Lately I’ve been doing a bit of Rails development for an important project at work. While I really enjoy working with the Ruby programming language and Rails (and ActiveRecord) can be huge time savers, I occasionally find myself wishing I was working with Java instead. I have several major beefs with Ruby on Rails, as [...]
Last weekend I attended the Beijing Perl Workshop. It was actually my first time attending such a workshop and my first time giving a speech at one. Unfortunately I felt my speech train wrecked (some technical problems with my laptop followed by my own stuttering and incoherence). Next time I’ll do better, I promise! Overall [...]
I’ll be attending the Beijing Perl Workshop being held on November 8th. Actually, I’ll be giving a short (~10 minute) speech there, the topic being Perl, Outsourcing and China. I’m looking forward to it for a number of reasons: 1. All speakers get a free O’Reilly book 2. Everyone gets a shirt 3. I might [...]
Recently I have been making some (minor) contributions to one of the Perl 6 implementations being actively developed. It’s called Rakudo and it is the Perl 6 implementation that targets the Parrot virtual machine. If you haven’t heard about Parrot, please check it out. It is a register-based virtual machine specifically designed to handle highly [...]
I decided to register a domain for CEDict, so now you can access it at: http://www.cedict.info I’ve also made a few changes and bug fixes. One important bug that got fixed was that character and bigram frequency data was only getting partially loaded. This was due to a (possible, not yet confirmed) bug in MySQL’s [...]
I have placed a preliminary release of my CEDict web application up on the site. You can access it here: http://www.chrisdavaz.com/cedict At present you can query using English, Pinyin and Chinese characters. Autocomplete functionality is active for the English and Pinyin inputs however I have turned it off for the Chinese input as it was [...]
\o\ \o/ /o/ Finally got my PAUSE account activated! I’ve uploaded a couple of modules to CPAN, CEDict::Pinyin and Class::Light. I wish I started uploading things to CPAN earlier when I was writing some more interesting code on a project I was working on for IBM a few years ago. Something like what SQL::Abstract and [...]
I recently wrote CEDict::Pinyin to help me validate and parse pinyin for a Chinese / English Dictionary web application I am developing in my spare time. I’m still waiting for my PAUSE authorization so I can put the module on CPAN. Here is the description from the module documentation: This class helps you validate and [...]
Here is the problem: You are developing a web application that uses a database. You don’t want to create a new connection every time you do something with the database, so you naturally create a class that manages a single database connection and gives it out to any who asks (some people call this a [...]
I wrote a Perl module called Class::Light for creating class hierarchies in Perl. There are a lot of Class::* modules out there but I wanted something particularly lightweight and easy to use. The main OO features I desired were cascading object initialization and accessor / mutator autovivification. Take a look at this to see how [...]
