Entries tagged cpan

As of this morning I'm a published author on CPAN!

Thus far I have only a single module to my name, but that will most likely change in the future:

CGI::Session::Driver::redis

A module for storing (CGI) session data within a Redis database.

A while back I setup a dynamic website which was 100% redis backed, using my redis backports for lenny, and realised I needed somewhere to store the session data too. Hence this module.

I'll create a .deb package of the module, and stick it alongside the redis server.

ObQuote:I like to keep this handy... for close encounters.

Aliens

Tags: cpan, perl, redis | No comments

A while back I mentioned that I was going to be updating and overhauling the blogspam.net service. That process is now almost complete. A couple of nights ago I overhauled the website, and today I've finally committed my last (planned) change to the repository for the purposes of migration. I started reworking the code a week or so ago, but as of this evening the code in the repository is the code the server is actually running.

The previous codebase was functional but a little hasty - and was implemented before I switched to per-UID server-hosting - so there was a need to clean things up and make sure permissions and similar niggles were checked.

The new, modular, codebase requires no root access, and will store all state (logs & transient caches) in a clean extensible fashion. The code is also much more flexible making use of Module::Pluggable rather than Class::Pluggable. This allowed me to overhaul the API of the plugins (primarily to add an expire method such that each plugin has a well-defined means to expire any state they may maintain). Module::Pluggable is a great module - allows me to treat plugins as first class objects, which wasn't the case with C::P.

Since all the code behind the service is Perl it is also now available on CPAN in addition to the mercurial repository where it is developed..

I see that the server is getting pretty popular these days, used by the likes of embedders.org, publiclive.com, & etc. It doesn't hurt that ikiwiki, identi.ca, and other people include support in their distributions these days. Me? I mostly use it on debian-administration.org where it does a great job.

ObQuote: What's the name of that thing that if I eat it real fast, it's free? - Whip It.

Tags: blogspam, cpan, perl | 2 comments

I've just released a new Blog::Spam module to CPAN.

The Blog::Spam module is 99% of the code behind the blog & forum spam detection service.

On the whole I'm pleased with the way that development has gone, and although I'm going to keep tinkering it is essentially "complete".

Now I need to go back and fix bugs in chronicle, asql, and rinse.

ObSubject: "You are just an ordinary man in a cape!" - Batman Begins.

Tags: blogspam, cpan | No comments

Recently I've been producing simple Flash animations.

Mostly these are simple "Show an image, slide it around a bit, show another..". But I still feel vaguely unclean and non-free.

I started off using the SWF Perl binding, but soon realised that wasn't much fun. So I wrote a mini intepretter such that I can script creation:

#!/usr/bin/flash-scripter

# create the movie
create 640 480

# background == black
clear 0, 0, 0

# load image at 0,0
load 0, 0, foo.png

# move it about a bit
move 0, -1
move 0, -1
move 0, -1

# movie-time is over now.
stop

# finally save the movie
save foo.swf

# all done
exit

I see I'm not alone in doing such a thing as swftools (not available for Debian) includes swfc "A tool for creating SWF files from simple script files.". Sadly swftools fails to build for me on Squeeze so I couldn't try it out.

My little tool is called SWF::Scripter and uses plugins to implement each "command" so I should probably upload it somewhere public. On the other hand it was a quick hack to produce a mini-story from a bunch of images with no complex transitions so I'm not sure it is worth the effort.

ObQuote: "I honestly think I'd give up smoking if he asked me." - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Tags: cpan, flash, perl, scripting | 7 comments

Some coding updates:

My templer static site generator has now been uploaded to CPAN, and is available as App::Templer.

I've converted most of my Dockerfiles to work with docker 1.0.0, which is nice.

I also hacked up a fun DNS-server for sharing JSON-encoded data, within a LAN or other environment:

• https://github.com/skx/json-dns

Finally I updated the blogspam-detecting site a little, on the back-end. The code is now running inside Docker containers which means I can redeploy more easily in the future.

My blog post about looking for a job received some attention via a Reddit advert I posted to /r/edinburgh + /r/sysadmin, but thus far has mostly resulted in people wanting me to write code for them .. which is frustrating.

For the moment I'm working on a fun challenge involving (email) spam-detection. That takes me back.

Tags: cpan, docker, perl, templer | 2 comments

As previously mentioned I've been working on git-based DNS hosting for a while now.

The site was launched for real last Sunday, and since that time I've received enough paying customers to cover all the costs, which is nice.

Today the site was "relaunched", by which I mean almost nothing has changed, except the site looks completely different - since the templates/pages/content is all wrapped up in Bootstrap now, rather than my ropy home-made table-based layout.

This week coming I'll be slowly making some of the implementation available as free-software, having made a start by publishing CGI::Application::Plugin::AB - a module designed for very simple A/B testing.

I don't think there will be too much interest in most of the code, but one piece I'm reasonably happy with is my webhook-receiver.

Webhooks are at the core of how my service is implemented:

• You create a repository to host your DNS records.
• You configure a webhook to be invoked when pushing to that repository.
• The webhook will then receive updates, and magically update your DNS.

Because the webhook must respond quickly, otherwise github/bitbucket/whatever will believe you've timed out and report an error, you can't do much work on the back-end.

Instead I've written a component that listens for incoming HTTP POSTS, parses the body to determine which repository that came from, and then enqueues the data for later processing.

A different process will be constantly polling the job-queue (which in my case is Redis, but could be beanstalkd, or similar. Hell even use MySQL if you're a masochist) and actually do the necessary magic.

Most of the webhook processor is trivial, but handling different services (github, bitbucket, etc) while pretending they're all the same is hard. So my little toy-service will be released next week and might be useful to others.

ObRandom: New pricing unveiled for users of a single zone - which is a case I never imagined I'd need to cover. Yay for A/B testing :)

Tags: cpan, dns, dns-api.com | 4 comments