Technology
A key part of my plan for Upgrading from Perl 5.8 is the ability to take a perl library installed for one version of perl, and reinstall it for a different version of perl.
To do that you have to know exactly what distributions were installed in the original library. And not just which distributions, but which versions of those distributions.
I’ve a solution for that now. It turned out to be rather harder to solve than I’d thought… Continue reading
Imagine…
I imagine there are lots of people in similar situations.
In this post I want to explore how I’m tackling a similar problem, both for my own benefit and in the hope it’ll be useful to others. Continue reading
The company I work for, TigerLead.com, has another job opening in West LA:
As a Senior Developer, you will be playing a central role in the design, development, and delivery of cutting-edge web applications for one of the most heavily-trafficked network of real estate sites on the web. You will work in a small, collaborative environment with other seasoned pros and with the direct support of the company’s owners and senior management. Your canvas and raw materials include rich data sets totaling several million property listings replenished daily by hundreds of external data feeds. This valuable data and our powerful end-user tools to access it are deployed across several thousand real estate search sites used by more than a million home-buyer leads and growing by 50K+ users each month. The 1M+ leads using our search tools are in turn tracked and cultivated by the several thousand real estate professionals using our management software. This is an outstanding opportunity to see your creations immediately embraced by a large community of users as you work within a creative and supportive environment that is both professional and non-bureaucratic at the same time, offering the positives of a start-up culture without the drama and instability.
If that sounds like interesting work to you then take a look at the full job posting.
TigerLead is a lovely company to work for and this is a great opportunity. Highly recommended.
In this post I’m going to talk about the java2perl6api project. What its goals are, why I think it’s important, how it relates to a Perl 6 DBI, what exists now, what’s needs doing, and how you can help.
Continue reading
Please forgive the title!
Perl has three regular expression match variables ( $& $‘ $’ ) which hold the string that the last regular expression matched, the string before the match, and the string after the match, respectively.
As you’re probably aware, the mere presence of any of these variables, anywhere in the code, even if never accessed, will slow down all regular expression matches in the entire program. (See the WARNING at the end of the Capture Buffers section of the perlre documentation for more information.)
Clearly this is not good.
Continue reading
The name Buzz Moschetti probably isn’t familiar to you. Buzz was the author of the Perl 4 database for Interbase known as Interperl.
Back in those days Perl 5 was barely a twinkle in Larry’s eye and database interfaces for Perl 4 required building a custom perl binary.
Buzz was one of the four people to get the email on September 29th 1992 from Ted Lemon that started the perldb-interest project which defined a specification that ultimately lead to the DBI. (The other people were Kurt Andersen re informix, Kevin Stock re oraperl, and Michael Peppler re sybperl. I joined a few days later.)
Update: It turns out that it was actually Buzz who sent that original email, Ted just forwarded it on to others, including me. So Buzz can be said to have started the process that led to the DBI!
I hadn’t heard from Buzz for many years until he sent me an email recently.
This is his story: Continue reading
In addition to the job vacancy in West LA, the company I work for, TigerLead.com, has an opening for a “skilled developer” in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Our work involves manipulating and warehousing external data feeds and developing web interfaces to create home search tools for prospective buyers and lead management tools for real estate agents. We’re looking for a skilled coder to join our small team of talented engineers in Ann Arbor. We hope to find an experienced programmer who is a good fit with our team, well-versed in multiple languages, able to learn quickly and work independently. We work in a Linux environment, and tools and languages we use include Perl, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and GIT. Perl experience is a significant plus, but your current comfort level with any of these specific tools is less important than overall technical aptitude and ability to learn quickly and fit in well with the current team.
That’s a little thin on details partly because the work is varied. If you think you might be interested, take a look at the full job posting.
TigerLead is a lovely company to work for and this is a great opportunity. Highly recommended.
The company I work for, TigerLead.com, has an opening for a “skilled coder / database wrangler”.
We’re looking for a skilled coder / database wrangler to play a key role within our Operations and Engineering teams. The various responsibilities of the job include working with the large databases underlying our real estate search tools, setting up services for new clients, communicating with clients to evaluate bug reports, troubleshooting technical issues escalated by our client services team, and interfacing with the engineering team on systems maintenance and development. The scope of work that we do involves managing hundreds of external data feeds that feed into in-house databases totaling several million property listings. These listing databases power hundreds of real estate search sites used by more than a million home-buyer leads, who are tracked and cultivated by the thousands of Realtors using our management software. This position is critical to the robustness of these systems.
If that sounds like interesting work to you then take a look at the full job posting.
TigerLead is a lovely company to work for and this is a great opportunity. Highly recommended.
I’ve recently started looking into geocoding in perl. We’re currently using some old hand-coded logic to query the Yahoo Search API. I wanted to switch to Geo::Coder::Yahoo but I noticed that that depended on Yahoo::Search which hadn’t been updated since March 2007 and had accumulated a number of bug reports (which may well be closed by the time you read this).
Several related to the fact that Yahoo::Search didn’t handle Unicode properly when using its default internal XML parser (instead of the optional XML::Simple which does the right thing, but slowly).
What happened next makes a nice little example of getting things done in the Open Source world… Continue reading
Where I’m working at the moment we’re using the Yahoo Geocoding API but aren’t very happy with it. I’ve been asked to look into how we can improve our geo coding.
Not this... 