I am currently interested in Perl even though I am not really a programmer. I know Fortran though and I claim I can learn any language in 2 days. This belief has been put to serious test when I started reading a C book (Pointers on C) and then I put my project of learning C on hold. Perl is easier though (well, it's easier to start, but then this idea that assignments depend on contexts gives me the creeps - a beginner should rather get error messages).
- My first perl project was to write the patch WikiPatches/GetAdminBar. I think it is k00l, but I wrote it without actually knowing anything about perl.
- Hence I decided to buy "Learning Perl"; two days later I wrote my first decent program, a data managing program that I use for my real job. I could have used stata more efficiently I guess, but then I wouldn't have had a chance to use my job to lear Perl :-).
- Then I wrote WikiPatches/GetReferersBar. The idea is to implement something you can see at Everything2: have on each page a links bar that displays its most frequent referers.
And now my own personal diary in reverse cronological order
7/8/2002 I sort of gave up Perl and now I'm doing Postnuke (http://www.postnuke.com) plugins coding and bug fixing in PHP.
1/9/2002 Nothing much new I am overwhelmed about things to do for my real job. Not much perl programming in the next few weeks.
12/22 I have looked into how diff is done and played with diff -u which gives a much more understandable output. I think I can do it but I'd have to dig around a lot more. Plus I found out that I have to present a paper at a conference I was just planning to attend, so more real work for me and no playing with perl. Oh well. Ah I also got an email from CliffordAdams. Kool. Seems like he liked my WikiPatches/GetReferersBar.
- yes, I like the way Cliff takes the effort to respond to work that is posted on this site. This was one of the two main reasons I chose UseModWiki rather than one of the other WikiClones. -RiVer
12/10 I am almost ready to pick up another project, but I have 2 ideas. One is to implement a RequestedPages? feature. Shouldn't take too long. The other is to have diffs between versions. That is a harder task as it is still obscure to me how and where diffs are computed (I'm not even sure where versions are stored).
12/9 I have read man perlreftut and I am glad perl can have arrays or arrays arrays of hashes, etc...etc... Thanks RiVer for the tip. I'll get to my WikiPatches/GetReferersBar and simplify the code asap. I glanced man perlref which is not so bad after reading perlreftut.
12/9 I have found the following line on my webserver's log:
203.167.214.178 - - [08/Dec?/2001:21:07:27 -0600] "GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00%u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0" 400 328
that's really weird, it doesn't seem to point to anything. Any clue?
- Yup. Not good news, though: http://www.apacheweek.com/features/codered --RobertBrook
- Luckily, I am running Apache. I'm thinking... why did the codered Hackers put such a recognizable request; you'd think that a less strange string would have attracted fewer suspicions. --ElMoro
12/7 I must say I like perl but a few things annoy me big time.
- I can't seem to remember those semicolons
- I hate it to find workarounds for not being able to write arrays of arrays
- I must have tried a thousand times to write hashes as arguments of subroutines. Nope it will never work.
you need to pass in the reference to the hash, and then deref inside the sub - best place to start reading is man perlreftut followed (if you feel brave) by man perlref --RiVer (and by the way the idea is the same as passing in the pointer to a struct in C, so the ideas will be useful to your C when you resume it, just the ideas - the actual syntax is very different)
- The statement if ($string1 == $string2) does not say what you think. Trust me. That shit put me into hell twice already. But I won't do it again. ''
- maybe $string1 eq $string2 is more like what yu meant?''
- you got it man, I didn't want to reveal it because I'm evil :-)
12/6 Evening first beta version is out. Looks good. WikiPatches/GetReferersBar . Test it at http://spooky.econ.umn.edu/cgi-bin/testwiki.pl
12/6 Hey the project is basically done. I need to fix a few glitches and it's ready for testing. Unbelievable. Sometimes I surprise myself.
12/4 Today I figured out how to get the referer and display a link to the referer on the GotoBar. Pretty trivial stuff, except that I had to actually understand a bit about the UseModWiki code before actually getting anything useful.
hi
ElMoro,
got your note - will have a proper look when I get time (my time for my own wiki mods is getting squeezed at present). Nothing major jumps out in a five minute whizz through, except that there now clearly exist parts of Clifford's code which you know better than I do :) and don't think of me as a Perl expert, I only started Perling a few weeks before you did.
best regards,
RiVer
ps, how did Andrea become "El" - just curious, River
- "El" means "The" in venetian dialect. Sometimes my friends call me that way.
Obvious really. Just so long as they don't confuse it with Cyrillic script, where an M is pronounced as a T <wink> --R
- Actually, in Cyrillic the little m-sign itself is a "T". M is M and small M is still pronounced M. Just the glyphs are different. -- UrbanSheep
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