About Perl’s Binding Operator
This piece is as much an aide de memoire for myself as anything else but putting it here seems worthwhile if it answers questions for others. The binding operators, =~ or !~, come in handy when you are framing conditional statements in Perl using Regular Expressions, for example, testing whether x =~ /\d+/ or not. [...]
Scripting
ImageMagick and Ubuntu 9.04
Using a command line tool like ImageMagick for image processing may sound a really counter-intuitive thing to do but there’s no need to do everything on a case by case interactive basis. Image resizing and format conversion come to mind here. Helper programs are used behind the scenes too with Ghostscript being used to create [...]
Are ten seconds enough?
Fasthosts, the hosting provider for what you find here has, in their wisdom, decided to limit the execution time for ASP scripts to 15 seconds and 10 seconds for any others. I haven’t used Perl sufficiently in this shared hosting set up to determine how that is affected. In contrast, I can share my experiences [...]
Ubuntu upgrades: do a clean installation or use Update Manager?
Part of some recent “fooling” brought on by the investigation of what turned out to be a duff DVD writer was a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.10 on my main home PC. It might have brought on a certain amount of upheaval but it was nowhere near as severe as that following the same sort [...]
Harnessing the power of ImageMagick
Using the command line to process images might sound senseless but the tools offered by ImageMagick certainly prove that it has its place. I have always been wary of using bulk processing for my digital photo files (some digitised from film prints with a scanner) but I do agree that some of it is needed to free up [...]
JavaScript: write it yourself or use a library?
I must admit that I have never been a great fan of JavaScript. For one thing, its need to interact with browser objects places you at the mercy of the purveyors of such pieces of software. Debugging is another fine art that can seem opaque to the the uninitiated since the amount and quality of [...]