kjw/code

So I’ve had this topic tumbling about in the back of my head for a while. What’s the best environment for web programming in Perl?

mod_perl is a given, but where to go from there is a little murky. Mason is one way to go, but it’s frustrated the heck out of me before. Bricolage sounds interesting, but I’m not sure how well it works for more dynamic, interactive sites. Plain old CGI is a way I know well, but it has perhaps more drawbacks than every other approach combined.

I’ve looked at using a few other languages for web programming, but when it comes down to it, it’s Perl I know best — if I want to solve interesting problems I’m more likely to succeed using a language I know well. Or at least that’s my opinion this week.

Time to see what jumps out at me from the ports tree.

As I was waiting for a big build to finish I started playing about with my freshly-installed Macbook. Noting that I hadn’t gotten my favourite build of Vim (being the most recent one) installed I started casting about for things to play with until I could start that build. Macports doesn’t appreciate two builds going on at once.

It occurred to me that I had never really given TextMate a fair shake. XCode and Komodo are too much for my regular use, and I use vi and clones mainly due to inertia (because 20+ years can form hard habits to break). I decided to grab it and give it a go.

I downloaded it, hit the Preferences, then tried some simple editing of file types I normally deal with — Perl, Apache configuration, C and C++, and a few others. After hitting the on-line help a few times I was able to get enough figured out that I could be productive.

Then I hit the bundles, and got that “oh, that’s what I’ve been missing” feeling. I hadn’t looked there before, as far as I can tell — it’s a bit like writing off Emacs before realising that ELisp exists.

After another hour of playing with various bundles I’m still undecided. I’ll consider it more when I’m closer to the trial expiry — how much I actually use it between now and then will probably make the decision for me.

Okay, KDE 4.1 and dependencies are all packaged up in the repo and ready for install via portupgrade.

I wrote a quick and dirty script that is something of a clone of repomanage.py, but it is specific to FreeBSD packages and written in Perl instead. I’ll clean it up, make it handle command line args in a reasonable way, and get it posted in case I’m not the only person out there who could use it.

There are a good number of new FreeBSD packages in the repo. Most of KDE 4.1 and its dependencies are there now, but not all.

Though I’m not using the Eee any more I still do use a FreeBSD VM on my Macbook fairly often. People seem to be downloading and using the packages I’m making, and if I can build the package once on my VPS and save the build time on my VM, then so be it.

I should have the rest of KDE 4.1 and its dependencies done by the end of tomorrow. Note that I haven’t actually tried many of the packages yet. I’m taking it on faith that they work. If you find one that doesn’t work how it’s supposed to, send me a message at kjw at kjwcode.com and let me know.

I’ve decided that the kidlet gets the Eee, and I’ll be going back to using the Macbook full-time, rather than treating it as a desktop machine.

There were a few things I could never get used to with the Eee. The first was the screen real-estate. Like it or not, I seem to be addicted to 120×42 to get real work done — preferably a couple mostly visible for best productivity. The best I could do on the Eee’s screen was about 88×23 which isn’t horrible for coding, but it makes it very, very difficult to read through logfiles and the like.

The other thing I struggled with was the keyboard. The escape key always seemed to escape me, and the tilde was always a two or three-try key.

One other nit was the video out having a yellow colour cast. I’m sure I could compensate for that in my monitor set-up, but having to change monitor settings for each laptop would have been annoying.

Am I considering another ultra-mobile machine? Not at this point. The Macbook is about as ultra-mobile as I want to go. The nice part about the Eee is that it’s a very reasonably-priced experiment, and Lo will be thrilled to have it.

Thanks to Lauren Weinstein’s blog post, I now know about Perspectives, which ought to make self-signed SSL/TLS certificates more useful. This may just be the impetus I need to get https up and running on the new VPS.

Life’s been busy these past few days and I haven’t had time to finish the KDE 4 packages. I hope to get to them on the weekend, as it doesn’t look like this week is going to slow down much.

I did update nine packages that have seen action in the ports tree in the last few days. When I get a tuit or two I’ll look at scripting some of that work away. Something like repomanage, but aimed at packages instead of RPMs.

Things were starting to get a little cramped on my Macbook’s 160GB hard disk, and NCIX had 320GB Seagate disks on for a little over a hundred dollars.  It didn’t take me long to order one along with an enclosure for the old disk.

I got the wrong enclosure, even though I could swear I chose one that said SATA — that will teach me to order stuff in the middle of the night. Not all was lost, as a disk I had in another enclosure died the day before yesterday, so it just took a minute to swap disks and I had the old disk ready to be useful again.

Installing the new disk into the Macbook was a bit of an adventure, though. For whatever reason the rubber lining of the hard drive bay came away from the edge and got folded underneath the disk as I tried to install it. It was bad enough that I had to take the lining off one side, then the other side tried to do the same thing. I was wise to it the second time and kept it in line.

I’ve got almost everything re-installed — OS X, Aperture, VMware, and all that good stuff. Even better, I’ve got a metric buttload more space to play with. Enough that I can keep most of my photos on the internal hard disk without stretching things.

Now, of course, they’ll release a 500GB disk for $129 and make me regret it.

I’ve built 56 packages out of the 175 packages that make up KDE 4 and its dependencies, and so far it’s taking up 740MB. Compressed. bzipped. This is definitely not going to be fitting on the Eee’s SSD.

What I’m pondering is having a “lite” environment (FreeBSD with Xfce 4) on the SSD, and a “full” environment (FreeBSD with KDE 4) on a USB 2.0 hard disk. I’ll have to see how I can make that work.

It looks like the kde4 port has been updated to build KDE 4.1, rather than 3.5.8. I’ve got it building right now. It’ll take a while, and will likely represent another two hundred or so packages — I’m only at kdepim right now, and it’s added over 160 packages so far.

Once it’s built I’ll go back and build packages and add them to the repo.