Month: December 2005

Perl modules of the day

I’ve been doing a whole lot of Perl recently. Because of that, I spent a lot of time at CPAN. As a result, I came across a few excellent modules that I didn’t know about before. Here is a round-up for you:

  • Devel::ebug – Perl debugger, than can be used from the web and from the scripts.
  • Class::DBI::Sweet – some really useful stuff for Class::DBI users.
  • DBIx::Class::CDBICompat – compatibility layer between Class::DBI and DBIx::Class. In case I’ll ever move to DBIx::Class.

Also I have to express my amazement with XML::RSS, which goes far beyond RSS documents and parses almost any XML document. Outstanding job!

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-12-07

Car service and fixes

My car was making a whole bunch of sounds that it shouldn’t normally make. After my last service, my left rear wheel was making sounds whenever I was breaking. One of the engine shields under the car got disconnected from all holders/screws, except for one. It was touching the ground when I was driving slow and making a sound that made every pedestrian look my way. Not that I mind that a lot, but I felt that I had to fix it. And I also had a suspecion that one of my shock absorbers was getting old and cranky on bigger bumps.

I didn’t want to leave the car in this state for a long time, and considering the upcoming Christmas holidays I realized that I’ll be probably broke for a month or two. I thought now was the proper time to fix everything.

The good news – I got the car back within a day. My shock absorbers are just fine. The engine shield is easy to fix. And the sound from the left rear wheel wasn’t from the breaks, like I thought. It was because of some lower arm control handle or something like that. It got old and wasn’t holding the wheel properly. So every time I was breaking, the wheel was moving. The new part is pretty expensive – at about 180 CYP with labour. But since they rarely have this problem, I’d have to order one of this from Japan. Instead, mine was replaced with the second hand part in good condition – 40 CYP with labour.

The mechanics also took the liberty of servicing the car, although it wasn’t time yet. Usually, I do a service every 10,000 km. And I change oil every 5,000km. Since last service I had only about 4,300km and they decided it was time for service. Oh, well. I told them that they should consult me next time. On the other hand, I was glad that I won’t have to think about the car service when Christmas will be all over the place.

93 CYP altogether and I was done. The car looks and feels like brand new now. It’s clean, fast, and makes no extra sounds. I’m happy.

The War of the Worlds

There are some things that I would like to do and nothing in particular stops me from doing them, but I still don’t do them for some metaphoric reasons, which aren’t even good enough to blog about. One example of the thing that I wanted to do was to listen to the original “The War of the Worlds” radio show. I could have downloaded the mp3 at any moment and listen to it, but something was stopping me.

Today I finally did it though. “The War of the Worlds” mp3 was tossed into a bunch of other stuff that I was getting for my growing podcast hunger, and so it ended up on my phone and as a next item in the playlist.

By the way, if you don’t have a slightest idea of what I am talking about, you should probably read “The War of the Worlds (radio)” Wikipedia entry. If you want to listen to the show yourself, then you can get it from The Mercury Theatre on the Air website. If you have a feeling that the title sounds familiar, but somehow doesn’t fit the content, then you are probably thinking about the “The War of the Worlds” movie, which I’ve also seen some time ago and reviewed in this post.

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