programming

Last week I needed a way of converting a two-dimensional array, in perl, into a tree-like datastructure.
While seemingly trivial, the convoluted use of references when passing around arrays and hashes between perl function calls -- recursive calls, in this case -- made this a mind-boggling exercise to me. (the fact that I hadn't seriously used perl in the last eight years might have had part in that, too)

Below the jump is my implementation, debugging info left in and all. If it's useful for someone, that's great; if not, ... well, except for my mental sanity no harm was done in writing this, either :) Continue reading "Perl hash tree helper"

To the people looking for a way of converting from metres per seconds to metres per days: multiply your value by 86400 (60 for seconds in a minute, times 60 for minutes in an hour, times 24 for hours in a day).

One of the disadvantages of using dynamic web pages, is that you might end up serving pages (depending on how the application works) that basically say: "I can't find what you're looking for". Over the last hour I've kept half an eye onto the webserver logs for this weblog, and noticed that the Google crawler tried to index pages which simply aren't there, like for example an archive view for the year 2083. But the underlying PHP script happily returns a HTTP 200 status, with the message that filters don't match anything. Hardly useful.
I also ran trough a large part of the site, checking if any page could refer to such 2083 archive, but haven't found any links to it. Which leaves me wonder why Google came to it.

On faulty pages; for the last couple of days I've also been updating the script code to some extent, and through the log following of the server logs I noticed that some links were broken (and did not return 200 but 404 instead, or, in case of the comment code, made it impossible to post anything at all). Largely due to modification of a global in some code path, which variable was used later to build up these broken links.
I think I've covered all faulty links; but if I oversaw any please let me know, I can be reached by email at mechanix on rack66.net.