talk minus action = zero

To go along with this post, I finished the first working version of my pidgin-identica-status plugin today. It pulls an RSS feed from identi.ca, and sets the latest entry as your status in Pidgin.
It feels like a hack to me; the Perl API for Pidgin is poorly documented. I set up a Google Code project for it, and would welcome contributors to clean up the code, ad functionality, etc...
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-identica-status/

Yesterday littlemeridian came to me and said she knew the sum of 1+2+3... etc to 100. She had figured out a way to solve the problem without adding all the numbers.
"I can bang out a perl program that can do the math," I said, not convinced she was right (she was right, btw). So we sat at my computer and I wrote this easy program that adds consecutive numbers up to a limit you specify from <STDIN>. It took us a little while to get the math right but we eventually got it.
( see the code )

To go along with this post.

 

I wrote a script that will post to twitter. It takes a command line argument or reads a random line from a text file, and posts the result. I've got it working, but I think code could be a little cleaner.
Basically, I want to know if there is a way to put each element in an array ( like @ARGV) into a string.
For instance, if I run perl post-to-twitter.pl here is a tweet, I'd like to turn "here is a tweet" into a string so I can put it in a scalar like $post.
I think I could use a reference, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept. I really want to turn the last 4 or 5 lines into one.

Thanks...

( here's my code )

Oh yeah, if the command line argument has an apostrophe, the script breaks... Why is that?

I'm doing what my boss calls "professional development," aka learning more Perl and prgramming skills. Today I was doing an exercise that was pretty simple. Calculate an employee's gross pay based on their rate of pay, hours worked and overtime hours worked. The math is easy.

$pay_rate * ( $reg_hours + ( $ot_hours * 1.5 ) )

But then I wanted to validate input, so my program wouldn't break when the user input wasn't non-numeric. I came up with (what I think is) a unique test. I created a regex that matched only digits and an optional decimal point.

/(\d+\.?\d*)/

Problem was it let through input like 7.h. I didn't want that. So I just compared what the regex matched to the string I was putting throught the regex! If they matched, input was valid!

if ( $_[0] =~ m/(\d+\.?\d*)/ and $_[0] eq $1 ) {
$is_valid=1;
}

I'm giving myself a self congratualory high-five.