Virtual Box – FTP Server Settings

I am continuing work on PROJECT ALPHA which is chartered to create a test environment for a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. If you have correctly followed the previous Oracle Virtual Box articles, a working guest image of Windows 2008 Server now exists with the IIS 7.0 Web server role installed. Today, we are going to concentrate on configuring the FTP server. A local windows user account will have a home directory containing the test data file for the Perl program. The series of screen shots below…

Virtual Box – Windows Server Creation

Today, I am continuing working on PROJECT ALPHA. The project is chartered to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. I am assuming that you have correctly followed all Oracle Virtual Box – VHD Creation steps that we did last time. The installation ISO is listed as a bootable drive and will kick off when the Virtual Image is started. The series of screen shots below will walk you through installing Windows 2008 Server on the new virtual hard disk (VHD). Step…

Calculating Primes – Part 1

Today I am going to talk about calculating primes. Not the Transformer movie in which Optimus Prime has to help the humans save the world. I am talking about prime numbers in which the number is only divisable by one and itself. The Algorithm that I am going to introduce is a brute force method for calculating prime numbers. It is great for comparing the computing power of two machines by looking at overall execution times. This routine consists in dividing n by each integer m which is greater than…

Excel Files

Business Users like to have data in a spreadsheet format. Since Microsoft Office is installed world-wide, it will be a common request for data in a XLS format. Let’s make believe that we have the business problem to write and read information about the first five presidents to a MS Excel file. The Cliché, there are many ways to skin a cat, does apply to technical solutions. I installed the write package (Spreadsheet::WriteExcel) and read package (Spreadsheet::ParseExcel) from CPAN to solve my problem. Both packages have more methods and properties…

Application Logging

Error handling and application logging are the most import tasks associated with programming that are over looked by many developers. After a program is released to the field, how do you know if it is performing as it should? Are there issues with the language execution (1-tier), with the database (2-tier) or with the middle-ware (3-tier) ? Many times, issues are only noticed and acted upon after several complaints have been issued. Here is a short list of why you should adding logging to all programs that you create. Traps…

Running the SMTP Relay

Today, I want to talk about sending email using SMTP relay host. The topic of a SMTP relay is an mportant one that you will come across in your career. A open mail relay allows a PERL script to send mail messages from a mail box that you can name and does not have to exist on the mail server. In todays information world, it is very important to stay connected via emails. Emails can be used for many different purposes in your PERL scripts. Alerting when system thresholds or…