Kimmel

• About: I like writing Perl code and since most of it is open source I might as well talk about it too. @KirkKimmel on twitter

Recent Actions

• Posted Parallel Forking and Process Management to Kirk Kimmel

  Stop me if you have heard this one before. You have a list of files you need to process in a text file with one item per line. Handling this is fairly simple you read a line in and process it over and over again until you processed the whole list. This works great, but if that list is 40,000…

• Posted Download a mailman archive to Kirk Kimmel

  Oracle is closing down the opensolaris.org site on March 24th, which is inconvenient for the rest of us. I wanted to grab the mailman archives for the mailing lists so I fired up a search engine and looked for any existing open source projects to do this. After trying two different scripts that…

• Commented on Names And All That
  I think one of the problems is the "god" complex many programmers seem to have. Whether it be too look down on other programming languages, writing documentation, teaching beginnings, what operating system you use, design, etc... it all comes down...
• Commented on Web Scraping with Perl & PhantomJS
  The above seems like a lot of extra worked compared to WWW::WebKit a module for driving a headless WebKit browser. It uses Gtk3::WebKit a Perl native binding set to the WebKit browser. WebKit support also exists in the Gtk2 Perl...
• Posted Finding files faster to Kirk Kimmel

  A little while back I wrote a pair of applications that used Path::Class::Rule to do the file finding. I selected this module because I like the interface for building up rules. I started to run into speed issues as the source directory…

• Commented on A list of the Perl::Critic policies CERT recommends
  This post reminded me to release the already completed CERT themes, which will probably be folded into the next release of perlcritic. I made a repo with just these changes for people to test with. https://github.com/kimmel/perlcritic...
• Commented on Using Padre for the first time
  Yes you are right. By biases I mean the biases people develop as they use a piece of software. If you like the software you might gloss over problems that you have been doing for so long it is now...
• Commented on Using Padre for the first time
  Yes I installed Padre via CPAN using the standard cpan client....
• Commented on Using Padre for the first time
  I started this blog post out by stating that I was doing research into development tools. That means I am evaluating many different pieces of software. Doing that is part of a larger process of generating research and data for...
• Posted Text Processing Part 2: More Speed to Kirk Kimmel

  In my previous post Text Processing: Divide and Conquer I took a text processing problem profiled it, then developed a few possible solutions. I benchmarked these options and now use the fastest…

• Posted Using Padre for the first time to Kirk Kimmel

  Recently I have been doing some in depth research with regards to development tools of all kinds. Currently I am working my through the various IDEs available in both the open and close source worlds. This is what spurred me into giving Padre another shot. The last time I tried to install it…

• Posted Testing for HTTP compression to Kirk Kimmel

  How do I determine what the content-encoding of a web page is? A simple question which after doing a little searching did not turn up a simple answer. A stackoverflow question lead me to the solution but did not answer the question directly so here I am writing it up. We will need to install…

• Commented on Preliminary results - Survey about Newcomer experience in Perl + One week reminder
  Why not just use a bar chart to show the breakdown of the results? Pie charts fail when there are more than a few items. http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/ A bar chart is much faster to scan and easily understand for this kind...
• Posted Text Processing: Divide and Conquer to Kirk Kimmel

  Another day another generic text processing problem that many developers have had to solve before. I have a list of patterns and need to find if they exist in a group of files. If I did not need to do complex post processing then I could just use the command line like so

  ="prett…

• Posted 3 features I would like to see in Perl to Kirk Kimmel

  A few days ago I read Features Perl 5 Needs in 2012 by chromatic and while I thought the ideas were nice the only one I really cared about was a replacement for XS. I have tried with XS and FFI to bring in…

• Commented on How many ways can I use thee, module?
  I use Module::Load::Conditional to load in modules in certain cases. my $rv = check_install( module => 'LWP', version => 5.60 ) or print 'LWP is not installed!';...
• Commented on Q: When not to use Regexp? A: HTML parsing
  Thanks oylenshpeegul for the suggestion. I am going to give Mojo::DOM a try on some of the parsing problems I am working on....
• Commented on Q: When not to use Regexp? A: HTML parsing
  Beautiful soup is doing something different in version 4 from what I have looked at of it from previous versions. The whole python2 vs python3 thing in getting libraries running is annoying since I am no expert when it comes...
• Posted Q: When not to use Regexp? A: HTML parsing to Kirk Kimmel

  It always starts out as something simple and innocent and then the Internet ruins it.

  So I am giving a data mining talk at Ohio LinuxFest 2012 and surprise, surprise there is going to be a nice helping of Perl. So I am on the internet doing research look…

• Posted A NYTprof encoding hiccup to Kirk Kimmel

  While using Devel::NYTProf on a new application I started getting this message
  fid 33 has no src saved for /usr/lib/perl5/5.14.2/autodie.pm (NYTP_FIDf_HAS_SRC not set but src available!)
  
  Now my first thought was this has something to do w…

• Posted DIY personal analytics to Kirk Kimmel

  How many times a day do you reach for <ctrl> + r when using the shell? What about the history command? !! anyone?

  Do we as programmers evolve and stop making the same mistakes? Do we really optimize our workflows? This is where the idea of personal analytics comes in. I am going to s…

• Commented on Backing up Berlios.de
  Yes but I wrote this before I had heard of them....
• Posted An overview of spell checking modules to Kirk Kimmel

  Spell checking is one of those problems that is already solved... sorta.

  Like all problems it really depends on context. Take Jon Bentley's Programming pearls: a spelling checker where h…

• Posted Backing up Berlios.de to Kirk Kimmel

  Last year it was announced that www.berlios.de was going to be shut down. People were asking if someone was going to back it up to save all those open source projects. I decided to gave it a shot and I was able to backup all of the berlios projects. While…

• Commented on Finding Perl material online
  Neil - I added 'perl' as a keyword to Google so the results should be more on target now....
• Posted Finding Perl material online to Kirk Kimmel

  So you need Perl information and the perldoc does not have what you need. First stop the search engine. You type in the keywords and start exploring. One thing I kept noticing with different searches were the results returned that were just the POD online. I decided I was tired of looking at it…

• Posted utf8::all and autodie now coexist peacefully to Kirk Kimmel

  autodie version 2.12 works with use open now.

  Recently I was reading a program that was using utf8::all and I decided to take another look at the module. The last time I tried it out was version 0.003 from 2011 and it basically did the following:

  …

• Posted A free Perl talk Oct. 22nd in Columbus Ohio to Kirk Kimmel

  The 2011 Code Camp Columbus is nearly upon us. It is all day the 22nd and it is free to all attendees.

  I will be giving a talk about building Perl applications to solve everyday problems culminating in a WWW:Mechanize application that shows most o…

• Posted Core Modules add/remove quick reference to Kirk Kimmel

  When designing a Perl application that needs to run on many different versions I end up using 'corelist' a good deal. Most of the time I just needed a list of the additions or removals of core modules from different stable series of Perl releases. I kept all this information in a text file for…

• Commented on New Beginning Perl book
  The reasoning here is simple: I've never worked with 5.10 or above in a production environment. Ever. I added emphasis on what I thought was the scariest part and is so true. I can understand this because until recently I...

Comment Threads

• Ron Savage commented on Names And All That

  Hi

  Thanx for both perspectives.

  One thing to note is that there is so much promotion these days, people simply expect it. It can be content-free (as with 'celebrities'), or meaningful.

  So, if we - as a Perl community - lack pushiness, it reflects, however unfairly, on Perl as a language.

  One terribly sad thing is that people (consciously and unconsciously) become programmers to escape emotional involvement, i.e it's a symptom of psychological trauma.

  Hence the (usually) personable people in marketing are in that field precisely because they are more co…

• Steffen Mueller commented on Names And All That

  Thank you for this voice of reason in the big waste of time that the recent storm of talk has been.

• awwaiid (Brock Wilcox) commented on Web Scraping with Perl & PhantomJS

  Sounds totally cool, I'll check it out.

  You might also look into WWW::HtmlUnit, which is perl bindings for the java library. I've been using that at work for a long time now and like it quite a bit.
  

• Mike Sanders commented on Names And All That

  No, it wasn't (isn't!) a waste of time.

  At least not, if - by following the discussion - the powers that be realize that adding always more "use feature 'xyz'" to the perl core while maintaining backwards compatibility isn't viable any more.

  We need a new release that breaks backwards compatibility to remove cruft, makes it easier for newcomers to get the most out of the language without having to jump to all these hoops or writing all that boilerplate code all over again, every time, and that especially allows for adding new features (like the MOP).

  Extending the na…

• sillymoose commented on Web Scraping with Perl & PhantomJS

  Thanks for writing this article - I do a lot of QA testing with Selenium, but wasn't aware of Phantom.js.

  Also the comments were helpfful too - can't believe there is an HTMLUnit Perl binding ... I didn't think to look for it and all this time I have been writing the Java code directly :(