SPUG: The SPUG Report, 15 February 2005

[Andrew Sweger]

We had nine very experienced Perl programmers AND NOT EVEN A SINGLE PERL
BEGINNER. My apologies for yelling. But come on! I'm sure there's got to
be at least one beginner looking for help with some Perl. You just missed
your chance to have nine people tell you fifty different ways to do
whatever it is you're trying to do. Hmmm. Maybe that's a good thing. Okay,
perhaps a little bit more lead time on the announcement will help.

Bill Campbell gave us a review of his talk proposal to OSCON for the
OpenPKG[1] system. It permits application and configuration deployment to
just about any Unix-like OS and requires very little alteration of the
base OS. This is great for managing heterogeneous Unix environments as well
as Perl development (use the latest Perl distribution without mucking with
the vendor's version).

I asked if anyone has been using Class::DBI [2]. Looks grand. But I wanted
to hear war stories.

Then I showed off this crazy book library application that only works on
Mac OS X and a cool Bluetooth barcode scanner and how I made my own
barcode series and labels for tracking boxes of junk around my house.
It'll use Perl someday. No, really.

Then a discussion of King County Council erupted on how they've all come
down with insanity. Too bad Chubby & Tubby is gone. We could get a great
deal on pitchforks.

C.J. talked about parsing C++ with Perl and how he's discovered the
GCC-XML [3] converter. He's using it to generate unit tests for C++. He's
interested in comments on XML parsers in Perl.

Then we yacc'd about how to count how many times a regex matched. E.g.,

$foo = "lkjsdlfkjsdlfkjsd";
$foo =~ m/k/g;

The answer will be posted RSN [4].

Thanks and good night. Next month we might have a presentation on debugging
running mod_perl code in Apache.

And check out Google Maps [5], yo!

[1] - http://openpkg.org/
[2] - http://search.cpan.org/~tmtm/Class-DBI-0.96/lib/Class/DBI.pm
[3] - http://gccxml.org/
[4] - http://regex.mainstreamlinux.com/
[5] - http://maps.google.com/

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.