[boulder.pm] Re: A real stupid thing

[Walter Pienciak]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2000, Rob Mohr wrote:

> Details, Walter, details!!

Ha!  If you want the lurid details, you'll have to hunt me down and
get them personally.  I won't put them onto the Internet.  It's a good
list of things not to do, though.  Obtuse algorithms, crazy code . . .
when I took a look, I couldn't *believe* some of the stuff I saw.

Anyway.

Vacation was GREAT.  I should do it more often.  We were out in 
Palmdale, California, which is always a super destination if you
like things that go Zoom! in the sky.  One of my sister's friends
works for Boeing's Reusable Space Systems, and got us in to Site 1,
which in English means that we got a close-up and very cool look at the
shuttle Columbia, which is in the plant getting a major systems refitting
(heads-up avionics, etc.)  We walked over it, under it, and around it,
but didn't get to sit in the pilot's seat and play with the steering
wheel, and they didn't want me carving my initials in the heat-shield
tiles -- fussbudgets!  Then I came home to Boulder and got 3 days of
climbing in.

Then when I punched in for work on Monday, I sent an e-mail around to
staff notifying them that I had 2,664 pieces of e-mail waiting for me,
and that they should *call* for anything important, but be patient
otherwise.  Now, systems folks get a lot of automated e-mail when 
different events happen, and I was able to go through those pretty
quickly, but the sheer number seems to have shocked general staff into
leaving me alone.  It's been a quiet week so far.

Ach, some Perl schtuff -- via some excerpts of am e-mail I sent today.
If you already know this stuff, just say (quietly, to yourself!)  "Hmph!
I know THAT!" and delete the message ;^)

Walter

---------- Excerpts follow ----------

Anyway, your code looks good.  I can think of pissy little changes like

< my $lttf_adm = "xxxxx\@xxxxx.ac.nz";
> my $lttf_adm = 'xxxxx at xxxxx.ac.nz';

but the only substantive change I'd recommend is to include $! in your
dienice stuff.

Stylistically, I'll comment on your print statements.  It looks like
you've adhered to the "best practices" methodology of cut-and-paste
programming  ;^)

What I mean is that I see a mix of styles (which I do also):

print MAIL "Something or other\n";
print <<MARKER;
  dum
  de dum
  de dum
MARKER

I find that

  print MAIL "Something or other\n";

is good for single lines of text, and I use the "print from" stuff
almost exclusively for shooting out HTML, since I get to avoid all
the \n and " and escaping that obscures the HTML.

I also use, when doing single lines of HTML,

  print qq{<a href="yaya.html">Get rich NOW! !!</a>};

which also lets me avoid a proliferation of quotation marks and the
visually yukky escape stuff.  This one is kinda undocumented (or at
least hard to find).  See the "print" entry in the perlfunc manpage,
and the section on "Quote and Quote-like Operators" in the perlop
manpage.

But the code looks good.  This is all trivial stuff and intended in
the spirit of "there's more than one way to do it."  Either that or
I'm in a chatty mood today . . .