Parsing Arguments in Perl
Introduction Throughout my years of working with Perl, I have come across several different ways to parse command-line options. I decided to write an article describing some of the methods as well as some pros and cons to each method. Here are five of them.
Perl Development
Introduction After finishing my Python Development article, I was curious as to how I could create a better Perl development environment for myself. Why Perl? I first learned Perl in 1997 when I was a Sophomore in High School. It has stuck ever since. No matter what other language I learn or focus on, I’m [...]
Perl Virtual Environments
Introduction One nice tool for Python is virtualenv. It allows you to create sandboxed Python library repositories and enable them and disable them at will. By utilizing this, you are able to work on separate projects that can each have their own individual environment and not affect other environments. Perl has something similar called local::lib. [...]
Python Development
Introduction I first learned Python back in 2004-2005. I thought it was a great language and I loved programming and scripting with it. Then in 2007 I took on a job as a Windows systems administrator. The environment had no use for Python so I stopped using it. A month ago I decided to pick [...]
Django and OpenID
Introduction OpenID is a technology that can be used to allow a single account to log into many different OpenID-enabled web sites. Both developers and users benefit from this: the user does not have to create a new account for each site he or she visits and the developer does not have to worry about [...]
Soft Deleting with Django
Introduction Normally when a piece of information is deleted, it is gone forever. Unless you have a backup copy, you will have to manually recreate the information. “Soft deleting” is a method that will simply mark the information as inactive instead of performing an actual delete. Since storage space is cheap and abundant, soft deleting [...]
Modifying Vixie Cron for Fun
Introduction Cron is an essential *nix package that silently runs in the background running scheduled jobs. The most common version of cron is Vixie Cron. Coincidentally Vixie Cron is also the most vanilla version — it doesn’t provide any flashy features that other variants have, just the ability to read from a crontab and run [...]
Making a Plain Website
Introduction For the past few years, Unix Mages was running on WordPress. The site has not changed in over two years as I was no longer writing content for it. So instead of leaving a stale and possibly insecure WordPress installation on the web, I decided to turn it into an old fashioned static website.
My Zend_Acl Implementation
Introduction It seems everyone, myself included, has a bit of a hard time first grasping Zend_Acl. For the time being, I’ve settled on a simple solution. It’s party based on the solution given in the Zend Framework in Action book. I hope you get some use out of it.
How I Deploy Websites
Introduction I’ve gotten into the habit of using a Virtual Machine to develop my websites. The VM mimics the production server as much as possible so there are little-to-no changes that need made when the site is moved to production. To move a site from the development server to the production one, I wanted a [...]