bryandunn.com

Last year at this time I took a Java programming class as a refresher as I hadn’t done much with Java since my days as an undergrad (and a few short programs in grad school). After primarily using Perl for the last 7 years, this was a big switch. The difficulty with Perl is that [...]

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I spent an hour trying to figure out what a field in a fixed width file was being truncated by one character. This is what I found:
Definition
<header start=”1″ end=”8″>accountnum</header>
Calcuation
$length = $header->{end} – $header->{start}
Great, except that columns 1 THROUGH 8 total 8, not 7. Ugh.

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Interesting post at O’Reilly about Perl and how some companies view it as the major problem behind legacy applications. Obviously false but it just goes to show that Perl should be “used by consenting adults” with some semblance of adherence to standards.
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/08/why_corporates_hate_perl.html

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I recently registered a couple of domains and though I’ve been happy with dyndns figured I’d try a free DNS service. dnsexit seemed to have what I needed and I was able to get up and running quickly without any issues. I typically use ddclient for sending my updated IP address to dyndns, but since [...]

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I’ve been using Perl since 2001 in a variety of roles beginning with systems administration. For the last few years I have been a “Software Engineer.” I put that in quotes because popular opinion states that using a scripting language to develop software somehow makes you less of a Software Engineer. Users [...]

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