RasterWeb!Anyone interested in attending the Chicago Perl Hackathon happening Nov. 10th/11th, 2006?
I’d be willing to drive from Milwaukee. I’m not sure I’d spend the night, but I’ve got Saturday totally open and would at least spend the day there…
Just because I can’t participate in BarCampEarth, doesn’t mean I can’t participate in BarCampEarth…
A few months back, my pals at Z2 Marketing gave me an old Mac, so my challenge became “what can I do with it?” You might remember such projects as MacKiosk which was a photo kiosk built using an old Apple Workgroup Server 80. Well, this is Kiosk2 , which is built using an old PowerComputing PowerCenter 150. Ten years ago this was a killer workstation, featuring a 150 MHz PowerPC 604 processor. Nowadays it’s almost useless…
A little MacPerl magic, a copy of the always exellent JPEGView, and an AppleScript applet to kick things into gear, and we’ve got our kiosk!
So what about BarCampEarth? Well, I built this thing to use at BarCampMilwaukee, the idea being we set it up and as people upload and tag photos with "barcampmilwaukee" they will appear on the screen. So since this weekend is BarCampEarth, we decided to test it all using the tag "barcampearth"
So far it’s working ok. There is a weird flicker when the images load, so I’ll have to work on that, and in earlier testing I’ve had the Mac lock-up on me, but a reboot fixes that problem. Old hardware put to good use… hooray!
MadMongers is the Madison Area Perl Mongers group, and they’ve got a nice site over at madmongers.org…
Of course I missed the meeting, but I guess 20 Perl Mongers showed up, which sounds like a pretty good turnout.
Anyway, if you’re near Madison, and a Perl hacker, hit one of their meetings, they seem like a nice group. (Heck, that Andy Lester guy is even a member!)
Face it, even though Excel is a spreadsheet, the vast majority of users think it’s a database. Sure, why not? It’s got columns and rows and you can type data into it. Isn’t that what a database is?
In the olden days it was common to let people think this way, and then just dump the data out to a tab-delimited file and use Perl to rip through it. That was the olden days, because now we’re used to the new days, and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
The Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module makes it pretty easy, and those people can keep sticking their data into Excel, and we’ll keep right on ripping it out with Perl. (Thanks Kawai Takanori!)
Even after all these years, when PHP and Java got bigger and stronger, and Ruby showed up and what not, Perl is still a great language for processing text and data, mainly due to the huge amount of useful modules available.
I needed to add some captcha foo to a Perl CGI I was writing, so I took a look at the Authen::Captcha module, which looked pretty simple, but, wait… requires GD, which requires the GD Library, which requires… you get the picture.
Luckily I found a guide titled: Compiling GD on Mac OS X HOWTO, which I followed, and which failed for me. (I did get newer versions of zlib and FreeType, but the rest matched up.) Once again, GD got me. After repeated attempts and failures (it was a long day) I finally realized that libtool was tripping me up. See, there is this bit:
% cd ../gd-2.0.33 % ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool % ./configure
But after running the ./configure my symlink to libtool had been replaced by a file named libtool. This was easily fixed by running ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool again after running ./configure like so:
% cd ../gd-2.0.33 % ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool % ./configure % ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
I am running Mac OS X 10.3.9, and I’m not sure what else is different, I’m just documenting what I had to do. Anyway, I’ve now got GD installed, as well as Authen::Captcha and I can now attempt to determine if someome is a robot or a real human being. (Or at the least, discriminate against those with accessibility issues. Apologies to Bender…)
(Thanks to Matías Giovannini for writing the guide.)