While reading something about artificial neural networks I just thought about Conway’s Game of Life. I remembered that when I first read about this, I wanted to try it out and so whipped it up in Javascript. And guess what? My minimalistic approach to Life in HTML and Javascript was still on my webserver.
Click the [...]

Programming Collective Intelligence:
This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build web applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze [...]

In a post about the Google Social Graph API, Tim O’Reilly pointed out to two profiles that Google doesn’t know about: dopplr and goodreads. As I am not a business traveller, dopplr doesn’t seem to be of any use to me right now. But goodreads looked interesting.

So from now on, in addition to my posts [...]

Ever wondered if there was a better way of reading a file into a single scalar than

$the_file = join ”, <FH>;

There is!

{
  local $/;
  $the_file = <FH>;
}

Not only does this save you the join, the actual reading from the file is done much faster that way.

for (<FH>) { … }

generally does the same as

while (<FH>) [...]

I already knew that the => operator automatically quotes its lefthand operand. This has one effect that is actually pretty obvious, but I hadn’t really thought about it anyway. By quoting the lefthand operand, it is really just a string. Even if it is the name of a function, this function is not called.

@a = [...]

I recently started reading Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl. After reading the first five items, I was glad to be able to honestly say that I already knew these. After reading number six, I am still glad, though I didn’t know the details of this one.
my $value = sqrt(2);
local $# = ‘6.283′;
print [...]

When I read an interesting wikipedia article, I usually don’t read to the end and start following links afterwards, but I open the links in new tabs. After finishing the article or when one of the referenced articles seems to be more interesting, whichever happens first, I switch over. By applying this scheme recursively I [...]

In the description of Programming Perl at oreilly.com it says
Any Perl book can have a title, but only this book is affectionately known by all Perl programmers as “The Camel.”

This undoubted leadership among the vast amount of printed books about Perl is in my opinion one of the most fascinating aspects of the entire [...]

CPAN is often called one of Perl’s biggest strenghts. Most of the time I think this is true. But sometimes I think it’s also one of Perl’s biggest flaws.
Why? Well, some modules from CPAN refuse to be installed due to bogus Makefile.PL files. Some don’t comply to standards they really should comply to. Others simply [...]

There are some languages that most web developers (at least the ones I know) learn almost entirely by just using them as opposed to learning a language by the book. I consider HTML, CSS and SQL to be in this category.
I don’t think that I know too little HTML, CSS or SQL to get my [...]