Liveblogging Perl Mongers ....

My friend, Mark Senn, is presenting at Perl Mongers on the topic of A Perl::Critic Complaint. Like, right now.

For the first time, I'm liveblogging.

"I never use it because it's such a pain."

On use strict: "You can't do anything automatically."

Quoting Larry Wall: "Different things should look different. Similar things should look similar. I agree with them. '&&' and 'and' look different and are different. ... Why is Perl::Critic warning me about this?"

"I want it to do what I want, out of the box!"

That's it.

Mulling a coming book review ....

(It is wrong to start a post with a parenthetical, but I am doing so anyway. I hate the phrasing "as a member of ...., I". I try hard to avoid using it. So I fumble over it on occasonally.)

I'm a member of my local Perl Mongers group, and our Perl Mongers group is a member of the O'Reilly User Group program. O'Reilly sends out copies of books to groups for review so that their name gets spread. For any abstract technical issue, the first book I will reach for is an O'Reilly. So, I was offered a free book for the price of reviewing it.

And abstract it is. Beautiful Code is about writing code that is more than functional, more than elegant, into the realm of the beautiful.

Whatever that means.

Which I will find out, and express to you.

Many, however, will be surprised to find that "Perl" and "Beautiful Code" to be referenced in the same book without negation.

Commenting on Text Email ...

The last post was posted via email from my phone. And boy, is my thumb tired. </rimshot>

Today, the mobile phone is a data center, with the talking taking a minor part. I got religion on texting at Disneyland, when I tried to hook up with the rest of the family. We had agreed to meet at the statue of Mickey and Walt at the center of the park. Unfortunately, that's when everyone else in the world, including the Parade, planned to be, too. We tried to call, but connections were sketchy and everything was loud, so we couldn't hear. So, I texted them, they replied, and we met up.

Since then, I've had texting as the core of my mobile data center.

I'm a Verizon user. I haven't really tried the others, so I don't know the details. I do know that sending your cameraphone pictures to your email is a better bet than using their Pix site.

If you have mail on a UNIX machine you have procmail on, even better:


:0
* ^From: xxxxxxxxxx@vzwpix.com
{
:0 c
| ~/Procmail/handle_cameraphone_shots.pl
:0
mailfromphone
}


That's all it takes to pipe your pics into a program to unpack 'em. (They're MIME attachments. Like I said, it's all just email.)

And what's in handle_cameraphone_shots.pl?


use MIME::Parser ;
my $parser = new MIME::Parser ;
$parser->output_under('/home/jacoby/www/Cell/') ;
my $entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN) or die qq{parse failed\n} ;
$entity->dump_skeleton ;


I'm a Perl geek, but I am sure something similar is possible in Python, Ruby or your other favorite dynamic language.

texting is fundamentally email, but

texting is fundamentally email, but with a simplified interface. If you go Verizon, yr address is xxxxxxxxxx@vtext.com.