Dobrica Pavlinušić's Weblog / Blog

Well, it's released. Module which used to be called IsisDB is now Biblio::Isis. It also includes part of CDS/ISIS manual about file format which might be useful even if you don't plan to use this module.

This module was my first journey into decoding file formats (well, not exactly first, but first which had to be released to public). I did a good thing and asked nice people at perl4lib to test it first. And guess what? It didn't work on Mac OS X. I should have known better than to use perl's unpack with l if I wanted cross-platform compatibility. But, over-presence of Linux boxes with x86 processors produced strange problem for me: PowerPC which powers Mac is little-endian while all boxes which I have access to are big-endian. Hum, what to do?

Few weeks ago, I stumbled upon PearPC. Together with OpenDarwin it's a great platform (and little-endian :-) to test your code on BSD-based Unix which runs totally different than your local Linux box. Thanks to all hard working developers from both project for that.
Have in mind that PearPC is really slow. Something like 68k-based Mac. However, for simple perl development it's fast enough. And it solved my problem. Highly recommended.