JDPFu.com 2025

As I relearn Perl OO programming, there are a few changes or improvements
that have been added since the last time I was programming in perl full-time. In the old days, we manually wrote our OO code in perl and liked it. We didn’t know any better. These days we have helper modules to remove the need to re-write over and over many of the same OO code elements thanks to Moose, Mouse, Moo and Mo.

Hopefully, my ignorance doesn’t detract from the data below.

Our friend Steve over at My Linux Rig did a review on Gnome 3 and OpenSUSE 12.

Read an article over at LH earlier this week that convinced me to buy some more backup storage before the price hikes rippled through the external storage market like they already had for the internal HDD market. What? you ask? The price for internal drives has change from $65 to $129 for a slow 1.5TB 3.5" disk since the flooding in Thailand. Some of the non-tech specific retailers haven’t changed their prices to reflect the coming HDD shortage, so getting some storage to fill your needs for the next 6-12 months might be a good idea.

The Checklist

1. Stable / Works Every Time
2. Automatic
3. Different Storage Media
4. Fast
5. Efficient
6. Secure
7. Versioned
8. Offsite / Remote
9. Restore Tested

When you are looking for a total backup solution, those are the things you want from it.

A few months ago, I did an interview over at My Linux Rig. It was recently published.

There are many different levels of “learning linux”, just like there are many different levels in “learning” any OS. My Mom has been a Linux user for over a year now. I don’t recall there being any “learning curve” for her. She told me that last time I visited that it was easier than WinXP for her. She’s running Lubuntu, though she doesn’t know or care about that.

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.

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.