netCUBED Blog

Hi,

I was looking for a way to add all files with certain extensions to a subversion repository.

After reading the find manual I came up with this neat line:

find -name *.pm -o -name *.t -exec svn add '{}' \;

This line adds all files with extensions *.pm and *.t to the svn. All subdirectories are included.

I needed to draw some charts using gnuplot. Downloading and installing as usual (configure, make, make install) led to a lot of errors. So I looked around and found this solution:

# ./configure –with-readline=builtin

If you need PDF support you have to install pdflib first:

# sudo port install pdflib
# ./configure –with-readline=builtin --with-pdf=/usr/local/lib/pdflib-config

You need to have MacPorts installed.

And that was it. You can now run gnuplot from the command line and create beautiful charts.

As a Perl programmer I prefer to do everything I want in that language. Since I decided to run a blog and was wondering what blog engine I should use. The easiest way would have been to sign up at blogger.com or similar services but I want to host my stuff on my own.

I searched the net and of course CPAN for a blogging engine based on Perl. The only one I came up with was Angerwhale. I read through the CPAN pods and looked at blog.jrock.us to see it in action. It seemed pretty nice and I decided to give it a try.

I read the README file, ran “perl Makefile.PL” and “make test” as I was supposed to do. There were some unmet dependencies, of course. Many of them failed to install unfortunately. After spending a lot of time installing all of them manually (most of them needed additional development packages from debian) I was almost there.

Three to go: Catalyst::View::Jemplate. That damn thing wouldn’t install because most of the tests failed. As it turned out it was the fault of the latest Jemplate upgrade which made some changes to its API. A dev release of Jemplate fixed that problem, but that’s not the way it is supposed to work.

Two to go: Test::WWW::Mechanize. Tests failed. Both on my system and most of the CPAN testers’. Seems like a libwww release breaks these tests.

One more to go: Kate. This is a syntax highlighting engine. Angerwhale uses it to format and color code passages. It failed to install as well. There is a fix for that problem but this patch is 4 month old! Why didn’t the maintainer apply that patch and push a new release to cpan?

At that point I was pretty sick and tired of trying to force install or patch any more modules.

After rethinking this whole blog thing I visited wordpress.com.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
unp latest.tar.gz
lynx http://localhost/wordpress

Well, and after entering db user / password etc. I had my blog up and running.

There might have been some coincidences and bad timing but after all I must say that installing wordpress took me about 5min. Not installing Angerwhale took me more than an hour.

Wordpress does a great job and it just works. It’s just sad that there is no such success story with a perl written blog engine.

Inspired by this blog post by Jonathan Rockway I decided to be a “little noisier”. So here is my blog where I will talk about things like Perl, JavaScript, software engineering, Mac OS X and anything else which comes to my mind.

Regarding Perl I will focus on Catalyst, DBIC, HTML::FormFu and AJAX related topics. And that’s where JavaScript jumps in. I did some work using the fabulous ExtJS framework and will write about that in combination with all the above named modules.

I hope I can interest some people in reading my blog.