User since: Mar 01, 2011 at 20:42 UTC (13 years ago) Last here: Dec 06, 2023 at 10:32 UTC (4 days ago) Experience: 7300 Level: Parson (16) Writeups: 892 CPAN ID: CAVAC Location: In my office at the monastery, see map below. User's localtime: Dec 10, 2023 at 19:04 CET Scratchpad: View Member of: pmdev, QandAEditors For this user: Search nodes

About me

Geek, Software developer, owner of a simulated space agency.

And it seems i'm now a pmdev too. So if PerlMonks goes down or something is horribly messed up, you are free to blame me.

I maintain the chatterbot account that will take over last hour of cb at some point. It currently uses the dev page for testing: chatterbot dev page

Some of my writeups

Those are some of my more useful writeups, including some threads that show my step-by-step processes of developing stuff:

Re: Perl's not dead, and neither is the community	Age comparison of popular languages
Re: 80x25 ASCII text art in terminal	Using Curses, monochrome and basic colors
Imagecat - show color images in a terminal	Display colorful images in text consoles (Using unicode)
Mixed value encoding	Obfuscated code with stuff learned from ImageCat
Re: Getting id of postgres record inserted via DBI	Sometimes it's easy to solve a problem...
Custom date calculations using Date::Manip	Doing math with Date::Manip to make a custom calender
GeoIP revisited	Working with GeoIP data
Thoughts on new 'class' OO in upcoming perl	Hint: It's basically a good idea, but far from ready for production
Autoclicker! Cheating is winning, too!	Another win for total lazyness!
Compiling and uploading a crontab to my Radioduino	Parsing C headers and "compiling" a binary file
Interprocess messaging with Net::Clacks	Let processes talk to each other

If your programs need to communicate with each other, head over to Net::Clacks. There is also a (slightly outdated) tutorial on PM: Interprocess messaging with Net::Clacks

Posting colorful low res images using only PerlMonks approved HTML tags? Yup. Re: Shameless plug and QR japh

Significant achievements on PerlMonks

• 2011-03-01: Finally managed to register an account
• 2011-03-28: Broke the 10-writeups barrier
• 2011-03-29: Leveled up to Novice, missed vote fairy by an hour
• 2011-04-02: First writeup with negative reputation. Installed think-before-posting output filter.
• 2011-04-02: Leveled up to Acolyte by bribing the vote fairy
• 2011-04-05: Leveled up to Sexton by not downvoting my own comments
• 2011-04-10: Leveled up to Beadle after winning a game of poker against the reaper
• 2011-04-10: Uploaded Photo
• 2011-10-03: Leveled up to Scribe and stole the fire from the gods
• 2011-11-05: Leveled up to Monk in exchange for selling some fire back to the gods
• 2011-11-25: Broke the 100-writeups barrier
• 2011-12-10: Leveled up to Pilgrim by actually helping others. I feel dirty.
• 2011-12-25: Drunken Santa crashed sleigh into my house. Made me Friar for not calling the police. Can now approve and consider.
• 2011-12-25: Approved my first node, meditation 945069.
• 2011-12-31: Reached 1000 XP.
• 2011-01-01 2012-01-01: Encountered first date/time bug of the leap year.
• 2012-01-07: Broke the 200-writeups barrier
• 2012-01-17: Leveled up to Hermit, I'm here to write code and chew bubble gum. And i'm all out of gum...
• 2012-06-17: Reached 250 writeups. Seems to get harder over time.
• 2012-06-28: Broke my left arm. Online discussion still possible, but not code writing.
• 2012-07-14: Joined as the newest member of QandAEditors.
• 2012-07-16: Leveled up to Chaplain due to an accounting error.
• 2016-07-04: Leveled up to Deacon. That took longer than expected.
• 2018-11-27: Leveled up to Curate. I'm now the 718th Saint on Perlmonks.
• 2021-06-10: Wasn't careful and volunteered to help by accident. I'm a pmdev now. Yay, more unpaid work!
• 2022-01-13: Damn. Leveled up to Priest. I should really stop writing those helpful comments.
• 2023-03-20: Promoted to Vicar? Must be a bug.
• 2023-11-25: erzuuli gave me a 1000XP for implementing chatterbot. Seems i'm now a Parson...?

Useful nodes

Here are some helpful node. Some are my own, actually.

Node	Title or Des‎crip‎tion	Author
939918	Using Tab Completion on Windows in cmd.exe	Stamm
935499	Reinventing the wheel	cavac
931045	3-byte representation	gerleu
929344	Embedded s‎crip‎ting sandbox? Lua?	cavac
941905	Poem "Perl(Hello World)"	chacham
693828	Yes, even you can use CPAN	Tanktalus
128077	A Guide to Installing Modules	tachyon
376075	brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem	brian_d_foy
919075	Common Software Development Mistakes	eyepopslikeamosquito
914899	Hoss'ss Last Words	hossman
967433	Radius with RFC conform OTP tokens	cavac
945042	Automation with X11::GUITest	cavac
944371	Turn a Website into a native application Fixing MakeMaker on 64bit Linux	cavac
976036 978081 978256	Cavac does text adventure	cavac
976888	Design elegance vs. getting the job done (the famous piggy bank example)	cavac
976690	Twas the night after Lulzsec (Perl vs. PHP)	cavac
969030	How to maintain a persistent connection over sockets? (Amazing! Multi-tasking without multi-tasking!)	BrowserUk
116759	Finite Automata Question Generator	suaveant
980650	Explaining the poorly documented ||= operator	live4tech
130021	Orcish Maneuver (caching expensive lookups in sort operations)	AidanLee
26380	The path to mastery	tilly

Interesting nodes

Here are some funny or "historically relevant" nodes. Most of them don't have "useful solutions to Perl problems", but are relevant in PM culture or just plain funny.

414465	Funniest Nodes of 2004
4677	Erudil, the master. Read all his posts!
499201	"Most popular links on homenodes"
846	Paco! He will return!
100000	AntiVroom!

PM quotes (and a few other relevant ones)

Author	Post	Quote
Albannach	882459	That reminds me of something a senior engineer told me about 20 years ago on the topic of estimating effort: double your first number and go the the next larger unit. So if your first reaction is 30 seconds, better say 60 minutes. Four hours is more likely to be 8 days, and so on. I'm still crap at estimating individual task effort, but I'm much better at total project cost at least.
sundialsvc4	935935	Yes, it really depends upon your project’s DFQ (Dissected-Frog Quotient), followed by your cauldron-burn and fire-bubble. ;-)
Crow	MST3K The Movie	Believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this succeeding against the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid and I went ahead anyway.

Where to find me

There is always confusion on how to find me in the "real world". I don't understand why, i'm nearly always in my office at the monastery. It is on ground level, so you wont even have to climb stairs or anything. The layout of the monastery is simple enough, it has been agreed on by a fair vote all inhabitants. Most of it is even very well documented.

If you still can't find my office, here's the map:

                                               Enter monastery here  ⤋
█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████•███████████
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█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
   ↑ My office

XPDB0XRFMCTHN1ZSP5HUJA4VT