the point of Perl

I should mention - the reason I'm trying to familiarize myself with Perl is because I'm hoping to get a toy LAMPP server going to run some experiments.

In the early 2000's I had an XAMPP install and learned a lot about Apache, PHP, SQL, and all that other good stuff. It was super useful and that knowledge allowed me to run a server in the lab I used to work in for data storage and general web stuff (wiki, image hosting, light PHP scripts for various things).

Re-familiarizing myself with that stuff wouldn't hurt, and it might come in handy in the near future.

I don't have a PC anymore to run it. Hopefully I can get away with doing it on my netbook. The netbook is on paper twice as fast as my old web server.

Not the camel

I keep forgetting it's NOT the "camel" Perl book I have. It's the llama.

The Camel book is a thousand pages long - the Llama book covers syntax and control structures.

I'll pick up the Camel book after the holidays (hopefully I'll have some Amazon gift cards or something).

Looking back at the security camera program

The Python+OpenCV program I wrote last summer is pretty handy.

http://chrislearnsc.blogspot.com/2011/03/added-timing.html

I use a modified version of that to take a picture every time I boot my laptop.

If I can find a way to get webcam images without using OpenCV I'd like to flesh the program out a bit and maybe add more options (command line or GUI with PyGTK). It's necessary to get away from OpenCV because it's serious overkill for just grabbing webcam images. Also, it's horrifying to install - it took me weeks to get it to work on my laptop and if it ever broke I wouldn't know where to start. I think that there are handy ways of grabbing webcam frames in Linux, but I don't know about OS X or Windows.

Perl

I stumbled across a Perl book I have sitting around (the camel book).

So far I haven't run into a problem that readily called for Perl, and honestly I wonder what kind of people use it on a day-to-day basis. I did a search for reasons to learn Perl, but most reasons have to do with parsing large text files.

I don't have any large text files.

Don't work harder, work smarter

10 minutes of code saved me an hour of copying and pasting repetitive lines in a script.


EDIT: Oof, bad newbie - no treat. Forgot to close the file. Leaving it up as a shameful reminder.

Project Euler 13 WIP

I meant to have this finished by now but I got distracted. I already know how to finish it, but I don't yet know when I will be able to. Here's what I have so far.


Here's data.h:



What's left to do is pad the storage array so that the remainders can add up and I'll be able to reconstruct the sum in this artificial manor. The printf() where it dumps everything out was my sanity check before I went any further.