$z=sub{for($z=0;$z<@_;$z++){$z=oct("$_[$z++]")."$_[$z++]".$_[$z];for($w=0;
$w<length($z);$w++){($n,$n)=split(m--,substr($z,$w,2));$w++;$x=int($n);
push(@v,split(m++,${n}x${x}));}}for($w=0;$w<@v/3;$w++){$_=chr(int($v[$w].
$v[$w+055].$v[$w+0x5a]));$_=~tr,a-za-z,n-za-mn-za-m,;print $_;}};$z->(10016,0x460,
4120,6046,0x1810,3110,15706,0x83e,1130,2437,0xb5e,2110,2447,0x456,1213,6050,0x456,
3411,2613,0x840,1321,1763,0x7db,1910,2151,0x584,1312,1771,0x715,1714,2130,0x77a,
2112,3256,0x4ba,1411,7032,0x5ef,1718,2142,0x6af,1812,2442,0x6b0,1417);

I was attempting to install DBD::mysql today, and I ran into a fiendishly difficult problem.

I've installed the mysql drivers for Perl countless times, but this time for some reason, I was getting the following error:

ool-4577f347:~/.cpan/build/DBD-mysql-4.004 root# make
cc -c -I/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI -I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch ppc64 -fno-common -DDBD_MYSQL_INSERT_ID_IS_GOOD -g -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -no-cpp-precomp -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -Os -DVERSION=\"4.004\" -DXS_VERSION=\"4.004\" "-I/System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE" dbdimp.c
dbdimp.c: In function 'mysql_dr_connect':
dbdimp.c:1565: error: 'ulong' undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:1565: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:1565: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:1565: error: parse error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1567: error: parse error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1681: error: parse error before numeric constant
make: *** [dbdimp.o] Error 1


This is something I wrote over at DocForge, but I'm keeping it here for posterity. You never know what those crazy wiki-ers might do with it over there ;-)

I've got a directory full of eBooks in the godawful Microsoft .lit format. I had marked with the Finder labels the ones I've already read, and wanted to convert all the ones I hadn't read yet into a readable format.

After using the Spotlight UNIX tools and applying liberal amounts of command-line trickery, the end result was a rather beautiful pipeline, if I do say so myself.

I'm hoping to get away from PHP in favor of mod_python, but the first thing I needed to do was get mod_python successfully working on Mac OS X. I tried once before, using the built-in Apache and Python binaries that ship with Mac OS X. At the time (I think this was still 10.4, but it could have been 10.3), the built-in Python wasn't multithreaded (or something like that) and the mod_python developers were starting to move away from Apache 1.3 altogether.

I had success recently compiling mod_python on Mac OS X Server, against the distributed (but inactive) Apache 2 installation in /opt. However, I found OS X Server to be basically garbage, so I did a fresh install of the client version of Mac OS X, and set about getting Apache 2 to compile, and then mod_python.

It was not easy.

#!/usr/bin/perl
@x=(0x50,-82,0xd,-3,-12,0x5,0x1,0xd,0x41,-84,0x1,
-2,0x2b,0x4a);$Z=sub{for($z=@_;$z;$z--){unshift(
@z,chr($_[$z]+$z{z}));$z{z}+=$_[$z];}while($z=pop
(@z)){print($z);}};$z=$Z;@Z=(0xd,-6,0x8,0x2);$Z->
((0,0,0,-68,@Z,-7,0x48,-76,-6,0xd,-11,@x));

mark got me thinking about this, and then i was messing around with one of my own projects that needed the same feature, and i realized the easy way to do it.

i would always get the year/month/day out of a timestamp using the date() function, and then create a new timestamp with mktime().

i just realized the best way is:

$now = time();
$beginning_of_day = $now - ($now % 86400);

this works for me because i definitely remember that number for seconds in a day, and avoids any locale-dependent variations. plus, end of day becomes just as easy.

I got a message from someone who was interested in pooking around InnerSpace today, and spent enough time providing some starter instructions that I figured I'd post them here.