PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

The Learning Perl, 6th Edition (O'Reilly) book review had the distinction of being iProgrammer's most popular  review of 2011, between more than 250 reviews on a vast variety of subjects with thousands of reads each, but the Perl review reached top spot with 10,800 reads (figure untill 29/12/2011) The benefit is that it exposed the language to a wide audience, since the site appeals to a general programming public from C# to Javascript, therefore I do hope that it managed to attract "new blood" and/or converts !

Read it on blogs.perl.org

Review on i-programmer

Read article on i-programmer

An interview with Roy Hann

There was a very interesting proble set forward at the Ingres forum, quoting : "I have to use an Ingres Database to store my data which is in several languages (like french, german, and so on). In my web site, the user can use the function "search". The problem are the special characters like éàèâ in french, or öäü in german. The user doesn't enter these characters, but it should be found anyway. For example:   In the database is the word "château". The user types "chateau" (whithout â) The program should find the "château", even if "chateau" was typed. So all accents in the database should be replaced by something more useful (like "_")  Has someone an idea how to do that? Ingres database version : 9.2.1    Thanks a lot, Kakmael"  and this is my attempt to tackle it,using Perl,of course Ok you so you get the latin1 encoded string "Chateu" from your web form and you pa...

Review on i-programmer

An article on why you should start learning Perl and at the same time the book review of Learning  Perl 6th edition At i-programmer : In Praise of Perl and the Llama

There is an offiicial patch for the bug released now by Roderich Schupp : "fix is rev 1257 in PAR::Packer's Subversion repo and will be in the next relase of PAR::Packer"

Book review at iProgrammer : Beginning C# Object-Oriented Programming

Building an executable with Strawberry Perl is successful but when actually running it (after we have renamed the c:/strawberry to c:/strawberryX so it cannot find the dependencies from the path), fails with the following errors : " Can't locate loadable object for module IO in @INC (@INC contains: CODE(0xa1d31c ) C:\strawberry\perl\vendor\lib .) at C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/PAR/Heavy.pm l ine 103 Compilation failed in require at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/IO/Handle.pm line 266. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/IO/Handle.pm line 26 6. Compilation failed in require at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/IO/Seekable.pm line 101. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/IO/Seekable.pm line 101. Compilation failed in require at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/IO/File.pm line 133. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/IO/File.pm line 133. Compilation failed in require at -e line 351. " I am on WinXP SP3 ,PAR 1.002,PAR...

I've just published a news piece on the UKIUA Conference on iProgrammer which also includes an overview of Ingres as a company as well as the RDBMS

Perl 5.14, this year's stable release of the Perl 5 language, is the first in the planned series of annual time-based releases announced last year. From the Perl developer's point of view it has several important features. This article takes a look at what's new and valuable.

C# in Depth, 2nd Ed book review at iProgrammer

In this iProgrammer article we explore how to turn a single threaded Perl/Tk GUI application into a multi-threaded one; examining the steps, the obstacles and the benefits. Along the way we cover concepts such as callbacks, events, windows messages, thread affinity, thread safety and more.

Just finished reviewing Pro DLR in .NET 4.0. Book review at i-programmer

Just released an article on  i-programmer called Unicode issues regarding the Window OS file system and their handling from Perl Intro : " Unicode is supposed to make character handling easy, but living with a legacy system that uses multibyte encoding makes things complicated. This article looks at  the real world of Perl Unicode integration and exposes a set of problems that also occurs in other languages and systems. "

I wanted to set up a2ps 4.14 on an old SCO Unix machine (which suprsingly had a gcc compiler installed) for Transforming Ingres' legacy reports with PostScript  Before you set up a2ps, you have to set gperf up first. Its installation  was a breeze, so I assumed that a2ps would install easily too.....However that was not the case; when reaching the 'make' phase I was getting the following error : Making all in lib make all-am Making all in src make all-am /bin/ksh ../libtool --tag=CC --mode=link gcc -g -O2 -o a2ps main.o read.o sshread.o ssheet.o select.o generate.o delegate.o regex.o buffer.o ve rsions.o ffaces.o version-etc.o long-options.o parsessh.o lexssh.o lexps.o sh eets-map.o ../lib/liba2ps.la -lm gcc -g -O2 -o a2ps main.o read.o sshread.o ssheet.o select.o generate.o delegate .o regex.o buffer.o versions.o ffaces.o version-etc.o long-options.o parsessh.o lexssh.o lexps.o sheets-map.o ../lib/.libs/liba2ps.a -lm  ...