The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Back in the day, I used to use a program called Windows made by a little company called Microsoft.  I liked windows, and for the most part it did what I needed it to do.  But it also had a nasty habit of crashing when I tried to do something complex.  And this was really annoying.

Well as time went on, and I became more adept at using windows, I noticed that it tried to tell me what was wrong.  Windows was writing out a crash report.  And it had a message on the blue screen of death.  (a mostly incomprehensible message, but at least it was trying.)  And I discovered that if you looked for the error codes in Microsoft’s knowledge base, you could find the errors had corresponding articles for many of them.  (some of these articles were also incomprehensible.  ) (more…)

Recently I needed to send our team an email.  Yeah okay, so I email a lot, but this was different.  I needed to send my team an email from a server that was not anywhere near a mail server, and that was pretty paired down.  I did a bunch of Googling for answers and came up with quite a few that didn’t work.

I hate it when that happens.  So as a form of perl tutorial, I am posting my working script here as an example of sending email from a limited server using perl and the MIME::Lite library.

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Running perl integration tools we have two basic needs for time stamps and date time values.

First, it is useful to note the time that something is happening in a log file so that we don’t have to guess.

Second, it is also useful to append the date to a file name to keep our logs in daily files not just one long never ending file.

Here is a function that I use to do both of these things. (more…)