DVD database hackery
News, Technical ·Sunday June 21, 2009 @ 00:39 EDT (link)
I spent some time tonight updating my DVD scan system. We keep a list of the DVDs we have (and have watched), with the help of my local web server, barcode scanner, and some perl code. It had stopped working for a while; it turned out that it needed to follow another meta refresh (<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" …>) and one of the referrers needed fixing, by simple expedient of calling WWW::Mechanize::back after fetching the cover image (so that the next fetch didn't look like it came from the image URL). And now I can again scan a DVD barcode and have it added to the system.
I also, in installing and updating modules, found out about the Moose object system (manual), which looks interesting, as well as a few other modules (e.g., I used CHI, the latest caching system, to cache pages to avoid hitting sites too frequently while tuning my DVD lookup module). I still would like to find out some way to speed up (mod_)perl under Apache, but I guess I'll have to wait for a stable Perl 6 for that (it's been a while since I took a look, but I know progress is slow; it may be worth taking another look soon). With the Parrot VM, Perl should be able to compete well with the .NET languages, and run even more languages. I look forward to being able to use a good, fast, stable functional language—with access to the perl module tree—standalone and under Apache.
DVDs finished: Species Trilogy.
