Operation Album.plBy: Allen Ayres
Editor's Note: Holed up in a bunker cell only Mini-Me could love, I crouch down with a recorder in one hand and a notepad in the other, eager to get a few tidbits of behind-the-scenes intel from the Canadian Army's premier, and perhaps only, perl guru. Due to the classified nature of this conversation, we'll be using code names, mine - ubbdev, his - Mike. What follows can only be considered of the highest need-to-know classification level... burn your brain after reading this to erase the contents.ubbdev :: Hello, "Mike". Can you tell us a bit about your background?
mike :: I'm a pretty regular guy. I live in Ottawa, Canada, am married and have three kids and a dog. Even have a minivan.
Previously, I've lived in a number of places across Canada, even worked in Michgan for about a year. I am currently working at Nortel Networks as a Senior Security Architect and I'm also a freelance writer for Information Security Magazine.
ubbdev :: Pretty interesting
You've obviously been on the web quite a while... Outside of ubb-related sites, what are your 3 favorite sites to visit?
mike ::
- http://www.devguru.com
- http://online.securityfocus.com
- and http://www.ebay.com
ubbdev :: When and why did you open
your site for the Canadian Army?
mike :: I started the site way back in December of 1993, when I was a Lt. in the Canadian Infantry. At the time, there was no official site for the Canadian Army, so I decided to put some information up, primarily to help answer questions about recruiting. Since then the site has grown significantly, and taken on a life of it's own through the efforts of many contributors.
ubbdev :: What are some goals you have for it?
mike :: I'm really looking forward to UBB's content islands, but since I don't think they've been announced yet, I'm not sure I can talk about them...
Other than that, I've been working on a re-design of the site's layout and navigation, which isn't quite ready yet. The highlight of that will be a flash menu system and some re-organization of the content. I've also PHPized all the pages and moved to a common header and footer. Though there are few noticable changes so far, these updates make it much easier to add dynamic content to the site.
ubbdev :: When and why did you begin developing
your perl scripts ?
mike :: I started writing PERL about 5 years ago, as I was trying to learn the language. I used examples people put on the web as tutorials, learning how they did various things by looking at the code, then writing my own. The more I used PERL the more I liked it's efficiency and flexibility, and it soon became my language of choice. Since I relied so much on examples to learn the language, I decided to put some of the scripts I've developed on the web.
Specifically, I started writing album.pl because I'm a bit of a shutterbug. In 1999 I bought my first digital camera, and before long, I had more pictures than I knew what to do with. So I wrote a very simple script to help me navigate and view my large collection of photos. Almost two years later, I wrote a photo upload script for CdnArmy.ca, and before long managed to merge the two scripts into one: album.pl
ubbdev :: Which one do you find the most useful/fun to work on?
mike :: It changes from time to time. Now that
album.pl is fairly well developed I spend most of my time working with it. I've tried to keep the code fairly modular, so when I add a new feature I can get right to the good stuff instead of writing more "base" code.
ubbdev :: What about some of your other modifications, like the
mailing list integration . Can you tell us a bit more about that?
mike :: I built the mailing list archive because I have literally 7 years of mailing list traffic (that's over 8,000 messages) that would otherwise be inaccessible to my users. This mod runs through the list history and makes each message a posting in a special UBB "archive" forum. The benefit to this over other list archives is that it keeps it as part of my forums, meaning it all has the same "look and feel," is completely searchable and can be centrally managed. Unfortunately the mod is still pretty rough around the edges (some MIME formatted messages come out a bit garbled and "threads" aren't maintained for example), but it gets the messages out there.
ubbdev :: It would seem to be very useful to those who have email lists and a ubb.classic on the same site. I've seen it requested often
For someone considering beginning to write their own perl scripts, what are your favorite learning resources?
mike :: First and foremost, I find other people's scripts a great place to learn. PERL is flexible enough that there are tons of "shortcuts" out there, and every time I check out another person's script a learn a new (and usually more efficient) way to do something. Couple that with the fact that there are literally thousands of PERL scripts and mods out there, and you end up with some fantastic resources. The ubiquitous PERL "Camel" book by O'Reilly is also a great learning tool, though nowadays you can obtain most of the information you need from online PERL manuals.
ubbdev :: Thank you, I've heard great things about the Camel Book, tho I imagine the latest is always found online. Speaking of "the latest", what future scripts do you have planned and is there any intel you can leak about them?
mike :: Necessity is the mother of invention, so I usually don't know what my next script will be until I need it.
ubbdev :: Right right right... "top secret", we understan...
mike :: That's really not it...
ubbdev :: No need to explain, thanks for the interview and all the time you put into your great scripts
mike :: Cheers
