Caleb Cushing's Blog Also known as XenoTerraCide

Teaching Perl - Part 0 - Preface

This is my 2 cents on how perl should be getting taught at my school. My school’s curriculum sucks in general across the board. But assuming I can’t change what classes are taught, when and what prerequisites this is how I would teach perl given the current computer science curriculum.Since people reading this are probably not familiar with the Fail that is Baker College(I would not choose Baker if I had to start again but credits don’t transfer easily, so it was easier to continue on with it).

Unpaid volunteer work is a job

So the common misconception in the open source community is, “I don’t get paid, I don’t have to do it”. Actually, it’s not a misconception, you’re absolutely right, you don’t have to, you can stop, leave, go away. It’s also well know that FOSS software is without warranty or guaranteed support. But by the vary nature of being a volunteer you are offering to do a job for free. No? have you tried working for a volunteer organization and telling your boss there “I don’t have to do it because I’m not paid”.

Say Perl

SayPerllaunched yesterday. It’s essentially aggregated perl blogs translated through google’s translation service into english. Very awesome. 3 things could make it better.1) An atom/rss feed 2) instead of clicking on ‘spanish’ and listing all the feeds that were written in spanish… click on spanish (or make it espanol) and have it show all the feeds translated into spanish.3) It’s newest post is a while ago… so it’s update speed could be a bit better.

Perl Blogger annoyances

So I love Iron Man and people who blog perl. But I’ve got some complaints. No Language Specific Feeds. I’m not discriminating against people of foreign languages I want a Russian only feed as much as an English only. I just can’t read it, and I’d rather not have it in my feed. So I’m using Dagolden’s English only Feed. This feed doesn’t work 100% right however, see next.

Bad Customer Service from T-Mobile

So about 2 months ago I got fed up with Sprint (they suck for different reasons) and I already knew that they had better service coverage than Verizon in my area. My friend suggested T-Mobile, so I went and got setup with them for a 14 day trial period. I took the phone made some calls tried the web browser, I didn’t like the blackberry itself, but that’s besides the point.

my git remote

So occasionally I like to fork a project on GitHubwell the proper way to do it is to use GitHub’s fork button which then clone’s the repo into your account. this is great! I can than clone that locally develop it an push to it. Usually I do this push with git push origin. I can then ask the owner of the original repo that I forked from to ‘pull’ my changes in.

Managing CPAN on Arch Linux

So if you’re running Arch Linux and want to install a bunch of packages from CPAN the best way is NOT to use the official cpan client, or even the new cpanminus. No your best bet is to use AUR or lacking AUR packages, create your own, and I’m gonna walk you through how I do it. The really nice thing about installing packages with Pacman is that unlike cpan there is a utility to uninstall them.

Iron Man and introductions

So I’ve decided to “compete” in the Iron Man competition.My name is Caleb Cushing, I’m a 25 year old, unemployed, student, living in the Greater Lansing, MI, USA, area. I’ve been programming perl for approximately 6 months. This includes a lot of off time, time to relearn the language from the class I took a couple years ago (and learn modern perl), learning Catalyst and DBIC, all of which is an ongoing process.

How not to ask for help

This is the story of my friends problem today. I got one for ya. Field like field so of course I’m like: “? is that a question? he had given me no prelude, no premise. response I tried field like ‘%’ + field2 + ‘%’ No good though So I explained that % is a wildcard. He still hadn’t explained what his problem is or what he was trying to do.

You should have hired me! ( just a vent )

So this is about the 10th time my friend has asked me for help on a SQL (w/ SQL Server) problem. I Actually interviewed with his company at one point and they elected not to hire me. Why? because I have never found windows errors useful, have therefore never used its logging facility, and was unable to answer questions about it. I’m was UNIX guy then and am now. But I’m still better at figuring out problems on software I’ve never even used, with only about 1/10th of the information that I need.