http://blog.bluefeet.net Yet another Perl Hacker weblog Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:16:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Edit: It turns out there is already a module on CPAN that does exactly what I talked about here. Its called DBIx::Connector. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like the guy that wrote it designed it with input from the DBIC guys. I'm a big fan of ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2010/01/robust-dbi-transaction-and-connection-handling/ I've been meaning to give HTML::FormHandler a try for quite some time now. Over the weekend I converted a form from some home-grown form validation and html generation to use HTML::FormHandler instead. HTML::FormHandler was inspired by, and quasi-forked from, Form::Processor. There are many options for processing forms, ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/10/use-htmlformhandler/ You should use Perl because... 10. Real Perl coders don't have fohawks. 9. Perl has nothing to do with Ryan Seacrest. 8. Beer improves Perl. 7. It comes with a 20-sided die for all that TIMTOWTDI. 6. It has nothing to do with PHP. 5. Captain Picard writes perl. 4. There is no better place to get ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/09/top-10-reasons-to-use-perl/ I was really hoping that Internet Explorer version 8 (IE8) would finally be the version of IE where Microsoft stepped up to the plate and produced a fast browser, with few bugs, less Microsoft-only features, and a good and modern UI. I'm the kind of guy that holds judgment for a ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/09/ie8-another-screwed-up-version/ The Thousand Oaks Mongers are going to host a half-day Perl 6 hackathon next Saturday (the 22nd) as already talked about here. So far we have three people involved, including myself. We'd like to create a web site that displays aggregated data from other web sites, such as ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/08/setting-up-mod_perl6-part-1/ The CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) distribution, Path::Class, provides a simple OO API alternative to the built-in perl file IO functions such as open, opendir, stat, etc. Code written to use Path::Class tends to be smaller (concise, easier to maintain, etc) than similar code that uses the standard built-in ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/08/use-pathclass/ Over the last few days at $work I've been upgrading Catalyst from 5.7 to 5.8. This new version of catalyst, released in April, has been completely overhauled to use Moose for it's OO system, among other enhancements and bug fixes. I found that the Catalyst::Manual::CatalystAndMoose manual was a great starting ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/07/upgrading-to-catalyst-5-8/ Last year I wrote GIS::Distance::Fast to provide some much needed speedups to the pure-perl GIS::Distance. This ::Fast version used Inline::C which isn't all that optimal and was just a scapegoat for doing the right thing. So, this evening I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. I first ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/07/xs-hits-newb-bystanders-watch-in-dismay/ When writing jquery you almost always put your code within a ready block: $(document).ready(function(){ // Code... }); And I always forget the exact syntax. I just found that jQuery has a shortcut: $(function(){ // Code... }); Much better! http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/07/document-ready-shortcut/ I've been authoring CPAN distribution since early 2003 with my first module being Geo::Distance. Since then I've authored several other distributions and do my best to keep my RT bug list small and fix FAILs. This process of authoring and maintaining modules on CPAN is in my top-10 ... http://blog.bluefeet.net/2009/07/authoring-a-cpan-module/