Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Vim configurations

Good part of the day has been dedicated to Vim again. Since the amount of coding (perl) that I do has greatly increased recently, I felt like reconfiguring my editor a bit. Final configuration impressed a good part of our developers in the office. That fact drove me to the idea of documenting the process and sharing the configs and techniques. I’ll draft something during this weeked and we’ll see where it goes from there on. One thing I’ll promise from very beginning – lots of screenshots. Stay tuned.

w3m

I was doing plenty of browsing with my new affection – w3m web browser.

Firstly, It doesn’t need to be compiled by any Red Hat Linux user, since it’s in the distribution already. Of course, I’ve found that out after I compiled it and built the RPM.

Secondly, it behaves much like all other text-mode browsers that I’ve been using until now (lynx, links, etc). You can use lynx-, vi-, and/or emacs-style navigation. Tables, frames, cookies, SSL, and proxies are all well supported and nicely working. You’ve got colors even.

Thirdly, if you run it from a graphical terminal (xterm), you will even see graphics! That’s pretty impressive. You’ll have to get used to it, so give it few minutes.

Fourthly, and most importantly, you have a very nice integration with other programs. And I mean it. For example, you will use your favourite editor to fill all those TEXTAREAs! You are one button away to see current page in another browser (up to three other browsers are supported). You can fire up your favourite email client to communicate.

Still not interested? Well, I’ll stop with a mention of mouse support… Yes, you can click on links with all the different buttons that you have, and you can even scroll pages by dragging them up and/or down.

Sorry, I cannot tell you any more, since it’s my first day with the program and I haven’t yet even looked in the config file.

P.S.: Really nice bookmarks. Small, simple, with groups/categories. And I suspect they are stored in Plain Old HTML.

Perl bits

Here is a nice article covering date/time functionality in perl and CPAN modules. And here is also a link to Tie::Cycle module, which will help all those doing striped tables in HTML and any other “flagged” tricks. And to complete the whole perl thing, here is a nice article at Perl Monks which explains Net::Pcap module with nice examples. Get up and running in few minutes.

Porting PHP to Perl

I am doing lots of perl programming these days. And there is yet lots more to come. I am currently porting most of my PHP code base to Perl. This provides a good practice, as well as code review and clean-up. Although, I know that porting is somewhat easier then developing from scratch (at least in my case), Perl still looks and feels much easier and, well, natural, then PHP. Maybe it’s because I am spending too much time at Perl Monks.