March 2006 Archives

Luckily, I now have half of a solution to the Komodo Remote Debugging issue I previously wrote about, thanks to Peter.

I still don't have a solution to the PerlEx debugging issue. No matter how hard I try, there's no way I can get it to communicate with Komodo. I'm not too worried about it, though. It's not often you need to debug a perl application while in production, and I can deal with it later.

Peter found the same issue that I did. ActiveState's documentation states that you must change the application mapping in IIS to reflect 'perl.exe -d "%s" %s' to get perl to go into debug mode. This doesn't work, for a variety of reasons. Turns out, if you change the shebang in your cgi (#!/usr/bin/perl and the like) to add -d, but leave it out of the app mapping, debug mode starts up properly.

Sure enough, I tried it out on my IIS machine in a virtual directory, went to the script, and Komodo lit up just fine on my Mac.

Thanks, Peter.

While perusing the friends of friends on my LiveJournal account, someone wrote an entry with this link. Apparently, some assemblyman in New Jersey is proposing that every web site with a forums should require users to register their full legal name before being able to post any content in the forum. Then, upon request (that is, an email, not anything legal (!)), the owner or maintainer of the web site should be required to divulge said user identification in the case of harassment, libel, or other defamation.

The idea of this scares me -- it's overreaction to a problem, most likely spearheaded by people who can't take any type of criticism or otherwise. Who sets what is 'defamation' and what is criticism, a joke, or otherwise? And how does this affect Usenet? Frankly, if something like this became law, I don't know how I will be able to continue maintaining whatthefuck.com..

I hate to take this down a notch, but is everyone taking stupid pills now?

After really getting into the idea of Catalyst, I've been inundated with projects that require a quick lead time and implementation. Hence, I've been going with the standard CGI::Application/Template::Toolkit suite within Perl to deploy applications. They're fast and work well, but don't have the raw sex that Catalyst seems capable of.

I've been rewriting the whatthefuck.com codebase over the past who knows how long to reflect the things I've learned in the years since I created the site. The current codebase has a lot of perl code surrounded by a lot of print qq~ ~; statements to render HTML. It's not pretty, it's not 'strict', and it's not mod_perl compliant. This rewrite has happened in CGI::Application, and has changed three times since I started it.

I figured, "screw it," and started rewriting it in Catalyst. I'm using the same templates, and the same general database schema, but moving it into a data modeled system on the Catalyst framework. Milestone 1 was hit tonight: the damn thing renders in Catalyst.

(Image ganked from Engadget)

As seen on MobileWhack, the Nokia E61 was just approved by the FCC.

I've wanted this phone since it was announced last year. I've tried replacing my Nokia 3650 three times, and kept coming back to it. The Motorola V330 and the RAZR were great little phones, but the operating system sucked the nuts. The iPAQ 6315 was neat as a PocketPC, but sucked as a phone. It would crash often while just trying to answer the phone.

The E61 is known as the 'blackberry killer'. It's a wider and taller phone than most, with a full 320x240 display, 802.11 and quad-band connectivity, and proper push email. Better yet, it's still running Series 60 software on Symbian OS 9.1, which means a whole hell of a lot of existing applications will work with it, and it's a great development platform for new stuff. Hell, there's even a Perl implementation for it.

The countdown begins.

I'm on a Komodo kick here, sorry about that. I'm having some hell of a time trying to figure out remote debugging within Komodo.

So I'm using Komodo Personal 3.5 on Mac OS X, test environment is a Windows XP SP2 machine running IIS, no firewall, no port blocking, no antivirus, no antispyware. Komodo's running on a Mac OS X 10.4.5 machine.

I have:

• Installed the Windows Remote Debug for Komodo package (to c:\Perl \KomodoDebug)
• Set Komodo to listen to port 9000
• Set PERL5LIB to C:\Perl\KomodoDebug
• Set PERLDB_OPTS to RemotePort=[my mac's ip]:9000
• From the command line, started perl -d , and Komodo successfully did the remote debugging thing.

So, now I want it to work in IIS. Specifically, I want to know why this application dies in certain modules under PerlEx 3 with the ActiveState Perl 5.8.7 (815) package.

First, I tried changing the app mapping in IIS to 'c:\perl\bin\perl.exe -d "% s" %s', and it prompts for me to download the application. I manually edit the MIME types in IIS to always output text/html, and it just spins and spins and spins in the browser.

Okay, fine, I'll skip the perl CGI and go to PerlEx.

I create a key in HKLM/SOFTWARE/ActiveState/PerlEx/3.0/Classes called 'nx-d'. Inside are three string values: (LF being the ALT-1-0 trick)
CommandLineOptions = -d
Environment = PERL5LIB=C:\Perl\KomodoDebug[LF] PERLDB_OPTS=RemotePort=[my mac's IP]:9000
ScriptLocation=[full path to script, starting with c:, using backticks. seems to work.]

When running the CGI, it spins and spins and spins and never starts anything within Komodo on the OS X machine. I've noticed, once in a while, Windows shows an application unexpectedly quit issue regarding a COM loader. This is probably related.

I don't friggin get it. I was hoping writing it down would make some light bulb go off in my head.

No such luck.

Update: Debugging is now working using the standard perl executable!