Gadgetopia

Using Perl code from PHP: The possibilities here make my head spin. Problem is, I don't know if it's spinning in a good way or a bad way. The PHP Perl extension was implemented to allow the usage of Perl code from within PHP. It is a wrapper that embeds ...

The State of Perl: Here's a great essay on the current state of Perl and where it's headed, including information on Perl 6 and Parrot. Why do we use Perl every day? Because Perl scales to solve both small and large problems. Unlike languages like C, C , and Java, ...

In case you find Perl programs too easy to follow, Damian Conway has come up with a way for you to write Perl in Latin This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to ...

Is Perl Still Relevant?: An interesting answer from Tim O'Reilly about whether or not he thinks Perl is still relevant. In terms of the competitive landscape among programming languages, in addition to PHP, Python has long been gaining on Perl. From about 1/6 the size of the Perl market when ...

The more I work with Perl/CGI, the more it looks like J2EE. The Perl I m seeing in apps today is a far cry from a few years ago. Now Perl apps post to a single script (the controller) that controls the flow of the app, have all their code abstracted ...

PHP in contrast to Perl: As much as I adore PHP, this article makes a lot of good points when comparing PHP to Perl: PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations... PHP has inconsistent function naming... PHP has too many functions in the core I'll be the first to ...

There's a fascinating contest afoot since 1996 called "The Obfuscated Perl Contest." The idea is to write the most needlessly complex Perl program your evil little mind can think up. According to the Wikipedia page, there are four categories which tend to limit the size of the programs to just ...

Nokia to release Perl for smartphones: Right now the only options for Nokia phones are C++ and Java. This should open up scripting to a whole new class of developers. Nokia will make an internal version of the Perl scripting language for Series 60 smartphones available to its developer community...

The official Darwin Awards website is seeking help: I Need a Programmer! I want to give the website a Wiki-esque interface. I want to do it in Perl, preferably OO-Perl, nevermind why. Can you do the job? Write to me with your qualifications, and I can send you specs for ...

Mason HQ: Welcome to Mason: Ever wanted to use Perl without CGI? Ever wanted to just embed Perl in HTML like PHP or ASP? Anyone? Seriously....anyone? Mason is a powerful Perl-based web site development and delivery engine. With Mason you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages ...

Found this great comment over at SlashDot that I thought some of you might appreciate: So you're telling me superglue is like perl? Hell yeah it is. Nobody understands it, everybody screams about how great it is, promises to work forever but in reality only works for about three hours. ...

The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source: Here's a great survey of all that is good in the open source world. Movable Type made the list for Perl (even though it's not technically open source), and I was surprised to see Ruby in there as a Perl alternative. ...

Parrot virtual machine: I found this in this post about the future of Perl 6. Parrot is something like Java s JVM or .Net s CLR, but for multiple, dynamic, open-source languages. Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. ...

I've never been happier to be wrong. Turns out you can install Movable Type on a commercial hosted Windows account. It just depends on the host. The big hang-up on Windows is the storage mechanism. Most Windows machines with Perl installed do not have the DB_File module which MT needs ...

Are All Programming Languages The Same?: Python wins with Perl and Ruby close on its heels. Fair enough. Des Traynor wondered if this table was valid, so he performed a simple test: he provides examples of a tiny "read a file and print it to the console" app in Java, ...

#!/usr/bin/perl: I found my calling the theater. #!/usr/bin/perl (pronounced slash-user-slash-bin-slash-pearl) is a series of screenplays for a sitcom. It tells the story of Simple-Site, a web-publishing company that specializes in making web-sites that work. The concept is public domain, while the texts of the screenplays are available under the ...

When it comes to AMP (Apache; MySQL; Perl, Python, or PHP) installers, we at Gadgetopia started with FoxServ. That project kind of died, so a few weeks ago, we touted the benefits of Sokkit. That product, while very good, wasn't free, which was a drag (though, at $24.95, it's still ...

PHP programming language: Some interesting history on PHP. It used to be a Perl wrapper? PHP was originally designed as a wrapper around Perl by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to display his resume information and collect some data, such as how many hits it was generating. Others first used "Personal ...

The Ascendancy of Ruby: Someone made an innocent MetaFilter post about how much momentum Ruby has these days. The comments -- both pro-Ruby and otherwise -- have been heated and entertaining. Some good ones: Ruby seems to be caught up in some sort of blogger-positive-feedback-loop, its practically viral marketing. There's ...

I find myself in a constant struggle between accepting Movable Type for what it is, and working to extend it. There are a few cases where I want to do interesting things with entries, but I don t want to hack into Ben s Perl code. I solved this problem by inserting ...

Movable Type doesn't have a content review system. You can write an entry and leave it in "Draft" status, but no one knows about it unless they go looking for it. In practice, this can be a pain. New authors to Gadgetopia are told to leave their first dozen or ...

Brave New Web by Charles C. Mann: This article is admittedly seven years old, but it details what happened to Randal Schwartz, Perl Legend, and author of thee books on Perl. He was contracted as a sysadmin for Intel at the time: "Hearing of a security incident at another computer ...

Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement: As I work with content management more and more, I believe more and more in what this guy has written: ...the vendors' ideal of a generic site-management system "is completely wrong", Berk says. "The development overhead is very, very high ...

Jobs at Six Apart: They need a Software Engineer and an Executive Assistant. Given my MT hacking of late, I'm a shoo-in. Does it matter that I don't know Perl?

The Regex Coach - interactive regular expressions: This thing is a dream come true. "The Regex Coach is a graphical application for Linux and Windows which can be used to experiment with (Perl-compatible) regular expressions interactively."

A pro-PHP Rant: Harry Fuecks gives us a wonderful, glorious rant on why PHP is good, no matter how many beat-downs it takes -- and it's been beat down a lot lately. He starts with the simplicity and reliability... There are smallish sites I own / run, built on PHP, ...

PrettyPrinter.de, an online pretty printer for PHP, Java, C , C, Perl, JavaScript, CSS: Here's a nice little service that will clean up your semicolon-and-bracket-type code. It's well-done, but I'd like to see it sniff functions and alphabetize them. Via Simon in a comment to this post.

WordPress : Looks like a good blogging platform built on PHP / MySQL, which is just so much more hackable than the Perl / MySQL backend Movable Type uses. GPL, even. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a ...

MT Plugin Directory: Plugins Manager: There's a new add-on for Movable Type that will let you manage your installation's plugins through a browser-based interface. Sadly, I can't run it because my host doesn't have one of the required Perl modules (XML::Simple). It looks neat, though. Would someone who can run ...

Interview with a link spammer: The economics will always drive spam. Until people stop buying and clicking, spam will keep coming. For that's what Sam does, pretty much all day long. [...] he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He's unapologetic about it. ...

Remember: PHP is scripting language!: Some good advice that people tend to forget. One of the oft-overlooked aspects of PHP is that you can write scripts in PHP to execute from the command line. I fell into the habit of writing data munging scripts in Perl, and web pages using ...

Password protect your blog: Good documentation on a long overdue hack. I've got a new project, let's call it Project X, and one of the things I needed to do was set up a password-protected blog on an existing installation of Movable Type. Everyone that has a user account in ...

How the PHP acronym was reborn: Interesting post from one of the old-school PHP guys about ho the language came to be called PHP . There really wasn t much rhyme or reason to it. This is a quote from Rasmus back in 1998: I think I would prefer to just ...

www.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Open Books Project: Did you know O'Rielly publishes some free books? Man, I love free books. Over the years, O'Reilly & Associates has published a number of "Open Books" books with various forms of "open" copyright. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific ...

Product News > Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant > November 6, 2003">Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant: I guess I dispute that PHP is "little-known," but this is still good news. "PHP, a little-known open-source scripting language, is becoming dominant on Web sites, according to Netcraft.com, the U.K. surveyor of ...

Microsoft Visual FoxPro Roadmap: Visual FoxPro is actually going to die...in eight more years. (I know what you're thinking: "FoxPro is still around?") The VFP team made a special announcement to the community on March 13, 2007. The team has announced that there will be no VFP 10. VFP 9 ...

Developing Movable Type Plug-ins: The ease of developing plugins for Movable Type and their consequent ubiquity is one of the things that's made it so popular. If it doesn't exist, someone will invent it. "Movable Type provides developers with a framework to easily and elegantly extend the base ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type - Staggernation.com: Very interesting plugin for Movable Type. This would let you extend MT with arbitrary data stored as XML somewhere. It might be a hassle for every entry, but I'm running into a problem with this site whereby I'd like to store about six ...

I want a piece of software, and I'm hoping one of you out there knows where I can get it. I want software where I can specify: A search engine A search phrase A domain name Then this piece of software will tell me the position of the first appearance ...

Language Wars: Spolsky has a fun post on how to pick a language for your next Web app. [...] the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of ...

While waiting to pay for the gas I pumped this afternoon, I found myself standing next to a display containing a variety of QuickStudy Laminated Reference Gudes. What you get with QuickStudy Most valuable, clear and concise info on a subject Laminated 8.5 x 11 inch size Available in 2, ...

Mena's Corner: Support System: These three women were the source of a stunning number of posts on the MT support forums (one of them had upwards of 10,000). I worked with two of them (I don't remember which two, sadly) on the MT Wiki when it was first getting off ...

Hooray for knowledge!: This is good news. This used to just be for paid licensees. With the release of 3.2, we're making the Movable Type knowledge base completely public. (Sneak peak). Like the user manual, it is also completely powered by Movable Type and has comments enabled on every single ...

You Never Forget Your First Web Server: Zawodny gets nostalgic about his first Web server. -- a 486DX2 machine. It's nice piece, full of memories. That application led to the student government paying me $400 a year or so later to build the first on-line voting system. That's right, back ...

Wikibooks portal - Wikibooks: Here's a cousin to the perfection that is Wikipedia. Wikibooks is an attempt to write community-edited textbooks on a variety of subjects in a variety of languages. There are some good ones on XML, General Computer Programming, and Perl . But those are just the geek ...

GNU Aspell: I thought this was kind of interesting. Given my ignorance, I'm sure it's been around for years. GNU Aspell is a Free and Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker. Its main ...

So I'm in New Orleans at this convention with a little Toshiba laptop running XP Home. To my horror, I have no development platform (XP Home won't run IIS). That hasn't stopped me from coding as I have EditPlus and I can upload from dial-up the hotel, but still. This ...

Homeland Security Survey Takes First Pass at LAMP: Some good news, though I think the bug density would skyrocket once they moved passed the top 1% of projects and into the second and third-tier of open source stuff. First results are in for the Department of Homeland Security's vulnerability survey ...

Six Apart released a Developer Edition of Movable Type 3.0 today. While I haven't been able to find a detailed feature list of what's new in 3.0 it looks like they've made significant changes to their licensing scheme. Apparently one of the big improvements over previous versions is an improved ...

Avoid Santa Claus approach to content management: Great essay here on content management from Gerry McGovern. The Santa Claus approach to content management creates a content management software wish list. It believes in the magic of technology to sweep away any and every problem. Typically, those who believe in Santa ...

PHP5: Coming Soon to a Web server Near You: A comprehensive look at the masterpiece that is PHP5. The author details all the changes with copious amounts of code to browse. Big changes are coming, including a complete revamp of XML handling that includes the ability to say, Make an ...

PHP: date_sunrise - Manual: I don't know how closely you all are looking at the PHP 5 function libraries, but I stumbled on this function today (and its sibling). date_sunset() returns the sunset time for a given day (specified as a timestamp) and location. The latitude, longitude and zenith parameters ...

pop2blog: Speaking of Movable Type plugins, here's a great one. pop2blog, when executed, checks a given pop3 email account for email from a particular list of allowed senders. When email is found, pop2blog parses the email for text and embedded jpegs, and performs one of three tasks, depending on the ...

FoxServ Project: I'm surprised we haven't talked about FoxServ here before. FoxServ is an Apache / mySQL / PHP installer package for Windows. Unlike NuShpere or PHPTriad, FoxServ features the latest version of all included pacakges, user defined configuration during installation, PHP as a module, PEAR, and the Zend Optimizer. ...

Avoiding the web of costly content systems: An extremely well-written article that echos a lot of what I ve been saying lately: content management systems are more cost than benefit in 90% of instances. If you do implement one, only implement it on selected parts of the Web site the ...

Much like my selfish use of this space to ask for a GMail invite, I'm now asking for a software recommendation. I'm building a Web site for our local Christian school, and we need a Web calendar. I'm not going to roll my own, so we're looking for open-source or ...

At the Rational User Conference in Vegas, a guy from IBM got all condescending about LAMP. Businesses that run on the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) model will have to grow up to avoid reliability issues in future, an IBM executive said. According to Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM s ...

Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python: I always thought that a good way to gauge adoption of a language is by the amount of space its books occupy at the local Barnes and Noble. This is sort of the same thing. While I was looking at the data, though, I noticed ...

How long before someone issues a Movable Type "distribution," and how would Six Apart react? Movable Type is so customizable, that a lot of users have custom preferences, myself included. Whenever I do a new MT install, I find myself loading the same plug-ins, building the same templates, changing the ...

Being Popular: Here's an extremely long but interesting essay from Paul Graham about how to design the perfect programming language. He has no plans to do this, of course, but in considering the question he covers a lot of ground on why certain languages have thrived and others haven't. For ...

Textpattern: This app has finally been released in "gamma," whatever that is. Sounds like a pre-pre-pre-beta, which is what I thought an "alpha" was... When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to ...

I started working with Swish-E again recently. This is an open source search engine that, for my money, is one of the best deals in the open source world. A few years ago, I spent some time working with Inktomi Enterprise Search (now Verity Ultraseek) , but after a few ...

Lately, I've seen some XML backlash. XML started as a very simple markup language, but has progressively gotten more and more complicated. An entry over at Don Park's blog got me to YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) which is an alternative to XML, and from there, I found many others. ...

This whole Aestiva thing has got me thinking about development platforms. Every week, there's a new one that claims to be simpler and faster than the last one. ASP is simpler than JSP, PHP is more capable than ColdFusion, HTML/OS makes developing apps faster than the others, etc. You know ...

Cute email about programming found at ForwardGarden.com. Sometimes, I miss the days of the "High School / Jr. High" programmer. Keep reading through the "Master Programmer" section, because there's more underneath. High School / Jr. High =================== 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 END First Year in College ===================== program Hello(input, ...

Java is the SUV of programming tools: You may not be able to get to this link because Harvard is getting hammered by people trying to read this. "After researching how to do bind variables in Java, which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old ...

IDevelopers show their independent streak, favoring Web-based apps: Big frameworks and multi-layered architectures seem great in theory, but I've yet to see them work really well in practice. This seems to be the feeling coming out of this programming survey as well. "Web applications rule the enterprise. That's the indisputable ...

Dynamic Tools for Dynamic Languages: After reading the "Programmers are Idiots" essay that Joe posted last week, I got to thinking about my situation. Am I actually a programmer? I came to the conclusion that no, I'm not I'm a scripter. I work predominantly on the Web, and while ...

Rob left a comment on a previous entry about the site Pocket PC Thoughts. This site is doing something I've been thinking about for a while: running a blog-type site off of discussion board software. I first investigated the idea in this posting to the Movable Type support forum where ...

Sokkit - Install Apache and PHP on Windows: A while back, we mentioned FoxServ as a great way to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP (AMP) running on Windows. It was really nothing more than an installer that got all those pieces working together for you, but this was still a ...

One kink I ve recently noticed in a number of scripting languages geared towards producing web apps is the utter lack of support for XML Schema. I m surprised by this, since a good Schema validator can save a lot of code when used properly. For those who may not be familiar ...

Here s what I want: a CMS that was truly developed from the API out. If an interface comes with it, great. I might use it, I might not. I ve talked about this before. Last year, I said this: When building a new piece of software, you really need to completely ...

Note: This entry changed quite a bit in the 24 hours after it was published. I discovered a lot of stuff I'm ashamed to say I didn't know, I posted several updates to the end of the post, and I eventually changed the title. Quick survey: if you are a ...

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like, can ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...