Articles by Tony Lawrence
Spreadsheets can be powerful tools, and particularly so in the hands of an expert user. A spreadsheet can be used to reorganize data and to extract information not otherwise available. For example, at a client site, an application report generates a listing of hourly billing, but can't give the cross-reference totals desired.
Tuesday, 11th October 2005
Transferring Mail to a New Mail Server
Sometimes we just have to move on. Your current mail server may just not be meeting your needs, so you've put up something new. But what about old mail? If your servers are identical (Sendmail to Sendmail, etc.) or use the same mailbox storage format, you may be able to just transfer files directly. If not, read on..
Tuesday, 11th October 2005
HTML Forms POST, GET
Web forms have two possible methods of passing information back to the script that will process the form.
Saturday, 1st October 2005
Google Sitemaps
Google is now letting web sites submit an xml file that lists urls and some information about how often the pages change, and how important the page is relative to other pages. Basically, it gets you to do part of the work for them - which we would hope helps everyone.
Saturday, 24th September 2005
Fork and Exec with Perl
Recently I had a project that required a number of different programs that will mostly run all the time, but need to be restarted now and then with different parameters. Normally, the first thing I think of for a program that runs constantly is inittab or svc (daemontools). The svc facility is the more flexible of the two, and will be what I'll use in the final design, but in the "thinking" stages I played with using a Perl program launcher and controller. What we have is a config file that specifies programs .
Saturday, 24th September 2005
Creating Perl Modules for web sites
When you are writing your own code, you are more apt to use someone else's module than write your own, unless your project gets fairly large and complex. Small scripting tasks just don't need the advantages modules offer. However, there is a case where modules might make perfect sense: web server cgi scripts often repeat the same tasks. Putting those common features into a module can make your web scripting easier.
Saturday, 24th September 2005
Python vs. Perl
I went to the Python Documentation website and used the excellent tutorial there. I found things to like and things to dislike immediately:
Wednesday, 3rd August 2005
