Please Don’t Use CGI.pm

CGI.pm in the Bin

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 […]

Professional Programmer is Professional

Professional programmer is professional

(The image above was the first result I got when searching Google Images for a CC-licensed image for “professional programmer”.) Two weeks ago, I wrote about the SEO workshop I’m running on Tuesday morning just before The Perl Conference in Glasgow this August. Today, I’d like to give a few more details about the other […]

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. […]

Timeline Diagrams with Perl

Diagram of the "begat" sequence from Genesis 5

Two weeks ago, I introduced you to my new module SVG::TrafficLight and hinted that there were more SVG-based modules to follow. Today, I’d like to talk about the next one – SVG::Timeline. It all started over a year ago when I was looking through some of the more ridiculous religious questions on Quora when I […]

Drawing Traffic Lights With Perl

Traffic Lights

For a thing (that you may hear more about at some point in the future) I needed diagrams of traffic lights. But Google Image Search didn’t really have what I was looking for. Everything was either too realistic or not CC-licensed so I couldn’t use the images how I wanted. So I decided to do […]