martin-evans.me.uk Always finish the day on a success

Once I'd familiarised myself with the Arduino development kit I wanted to try and use it to monitor my electricity usage. I know you can buy commercial devices which do this but I wanted more than the current usage; I wanted to log usage over time and I wanted to involve Perl somehow. I saw the Flukso ages ago and even tried to buy one but they were out of stock.

Just got back from my first visit to the London Perl Workshop. Thanks East Coast Railways for not only cancelling my train to London (and making me sit on the train at York station for an hour for nothing) but also for cancelling the one back from London. I'm ashamed to be English when people travelled to the workshop from out of this country in less time than it took me to travel 200 miles by train.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole weekend. It was great to put some faces to the people I've had contact with on the Internet (in particular ribasushi, timb, tux) and the talks were most enlightning. I have to pickout some highlights for me although I obviously did not see all the talks:

I ordered a Smiley Micros Arduino Workshop book and Projects Kit a few weeks ago. I'm based in the UK and Smiley Micros are in the US and I paid via PayPal so I expected it to take some time for it to arrive. The PayPal payment took the best part of a week but after that I received an email saying my kit was dispatched and 6 days later it arrived. Thank you Smiley Micros, US Postal Service and Parcel Force.

I've recently uploaded a new experimental (and development) release of DBD::ODBC 1.26_1 to CPAN. This contains over 200 block code changes so it is a VERY significant change and should not be used on production servers until you have tested it. This release adds little in the way of functionality (and a few bug fixes) but is a major push to get DBD::ODBC truely ODBC 3.0 compliant and as such it will REQUIRE an ODBC driver manager to translate ODBC 3.0 calls to ODBC 2.0 if you are unlucky enough to have an ODBC 2.0 driver. I include the changes below but a few notes in addition:

Firstly, I should say I don't use Windows that much these days. The Windows machines where I test DBI and DBD::ODBC I set up ages ago with a Perl built with MS Developer Studio and I tend to keep them for that purpose. However, I bought a whole load of nice shiny new parts to build myself a new PC a month ago and installed Ubuntu and Windows as I thought I could get a more up to date Perl on Windows at home.

I'm pleased to announce the 1.25 release of DBD::ODBC. A full list of changes since the last major release is listed below and at DBD::ODBC Changes. New features include support for MS SQL Server's XML type, a new odbc_lob_read method, overriding of types on bind_col. Many thanks to everyone who has reported issues and helped with the development and testing of DBD::ODBC and especially all my friends on #dbi, Perl Monks and my colleagues at Easysoft Limited..

Today someone posted a problem using the SQL Server XML datatype with DBI/DBD::ODBC on the dbi-users mailing list. I sorted their problem pretty quickly but noticed his code using length() on scalars which were bound with bound_col was not reporting the correct length. The example and output are below:

Just spent around an hour trying to get my wife's laptop to connect wirelessly to my Canon IP5000 printer connected to my new Windows 7 x64 machine. It all worked fine when I was running Windows XP x86.

In the last few days I've released what hopefully will be the last development release of DBD::ODBC (1.24_4). If you run Windows especially and Perl 5.13 even more, then please test.

Ok, so someone is bound to say I'm just using a blog entry to complain about a company and although I am, it was not me that got the bum end of a deal from Dell. My friend, does not use computers every day and is self employed in the building industry but needs better records for his tax and the production of bills and would like to watch a DVD or two. He found a laptop he liked but could not find anyone selling it and found something almost equivalent from Dell.