Sunday, January 13, 2008

What's the buzz?

So, what is the Buzz you ask? Funny you should ask. Back in December 2007 (specifically, on the 7th of December, 2007), I was reading the newest entry on the Perl Buzz website. The article was about what the author called, "A Couple of Happy Perl Users". Much to my suprize, the user in the second paragraph was ME! I was taken aback and could not believe it. My blog had gotten mention on Andy Lester's Perl Buzz. How absolutely cool was that?

Well, it made my day yet again when an article I wrote for TheScripts.com was mentioned on Perl Buzz. The article was about how to install Strawberry Perl, a distribution of Perl for Windows. I was overjoyed yet again. The comments on the article began to come in, but they weren't all positive. Since the article was written, you see, Strawberry Perl had released a newer version of their distribution that was based on Perl 5.10. The new version had newer capabilities that the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 version did not. The article that I wrote was based on the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 version and not the 5.10 version, thus, it is not valid for the newer version.

With that discovered, I made a modification to the beginning of the article to mention that it is for the previous version of Strawberry Perl, not the present version. You see, with the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 version, in order to get the CPAN interface working properly, I discovered that I had to install the Windows binary version of some of the Unix tools that were needed by the CPAN interface, and after doing so, all worked fine and still does (since I have not upgraded to 5.10).

In a slight defense to myself though, I did post a comment to the article on Perl Buzz (see comment #3), in order to clear up the confusion that seemed to have ensued. On January 8th, a follow-up article was posted on Perl Buzz that mentioned that the article I wrote was not in accordance with how 5.10 works. I also commented on that and mentioned the version difference. As I mentioned in my comment, I will work on getting the article updated for 5.10 once I have had a chance to update my system.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Happy New Year!!! ( and updates)

Well, it is 2008 and I can well imagine that we are all looking forward to a hopefully wonderful year. Personally, I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish this year and am hopeful that I will get most of them done.

My biggest project of the new year is to finish my home office in the basement. The construction is still at the point of being bare skeleton (framing) with electrical and network wiring in place, but nothing else accomplished. Most of this is due to the young nature of my kids and the allotted time that I have had to work on it, which has been NONE!

I recently decided that I need a nice powerfull desktop machine that will not only last a while, but will be able to do everything that I need to do, and not worry about clicking on something and waiting for hours for it to happen because of all of the other operations going on. So, at the CompUSA going out of business sale, I picked up and new computer case last weekend. I had researched the case want and decided upon and bought the Antec Nine Hundred. Sure, it is labeled as their "gaming" case, but it has the potential for seven internal hard drives. How sweet is that?

To top it all off, I have already scoped out the AMD Phenom Quad Core chip that I want, as well as the Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 motherboard. The motherboard supports up to 16 Gb of ram, and has 6 total Sata connections internally and 2 Sata connections externally, 6 USB ports, 2 firewire, as well as gigabit ethernet (I know, that's almost a standard on motherboards these days). I plan on loading this puppy up with several large hard drives (500+ Gb), DVD writer(s) and also a 650 Watt power supply.

It will take a while to get the parts (money and all, you know), but when its done, WOW!! will it be a sweet machine!

On the flip side, my venture into Python is going very well. There is A LOT to learn about the language and I am still trudging my way through two different texts. The first is the Dive Into Python (DIP) text that is online, and the other is Beginning Python from Apress. Both are great books. DIP is just what it says, a head first dive, right into the language itself. It pulls no punches and gives you what you need to get going in the language. Beginning Python, on the other hand, provides me all of the insight I need to understand the topics that puzzle me. Magnus Lei Hetland (the author) has done a wonderful job at putting all the details into the book. Hopefully soon I can sit down and start producing some code.

Anyway, Happy and Prosperous New Year to all!!!
 
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