Developer Notes

Some adventures in software development...

Perl

Using Graphviz to automatically generate diagrams of schemas for databases such as Postgresql:

Graphviz::DBI::General

Random selection for esthetic purposes (e.g. a series of "random" images):

Esthetic Randomness

A talk about using a perl test framework on external processes, including GUI code (e.g. the "colors" method of Image::Magick and the experimental Image::BoxFind module):

Using Perl to Test Everything

Slides for a lightning talk about hacking files of constant definitions:

Constant Amusement

A lightning talk in progress:

What I like about Object-Oriented Programming

An introduction to the perl debugger:

An Introduction to the Perl Debugger

Once around the block with the current crop of pod to html converters (a recommendation for Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch).

Pod to Html

Example of a quick, no-brainer method of getting data persistance via a tied hash:

Simple Tied Hashes

Tools

Version Control

The Joys of RCS (with vc.el)

Piecing together a simple system using timeclock and timeclock-x for:

Time Tracking in Emacs

Admin

Debian Linux

Two-Faced: Setting up a Simple Linux Firewall

System Administration in Self-Defense: Disk Backup Strategies

Emacs Lisp

A table of elisp constructs that are roughly equivalent to some perl constructs:

Emacs Lisp for Perl Programmers

Also some slight criticisms of emacs lisp can be found here:

The Whinery

A GNU emacs extension for editing "rectangular paragraphs"

rectpara.el

A series of three articles on writing customized user input routines with tailored auto-completion behavior:

Prompting for new file creation, part 1

Prompting for new file creation, part 2

Prompting for new file creation, part 3

As an example, these use the "perlnow.el" package that I wrote:

perlnow.el.