Perlrun explained!

One more quick thing. I was looking for a good explaination of the perl command-line switches and I found this.

Doc converters

Just a little post, mostly for myself. In reading this post about converting LaTeX to plain text I found a couple cool projects that I need to check out, opendetex for converting LaTeX to txt and Pandoc to convert seemingly anything to anything.

Explaining Perl Regexes

If you need to figure out what a certain regex is doing you can use YAPE::Regex::Explain but even more convenient is this web interface.

Open source web meetings

Some time ago I was trying to TA via an open source web meeting platform. At the time I was considering dimdim and openmeetings.

While I haven't followed up in a long time, I just got an email that dimdim is being bought and the open source platform is being discontinued (actually it seems that it was abandoned not long after I was looking at it anyway).

Just to update though, it seems that openmeetings is going strong and a poster added a new project to my open source horizon big blue button. I will keep that in mind for the next time I get the web interaction bug, perhaps for my dissertation.

Ideone -- an online pastebin and compiler in one

http://www.ideone.com/

What is ideone?
Ideone is something more than a pastebin; it's an online compiler and debugging tool which allows
to compile and run code online in more than 40 programming languages.

Sounds cool, I wonder if I will find a cool use for it sometime soon?

Perl -- add the script's directory to @INC

Lets say you write a Perl script that includes some local packages, but you want to run the script from a symlink or from in your path. How can you get it to include those packages in your libraries (@INC)?

Near the top of your script place the lines:

use Cwd 'abs_path';
use File::Basename;
use lib dirname( abs_path $0 );

Should work in all cases and on all OSes. (source: http://use.perl.org/~Aristotle/journal/33995)

Roll your own Ubuntu with UCK

Ubuntu Customization Kit lets you build your own Ubuntu install CD. Read more http://www.tuxradar.com/content/build-your-own-linux-distribution-easy-way