What I’ve Been Up To

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I guess this can be split into two sections – what I’ve been up to, and what I haven’t.

Onward…

What I’ve Been Up To:

  • No good.
  • Work on a batch of Perl parsers – screen scraping, processing and using Perl DBI to load MySQL. Learning a bunch. The more I use Perl, the more I admire it. The more I learn Perl, the more I realize I don’t know about the language.
  • Reading about the whole Google IPO thingee. The are a different company. Hope they stay that way.
  • Continuing my love-hate relationship with MySQL. I’m using it more and more – actually, it’s the database I’ve pretty much been using exclusively for development over the past few months – and really haven’t changed my mind about it that much. Sure, it’s fast, cross-platform (*nix and Windoze) and pretty easy to use, but its lack of power still grinds on me. Subselects (coming in 4.1 in November) and stored procs are the big rubbing point to me; I’m still confused on how this beat out Postgres in the OSS database battle. It’s unfortunate, but I understand why MySQL is so widely deployed today: Because it is so widely deployed. The chicken vs. egg battle is over.
  • Lots of PHP – it’s usually the back-end for whatever feeds I get/process with Perl. PHP is just a great Web language. I know a lot of folks are starting to use PHP as a command-line scripting language; I see the reasoning (only one language to learn), I find Perl and/or shell scripts more appropriate for command-line type tasks. That said, I do have a handful of “exec($someCode)” imbedded in my PHP pages. Just easier to do this call vs. the whole page in Perl or what-have-you (I’m currently on PHP 4.1.2, so I have to use the “exec()” function; I think 4.3 and up makes it more transparent to do system calls via PHP).
  • A lot more template-driven work. Right now, I have several tools/processes that run and all pull in the same damn TXT template. Load template, replace etc and spit out finished pages. Set those processes on timers (CRON) and life is sweet. Change template and – by the next day – a whole swath of a site is automagically updated. Very sweet.
  • Getting back into – in a very small way – photography. God I love pics…

What I’ve Been Missing:

  • I did a solid week or two of Java – trying to get my hand back into that game – but have currently put it on the back burner. I’m more of a Web development guy, and Java – while there are JSPs, servlets and so on – is more for heavy lifting on the backend. While I’ve done – in very small bites – most of what Java has to offer, I still have to find a project that I can code a full app/backend with so I can better learn the language. Like Perl, I’m impressed with how well thought out Java seems to be (with notable exceptions: AWT, some primitive types and so on…). But Java really is not a good tool for getting work done – it’s for getting work done that will last and scale. In many cases, the Web is moving too fast for that.
  • I’m stuck on what book to read next. It’s coin toss between a doorstopper of a non-fiction book and a older fiction work. My guess? My next read will be neither…
  • SQL Server – as mentioned, I’ve been focusing on MySQL lately (actually, the only Windows work I do is to used my Win2000 box for various tools [editors, GUIs] that point at my Linux box(es] ). The only SQL Server work I’ve done in the last couple of months have been either maintenance or very incremental updates. Nothing new or major.
  • Ditto preceding point, but ignoring ColdFusion and instead working on PHP/Perl. The whole Windoze vs. Linux statement holds here, as well.
  • Not as much CSS as I’ve done in the past. Partly that’s because I’m getting a little better at it, so a CSS event that would have taken a day a year ago takes 10 minutes today. I still need to get better at it, but I do have a broad part of the basics down pretty well. I’ll give myself that.