Perl usability

"Shlomi, it takes 10 years to learn UNIX. I want you to learn it in a month". That were the words of Shlomi Fishs new supervisor, and Shlomi went out to learn. And soon he discovered Perl, and its mighty ability to do almost everything. He even wrote a book about it.

Project Gutenberg

Ever wished you could read a downloaded Sherlock Holmes story in bed instead of in front of your computer? Now you can : Project Gutenberg offers electronic versions of texts whose copyright has expired; almost all major classics (and more) are covered. Unfortunately, these texts come as plain ASCII, which is very platform-independent, but also a pain to read. With a little LaTeX formatting, maybe these things can be reformatted to someting more readable. I noticed also that Debian includes a Gutenbook program, which allows you to browse the Gutenberg library online.

Eclipse Perl IDE

I was discussing a Perl project with a collegue, when one made the remark that actually there's no real Perl IDE (apart from Emacs or Vim, of course). I said that Eclipse maybe could be a solution, and lo and behold : two minutes later, my collegue found the website of EPIC, which is a very impressive Eclipse plugin. The number of Eclipse plugins is really impressive, even Clearcase plugins can be found. They now can all be found on the Eclipse plugin website.

Some days ago, I pointed out that Eclipse entered Debian. Unfortunately, there are still some problems to be solved for the Debian package. Luckily, the default Eclipse zipfile turned out the be a breeze to install.

Hercules VM/370

Last week, I have been toying with Hercules, a "mainframe" emulator for Windows and Linux. Within Hercules, one can install different mainframe OSses, such as MVS, VM/370 or Linux/S390. Different older IBM mainframe OSses can be downloaded from cbttape.org. It looked promising to run VM on my laptop, but alas, the VM/370 version there is arcane. You won't find utilities like FILELIST or XEDIT, which makes it almost useless. A bit of a shame : it's hard to believe that IBM won't provide a modern VM OS to tinker with. It could attract lots of new administrators and developpers.

Anonymous Sun, 10/19/2008 - 03:35

thats the problem with emulation..

For me i can make use of the cobol aspects....
I really wish I could make rexx work on hercules (mainframe side) too..

All I want is way to compile cobol related stuff.
I even have some stuff that might be pretty cool to add to the community...but that will await another day.