Perl

In my previous post regarding PerlCatalyst tutorial setup I mentioned about setting up a virtual machine inside a virtual machine. I didn’t provide you with much information regarding how I did it because all the tutorials related to that is already available online. Pasting the links below: Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial::01_Intro But I had a serious problem with my virtual box inside a virtual box. Not so serious actually, just that it stopped me from proceeding ahead because of my ignorance of network configuration. The tutorial says that after downloading the virtual machine for the tutorial and setting it up as mentioned in the website, I could start using it as a server and log into it using ssh from my host computer. But for some reason the VM (virtual machine) provided by Catalyst just had a loopback network configuration. It wouldn’t show me a proper ip address to which I could connect to. And hence I had no way of connecting to this new tutorial virtual machine that I started from within an Ubuntu Virtual machine. I played around with the network configuration of VBox for a couple of hours trying out the different settings provided: ...

I was trying to explore more about how and where Perl is used on the web. I figured out that there are a lot of web frameworks that are based on Perl. Catalyst seems to be a nice MVC framework that is really popular. I thought I’d take some time off to learn more about it. And I downloaded all the necessary packages and modules and then went on to check out the tutorial which is posted here: Catalyst Tutorial. I am already using Ubuntu on a virtual machine. My laptop came pre-loaded with Windows 8. And I’ve upgraded it to Windows 8.1. I always wanted to own a Linux laptop. But thinking about the lack of availability of games, I chose Windows over Linux. But I still can’t avoid using Linux as I always use it at work. Though recently I made a move to a windows based development team, which still has some code on non-windows based boxes. ...

Ever wondered how to install a Perl module from CPAN: sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install ModuleName'

I don’t know if you have ever wondered where a module that you have been using is installed. Working in a corporate with multiple operating systems and having to maintain data update systems on multiple platforms that run on Perl based scripts, you might have to make sure that the CPAN modules you use are of the same versions, to keep your code portable. So recently I ran across one of these problems and came up with some interesting solutions as suggested by my colleague. I didn’t understand what I was doing at the time. So I took a break and tried to understand how I actually got to know what it was. ...

When I first heard that term, I was worried. I felt ashamed of myself for not knowing it. After all I’ve been writing Perl scripts for almost 3 years now. And I still don’t know what that means. But finally I accepted that computer science is too vast to know everything about everything. You learn it as you get through it. So apparently: Autovivification is the name for what happens when you attempt to assign a nonexistant entry of a hash; Perl actually creates the missing hash entry for the key you specified. You might not have intended that to happen. But Perl does exactly that. I’ve recently seen a bug in my new team because of this very feature or curse of Perl. And it did take a long time for them figure out the root cause of the problem. Because Perl doesn’t complain when this happens. This is more of a logical error than a compile time or run time error. Hence too hard to find. ...