Free Software Linux

Wouldn't it be nice to have a CGI script which would convert bunch of SQL queries into XLS file on-the-fly? And while we are at it, let's have multiple reports, each in it's own directory? In a sense, it's simple REST API to SQL files on disk which produce Excel files. I first wrote something like this back in 2002, but until now, I didn't have subversion repository for it or announced it to the world. Each file in current directory which ends in *.sql will be converted to Excel sheet. If you want to have specific order, you can prefix filenames with numbers which will be striped when creating sheet names.

As you might remember, back in 2007 I wrote about Exhibit which in meantime released version 2.0 and moved to google code.

Last week I was playing around with understanding serial protocol between RFID reader and computer. For a start, I had a windows application which could communicate with RFID reader over USB serial adapter (which is included in device, so device looks like USB device). First, I needed to sniff USB serial traffic under Windows to understand protocol between device and program. Then I wrote a simple script to reformat output from portmon to more readable format, and found out that packets have two byte checksum in them.

My mind is just too accustomed to RDBMS engines to accept that I can't have GROUP BY in my shell pipes.

First of all, we had first ever Croatian perl workshop. Thanks to all the people who showed up, we had attendance of about ten. Organizing a workshop event turned out to be much more work then I anticipated, and various other tasks stopped me from preparing for it as good as I should. Also, small number of people force me to re-consider my lectures about perl. On one hand, I really, really, tried to spread perl (and had good fortune of being at right place at right time to get Zagreb.pm off the ground), but with such low attendance, I must conclude that perl is used only by about 20 people in Zagreb. This seems somehow disturbing.

Danas sam na Razmjeni vještina održao maratonsko četverosatno predavanje koje je nadam se bilo donekle korisno. Nažalost, nismo stigli ući u detalje onoliko koliko bih želio, ali ako ništa drugo ponovo sam koristio pgrestraier (koji se nekako indeksira previše sporo, morati ću pogledati zašto) i još jedan zgodan projektić koji sam napisao prošle godine za studente u Zadru pg-getfeed koji je zapravo mala perl stored procedura kojim možete raditi SQL upite na RSS feedovima.

Initially created in 2006 this handy tool is best described with original commit message: IRC bot which replace human memory Here is a quick run-down through available features:

• web archive with search
• irc commands: last, grep/search, stat, poll/count
• tags// in normal irc messages (tagcloud, filter by tag, export as RSS feed)
• announce /me messages to Twitter (yes, lame, but that was a year ago)
• tags are available as html links for embedding (in wikis)
• RSS feed from messages with tags (also nice for embedding)
• irssi log import (useful for recovery