In a few days, The Apple App Store will hit 25,000,000,000 downloads. They're making a grand promotion out of it, even giving the "winner" a $10,000 App Store gift card.

pv, or pipe viewer, has quickly become one of the most useful applications for me. Many times, I've started a long-running task, only to wonder after starting it, how much longer it was going to take.

UPDATE: I've added the guts of the script in the following post. A few months ago, we got our secondary MySQL server online.

One of my duties, as I explained in my last post is to automate things, as everything we allow to be done by human hands causes the chance for error to increase. So scripting things not only reduces that chance for error, but also speeds the process along.

My employer has a lot of different services; one of these services is called an Email News Alert (EMNA for short). For a long time, these EMNAs were prepared manually by a team of 3 based on articles posted on our sites.

I've just created a new blog publishing system. It's a simple perl script, using Markdown, and a series of Template modules: * Template::Plugin::Date * Template::Plugin::Markdown Right now, this will generate a post page, along with an index page that is a collection of all the posts in the system.

Parallel::Iterator is a Perl module that can make your scripts much faster if you perform long-running tasks within a loop. It does this by managing a forking system in the background, allowing your long-running tasks to execute in parallel, instead of one at a time.