Today, I ...

• spent some time getting to know Joomla better for this web site.
• updated my overall todo list so I don't have to look in 20 different places to see what I can be working on.
• worked on that one page on our web app, updating the graph title so it tells you how many weeks you are viewing. Previously, it always said the data spanned two weeks.
• read perldoc perlreftut.
• looked at making our graph page loop through data so we can automate some things, but had to email the Catalyst list to find out how to pass an array from a Controller module to a View module, specifically a Template Toolkit file. Apparently you have to pass a reference to the array ( \@array ), not the array itself. I went and read perldoc perlref after that, but I still think I would have had to read between the lines a bit to figure it out. Oh well, next time I'll know.

Poor mailing lists, they're probably getting sick of me. I keep asking basic questions. I do try to check list archives and other documentation before I ask for help, but sometimes I can't find the answer because nobody else had to ask these questions. The problem is that I don't always know, when I have a problem, if it's a problem with DBIx, or with Catalyst, or with Perl, or (in today's case) with Template Toolkit. I learned all of these almost at the same time, so I'm not always sure where one stops and the other begins. Catalyst is built on Perl. DBIx is a Perl module that you can use in Catalyst. Template Toolkit is something else that you can use in Catalyst, and it has its own syntax. At least folks are kind enough to point me to documentation, since I don't know where all of that is, either. But I'm learning.

I feel like a bit of a leech sometimes. Most of the questions that go through the lists are way over my head, so I never contribute anything; I ask for help, but I don't give it. I did, though, make my first attempt at offering help on the DBIx list today. Hopefully that will show that I'm not trying to be lazy or make other people do my work for me.

A couple of interesting things I learned today:

• Well, this one's from yesterday: When you construct a regex (regular expression), [sql|date] searches for those 7 letters (s, q, l, d, a, t, e), while (sql|date) searches for those 2 words (sql, date)!
• You need to pass a pointer to the array you want; otherwise, when you try to use it, you get the scalar (length) of the array

Tomorrow, I'll continue looking at putting loops into dbixdemo to further automate it, now that I know how to pass arrays.