For a recent project I needed some realistic market data for an electronic exchange. Seeing how MtGox provides free and open access to theirs (thank you!) I chose them. However none of the examples floating around the internet seemed to work, so I whipped one up using Net::Async::WebSocket ...

The slides from my Cluj.PM lightning talk:

It was a stressful (but fun!) experience. Thanks to the organizers!

Lets say that you have the following problem: you want to write a script which processes the output of a program and writes out the modified somewere, with as little buffering as possible. One concrete example (for which I needed the script) is log rotation: you want to save the ...

The problem: lets say you have a program which generates data to the clipboard (or it is easier to get the data into the clipboard than into a file) and you want to process the data (create a summary for example).

Perl to the rescue!

Get the Clipboard module (if ...

In the latest Software Freedom Law Show Bradley mentioned the X-Face email header and challenged listeners to send them an email containing the X-Face header. So here is the small Perl script I’ve whipped together to send them an email trough GMail:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::SMTP ...

After talking a lot about optimizations and selecting the right algorithm, here is a little brute-force code. This particular one gives the answer to the following puzzle from Richard Wiseman’s Blog (one well worth following BTW):

Can you make the number 24 with the number 5, 5, 5, and ...

Inspired by a post on the PacketLife.net blog - Cisco “Go” links reference in the wiki – I tried to mine the short links to come up with the “definitive” list, but after running it for a couple of days, it only managed to find 473 links, compared to the 4720 ...

Recently I was reading the blogpost on the BrekingPoint labs log about parsing pcap files with Perl and I immediately said to myself: it is impossible that there isn’t a module on CPAN, because Perl is great. Turns out I was right, there is Net::TcpDumpLog which can be ...

…and of the Perl modules in general. I had the following problem:

Given a list of 16 character alphanumeric IDs, find all the lines from a large-ish (\~6GB) logfile which contain at least one of the IDs.

The naive approach was to construct a big regular expression like \W(\QID1 ...

I’ve had to use this trick a couple of times the last few years, so I decided that I might as well document it:

If you have an image of a storage media (like an SD card or CD/DVD) which you can not mount (either because the filesystem ...