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20041123 Tuesday November 23, 2004

Adding a file system hierarchy into a CVS module I had a whole bunch of code that needed to added to a CVS repository. Normally with just a new directory or two and a few files, doing "cvs add" for each one is no big deal. But when there's a whole file system hierarchy that can be a real PITA. This is where "cvs import" comes in handy.

I usually only use "cvs import" to create a new CVS module but it can also be used to do a "bulk add." Maybe it's common knowledge for CVS jockies but it's easy to forget about unless oft-used. Here's the scenario:

There, that's a lot easier than individually adding directories and files.

( Nov 23 2004, 11:09:35 AM PST ) Permalink


20041119 Friday November 19, 2004

Editing Perl with Eclipse and EPIC I've been bouncing between development in Perl and Java a lot this, two languages that I both love and loath at various times. One of the things that I love about developing in Java is using Eclipse. This week I decided to give the Eclipse support for Perl a spin. Well, I'll be saving my love for the Java support.

The only gripe I've heard about Eclipse that I haven't had a good answer for is the absense of Emacs key bindings. Otherwise, what's there not to dig about Eclipse?

Dollar costs
zilch
Support for refactoring
renaming and changing method signatures, moving them around... all with dependent references kept in tact
Extracting interfaces
OK, that falls under refactoring but worthy of its own mention
Source and javadoc stub automation
Spontaneous method stub creation, constructor and accessor creation, javadoc stubs
Test case generation and running
JUnit and ant awareness, yum
Syntactical and semantic error highlighting
Fixing errors early and often is easy cause they're usually obvious

I was hopefull that the EPIC plugin would provide at least some of those things for Perl development. This is what I found:

OK, that's a pretty good start. But some things I wanted like syntax completion (i.e. when editing Java, you can type "for", hit shift-space to pull up options to loop over an array or a Collection and voila: a for loop is materialized. ...so basically all of the goodness you get for Java development is lacking for Perl. Nonetheless, I think it's a promising start. I'll be trying the EPIC updates from time to time as new occasions to develop in Perl present themselves.

In the meantime, you can enjoy the fruits of this week's labor by pulling it off of CPAN; that's where you can get WebService::Technorati. It's also part of the latest release of the Technorati web services SDK. Thanks to David Wheeler for turning me on to Pod::Simple::HTML ...I'm still trying to figure how he gets it to output nice docs from pod, mine didn't come out nearly that purty. Ah well, I guess that'll be part of next week's Perl fun.

( Nov 19 2004, 10:59:25 PM PST ) Permalink


20041117 Wednesday November 17, 2004

XML::Parser on Mac OS X I needed to fiddle with XML::XPath on my powerbook today, it depends on XML::Parser. Complacent with how most unixy things I want to do JFW on Mac OS X, I dropped down to my CPAN shell and typed "install XML::Parser" -- bzzzt!

It turns out that expat is not installed, grrr. So I fired up Fink Commander and had it gimme some expat lovin'. Tried it again -- bzzzt! This is what I did in the CPAN shell 

cpan> o conf makepl_arg "EXPATLIBPATH=/sw/lib EXPATINCPATH=/sw/include"
cpan> install XML::Parser
-- ding-ding-ding! We have a winner! XML::Parser installed! Thereafter, XML::XPath JFW'd and I'm on my way.

( Nov 17 2004, 04:53:44 PM PST ) Permalink