Category: Perl

Jeremy Zawodny:

After a long period of not integrating patches, I’ve released the newest version of mytop.

Great stuff for database navel-gazing, I’m checking it out now.

Some of these links are a few hours out of date, but I’d like to get them posted anyway:

• MozillaZine: “AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla…”
• Use Perl notes that search.cpan.org is orange (at least for a few days).  I kinda like it.
• Imaging Resource notes the announcement of the UMAX Powerlook 1000 and UMAX Powerlook 1120.  I currently have a UMAX Powerlook 3000 in the trunk of my car, but that’s a completely different story.
• Matt Raible has been poking around Tomcat 5.0.4.
• DPReview notes that Sony is announcing a new CCD sensor that incorporates four colors: RGB + Emerald.  From what I’ve read, it’s not really about improving megapixels, but improving image and color quality.

Rafe:

I think I forgot to mention that version 1.01 of the XML::RSS module for Perl was released. My code that generates RSS 2.0 was included, but the other people on the project did most of the real work.

Sweet.  It’s nice to see RSS tools deal with 2.0, some of the open source projects that I looked at a few months ago lacked support for RSS 2.0.  Great work!

Geo::Weather is a cool little perl module that scrapes weather.com and produces your local weather in html.  I installed it on my box at home (perl -MCPAN -e shell as root and then install Geo::Weather) and have been playing with it for a few minutes.  Here are a few lines of code adapted from the man page:

use Geo::Weather;

my $weather = new Geo::Weather;
$weather->get_weather('Kensington','MD');
print $weather->report();

That’s really all it took.  Here’s the output from that (as viewed in Lynx):

Kensington, MD

[29.gif] Partly Cloudy
Temperature: 28° F/-2° C (Feels Like: 18° F/-8° C)
Wind: From the Northwest at 12 mph
Dew Point: 14° F/-10° C
Rel. Humidity: 48 %
Visibility: Unlimited
Barometer: 30.03 inches and rising
UV Index: 0 Minimal

Pretty darn cool.  Of course you can access specific bits of weather information if you want.  Of course if you want to get down and dirty, you can use Geo::METAR, which was written by our very own Jeremy Zawodny.  It’s a damn small world.

Ripped from the pages of Use Perl; soon to be a TV miniseries:

Over the last 7 months, a generous grant from the Dutch NLnet Foundation enabled me to improve Mail::Box: a large module for e-mail handling. Mail::Box is designed as modern alternative to MailTools, MIME::Entity, Mail::Folder, and many more CPAN modules.

Now it is time to reconsider and plan for the future. I would like to hear which features you need more before you upgrade your (MailTools based?) applications to Mail::Box. Could you drop me or the Mail::Box mailing list a note why you are using (or could not use) Mail::Box? With a list of users, usage, and wishes, the funding may be extended. Other conbributions are welcomed as well.”

RPC::XML 0.46 is out.  Changes to this version include makefile fixes, signature handling cleanups, and fixes to the uri() client method.