Kristof.Willen.be

Dark days and the smell of rotting pumpkins ? It's that time of the year again : here's the Perl Advent calendar 2011 !

Does Christmas reminds you of snowy weather, eggnog and turkeys ? Not here with us ! We rejoice every year in the arrival of the Perl Advent calendar, this year again also in a Perl6 edition.

It's nearly Christmas, so it's time for the Perl Advent Calendar.
And this year, there's some competition around the corner, targeted at the Perl 6 adepts.

The 'Goatse Operator' isn't a nurse with slight sadomasochistic inclinations, but one of the secret Perl operators.

Perlgeek.de has some articles on the transition from Perl5 to Perl6, while clearly explaining the differences between those versions. Very interesting, not only for a Perl6 introduction, but the articles also learnt me some new Perl tricks I didn't master yet.

Speaking of Perl, it keeps amazing me what someone can do with this language. In our new TSM version, IBM changed the web frontend to a full blown Websphere application, called ISC, with of course its own user database, different from the one in TSM, and kept in an unaccessible format. That's a big problem in an organisation which has about 150 TSM operators. We almost feared that this would end up in a manual definition of those people. It was there that I grabbed the documentation from WWW::Mechanize, which I discovered during my Test::More enlightenment. Within two hours, I had hacked up a Perl script which pulled all info about the operators from TSM, and entered them automagically in ISC.

Love this stuff !