While I somehow forgot to include my annual plea for your charity dollars, it’s better late than never, as they say. If you have not yet taken the time to donate some of your holiday or bonus funds yet to a deserving charity, let me bring two to your attention. While I’m sure many of you have charities of your own, my personal choices are the following:
- Curt’s Pitch for ALS: Funds research into ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
- The Jimmy Fund: Fights cancer in children and adults at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
If you find yourself short of funds, for whatever the reason, there are other ways you can help a charity and – simultaneously – yours truly. I’ve been doing some very minor work with a small non-profit for a friend and am coming up regrettably short in the skills department. There are two primary needs:
- If you’re skilled with Perl scripts, I’m trying – in vain, thus far – to get a simple form mail script working and could really use a second set of eyes.
The script actually works just fine with a quick sample I worked out – I’m working off FormMail from Matt’s Script Archive and it’s pretty much dead simple – but for some reason when I embed a relatively complex existing HTML table withing the page’s form tag (entirely within the tag, of course), it’s not mailing anything (though an input type redirect tag is being executed so the form is in fact being executed). Given my overall low intelligence, I’m sure it’s something really dumb, but a couple of quick efforts at debugging it have met with pretty much total failure. I do not, at this point anyhow, have SSH access to any of the logs that would make this a simpler effort.
- On the other hand, if you’re skilled with logos and UI design, the site could use some TLC. I have them on a stock Contribute template at the moment, but it could use some personalized attention in the look and feel and logo departments, so if you’ve got design chops and would like to do some portfolio building or are just kind hearted generally, drop me a line. I’m worse than terrible at anything involving anything remotely aesthetic in nature.
Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated not just by me, but more importantly, the families of cancer victims. Any work you perform will be duly noted in this space, and either way thanks.
Update: I’d like to personally thank Sun’s Tim Bray for his generous offer to assist w/ my Perl issue. I was trying to convey to the friend in question what it meant to have one of the better technical minds in the industry offering to assist with my Perl/HTML form difficulties, but failed miserably. It’s sort of like having Mozart offer to write a jingle for your friend’s Mom & Pop store TV ad. Fortunately, I “fixed” the problem simply by swapping Matt’s FormMail.pl script for a fully compatible, drop-in nms project replacement – just as Randal recommended I do today in the comments. I don’t know why it fixed the problem, but can’t say that I really care (reason #1001 I was a poor developer). Thanks again to Tim and Randal for their assistance.
