{Can't locate object method "get_handlers" via package "Apache::Filter"} into the apache error_log.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>So far my searches have indicated the "get_handlers" error comes when mod_perl was compiled without support for PERL_STACKED_HANDLERS. However, I've recompiled and verified via the return value from Apache->can_stack_handlers that mod_perl was indeed compiled with support. Most likely I've misconfigured something along the way. So I'm putting out a feeler for anyone familiar with stacked handlers and any code examples which might make use of stacked handlers independantly of AxKit or otherwise show me how I could hopefully begin to narrow down where the problem lies. Doug thought he might have run accross some useful code snippets and recommended I check out the perl.apache.org's documentation and the highly recommended "mod_perl Developer's Cookbook".</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>After this, we wandered through various recent events and topics of interest. Stephen described some of the work he'd done with Perl's Database Interface (DBI) Module beneath the exposed interface in order to increase performance querying Oracle databases. This lead into general discussions on web server arrangements for serving images, dynamic, and proxied content. And then on into Apache mod_perl 2.0 and the upcoming libareq 2.0 which when it arrives will enable many of the Apache related CPAN modules to work on Apache 2.0.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>By this point, discussion pretty much puttered out as we each started glancing quickly at our watches, pagers, and clocks. So we wound up, headed out, chatted a bit in the parking lot, and went our separate ways. At least until next month ;)</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>1;</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>__END__</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>--</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Garrett Goebel</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>IS Development Specialist</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>www.scriptpro.com garrett@scriptpro.com</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2> </FONT>
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