Shlomi Fish

• Website: www.shlomifish.org/
• About: An Israeli software developer, essayist, and writer, and an enthusiast of open/free software and cultural works. I've been working with Perl since 1996.

Recent Actions

• Posted Copied from Slashdot.org: "Heroic people make any job they take awesome." to Shlomi Fish
  First of all, I have written my recent hacktivity log over on my new dreamwidth.org blog, and I am not posting it here, because it involves a lot of non-code hacktivity, which I expect to do quite a lot more of from now.

  That put asi…

• Posted XML-Grammar-Screenplay: Alternative Format for Hollywood Screenplays to Shlomi Fish
  A short time after I posted a message about XML-Grammar-Screenplay to a Perl forum, a Perl enthusiast sent me a message reading like that:

  I would think that a proper screenplay grammar would…

• Commented on Whats wrong with the Perl Community?
  Hi, Just my two cents, in addition to what everyone here said: I think we can derive a lot of value from people who say negative things (even if it's destructive criticism), because it may tell us where we...
• Posted ANN: My Transition From Software Developer to Writer/Entertainer/Amateur Philosopher/Internet Celebrity to Shlomi Fish
  I'd like to make an announcement: after some serious thought, I decided that from now on, being a software developer (which I am not too bad at) will only be the means (but the absolutely necessary ones) to me being a writer / entertainer / philosopher / Internet celebrity (a little bit of all t…
• Posted Essay: "Just write the God-damn tests, motherfucker!" to Shlomi Fish
  (I originally wrote this in a post to qa@perl.org, and I apologise for the profanity in the title, but I felt it is needed in this case.)

  So why am I writing this? I used to feel guilty about not being conscious…

• Commented on I would like to buy a Hailo
  What brian is telling is strange. As far as I know, proprietary software companies such as Microsoft, sell their software with a big “no warranty” disclaimer in all-capital letters in their licences, which prevents you from effectively suing them,...
• Commented on Perlybook updates
  Just wanted to note that Perlybook seems like a commendable and useful project, and thanks for putting the source under the Artistic 2.0 licence, which is open source and supersedes the old and lacking “Same terms as perl”. I'm...
• Posted Count-up to 100 CPAN Distributions: Quality *as well as* Quantity to Shlomi Fish
  Going over the previous count-ups to 100 CPAN distributions in this blog, I feel I have been carried away: I tried to release a lot of new distributions to the CPAN, while neglecting all the existing distributions I have, and not tending to their pending problems and their lack of software qu…
• Commented on Count-up to 100 CPAN Distributions: Test-XML-Ordered, SDLx-Betweener, and more
  Replying to myself, I would like to note that the Marpa scanless interface was announced, so it's one less reason for me not to use it. Thanks!...
• Commented on Count-up to 100 CPAN Distributions: Test-XML-Ordered, SDLx-Betweener, and more
  Hi Jakub, thanks for your comment. I should note that in general, I have yet to study Marpa extensively (though I looked into it a bit). One thing I dislike about it is that it still requires a separate...
• Commented on Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX
  Sounds great, thanks. I recall having some fun coding custom macros and functions in Visual Basic for Apps on Excel. BTW, you misspelled "existing" as "exiting", and may wish to correct it. Thanks, and happy Hanukkah....
• Posted Count-up to 100 CPAN Distributions: Test-XML-Ordered, SDLx-Betweener, and more to Shlomi Fish
  Well, it's no longer a secret that I'm craving to join the "100 CPAN Distributions Club" by releasing some code that is hopefully not too useless. Here I would like to blog about the two new additions to my CPAN page which are the 83rd and 84th di…
• Commented on Three Command-Line Utilities
  Hi Steven, OK, the new release of App-Countdown, supports timeouts such as 2m or 1.5h or whatever (in input - not in output yet - I have yet to determine if and when I should display the minutes and...
• Commented on Three Command-Line Utilities
  Hi Alexey, reminder looks interesting. I have packaged it for Mageia (= Linux distribution) already and will take a further look. Its tk interface - "tkreminder" appears to be confusing, but maybe I can figure out the command line...
• Commented on Three Command-Line Utilities
  Hi Steven, thanks for your comment. I made App::Countdown object oriented, because I'm making almost all of my code object oriented, because I don't know when it will outgrow its original design, and then I may have to break...
• Posted Three Command-Line Utilities to Shlomi Fish
  So, November is NaNoWriMo ("National Novel Writing Month"), and I was hoping to get some serious writing done (instead of coding), but I kept being distracted with coding and random writing in various Internet forums. Well, …
• Commented on Please Publish Perl Events on the LWN.net Calendar
  daxim gave the following links in addition: http://www.theperlreview.com/community_calendar (contact: brian d foy) http://www.yapceurope.org/events/timeline.html (contact: #act mongueurs) https://grical.org/ (contact: Sven Guckes) http://www.heise.de/open/veranstaltungskalender/ (for the German speaking audience)...
• Posted Please Publish Perl Events on the LWN.net Calendar to Shlomi Fish
  As I read last week's LWN.net's Announcement Page (LWN.net is a news site for open-source-related news, formerly standing for "Linux Weekly News"), I noticed that there were few if any Perl events featured in its upcoming events calendar. However, th…
• Commented on Alien::Base Beta Release!
  Thanks for your effort! The three modules build, test and install cleanly on Mageia Linux 3/Cauldron. Given the time and the motivation, I can test it on other systems I have on VirtualBox VMs. Should I?...
• Commented on My Experience with Inline::C
  petdance: I'm glad....
• Posted Tech Tip: Overriding the C compiler with ExtUtils::MakeMaker to Shlomi Fish
  In order to override the C compiler with ExtUtils::MakeMaker, one can do something like:

  perl Makefile.PL CC=/usr/bin/clang
  

  Which will make the "CC" variable in the generated makefile be set to /usr/bin/clang instead of the default. Apparently, setting the CC…

• Posted Grant for Improving the Perl Debugger + New CPAN Distributions to Shlomi Fish
  First of all, I am glad to announce that the Perl Foundation grant committee has accepted my grant proposal for adding tests and refactoring the built-in perl debugger. Here is ="http://news.perlfound…
• Commented on The goodness of testing
  I enjoyed reading your post, but I don't see why what you are saying is controversial (at least not to people with significant experience in automated testing). I've written a little about it on my Perl for Newbies talks as...
• Commented on What's new on the Perl Beginners' Site
  Hi Andy, I'm sorry for the late response, but I was not notified of posting this comment for some reason. Anyway, you're welcome....
• Posted Tech Tip: How to Package and Maintain CPAN Distributions in Mageia to Shlomi Fish
  Mageia Linux is an RPM-based Linux distribution, whose repositories contain over 3,000 CPAN packages, and part of the reason why it has so many is because Jerome Q…
• Commented on Perl Coding for the Win
  Welcome to blogs.perl.org!...
• Posted Announcement: the App-Notifier CPAN Distributions to Shlomi Fish
  I would like to announce two new CPAN distributions of mine: App-Notifier-Service and App-Notifier-Client. These are derived from a few simplistic scripts I've written i…
• Posted What's new on the Perl Beginners' Site to Shlomi Fish
  The last update on the news feed for The Perl Beginners's site was almost a year ago. While the site continued to improve, I neglected writing a new entry until now, so I hope this one will compensate for that.

  So without further ado, here is what i…

• Commented on A Porter's Tale
  Thanks for the writeup - I enjoyed reading it (found it on an issue of Perl Weekly)....
• Posted Tel Aviv Perl Mongers Meeting on 30 May, 2012 to Shlomi Fish

  As a result we're assigned to room 2205 in the new building (Mitchell building). The entrance is through Yeda Am street, on the corner wi…

Comment Threads

• John McNamara commented on Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX

  Thanks. Typo fixed.

• Neil Bowers commented on Whats wrong with the Perl Community?

  I do it because I want perl to be Awesome.

• Steven Haryanto commented on Whats wrong with the Perl Community?

  At the risk of being repetitive (as in repeating other commenters), could you tell me which particular blog post(s)/comment(s) you view as containing "negative stuffs about Perl from the Perl community"?

  Because all I've read so far are things along the line of "X sucks/has problems, and here's how I think it could be solved." Perl community, as always, are searching for solutions to their problems.

  I'm seriously asking. I might be biased after all.
  

• tempire commented on Whats wrong with the Perl Community?

  Your presumption about other languages is incorrect; the issue is not about chosen language, it's about humans.

  http://rubydramas.com/

• crasshopper.wordpress.com commented on Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX

  Thanks for writing this! Is there a way to read the code lines of the vbaProject.bin as text?