David Mertens

• Website: github.com/run4flat/
• About: This is my blog about numerical computing with Perl.

Recent Actions

• Posted Request for help to verify a docs translation to Serbo-Croation to David Mertens

  I am writing to solicit help from anybody who knows Perl and can read Serbo-Croation. Vera Djuraskovic kindly offered to translate the documentation to PDL's threading engine, PDL::PP. Not light material, mind you. :-)

  The problem is that I only speak and read English (and maybe British). …

• Commented on Astro::SpaceTrack upgrade
  Very cool. I have been looking for a source of quantitative data for making cool demo plots, and I may give this a try for my public examples. :-)...
• Commented on CUDA::Minimal takes two steps backwards, one step forward
  Ah! It's CUDA::Minimal! D'oh! I'll edit the title......
• Posted CUDA::Minimal, back where it should be (but why did it break?) to David Mertens

  I just posted an entry about how CUDA::Minimal was behaving weirdly. I hadn't dug around to figure out what was…

• Posted CUDA::Minimal takes two steps backwards, one step forward to David Mertens

  Edit: I got my original approach to work, see my follow-up.

  A week ago I wrote about how I though play-perl was great. I put up a bunch of ideas and waited to see wh…

• Commented on Bringing Perl5 to GitHub
  Hey, cool! I like this idea. I'm not sure if I'll ever contribute a line of code to Perl's core, but if I do, this'll make my life easier. The problem I see is that new code should come in...
• Commented on Introducing quickcd
  Neat! Thanks!...
• Commented on About the Grants Committee
  I can think of a number of numerical extensions for Perl that I would be delighted to propose. I am also close to a job transition, and may be able to leave my current job a few weeks early, and...
• Commented on I <3 play-perl
  Fixed the links. Thanks!...
• Posted I <3 play-perl to David Mertens

  play-perl was only just announced, but I've already fallen in love with it. There seems to be some confusion about how it works, so I thought I would lend my interpretation. Note that I did not write it nor am I affiliated with it, but I think it's awesome and…

• Commented on My First Post.
  Welcome! I am always happy to see new faces and I hope that your learning process goes well. I am annoyed when people moan about Perl, too. The best way to change that perception is to use it, and to...
• Commented on $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number
  @Steffen, I can think of multiple projects for improving Perl's speed for data analysis. These include extensions and improvements to PDL as well as writing (finishing) Perl bindings for the Tiny C Compiler and pushing development on FFI::Raw. If I...
• Commented on Play Perl is online
  Alright, I've added a bunch of different quests. I hope that others give it a look and tell me what they think would be cool. :-)...
• Commented on Play Perl is online
  This looks really neat! And as if I didn't already have enough intrinsic motivation to hack on my Perl stuff......
• Commented on What is Moe (a clarification)
  Thanks, Stevan, that helps clarify a lot....
• Commented on Does Perl (5) have a future?
  Joel - Thank you for articulating these concerns so well. I love Perl and I’ll use it in my own work because it is such a wonderful glue language and I love the community. But it would be REALLY NICE...
• Posted $3M says Perl5 needs a new major version number to David Mertens

  Yesterday, Ovid started his discussion about moving the major version of Perl 5 to Perl 7. You know what else happened that day? Continuum Analytics won $3M from DARPA to undertake a huge renovation to NumPy.…

• Commented on Alien::Base - progress and problems
  Joel - I recall at some point that we discussed adding code into Alien::Base that would detect whether or not it was being run via a CPAN smoker via the AUTOMATED_TESTING environment variable, the PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT environment variable, or some such....
• Commented on Pod::Perldoc at 3.19_01
  For any who care to test, here's a simple example pod file that should give you something to try, based on this discussion: =encoding utf-8 =head1 UNICODE CHARACTERS These are less-than-or-equals characters: '≤', 'E<le>', 'E<0x2264>'. =cut...
• Posted Viewing your weather forecast without a browser to David Mertens

  PDL::Graphics::Prima is a Perl plotting library written using PDL and the Prima GUI toolkit. It is targeted at PDL users with the hope of one day becoming the standard…

• Commented on Alien::Base Beta Release!
  Fantastic work, Joel! I am excited that it’s finally out on CPAN. I think that at Chicago.pm I’ll try to get Alien::FFCall and the next release of FFI onto CPAN as a separate test of the Alien::Base infrastructure. Not only...
• Posted The Quantified Onion is not just another echo chamber to David Mertens

  In tandem with the creation of perl4science.github.com, gizmo_mathboy created a new google group called The Quantified Onion. Both of these web properties are meant to give greater visibility to Perl's role in science, and…

• Commented on Object Oriented Learning of Prima
  Fabio - Of course! Your post is absolutely correct in its approach. My comment is merely a footnote for the interested reader. Please, keep up these beginner-targeted posts!...
• Commented on Hello, world.
  jctl - Welcome! I've been around Perl for five years and only have good things to say about the language and the community. I had dabbled with Perl for a couple of years, but when I decided to switch from...
• Commented on Object Oriented Learning of Prima
  Judging by the title, I thought that you were going to talk about something different. As you did not, I will. :-) Prima has a novel object model implemented in C. You specify a class in a stand-alone source file...
• Commented on A brief introduction to Prima
  Thanks for starting this thread of posts! I agree that getting from zero to Prima is a bit tricky. I started with the tutorial followed by looking through the examples. I look forward to your writeups because a comprehensive introduction...
• Commented on How Not To Highlight Women In Perl
  @Sawyer X - I think your idea is hilarious, and at the same time it makes a very powerful and important statement. It might even be a good idea. :-)...
• Commented on Adapting PDL to a Big Data Landscape
  @gizmo_mathboy, Do me a favor and tell those folks about PDL::Graphics::Prima. Also tell them that it's young and that I am very interested in helping get new people to try it out. I'll even implement new features if they request...
• Commented on Adapting PDL to a Big Data Landscape
  @Luben, Actually, PDL has a candidate sparse matrix library called PDL::CCS::Nd. It was first added to CPAN nearly a year ago. It's current pass rate isn't great, but it's a start in the right direction....
• Commented on Adapting PDL to a Big Data Landscape
  @leprevost, popularity is an ever-present concern. Yes, I believe that it is possible for PDL to be come as popular as R, because I believe that Perl is a better programming language than R. However, "it's possible" isn't the same...

Comment Threads

• Tom Wyant commented on Astro::SpaceTrack upgrade

  The Heavens Above web site has a plot of the altitude of the International Space Station over time that you could duplicate.

  One of my first correspondents was plotting some orbital parameter (ascending node?) of a cluster of Russian navigation satellites because he wanted to know what slots in the constellation they were headed for, but that's a bit esoteric, maybe.

  For any kind of historical analysis, though, you will need an account on the Space Track web site, http://www.space-track.org/

• vti commented on About the Grants Committee

  Maybe there should be a simple pre-applying form where people can vote just for ideas, like 'Should I ask for a grant for this...?' and get responses like 'Yeah, that'd be great' or 'Nah.. this is just silly'. This is much easier to check for your ideas and not be too much depressed because of the 'no'.

• metadoo commented on About the Grants Committee

  Whenever someone is to submit a grant proposal, that proposal goes through one's "internal review" first. And in that internal review one asks yourself: "Why should I ask to be paid for what countless of others just CONTRIBUTE to Perl community? The Perl itself and tens of thousands of modules are literally millions of hours, hundreds of years of work just contributed. Why should I ask for pay?". This is the perfectly right question to ask. And this makes the one's internal review quite picky, and the result is what we see - no proposals. And, though surprisingly it may sound, this is the…

• Vyacheslav Matyukhin commented on Play Perl is online

  You can sign in with email (using Mozilla Persona) now.

• grt@opendevnet commented on Bringing Perl5 to GitHub

  Hmm, I agree with these comments. It's possible to duplicate efforts ... even with forking and pulling :-) Proliferating organizational repos can confuse people (or at least people like me) who are used to the well-herded namespaces of CPAN!

  I think I am encouraged that Matt Trout thinks something like perlsourcemap is a good idea. Well, I am either encouraged or just less afraid :-)