Summersault Blog

Today’s local paper has a story about a software glitch at the Meijer big-box grocery stores that caused them to ring up all store purchases at half price. From the article:
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As a software engineer, one of the genres of programs that you’re always on the lookout for is the “killer app,” the tool or utility that immediately becomes the “best in class” for a given problem space and technology. One problem space where I’ve been hoping for just such a tool to come along is answering that age old question, “how can we quickly schedule a meeting between a bunch of people with separately maintained and very busy calendars?” In the past, it meant lots of back and forth conversations, disjointed calendar checking, and that sense that you were spending time on “administrivia” when you could be out enjoying the world.

Enter the free web tool Doodle.ch.
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Mark hasn’t had time to create a weblog entry about this yet, so I thought I would note that he recently had an article published on Perl.com entitled Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application, which is all about the popular and mature Perl CGI::Application framework for web applications. It’s definitely for geeky web developers like us, but shows how we’re keeping track of the latest trends and tools for efficiently creating robust web applications for our clients (and designing the logo for some of those tools too). Nice job, Mark!

I’d like to expand on one of the points in Tim Berners-Lee excellent recommendations on designing a good URL. He suggests leaving access out of the URL. An example of that would be the inclusion of “Public” in this bug tracking URL.

Tim is concerned about this primarily because URL access changes over time, causing the URL to need to change when the resource hasn’t changed.

There’s a bigger problem with putting access in URLs. In the era of web2.0, more sites are data-driven, providing different views of the same resource depending on how you access it. Commonly, an administrator may see links to edit and modify the data, while the public has fewer or no options to alter the content.

The problem comes when people try to share URLs to resource between different access groups. Instead of displaying the resource, the user may be prompted to login, since they are a different group than the one needed to view the resource. That’s somewhat silly– why block me from accessing a resource that I can see, even if it’s a bit different than what the sender sees?

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One of the most frequent uses of Perl in my job is to validate web-based forms. Here’s some explanation and sample code to how I do that efficiently and effectively.

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There’s been quite a lof interest in source control management (SCM) software since Linus Torvalds recently announced that he will no longer be using BitKeeper to manage the Linux kernel project. Related to this, kerneltrap.org has a timely survey about favorite SCM software. Sure it’s unscientific, but being skewed towards people who have some interest in large projects like the like the Linux kernel does make it more interesting. These are generally readers of kerneltrap.org, after all.

The two in the lead are no surprises: CVS and Subversion. CVS is the old heavyweight with a large mindshare. Subversion has gained popularity as a “better CVS”. Beyond these, the options get interesting because they get distributed.
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We use the excellent RT request tracker for our support system.

Each request is tracked through a unique ID that gets passed the e-mail subject line. Sometimes I want to update several tickets at once using a collection of unrelated IDs I have in my Inbox. Read the rest of this entry »