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I wasn't able to attend YAPC::NA this year. What a shame!

I still had an opportunity to meet the TPF president, Karen Pauley in person while she was in New York. One of the topics was the Grants Committee and here are my thoughts after the discussion.

• The Grants Committee is doing well. The bi-monthly grant cycle got positive feedback and the rule change earlier this year is making good contribution.
• One of the most important things we now have within the committee is participation. All of the voting members have been voting to select grants and both the grant managers are working hard. And the committee members have been discussing a lot.
• We still have room for improvements with marketing. I am testing something new, which will get the grant program known more. This should go live in a couple of months.
• I would like to add a few more enthusiastic volunteers in the committee. I will post an announcement to recruit new people. Stay tuned!

So I am keeping these XS posts in two places here and as a chapter here Hopefully once I am done it will be accepted my the current maintainers of that Github

Chapter 03 - Advanced XS Callback Patch For OCI

Introduction

Now we are going to jump off the deep end of XS programming and do a patch to DBD::Oracle.
Now DBD::Oracle is the poster child of early XSW programming. Starting out
way back in the stone ages starting with something called 'Oraperl.pm' back in 1994 that eventually
morphed into DBI and DBD::Oracle.

Now looking at the DBD::Oracle Code it is shall we say a little special as is not a straightforward call
out to a 'C' or 'C++' library, you are calling out to a very custom 'C' program and then to
a very obscure 'C' library called OCI (Oracle Call Interface).

The Interchange Development Group is organizing a conference with the focus on Modern Perl / Dancer / DBIx::Class / Interchange.

We offer you the following incentives:

• From Zero to Hero
• Meet the Experts
• Build the Community
• Write Real World Apps

See act.perl.dance for details.

The conference consists of two days of training (6th and 7th October)
and two days of presentations (8th and 9th October). See program for more
information.

It takes place again at the West Branch Resort in Hancock, NY
(http://www.westbranchresort.com/). If you need assistance to travel there, please let us know.

We are searching for attendees, speakers or trainers and sponsors.

Registration

Call for Papers

Sponsoring

Anyone who has contact to Perl newbies or students, please let me know.
One of the goal of the conference is to introduce new people into Perl, Dancer and Interchange.

Questions and feedback are welcome here or by email.

Regards
Racke

Still hacking around bash tab completion. Released some utilities like pmpath, podpath, pmless, pmedit (you can find them in App-PMUtils distribution). To use these utilities:

% cpanm App::PMUtils
% complete -C pmpath pmpath ; # this line can be added to your .bashrc
% pmpath [TAB]
% pmpath tex[TAB]
% pmpath text/ansi[TAB]
% complete -C pmless pmless; # do the same for the other utils
(and so on)

You'll notice that I use slash instead of double colon as it should be. And here goes the rant.

Here's the gist of how completion in bash works. For each command, you'll need to issue a 'complete' internal bash command to tell bash how to complete argument for that command. For example:

% complete -W "checkout clean commit log status" examplecmd

After this command is issued, if you type:

% examplecmd [TAB]

or:

% examplecmd c[TAB]

In my last article I introduced a design technique called Functional core and Imperative shell (let’s call it “FC&IS”). It enables to do isolated testing without using test doubles (mocks, stubs). It’s also said to produce better designs (I’ll let you judge of that).

My post was a bit abstract and introduced quite a bit of vocabulary. Now I’m going to make it a bit more real by showing some code. Writing this code also helps me re-arrange and crystallize my understanding. Here we go!

Well in my last post like almost all other XS post I started out by lamenting the sad truth that there was little in the way or resources for XS in 2010 and things haven't improved much since then.

Well I was wrong. While doing a little research for this post I stumbled onto XS-Fun up on github and was so surprised at what I found I decided to do a quick review on it for today's post.

Well it is new tutorial, less than an year old and a work in progress with three short chapters in POD format.

Well it is worth the read as they introduce the novel approach to drop 'h2xs' from the picture and dive right into actually using XS code with practical examples. So to use the authors own words

Eliminating the use of h2xs and bundling any C libraries we use (that we haven't wrote by ourselves) remove a lot of needless complexity.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Box::Calc 1.0, which is an algorithm we’ve been developing for a few years over at The Game Crafter for packing items into boxes. If you run a shipping / receiving operation, or a web store this module can help you determine which box or boxes to use to fit all the items ordered, how much each box will weigh, etc. 

Originally we offered Box::Calc as a web service, but now we’re releasing the full module as open source on CPAN. Enjoy!

[From my blog.]

I want to write all mop problems I am thinking before mop is added to Perl core.

mop is abbreviation of Meta Object Protocol. I think this name is misleading name. This name associate "Meta information of Object ".

But truth is that any information is Class Information, not Object information.

For example,

1. Attribute name
2. Parent class
3. Role

This is belong to Class, not Object.

    ref $object
        -> Class
            -> Attribute name
            -> Parent class
            -> Role information

The following concept is not good.

TL;DR

The rant

Honestly, I don't get it. It seems the organizers of YAPC::NA 2014 have decided to keep total radio silence, so no enemy will know about the event. No blog posts. Hardly any tweets. Even the mailing list was almost deserted.

Then a month before the conference there was a blog post asking YAPC::NA or not which I posted on twitter and to the YAPC::NA mailing list. Not surprisingly some people took offense of me echoing it or calling the whole thing silly. Instead of focusing on the actual issue. The lack of communication.

There was a response to that article in the form of a comment, but still no post on the YAPC::NA web site.

I understand how other things can interrupt the well meaning of people, but if it was an unfixed bug in a piece of open source code, someone could step up and fix it. At a conference, at the Perl conference in NA, I'd hope the organizers would mention they have a time or resource issue. I'd probably even expect the officials of The Perl Foundation to check if the organization of YAPC::NA goes well.

Well I think I will tackle a difficult subject for my next series and that is XS programming or how to add C to you Perl and learn to regret it.

XS programming is not for the faint of heart I will warn you know it is tedious, stressful, unrewarding, undocumented and hard to learn. However if you can get past the first few high hurdles it is well worth the effort.

Now XS programming is not rare you can find it all over CPAN and I can almost grantee if you have ever used Perl to log into a DB then you have used XS.

So it is there and in use every day, it just works and we are happy about that.

Here's another idea that just popped up in my head and can be considered silly, somewhat: autocorrect for tab completion.

bash already has cdspell shell option (enabled via shopt -s cdspell) which can correct directory names for you, so for example if you have a directory named "pictures" and you type "cd picture" or "cd pcitures" it will assume you meant "pictures" and cd to the corrected directory. To be honest I've never used this feature.

bash also has another option called dirspell which can correct spelling in directory name during completion. Try it out with shopt -s dirspell direxpand. So now if you type "ls /ect/pa" and press [TAB] bash will correct it into "ls /etc/pa". Pretty nifty. I'm only recently aware of this option and will turn the setting on for the next few weeks to find out if this is useful.

But the dirspell setting only works for directory/filename and it does not show suggested alternatives. I was thinking more like Google search autocomplete and typeahead suggestion.

I just updated my blog about my work on MetaCPAN as I have been working on The Outreach Program for Women for fully a month. Here : My blog

I recently developed a Perl module that allows you to print backtraces when your program makes certain system calls; see my blog for the full story!

Well This should really be the last one in this series baring any big problems that come down the line if people ever end up using this MooseX.

So in my last post I applied the first patch to my MooseX by simply clicking a button on github and I must say I am pleased with the result

So not I get a full green board on CPAN testers for V0.00.05 with 33 passes and 33 attempts however I do see that my compatibility Matrix isn't that broad covering only two OSs.

Looking back a bit comparing to my first result I got 276 attempts, 95 FAILs, 17 NAs 164 PASSes, so I tested on a larger number of boxes but failed a large number of tests.

In this post: https://blogs.perl.org/users/samuel_kaufman/2014/06/when-a-fat-comma-is-confusing.html I mentioned I was using Test::LWP::UserAgent for my test. One thing I struggled with was testing ( with a mockup ) a service which was being instantiated completely beyond the scope of the test- so even though it took ua as a parameter to the constructor to override the default LWP::UserAgent->new, I couldn't reach down inside the Catalyst controller where it instantiated a module with the default parameters from the test.

So in case anyone else has had similar issues, here's how I got it working:

For a brief period of time (well, one week), I had a chain of 4 weekly neoCPANisms in NEILB's NeoCPANisms contest (which is subtly different from the Monthly New Distribution Challenge 2014 quest on questhub).

Then at the end of week 23, instead of pushing out an entirely new module (I have a two or three "almost ready" distributions in my CPAN folder), I decided to give up.

Here, I've entered ff9600:

http://www.color-hex.com/color/ff9600

Honestly I though my last post would be the final one of this rather lenghty series but I was wrong.

Seems soon after my release I got what I think is my first ever 'Pull Request' from github from the resident mooz giiyosewinini na Toby Inkster so I had to post on that today.

Well Seems there is a better fix for the bugs/errors that where thrown in the first version of MooseX::AuthorizedMethodRoles as the root of the problem was the inability of perls less that 5.8.8 to figure out that the $requires part of

 
 foreach my $key (keys($requires))

Well I must of really been up late when I wrote that up as I normally, as force of habit,
wrap my hash refs with {} like this

Following Ovid's Sick of being mocked by unit tests and the link to the discussion is TDD dead between Kent Beck and others, I found this talk and it seems like a promising solution. I'm writing this post to share it with you all, but also to clarify ideas for myself.

The original goal is to do isolated unit testing without using Test Doubles (mocks, stubs, etc), and the method is called "Functional core & Imperative shell". According to its creator it also leads to cleaner design, which is more important than testing in the end. So we're fetching two stones with one bird.

Here is how to do it in theory: