The State of the Onion
Note: All comments in square brackets are X screensavers that I ran for my slides. If you want to play along at home, start up xscreensaver-demo and click on the screensaver named. By the way, for any screensaver that…
Perl Command-Line Options
Perl has a large number of command-line options that can help to make your programs more concise and open up many new possibilities for one-off command-line scripts using Perl. In this article we’ll look at some of the most…
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This Week on Perl 6, Week Ending 2004-07-31
As I threatened last week, I’m moving the rollover point for these summaries from midnight on Sunday/Monday to midnight on Friday/Saturday, but rather than do it in one swell foop, I’m doing a couple of six-day weeks. The theory…
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Giving Lightning Talks
After the keynotes, the most popular sessions at most Perl conferences tend to be the lightning talks. Each session consists of about 10 to 15 lightning talks — talks typically lasting individually no more than five minutes — back…
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Building Applications with POE
Earlier, we talked about the fundamental principles of application design with POE. Now it’s time to put my money where my mouth is and build some actual working code. To make life a bit easier, let’s lay out a…
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This Week on Perl 6, Week Ending 2004-07-18
Following last week’s bizarrely dated summary (I misplaced a day) we’re back with the correct week-ending date, but I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve slipped to writing on a Tuesday again. My head hangs in shame and I am…
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Accessible Software
Last year Perl.com published an article about pVoice. You learned what pVoice is, why it was built, and where it was supposed to go. Maybe you wanted to do something for disabled people yourself, by writing something like a…
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Autopilots in Perl
X-Plane is an ultra-realistic flight simulator used by aviation pioneers like Burt Rutan, who uses it in his simulator for SpaceShipOne. The latest revision sports a flight model so accurate that the FAA has decided that your time spent…
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This Week on Perl 6, Week Ending 2004-07-04
Another week, another Perl 6 Summary. This is becoming a habit. Let’s do perl6-internals first, shall we? Japhy’s Perl 6 Rules Parser Last week Jeff ‘Japhy’ Pinyan announced that he’d be working on a Perl 6 rules parser once…
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Application Design with POE
Day in and day out, I write large applications in perl. I’m cursed I tell you. While large scale, long-running applications in pure perl may sound fairly easy to write, they are not. Perl, beyond a certain size and…
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This Week on Perl 6, Week Ending 2004-06-27
What’s this? No! It can’t be! It’s a weekly Perl 6 Summary. What is the world coming to? Sorry, I can’t answer that one, so I’ll tell you what’s been happening this week in perl6-internals. Bignums, licenses, pie As…
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Profiling Perl
Update: Perl Profiling has evolved since this article was written, please see http://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/perl-profiling.html for the latest information. Everyone wants their Perl code to run faster. Unfortunately, without understanding why the code is taking so long to start with, it’s impossible…
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This Week on Perl 6, Fortnight Ending 2004-06-21
Good evening. You find me typing away in a motel room on the edge of the Lake District on the shortest night of the year. I suppose, by rites, I should be spending the night by some stone circle drinking,…
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Perl's Special Variables
One of the best ways to make your Perl code look more like … well, like Perl code - and not like C or BASIC or whatever you used before you were introduced to Perl - is to get…
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The Evolution of Perl Email Handling
I spend the vast majority of my time at a computer working with email, whether it’s working through the ones I send and receive each day, or working on my interest in analyzing, indexing, organizing, and mining email content….
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This Week on Perl 6, Fortnight Ending 2004-06-06
Whee! There’s a new graphics card in the G5, which means I can type this at the big screen again, which makes me happy. Well, it would make me far happier if the new card didn’t leave horrible artifacts…
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Web Testing with HTTP::Recorder
HTTP::Recorder is a browser-independent recorder that records interactions with web sites and produces scripts for automated playback. Recorder produces WWW::Mechanize scripts by default (see WWW::Mechanize by Andy Lester), but provides functionality to use your own custom logger. Why Use…
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Return of Quiz of the Week
Recently, Perl trainer and former perl.com editor Mark-Jason Dominus revived his Quiz of the Week mailing list; every week, subscribers are sent a Perl task of either “regular” or “expert” level. There are no prizes, but the submitted solutions are…
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This Week on Perl 6, Week Ending 2004-05-23
Yes. I know. This week’s summary is a week late. So it’s a summary of the last two weeks. So let’s get straight to perl6-internals shall we? Working on the Perl 6 Compiler Abhijit A. Mahabal posted his first…
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An Interview with Allison Randal
This week, perl.com has the pleasure of interviewing Allison Randal, one of the key figures in the Perl community. Allison has been active in the Perl 6 design process since its inception, and is the President of the Perl…
