Ken's Thoughts...
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Thu, 01 Sep 2005

Oh my lord, what have I done??
The past week and a half I have jumped head first into some serious new stuff at work. I've been writing perl since 1998, and wrote my first cgi back in 1994 (it was in pascal, on a windows 3.1 box running a version of the cern httpd that was ported to windows), but I've never done anything with SQL (any of them), and I haven't played much with interactive cgi's.

Until I returned from vacation..

Step 1: Learn SQL. Because we have some major projects that need to be finished that will require, or at least will benefit, from rdbms interaction, and the flamingos group has all of their work stored in a database and I'm supposed to be the dba (their guy moved back to England in 2003 and I've been puttering along maintaining it since), I figured it'd be a good time to learn SQL. I won't claim to be a whiz, but my years of database programming while at JenMar (and BBS programming) got me way past the basic concepts (data normalization, why foreign keys are good, and the like) and I have been able to ramp up very quickly. SQL syntax is very simple and straightforward, and working with multiple tables is so intuitive that I'm surprised people command high dollars for the work.

Last week I could barely accomplish a "select * from blah" statement. This week I've developed a print auditing system which parses my printer logs and dumps them into MySQL. With a simple perl script I can produce a few decent reports based on the data, including how much each user is spending and how much each printer is costing.

My users will be so happy.

Step 2: Extend my CGI programming abilities. AJAX and DHTML are the future, and they must be embraced for web-applications to be successful. One of the problems though is I'm a perl muench, and am not a big fan of the many insecurity holes frequently found in PHP. So, I need to start developing a framework where AJAX applications can be rapidly prototyped and developed in a perl environment.

I looked at WDDX, but it seemed a bit buggy. However, after plugging away I was able to come up with some simple code to do a few basic operations. The code should be able to be generalized enough that in the future I can make a library out of it..

Oh yeah, I need to sleep sometime now too.

Posted at: 22:49 on 01/09/2005   [ /diary ] #


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SAP Filtering 1998
Border Manager 1999
Astronomy Status 2002
Astronomy Update 2003
Linux on a CTX FC2A300
Honeynet Challenge entry