ICon starts tomorrow (Orson Scott Card is our Guest of Honor!), and first thing in the morning I give a talk called Introduction to Roleplaying Games. I promised explanations, anecdotes, demonstrations, audience participation and dragon taming
. I wonder how on Earth I’ll deliver all that…
Examples of working with Word using Perl’s Win32::OLE module, from this site, which has lots of good programming links (Perl & Windows stuff).
A cool Color scheme picker.
How the Jews created the comic book industry by Arie Kaplan, from Reform Judaism Magazine.
This was what Michael Chabon‘s Kavalier and Clay (now out in Hebrew translation, yay!) was all about.
John McNamara’s Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is a Perl module that writes binary Excel files, on Unix and Windows. It’s described in this introductory article about Reading and writing Excel files with Perl and here in a cooler and more technical article from The Perl Journal by McNamara, where he mentions a Perl module called HTML-TableExtract, which I wish I knew about 4 months ago…
There’s also a companion module (Spreadsheet::ParseExcel) and a PHP version.
…I just installed it on a Sun machine at work using perl -MCPAN -eshell. CPAN is tricky to set up (especially if someone installed perl using cp as his installer…), but awesome to behold in action once you get it going (To fix the configuration, I had to modify CPAN/Config.pm – or a local copy in ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm; It occurs to me that the only people following my blog who care about Perl geekery know all about configuring CPAN, but this is really more of a note to myself).