What's up

• I haven't updated this page in a very long time, You should stop reading it by now :)
• my amazon wishlist - stuff i want :)
• Just for fun, here is my recent Linux desktop snapshot. This one is for real, people :)

• Run into an article which interviewed Larry Wall(Perl's father) in Perl/Ruby conference in January 2001 Kyoto Japan. It's amazing to see his point of view about perl. It's also good to see what he say about Python and Ruby. Read it now

Work ( last updated 2004)

• A project that i designed and implemented for work place. It's a printer server which provides quota management, web monitoring and notification functions. It involves LPRng, Perl, MySQL, Unix. the doc and source codes.
• A perl script that manages Apache webserver's Virtual Host information with database. Support build, update, export and other operations between http.conf and database.dbvhost.pl

Linux config files , change logs , my notes....

• iptables notes
• Notes about djbdns djbdns

• Notes about setting up samba.

• Notes about sharing internet in Lan. IP masquerading & DHCP server related.

• The notes i have been writting since i started using linux..

• Here is my change log, indicating what i have been doing with my linux box.

Perl

Perl is the language i write with joy. Here are some codes i wrote for my own use. I wrote these programs back in 2001 or 2002. I doubt they have much use now :)

• I was using sympatico dsl service now. so I have to write a script to update my ip whenever it gets changed. If you are a user of zoneedit.com 's dns service ( Free ) and you are hosting your website over a dynamic isp, then this scirpt is for you. updateip.pl

• I had been playing LWP for about 2 months during the summer. It's a cool package made up of bunch of modules that mimic all kind of http stuff. such as form submission,webpage retrieval,it can save you lot of time and automate the things you do daily by hand. automation is pretty much one of the main job computer should do and whenever you feel doing something repeatedly on your computer then let the computer do it for you!

  Here is one of the perl pro i have written - check_site_linux.pl. this program will check the website availability or status of connection, msg me through icq when something went wrong.It works under my linux machine and use vICQ module to do the icq msg part. of course you can do it by email but i like icq way coz it's more instantly.

  Also, i want to share 3 LWP article and discussion with you. First a great paper presented in 2001 Perl conference by Sean Burke,who is the autho of the newly published book "Perl and LWP". Although this talk doesn't exist on the web anymore, luckily i pulled it out before google throw it out of the cache. should thank google for saving the best :) .The Second is an explaination about the often confused Credential method in LWP package, from sean Burke as well.The Third is commonly asked question about how to interact LWP with javascript.

  I also wrote a form-autosubmitter to submit similiar forms in one step,similiar as they all have similiar form entry.e.g name,age etc. HTML::Form and LWP kick in.

  It's a lot fun to play around with LWP. because you see what you usually do in browser can be done in perl as well. IMO, LWP::UserAgent HTTP::Headers HTTP::Request::Common HTTP::Response are the ones you should know. And remember the inheritance among some of them. >perl -e "use LWP::Simple;print (head('http://www.yorku.ca'))" see what you get :D Have fun LWP !!

  A note to myself: LWP doesn't follow HTTP redirect other than 302 redirect. Manual parsing to webpage that uses javascript or metarefresh is needed.

• a simple search engine. The search engine uses two files : index.pl used to index the local pages. search.pl used to search the indexed pages and print result. Below two versions use the common index.pl
  Latest version. search.pl and index.pl which add the file modification time to the search result.
  Version one : index.pl and search.pl. These two don't use CGI.pm and HTML::Template, as the latter might not installed in common environment. Note this one only run under as plain cgi.
  Version two : search.pl and the template file(a txt file but you need to download it to read). It uses CGI module and HTML::Template. Here i adopt the HTML::Template since it's good on keeping perl and html code seperately. and you can change the template file as you want. so you can have you own theme for the search result page. And this one is also approved on mod_perl, so it runs faster.
  

  During the time of writing it, i found some good articles that guide me throught. Whoever wrote it,Many Thanks! and i thought you maybe want to have a look.. general theory & info ; Database or full-text search engine? and another from perl.com

• code that resizes picture using ImageMagick or GD. I first did this code base on GD, then I found that ImageMagick works perfect in keeping file quality. GD is lack on this. This script runs fast.

  oh, a sidenotes for using imageMagick making thumbnail.Some image files contain image profile type (IPTC/ICM). `identify -verbose imagename` to see what type of profile it uses and to remove it,you need the Profile method. Then you will get smaller thumbnail,usually 3/4 k smaller.

  final version ; using ImageMagick module and using GD module