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I recently came across Catalyst,
an MVC web application framework, written in perl,
let’s say it’s competing against Ruby on Rails and Grails.
But (as it’s written in perl) it can make use of the vast resources on CPAN.

To be continued.

Do you know, where you can get ready made freeware packages to run on Solaris from?
I got a few from sunfreeware.com recently.

Do you think, you can only install Solaris packages as root?
Of course, it’s simpler and just better to do so,
but what if you can’t?

Solaris packages from sunfreeware.com come as gzipped files,
and I use pkgtrans in order to get pkginfo, pkgmap, and a subdirectory reloc created below my $HOME/PACKAGES/ .
pkgmap is described in the manual page protype(4) ,
it defines details like file mode, symlinks, and much more.
Within that subdirectory reloc you find the package’s executables, library files and man pages.

The sys admin would use pkgadd for installing a package,
but pkgadd only allows for execution by root,
so I developed a shell script (JHread_pkgmap.sh) imitating pkgadd.
It reads pkgmap and does jobs like adopting the file mode specified within pkgmap.
I don’t plan on implementing pkgadd‘s full functionality,
but just that subset, that is seriously required in order to get the packages installed, that I really want to install.

Of course, executables and libraries, that depend on hard-wired absolute file or directory pathnames will experience a little grief.
But most of the utilities, I am working with, don’t complain about such problems.

Now e.g. I am able to download and install ready made packages (wget, curl, …); and you know, how much nicer it can be to use wget and curl than downloading within a web browser.

Update 2013-01-02:
Please find it here: http://Jochen.Hayek.name/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Unix/Shell/JHread_pkgmap.sh

Yet another search engine,
but what’s special about it,
I mean from a developer point of view?
It’s implemented using Grails.
Well, yet another MVC approach in yet another esoteric language.
Well, guys why just don’t you use an ordinary language like Perl,
and why just don’t you use Catalyst?
Somebody should have told you.

al desko:
eating something, usually lunch,
at one’s desk.
The expression is a play on the Italian word al fresco,
which means outdoors or literally in the fresh (air).

Admit it.
While scrolling through this newsletter with one hand,
you’re probably eating a Döner or a slice of pizza with the other.
Glance down at your keyboard.
Can you see morsels of bread,
pieces of salad,
bits of dried-out salami?
Don’t worry.
You’re just one of millions of workers
who regularly eat al desko…

(unknown author)

After working with subversion within emacs for quite a couple of months, occasionally I found out, that my choice for emacs subversion bindings was quite a little to fast, but luckily enough apparantly quite the right one.

You can find all the bindings at this SVN URL.

My choice is psvn.el.

Silly me just wanted to create my 1st project on rubyforge.org,
and when I had just filled out all fields for doing so,
rubyforge.org told me, that a project by that name already existed,
and actually I found out, it is exactly, what I could have used instead of writing my own software.
I remember, when I started that software,
I was so focused and overly sure, that it was absolutely unlikely to already exist.
I am happy to replace using my plist implementation by the public one soon.

Actually my code looks like a litte more lightweight,
but it only implements a reader so far
(using ordinary lists and also hash lists but no dedicated classes),
and mine requires ‘rexml/document’
but theirs does it all itself — another case of NIH.
Both implementations don’t support property values of type date and data.

Maybe my code will survive this crisis.
Will this then be another case of NIH itself?
Or just offering an alternative?

title says it all.

application/x-director is something, that my Linux firefox does not understand.

On the Windows platform this is my favourite imaging utility.
It helps me compressing the documents I scanned and on multiple other issues.