Re: [mh] Need some direction, please!

[Joel D. <jr...@io...>]

Joey-

We were all newbies with mh at some point.  There's a bunch of folks with
all levels of experience in all different areas.  Perl (and mh) can be
really frustrating sometimes, but when stuff starts to work it's really
cool knowing you've made your house a little smarter than the rest of
the houses in your neighborhood.  Welcome to the nuthouse.  :)

Joel
-- 
Joel Davidson
Austin, TX


On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, it would appear that Joey French wrote:

> Yeah, I am getting the feeling there aren't too many newbs here (like
> myself). It's okay, I'm not scared...
>
> I think I have a lot of reading to do. As mentioned earlier, there is a
> default "test light 1" that is being turned on and off every 30 seconds.
> Where will i find this item's script, so I can toy with/edit it? If I use
> the default to work from, I might be a little better off...
>
> On 11/3/05, Matthew Williams <mat...@us...> wrote:
>>
>> Joey French wrote:
>>> I have not written in perl before, but I am not afraid to
>>> learn, so I don't see it as an obstacle. I will just have to get a few
>>
>> If you haven't written code in Perl before, then I must give you a few
>> words of warning/encouragement. Perl is a very unique creature that has
>> many ways of accomplishing the same thing, even something as "standard"
>> as an if/then/else type of structure. As well, there are many very
>> confusing looking operators and commands that Perl experts like to use.
>> Don't be discouraged if you can't figure some of these out, even with
>> the help of a manual and google.
>>
>> Do ask questions - one thing this group is full of, apart from the
>> obvious :-), is Perl experts.
>>
>> For example, here is something that recently threw me for a loop, even
>> though I've been writing Perl for 15 years and mh for quite a few. You
>> likely won't understand the details but you'll see why asking questions
>> is good.
>>
>> I had created a new Voice_Cmd called v_show_modes to help me to debug
>> something I was working on.
>>
>> I had used $v_show_modes->{said} to detect whether my command had been
>> selected instead of $v_show_modes->said. They both appear to do the
>> same thing, except with the 2nd version, a hook is called that sets a
>> global variable (Respond_Target) that automatically directs responses to
>> the right place (i.e. if you called the command via IM, it sends the
>> response back to that same user). This took me several hours of deep
>> examination of the core mh code before I finally figured it out. Now my
>> responses end up in the right place.
>>
>> For those that are interested, the pertinent code is in
>> lib/Generic_Item.pm lines 37 and 245 (latest CVS).