How to Tell Your Perl Story
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Have you done something stunningly cool or staggeringly useful with Perl in the past year? Conference season will be here soon; it's time to consider giving a talk to your local monger group, a regional conference, or even OSCON. Perl track committee member brian d foy gives several guidelines to help you decide what to talk about and how to present it.
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On his site, blogZero, Douglas Clifton shares his method for authenticating a Googlebot in both Perl and PHP. Basicslly, making sure that the bot hitting your server with the user agent containing Google is, in actuality, really from the search engine.    Following a tip from Russ I was pleased to find an interesting post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog titled How to verify Googlebot. In a nutshell, it explains how to use the Unix shell program host to authenticate that an IP address copied from your Web server log file really is a Googlebot and not some email harvester (or whatever).  I decided to take this a step further and demonstrate how you can automate this procedure using a scripting language.     He looks at methods using both programming languages and decides on showing off the PHP version first. It uses a simple method, made even easier by two of PHP's internal functions, gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr. The Perl version relies less of the "higher level" that PHP's functions use and opts for making an actual Socket object to handle the incoming request.
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Just been doing some heavy translation from German to English. Which lead to writing a simple command line tool for translating via Google - waste time to save time in other words. Getting a prototype up from scratch took about 15 minutes (which sheds a light on blog spam I guess). Have cleaned it up a bit and dropping it here in case anyone can use it.
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Rob Allen has posted about a small modification that he made to his Zend Framework setup that allows for a little safer echoing of information out to the View later of an application.   One of my biggest issues with using PHP as the templating engine in View scripts is that the easiest way to echo a variable is the least secure. [...] So, I decided to leverage a post by Mike Naberezny from a while ago about streams. The idea is all his; I just modified it to work with Zend Framework's Zend_View the way I wanted it to.   His method uses a slightly different output format - instead of using a normal echo statement to push out the escaped output, it uses a special syntax using the "@" sign as a shortcut to the call to escape(). He includes the code you'll need to make it work in your ZF install and explain it a bit (including where the real key lies - in stream_popen).
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Paul Jones has posted a very quick note about one of his presentations today:   The slides from my php|works talk are now available as a PDF file. I'm going to try to create an audio version after I get back from the conference.   You can see a summary of Paul's talk (and a list of the others being given) over on the php|architect site.
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The other day I was thinking about all the edge-cases within Linux and how there are hundreds of little commands and tricks.  I these know now but only after using UNIX for more than 15 years now (has it been that long!).  I wish I would have known all these tricks when I was just getting started.  This is similar to Danny O'Briens Life Hacks  but since so many of us spend our life tied to our shell these are essentially "Shell Hacks".  NetCat is one example.  Very powerful tool with a simple syntax.  Just run 'nc' and you can connect to a host/port and interact with it manually.  You could even write an HTTP client with bash if you really wanted to.  The zsh  shell looks like it might becom ...
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What's advanced Perl programming? The definition has changed over the years. For a while it was XS and GUIs and typeglobs and OO. Now a lot of it is using CPAN effectively. Since completing Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition, Simon Cozens has discovered even more ways to work more smartly and effectively. Here's what he's learned.
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Our sister site, AjaxDeveloper.org has a new post today with a request from Joshua Eichorn, the developer of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package for success stories.    If you've used HTML_AJAX to make something cool I'd like to hear from you.  If what you've created is publically accessible that would be even better.  Just leave a comment on this post saying what you've created and given a link to it if you can. Any suggestions on improvements that would make further development easier are also appreciated.     With the HTML_AJAX package being as well-developed as it is, I'm sure that there are more than a few out there using it - so get on over and submit your story today!
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Perl script that automatically searches for new episodes of your favorite TV shows and downloads the corresponding NZB files from various free sources on the internet.   This release is mostly just to update the .shows file and the README.  I was sleepy, and I stupidly said that you do not have to have the  element in your shows file.  Turns out I'm just an idiot, and you do.  I have updated the .shows file to include the proper template for most shows, which is %name%.S%season%E%episode%  Sorry about that!  I also started a code optimization run which will hopefully over time make things run faster and more efficiently.  I just picked off the low hanging fruit on this release, because I wanted to get the updated README out before too many people had problems.
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Perl programs are easy to write, especially if they solve simple problems. If you find yourself re-using the same programs (or worse, the same code), it's time to bundle your code into pieces easier to reuse. It's time to turn programs into modules. Andy Sylvester walks through the three steps of making a simple, standalone Perl program into a robust, tested, distributable, and reusable piece of code.
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When finding he was in need of a parser and lexer, Wez Furlong decided to work up one that was PHP-based and a take off of the popular lemon parser and JLex lexer.   From time to time, I find that I need to put a parser together. Most of the time I find that I need to do this in C for performance, but other times I just want something convenient, like PHP, and have been out of luck.   His result is two new packages - lemon-php and JLexPHP (under a BSDish license) you can download and compile on your own system.   Also, if you'll remember a while back, Greg Beaver had wanted something similar (as mentioned in the comments) and created his own lexer/generator as well.
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Though it's a full-fledged programming language now, Perl still has roots in Unix file editing. A hearty set of command-line switches, options, and shortcuts make it possible to process files quickly, easily, and powerfully. Geoff Broadwell explains far more than you ever wanted to know about it.
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Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists. The perl6-compiler list discusses rule engine flexibility, the Parrot people discuss the Parrot versions of Forth, Tcl, and Python as well as lexical pads, and the Perl 6 Language list argues about what being in the core really means.
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Press '3' to read this story or hold for a hack
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PÃ¡draic Brady has a quick update today pertaining to the PHPSecInfo project - a new manual (currently in development).   I'll keep adding to it over the days, weeks and months ahead. The current form is going to be mainly a draft. When it's done, I'll go through it and do some serious editing. Next priority is getting in the material on actually using and implementing PHPSpec...   You can find the manual at http://dev.phpspec.org/manual/ with quite a bit of content already filled out. Topics currently covered include installation guides, your "first steps", testing the code and some examples of it in use.
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Nessa has two posts that talk about how to use PHP to display the versions of software running on the local machine.   I've been working on this application for work that does some simple server reporting, part of which involves displaying the versions of major software running on the machines. [...] I need to be aware of this to make sure that customers are being moved to servers with compatible versions. It's also good in tracking and planning upgrades.   In the first post she recommends using the exec function in PHP to run system commands to get things like the cpanel version, python version and what perl you have installed.   Part two shows a little bit different way to get some of the same information - using the data in the /proc/version file as a single resource to get OS information.