Category: Programming
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Please Don’t Use CGI.pm
Earlier this week, the Perl magazine site, perl.com, published an article about writing web applications using CGI.pm. That seemed like a bizarre choice to me, but I’ve decided to use it as an excuse to write an article explaining why I think that’s a really bad idea. It’s important to start by getting some definitions…
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Fixing a Bug
I fixed a bug earlier this week. Ok, actually, I introduced a bug and then spent the next few hours tracking it down and fixing it – but that doesn’t sound quite so positive, does it? I thought it might be interesting to talk you through the bug and the fix. I should point out…
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Line of Succession
I’m a republican. No… wait… come back! That’s not what I mean. I’m a long way from being a supporter of the Republican Party. I mean “republican” in its older meaning of “someone who thinks their country should be a republic. That is to say, I’m not a big fan of the British royal family.…
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I Wrote Some Perl
Ok, yes, I’ve been writing Perl for over twenty years. But Perl 5.26 was released this week and for the first time, my name is mentioned in the release notes. Because I have not one, but two fixes in this release of Perl. The first is this commit which fixes a piece of documentation to…
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Shaving Last.FM Yaks
Long-time readers might remember that I once had a bit of an obsession with aggregating web feeds on sites that I called “planets”. I wrote Perlanet to make this job easier and I registered the domain theplanetarium.org to host these planets. The planets I built were of varying levels of usefulness – but of all…