I got this story in a chain email today. I don't usually give much thought to these types of messages, but this one is pretty good.
With everyone speculating about the economy these days, everyone seems to have a different idea on how to fix it. The problem is, these 'armchair economists' don't seem to understand how the economy really works. Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't understand how it works. I've even heard people with graduate degrees in economics say that they don't understand how it works enough to confidently suggest solutions to the issues we are facing.
My speculation on this speculation (meta-speculation, if you will) is that no one understands the entire system. Most people don't understand even one part of the system in any depth. Some people do understand certain parts of the system. There exists someone who understands, in depth, each part of the system. But no one person understands every part of the system.
Module Test CGI script for Perl
It can sometimes be difficult to track down problems due to missing dependencies when deploying a CGI application to a shared host, especially when they don't give you shell access or let you view the web server error logs.
So, I wrote this small CGI script to check for dependencies and let you know when certain modules are not present or are out of date. I bundle this will all of my Perl CGI apps, so I can tell right away if something is missing. I will develop the application locally, of course, but I will check the output of this script whenever I deploy to a new environment, whether it is a test server or production.