JDPFu.com 2025

For all you fellow Perl lovers, Chromatic has posted an update to the old Modern Perl book. Get the 2011-2012 version there.

I haven’t read the new version yet, but have dropped it onto my tablet for those times when stuck waiting someplace. It should be considered alpha, so expect typos at this point. Read it for the ideas, not to copy/paste code.

Perl Dancer WebApp Framework

If you would like to use a really solid, web-app creation, perl module, I can completely recommend Perl Dancer. Wrote a little server a few months ago and it has been running non-stop without issues all this time. It makes the simple things trivial and … well, I’ve only done simple things so far. ;) That entire app (including the DBIx backend) is only 350 lines of code. Modern Perl rocks.

Today I needed to reboot my main desktop to prevent a stupid setup of processes from running. I'm working on a presentation about a backup tool and had kicked off a snapshot. A large number of processes were running, so rather than hunt them all down, I decided that a reboot would be the easiest answer. I don't reboot this desktop very often – perhaps once a month – so changes made last week or earlier don't always sit in my mind as being all that important, especially changes made to a daemon used for authentication to other systems. Should something like that really prevent a local GDM-based login from working? Before 30 minutes ago, I didn't think so.

In Windows Media Center, 7MC, and probably earlier versions, you can change the filenames created for recorded TV shows to be something more useful. This may not be new information to you, but it was to me.

Sorry for delving off F/LOSS topics again.

So I was reading a blog over at ZDNet about why some guy had decided to switch back to Windows from Linux for his server. He says he was ranting, so I'll cut him a little slack. I'm certain the David is a smart guy. I'm not certain he is very smart when it comes to UNIX/Linux administration. He seems to have expected that MS-Windows administration skills transfer 1-for-1 to Linux. They do not. Improper expectations.

For the last 5 yrs or so, I've been using a group of tools to process TV recordings to remove commercials and then convert them from MPEG into something more efficient for storage.  Complicated scripts were used to feed the inputs and outputs between the different tools; going from the recorded format – mpeg2 – comskip – cutter – transcoder – closed caption dumper – container.  A $46 upgrade to one of the existing tools has changed most of that.  The best part is that subtitles and closed captions aren't harmed and the audio track to be included in the output file can be selected.  WTVConverter.exe doesn't let us select the audio track. Usually, that isn't a problem, but sometimes it really is.

Almost every week, I see the same question asked on different technology websites. That question, "How should I learn to program X?" Below I'll attempt to provide a considered answer that question. Other people will have different answers.

In my research for the last article on USB storage and KVM clients, I came across a few articles that should improve disk performance.

I also decided to tweak some HDD performance parameters. The commands used and results are below. If you have a disk array, you probably want to tune the parameters to increase read performance. My RAID setup saw a 41% disk read improvement. That’s pretty impressive for 20 minutes of effort. If you just have single disks, the default settings seemed fine and didn’t make much difference on my machines, but for many others there are big differences. Performance tests for SATA, PATA, Laptops, USB and RAID disks were performed.

Below are links to those articles, my performance tests and scripts for different systems, and my final tuning decisions based on those tests.

After getting Windows7 Media Center running in a KVM Virtual Machine a few weeks ago, I’ve been mostly happy … except that the Recorded TV/ folder available it too small.

USB2 Storage

In an attempt to provide more room for these recordings, I created a 388MB raw disk on an external USB2 disk and attempted to add that to the virtual machine through virt-manager. At this point, I’m unsure why it doesn’t work, just that at VM startup, it fails. Removing the 2nd virtio disk from the VM and the client starts without issue.

Dennis Ritchie has died.

Mr. Ritchie was a major contributer to the invention of the UNIX operating system and the inventor of the C Programming Language on which many other programming languages are based. If you have an electronic device with firmware, it is probably programmed in C. Almost every modern operating system is also programmed in C. C is one of the most efficient and most portable computer languages available. Almost every computer has a C compiler available.

Hello World

This Hello World program was provided in the first edition of the K&R book about C in 1978.

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

The world would be a very different place without this man. It is sad that most people have never heard his name.

It happened again to another website. Their password database was stolen. The entire DB. At least they were encrypting user passwords in some way. That will slow down the crackers, a little, but in the end, almost all those passwords will be known. My readers know that only the longest passwords will be safe, for now.

If you run a website, it can happen to you too. Can you Prevent this from happening? Probably.