Perl in Emacs and flaming servers

Started doing some Perl in Emacs because TRAMP is so cool. Started using cperl-mode too. It’s not bad, but it’s got some weird stuff that I’ll have to get used to. For example, it shows you extra whitespace on a line – including as you type it. So, for example, when a line is first indented, all whitespace between the first column and point is underlined. After you type any non-whitespace character, the underline goes away. Additionally, there was a small problem in cperl-perldoc where it searched cperl-small-docs case insensitively. Made a patch and sent it to the author:

--- cperl-mode.el.4.32	Wed May 31 01:14:42 2000
+++ cperl-mode.el	Fri Sep 20 14:47:49 2002
@@ -8075,7 +8075,8 @@
                    (error "No perldoc args given")
                  default-entry)
              input))))
-  (let* ((is-func (and 
+  (let* ((case-fold-search nil)
+         (is-func (and 
 		   (string-match "^[a-z]+$" word)
 		   (string-match (concat "^" word "\>")
 				 (documentation-property

The author, Ilya Zakharevich, is a nice guy. He dispelled any notion I had that the “Unbalanced parenthesis” messages whenever I started typing, for example, an s// expression were bugs. Indeed, until I finish it, the expression is unbalanced.

Doing network stuff in Perl is so easy with things like libnet and libwww-perl . Even file uploads via HTTP aren’t a hassle on either end.

I still need to get a decent template put on this web log (not “blog”, damnit). Maybe I’ll get a chance to do it today. Right now I have to go to work and fix a server that I suspect is overheating. We’re going to try and get more A/C put in on Monday — I hope. It could be SMP problems, but I don’t think the box is under much load and it just started happening; no major software or hardware configuration changes since I-can’t-remember-when.