PERLing Your Way Out of Chaos

Managing and analyzing logs can sometimes be a nightmare, specially if the process has been running for hours. Things get more interesting when a bug is discovered and no one has a clue as to where things went wrong. Since the beginning of time man has been using Perl to crawl his way out of the logging wilderness. This, and the reason that the new process I'm writing for out stock trading app is going to produce logs amounting to the size of a Tolkein fantasy, prompted me to try my hand at clearing things up using the trusty old scripting language.

My prior experience using Perl is limited to writing a few scripts for the Internet Programming module during my under grad days. So I had to start from scratch. With a lot of help from various tutorials and articles on the web, I finally put together a script which was pretty handy.


Original Log

Some useful links:
PERL string searching with user input
Multi-line string (pattern) matching
Trouble shooting file handling related issues
Guide to metacharacters used in perl regular expressions









After Initial Extraction

After Final Extraction

Memories: Our Trip to Udawalawe National Park

Me, Lanil, Nilanka, Shakila, Yohan, Shiraz and Prasanna

My Code Project Article

I wrote an article titled "Displaying Multiple Dynamic Images in a Web Form" a couple of years back. Today I saw another article which outlined a method to "Use images from an sql server in html emails" which actually referred to my original article.
Ahh... it's really satisfying to see someone benefiting from what you did!

Torrential Rains Cause Havoc

The rains started yesterday. True, it's the rainy season but it's been relatively dry for the last couple of weeks. Suddenly, out of the blue, the downpour begins. Most of the roads were partially flooded and roads were full of traffic. 10 people died due to flooding and land slides.

It took us 4.5 hours to get home, which is roughly about 40kms.
Seems that the Colombo area was effected more severely. The picture above shows a section of the Galle road which has fallen in near Wellawatta, in front of the William's Grinding Mill.

Edit: It was actually in front of Sumanadisi Bakers

Convocation

Had our convocation last week at the BMICH. No excitement. Just the presentation of garlands. Some of the grads had to wait for hours to get their individual photographs because only one official photographer was allowed for the event.