Workload is still way down. More so, in fact, since it is Father's Day. It was quite slow at work on Thursday also, which is why I decided it was a good time to learn some Perl.
I did a Google for a Perl tutorial, found some site with hands-on examples and tackled the first task. I uploaded the script, set the permissions, and watched the darn thing fizzle into 500 Internal Server Error. I applied all my tech support training to the problem and didn't find it, so I hit up my team leader. He took one look at the sample script and said, "Hey, there's a whole line missing there." I closed the window on that tutorial.
I learned more in the five minutes I spent talking with my team leader than I did in a couple hours fooling with that site. He showed me an extra line to add to my scripts so that I can get better information out of my error messages. He also pointed me to better places, such as the Perl Monks tutorials.
In case you are curious, here's that line:
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
You put that right under your path to Perl. Velly nice.
I've also been learning a little ASP, thanks to our corporate training program. Not much, so far, but some basic stuff about looping and passing the values of variables and stuff like that. Wlofie found a nice big hole in my homework that lets other people steal bandwidth by mooching off my script. I found it humorous and irritating all at once. I don't think I really have a programmer's mind.
He does, however. He immediately took my homework and made Perl and bash versions of it. He also closed the mooch hole by enacting a different variable type. He's amazing.
Meanwhile, the Linux box lies neglected. I want to attack it when I have a nice several-hour window open for it, without distractions. That doesn't happen all that often. I think, when I left off with it, before we moved from Condo Napalm, the machine was not recognizing the CD-ROM drive, and my install disks are of course that very type.
Wlofie tells me that a special Win98 boot disk will at least get the machine to see the drive, so I can take the install from there. How that is supposed to work on a machine that has a Linux installation already, I dunno, but he swears by it. He gave me a copy of the file to cut to floppy (will have to send to Napalm to do it - my A: drive hasn't worked in a couple years now).
I looked at my gear the other night, wondering if I had ever bought a piece of computer equipment. It was like a checklist. Monitor - nope, that was Dry & Thirsty. Windows box - nope, D&T. Webcam - nope, that was Napalm. The Linux box was a birthday gift that my friends put together from contributed parts, like stone soup. I really like it a lot; it's a beautiful gift. It's like getting a quilt.
Oh yeah, I bought a gutted surplus machine from NegiYo a few months ago. I dunno if it counts, though. Hardly an expenditure at all. I think it cost me less than a cartridge of printer ink.
