ofVOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 course WINTER / SPRING 2002 Brand new virtual machine Parrot Uncaged! The latest versions Perl • Java PHP • MySQL Tcl/Tk • Expect FROM THE EDITOR Star performance for Win32 New Want a server on which to develop, but don’t want the hassle of sourcing and Year installing all the bits you need? If you’re developing Web applications in Perl, and your desktop machine is Brings running a Windows operating system, you might like to have a look at IndigoPerl. IndigoPerl is a binary build of Perl 5.6 for Win32 with an integrated Apache Euro web server for testing and developing CGI scripts. Top of its feature list comes Change “easy installation”. You should be able to have a test and development server on desktop in very short order. Hello, and welcome to Well IndigoPerl is distributed by IndigoSTAR software, and can be downloaded House Consultant’s first “Of under their free software license from http://www.indigostar.com/indigoperl.htm. Course” Newsletter of 2002. On the 1st of January, the Euro Euro choice: replaced 12 national currencies in Europe. We were in Austria for the a few options new year and marvelled at the With the Euro now in use as the day- smooth transition. On the right to-day currency of most of Europe, hand side of this page, you’ll find you might if you should quote prices an article that lists the alternative and accept payments in Euros, even ways you can provide dual pricing if you haven’t quoted in Punts, Francs on your own web site, and if you and Lira before. look to our course schedule on When is m? a “m mode The exchange rate between the page 15, you’ll find that we now od a em ot connection Pound and the Euro fluctuates, and quote fixed prices in both Euros Most connect ” n hardware a “modem”, but it will be you have a choice to make if you’re and pounds. a computer to the Internet via an neither modulating nor demodulating moving to a dual currency web site. At Well House Consultants, analogue telephone line through a signals. A “cable modem” accessing You could: we provide training courses in modem. the Internet through broadband is • Update the exchange rate on Perl, PHP, Tcl, MySQL and Java, A modem got its name from what it another digital connection, but really your web site daily (you can running public and private courses does as a MODulator / DEModulator, acts as a convertor. get the latest figure from http: at our own training centre in a device that turns a computer’s digital Wireless networking technology //www.ecb.int), and quote Euro Wiltshire. We also train on site in pulses into audio frequencies for the such as IEEE 802.11b converts prices marked “for guidance only”, your offices if you prefer. All of telephone line and vice versa. But the digital signals into radio frequencies, invoicing customers at the rate that our courses are presented and term “modem” has evolved into other yet wireless network cards and holds on the day they order or have written by our own staff, who are uses these days. base station are still referred to as the goods dispatched. professional practitioners of the If you use an ISDN line, which is a digital telephone line, you may still call modems. • Update the exchange rate daily, and subjects on which they teach. And issue quotes in both currencies. having students with such varied You’ll need to keep good records of backgrounds and experience is Consider putting all your quotes, as prices will vary on a daily the reason why we offer so many basis. courses. Find your course needs cookies in one place • Update the exchange rate less on pages 6 and 7. frequently. You’ll be taking a risk The long-awaited Perl 6 will The European Parliament has voted versions that don’t that you don’t lose a lot of money incorporate a brand new virtual for a regulation of cookies as part of their allow cookies. on fluctuations, but your customers machine, written with the benefit adoption of the Cybercrime treaty. Under It does seem that will appreciate being offered prices of experience of the old bytecode the regulation, it would be illegal to “use persistent cookies that don’t change every day, and machine. This new virtual machine Cookies, Spyware, web bugs and are allowed on a they will be much happier to place is known as “parrot”, and it’s other hidden web site provided Euro orders knowing that the price designed to suit not only Perl 6, identifiers that the web site asks won’t change while they’re actually but also Perl 5, Python and Tcl. ... to store the user whether he or she will faxing the order through. We discuss this topic beginning information accept them. • Set fixed prices for your products on on page 8. or trace the activities Until these matters are resolved, we in both Euros and Pounds, based We use this newsletter to keep of the user”. suggest that you keep all the code that on the current exchange rate, and past trainees up-to-date on the There is currently some relates to cookies and hidden fields in review both sets of prices at the latest news on Perl, PHP, Java dispute amongst computer professionals one “module” or “class”; you can change same time on an annual basis. and other topics on which we as to what this will mean in practice; it sites easily to reflect changing legal You’ll be able to fix individual prices train, so you’ll find current release seems that under the proposals, needs. Modular design in both currencies so that you have information and news of Perl 6. undated cookies (those that such as this is, in easy-to-follow prices and not nastily Refer to page 13 for the latest die when you close your any case, very rounded ones. open source releases. browser, and are not stored good practice. If you accept credit card payments, Our tutor or administrator will to your disk) are check with your credit be more than happy to discuss still acceptable, How much risk in fixing the exchange rate? card company. You which courses are relevant to but persistent The Euro-to-Pound rate does fluctuate. Here are the will usually have to you, prices, availability, and other cookies are not. rates quoted as we write this article, compared to what charge UK prices in details. There’s no hard sell; It’s not clear whether the rates were one, two and three years ago. Sterling. If your client the majority of our business is persistent cookies may has a Euro card, the Jan2002 £ 0.6169 repeated from client companies legally be sent from a server in a country company will do the Jan2001 £ 0.6334 who have used us previously and outside Europe (e.g. the USA) to a conversion so that Jan2000 £ 0.6064 like our product. browser in Europe, or whether browser payment is in Euros at Jan1999 £ 0.6983 – Graham J. Ellis authors should supply European the current rate. 2 www.wellho.net WELL HOUSE CONSULTANTS All public courses are run at our specially fitted training centre in Melksham, Wiltshire. Extracting text Each trainee on our public course has exclusive use of a laptop computer for the course duration, including access to our servers and from a Word broadband Internet access. Public courses are limited to a maximum of eight trainees, and are presented by our own staff who write the material document to themselves, and who have practical experience in its application. Melksham is a town in Wiltshire, about 100 miles west of London. It’s put into Perl easily reached by train (86 minutes from London’s Paddington station) Perl embraces new technologies and or road (just a few miles off the M4 motorway). standards by providing a mechanism through which they can be supported. They are either built in to the Perl language itself, or provided through modules. For example: What if you want to take the text from some Word documents and have that text available in a different format on your web server? The natural choice is Perl and the hardest part of such a task is usually finding out how to do it, which modules to load, and from where, and how to call them. Here’s a piece of code for extracting text from a Word document: use Win32::OLE; use Win32::OLE::Enum; $document = Win32::OLE -> GetObject($ARGV[1]); open (FH,”>$ARGV[0]”); Poseidon Temple, Lindos, Rhodes. Cadlnus, king of Phoenicia, built this temple to Poseidon and dedicated a bronze cauldron with an inscription $paragraphs = $document->Paragraphs(); in Phoenician script to Athena. This is Mythologyʼs way of explaining the $enumerate = new Win32::OLE::Enum($paragraphs); introduction of the Phoenician alphabet. while(defined($paragraph = $enumerate->Next())) { $style = $paragraph->{Style}->{NameLocal}; A story of gods and mortals print FH “+$style\n”; Once upon a time, a long long time Unix / Linux: A daemon is a $text = $paragraph->{Range}->{Text}; ago, all was not well with the Greek background process, running $text =~ s/[\n\r]//g; Gods. whenever the computer hosting it $text =~ s/\x0b/\n/g; Zeus and Poseidon, Athena and is running, and providing services print FH “=$text\n”; Apollo, Aphrodite and Hermes all to users who call for that service. } found themselves spending too much Examples of daemons include time managing Olympus and too little web server programs, print spool This example uses the Win32 modules to access the Word document time involved in the godly life of ruling managers, and database engines, with (named as the second parameter of the command line) and saves each the world and, of course, partying.