Words of warning:

This section of the site is "for developers and by developers".  Any of these tools or instructions might cause your computer to catch fire and run around the room screaming.  There is no guarantee that it won't (or even that it will if you were looking forward to that sort of thing.)  Use it all at your own risk.

Feel free to contact me if you have any comments or even just drop me a line to let me know that you found it useful.  If there's something that you want to build onto, please tell me so.  I like sharp tools, but don't particularly think that I should have to build them all myself (or that you should either.)  Big thanks to all of the open-source software authors out there that have gotten us this far.

Subversion Backup Tools

Tools for managing backups of a subversion repository which allow you to schedule various backups at different revisions.

SVN for OpenOffice Files

Unpacking and checking-in the zip files that are the openoffice document format (sxw, sxc, sxd) is something that many people have thought of, but there are just enough tricky bits in there to make doing it manually tedious.  Not the least of these is the lack of linebreaks in the xml.  This tool isn't perfect ($yet= Fri Feb 10, 2006), but it's a start.

Disassembled POD Editing

This got started while I was working on a new release of 8 distributions with 21 Perl modules which had accumulated various contact, license, and copyright info over the years, as well as having changed my mind about keeping the "Changes" section inline to the main code.  By breaking the pod sections into individual pieces, a few simple shell commands allow you to edit all of them simultaneously without attempting a difficult and fragile multi-line search/replace.

Live Install System

The Live Install system is an idea/method that I've been trying to evolve into a high-speed software coding, revision control, and distribution standard.

Getopt::Crazy

Possibly a replacement for Getopt::Long with a couple of new features and (the key ingredient) a whole lot of features removed.  Still a work in progress, this is a complete rethink of command-line option processing.

Reloading Konqueror Windows with SGI::FAM

A browser refresh tool that watches the file (or directory) which you are currently editing to know when to reload.

The Guts of Perl

The slides and podcast from a talk about what the perl interpreter does when you throw a program at it. How perlguts and compiled extensions work and how to peek into perl internals with Perl code.

Subversion for CPAN

It is certainly feasible to create a subversion repository for all of CPAN past, present and future.  Is it fundable?  Thus far the answer is no.  We'll see what SoC brings.

Miscellany

The Subversion Repository is a pile of cryptic and sometimes buggy code (enter at your own risk.)  That's the latest version of any given thing, so you may want to look to CPAN for more stable, older versions.

I hope to have a nightly build system setup here soon.  Send me an e-mail if you know of one that plays nicely with subversion.

Still working on this section.  Check the old site for notes, info, etc.

Orphans

You might also call them love children.  There are a lot of small scripts and little projects that fall off of my main-line developments.  Typically, these are created when I need to automate something but can't find an existing tool to do it.  Rather than taking the time to handle the task by hand, I typically bet on having to repeat the process or something like it again later, so I write a script (often ignoring edge-cases or user-friendliness) and drop it into the repository.  These may be identified by a lack of documentation and options.  If you find an orphan that you would like to adopt, chances are that I would be happy for you to have it as your own project.  Contact me so I know what you're doing (after all, I needed to use this tool once and figured I probably would again so you improving it and not telling me doesn't help me much does it?) and I will send you a brain-dump, update my site to point at yours, etc.