Kevin's Weblog

Last night I talked at PDXfunc a bit about Erlang. The slides were pretty minimal, so I don’t think I’m going to post them publicly at this point. We spent more time looking at code and demonstrating features that way. I showed a very similar IRC bot as in the talk I gave to PDX.pm on POE and Erlang, although I had actually made a change that introduced a small bug (and failed to test the code before my live demo). But, this worked out to be a positive because I got to demonstrate hot code updates and fixed the bug while keeping the bot up and running. I also showed some code I’ve been working on in the last couple days, once again writing a web spider, this time in Erlang. Unfortunately, I found some problems in xmerl that required heinous workarounds, and I still had some bugs by the time of the talk, but I got to demonstrate the important bit, at least, which was that by replacing a single map with pmap, I could make my sequential program concurrent, proven by the fact that it hit one of the remaining bugs and crashed much faster :-).

At some point soon, I’ll write more about the spider code and my experiences with xmerl, but I want to work out the remaining bugs first.