Category Archives: Uncategorized

Win32::API v0.48 adds cdecl function call support

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In my (really little) spare time, I enjoy hacking on fun projects.
Lately, I have been struggling to get Win32::API Perl module to work on Vista with various MSVC++ and GCC compilers.

Since many have asked for it, and some brave soul had an old patch available on the net, I decided to give it a shot. I had already tried 2 or 3 times to get this patch (originally for v0.41) integrated in the new Win32::API versions, but always failed at it.

Today I decided to take the full journey, and seems I succeeded. Probably I broke something else… :-)
Please bare with me. Anyway, I have 2 things left in this release that I want to address in the new one:

– There's a Borland C macro def that is completely broken (thanks to BrowserUk for noticing)
– I need to complete the stack cleanup assembler code at the end of Call() function in the XS code. This should be easy, for some definition of "easy", since I already have some examples of MSVC/GCC assembler code in my RT queue.

Stay tuned for further updates…

MySQL is just crazy or what?

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Ok, I was working on the staging/test database, checking out some performance problems I was experiencing.
Then I thought of optimizing one table. Optimizing should be like rebuilding the physical data file to compact record structures, remove invalidated data, …

MySQL has this OPTIMIZE TABLE command.
Ok, fire!

2/3 minutes passed. Then other 2/3. Then again.

I started to worry and tried to start new sessions, to see if table was blocked. It was.
Completely locked up.

Ok, I left the session running. Went to lunch. Came back.
Still running. WTF? I decided to interrupt the command. CTRL + C.

MySQL responded with some error code, 22 or something.
Ok, just check if I have to rebuild indexes, just in case.

SELECT * FROM sometable

Boom!

Table corrupted. No kidding. Tried to REPAIR TABLE and REPAIR TABLE QUICK.
No way. Table was completely DESTROYED.

Amazing…

Wikidoc syntax highlighting for vim

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Recently I've been editing some wikidoc documentation, and I found boring to see everything as plain text.
I wanted to add some color to my vim screen.

So I decided to put together a wikidoc syntax highlighting file for vim.
And, 30 minutes later, it was working!

Thanks to the author of POD syntax highlighting. I shamelessly copied and modified his work…

BonDigi is the programming game of the moment

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As I said in my last post, Bon Digi (really Bon Diggy) game is taking over!
When I posted the original announcement on our nonsense mailing list, I didn't know that I would have caused such an incredible activity from our brain cells!

So far, there have been nearly 10 different programming languages versions of Bon Digi game. Languages are: Perl5 (oneliners, scripts and classes), Python, Ruby, Haskell (3 versions!), Perl6, Emacs Lisp, Vim scripting and even CSS!

I will try to post some of these wonderful pieces of fine arts here in the next days.
Stay tuned.

Have you ever heard “Bon Digi”?

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It's a game. A crazy one. A really crazy one.
We were doing it friday evening, drinking like nuts, and something in my mind popped up, and I thought:

We should code the algorithm for this game

In fact, it seemed really stupid and obvious. But thinking about it more and more, I discovered that it's not so simple at all…

And if you want to code it elegantly and concisely, you have to think about it for some time.
So, I took this -Ofun opportunity, and turned it, as I promised to Zoso, into a Games::BonDigi CPAN module.

Enjoy!

Fortune file about Jack Bauer

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… and finally I managed to assemble a fortune file about Jack Bauer facts.
I looked at some websites that carry a lot of facts about Jack, like www.twentyfour.tv/jackbauer, or http://www.jackbauerisgod.com…

Here it is!
You should generate also the ".dat" file to use with fortune program. The command is:

strfile -r jackbauer

This generates a "jackbauer.dat" file that should be copied into your "/usr/share/fortune" (or whatever) folder.
Enjoy!