This post was originally at my Harvard Law / Berkman Center blog, but has since been removed. Though it is certainly outdated with respect to the current practices and personalities of the History of Science department, it still may hold some value for prospective students. I originally wrote it as advice to my [...]
Posts under ‘bugfix’
CGI.pm hangs in read_from_client under Catalyst / TT
Aahhh. The joys of a Monday evening with the Perl debugger.
I have a quite simple Web front-end to a relatively complex back-end system. The Web app is written in Perl with Catalyst as a framework, and Template Toolkit (TT) as the templating engine. Since we are smart-asses, we aped the Ruby on Rails “link_to” function, [...]
Create blank objects in Perl’s Class::DBI
Perl’s Class::DBI is something I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with. It’s definitely been useful. And, like with Ruby’s ActiveRecord, it can sometimes rocket-propel you 10x with a development task.
However, it’s got a lot of weird gotchas built in. One of them seems to be the [...]
Fixing Net::Google error with 404 File does not exist
I was trying to install Net::Google 1.0 using CPANPLUS on my Mac OS X 10.5 machine, and kept getting a pesky error:
Service description ‘file:’ can’t be loaded: 404 File `’ does not exist
One thing I had to do to fix it was install an apparent prerequisite, SOAP::WSDL. It [...]
Entering a Hard Line Break in a Text Cell in Excel 2004 for Mac OS X
No cutesy commentary for once:
The equivalent on Mac OS X of alt-enter for entering a hard line break within a cell in Excel is command-control-enter (open apple-control-enter).
wxPerl on Mac OS X must be run with special binary
If you are having trouble with your “hello world” wxPerl script on Mac OS X, check your shebang (#!) line and make sure you’re running /usr/bin/wxPerl (or which ever wxPerl you have) rather than merely /usr/bin/perl — the normal perl will display the main window but won’t allow interaction between the window and [...]
Rails form_tag Changes in Rails 1.2
I recently updated my dev machine (Mac OS X) to the latest Rails gems, and was getting deprecation warnings for using form_tag in its old, non-block, pre-Rails 1.2 way.
Then, in moving between my development and acceptance-testing boxes (you do have a mirror of your production environment running as an acceptance testing [...]
God Help You If You Get Derailed: "Model is Deprecated"
The comprehensible but often superfluous model method in Rails is used in an ActionController to tell it about an ActiveRecord model that it ought to have loaded in order to have the AR classes available to it. It’s kind of got the feeling of a require or a use in Perl. [...]
Printing From Mac OS X Without Going Bankrupt
One thing about buying a new(ish) MacBook Pro loaded with Tiger: they really aren’t cutting a lot of corners. This includes in the area of resource usage (see e.g. memory usage, as you buy another gig of RAM). This, of course, is done in the name of an “Insanely Great” user [...]
Ruby’s ActiveRecord Makes Dropping to Raw SQL a Royal Pain (Probably on Purpose)
The opinionated programmers behind Rails have generally done a good job. (There are couple of FUBARs in their bag of tricks, such as the boneheaded choice to use pluralized table names (in some places) and use automagical pluralization code to try and mediate between the singular and plural.)
There’s another item I’d [...]