Mike B

• About: I blog about Perl.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Strawberry Perl 5.18.0.1 released
  Thanks a lot for your great work! This time the release was even quicker than with perl 5.16.x....
• Commented on POP3 with TLS in Perl
  Thanks for the pointer. Looking at it, it seems for SMTP rather than POP3; still might come in handy some day. I'm saving the link!...
• Posted POP3 with TLS in Perl to Mike B

  The famous libnet modules provide Perl programmers with a low level interface to POP3 and SMTP servers, among others.

  This works fine in general but over the past years most mail servers stopped offering 'plain' SMTP and POP3 access, but us…

• Commented on Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework...
  I can't help but think that if you need to change 120 modules if ONE API changes you could have made some abstraction somewhere. Still, I'm happy for you you pulled this one off......
• Commented on Windows CPAN Testers, your help please...
  Hi, I have a cpan smoker and it seems to test succesful. It installs here: Directory of C:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\auto\share\dist\Alien-Wenity 23-01-2013 14:39 40.960 Wenity.exe 1 File(s) 40.960 bytes...
• Commented on Windows CPAN Testers, your help please...
  Hi, I have a cpan smoker and it seems to test succesful. It installs here: Directory of C:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\auto\share\dist\Alien-Wenity 23-01-2013 14:39 40.960 Wenity.exe 1 File(s) 40.960 bytes...
• Commented on Smoke testing on Windows
  I'm #7 on the leaderboard for Win32; I have more or less the same experience. BINGOS, who is the über-smoker on Linux and BSD platforms, uses some tooling to automatically cancel modules after they exceed a timeout; I have not...
• Commented on Alien::Base Beta Release!
  I would really like it if the mysql libs would be ‘Alienated’. Also, the GD libs are really hard to use; libgd.org is down, it is confusing where to get these. Packaging them as a Perl module might help here....
• Commented on vworker for Perl?
  I think this would be helpful. Flattr is nice, but I can use it to give some money to module authors. This is typically in appreciation of the module, but you would not use it to say: 'fix RT#1234 and...
• Commented on testanything.org
  The same issue applies to the Perl Win32 wiki and the public OTRS wiki; these all are mediawikis. The backup from a few months ago is also probably still spammed to death. The best would be if someone would care...
• Commented on Shebangs with perlbrew aliases and EUMM (and without local::lib)
  So this is what I think would be the solution: If you author CPAN modules, any scripts in those modules should have a shebang that points to /usr/bin/perl. If you're not writing stuff for CPAN but for your own use,...
• Posted On Unicode and Sorting to Mike B

  Tom Christiansen published an article on Perl.com on the topic of sorting and unicode.

  It's good and it explains a little bit about why Unicode is so difficult and why sorting Unicode (or even ascii)…

Comment Threads

• Toby Inkster commented on Windows CPAN Testers, your help please...

  I have indeed seen Zenity for Windows, but it uses GTK, and I wanted something a little more native.

• Steven Haryanto commented on Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework...

  I love how you keep detailed timing. I have been similarly keeping time on daily.org and weekly.org files for the past several months, but not yet to this level of detail.

• dj_goku commented on Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework...

  That is a large number of modules to maintain for ETL. We have 3-4 main modules used for our ETL process.

  Can you give a break down of the modules and what they are used for? What is your database you load to?

• preaction commented on Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework...

  There is some refactoring we can do, but not as much as you'd think: These are all client modules of the framework. They're the implementations. They get/put data from/into databases (7, including CSV and JSON), they get data from various analytic libraries, news feeds, web scraping, and other such. Then there are the transform modules that run more analysis (using 12 functions with different calling conventions from 2 different libraries).

  It's all business logic, which can be difficult to abstract.

• preaction commented on Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework...

  We have two teams that each have different databases. We have three databases that we directly manage: Sybase and two commercial time-series databases. We also have CSV and JSON "database" modules so we can chop up a job or save a copy of data for later auditing.

  A bunch of modules are simply sources of data: News feeds from Reuters and Bloomberg, internal feeds, data from other internal databases not managed by us.

  The bulk of the modules I had to change were data transforms. Fills (forward, backward, sparse), simple derivations (divide by X, multiply by X, reciprocal, etc..…