So, what exactly is a Readonly variable in Perl? A readonly variable is one that, once assigned a value, cannot be changed. Any attempt to modify it will trigger a runtime error. This mechanism enforces immutability, ensuring that critical values remain untouched and are protected from accidental or unauthorised alterations.
Continue with the blog series, in this post, I am talking about AWS KMS Encryption.
Please check out the link for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-kms-encryption
Many thanx to Shawn Laffan for testing this version on Strawberry Perl.
I test it on my Debian machine first of course.
It took Shawn and myself a number of attempts to make all the test pass under the 2 types of OSes.
All of us showed up for a long meeting of identifying release blockers. First we went over the issues and PRs submitted since last week, none of which turned out to be new potential blockers. Then we examined all of the issues and PRs of interest we had previously identified. We applied the “Release Blocker” label where necessary, left comments, and merged a few of the PRs. Out of 20 issues and 11 PRs on our list, we identified 5 issues and 1 PR as blockers, of which the PR and several of the issues all pertain to the same problem with retention of errors on filehandles across I/O operations. This issue needs an informed decision, which we did not have the time for in this meeting, but will pursue next.
Our next meeting will be in person at the PTS.
App::ModuleBuildTiny is a relatively new authoring tool. It aims to be a relatively lightweight (at least to some other tools like Dist::Zilla) and newbie friendly tool. It supports two install tools: Module::Build::Tiny (obviously what it was originally designed for) and Dist::Build; it does not support ExtUtils::MakeMaker or Module::Build.
AWS S3 Encryption isn't as complex as I thought initially. I had fun playing with it. You can give it a try too. Please check out the link below for more information.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-s3-encryption
(apologies for "promoting"(?) Perl obfuscation...)
Today I won a gift card at an in-office meeting with the following code. Challenge: print the numbers 1-100 in the most incomprehensible, inefficient way. My entry, edited for brevity:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.16;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
# plus 95 more of this
say join $/, @_;
Thinking about it more this evening, I came up with
$SIG {__DIE__} = sub { $_ = (pop)+0; chomp; $_%6?say:exit};
{ select undef,undef,undef,1; eval { die time-$^T }; redo; }
(where 6 instead of 101 so I don't have to wait 100 seconds (and to be honest I'm not sure if there'll be rounding errors)).
Wonder if any obfuscators could come up with better (the less inefficient, incomprehensible the better).
I wrote very elliptically about this warning and received some helpful comments with the standard advice about how to proceed when encountering it. Except unfortunately that advice will be of no use when you encounter this warning.
Namely I should have been less cute about it and made it clear that I was specifically talking about a warning about a wide character “in substitution”. How can a s/// even possibly trigger a wide character warning, you ask? Beats me, to be entirely honest, even now, but: if you have a use locale somewhere, it turns out that it can. Because defeating that is what fixed the warning I was getting:
Control. That’s what we all desire and very rarely acquire. The natural restlessness that occurs when you watch one of your offspring flicking from one movie title to the next, barely glancing at the summary before rejecting it, is one of the reasons I don’t like family movie night. My daughter’s grip on the remote is as strong as her decision making skills are weak; I struggle silently to hold back any outburst that would expose my failing parenting abilities once again. I have to distract myself with thoughts of the good old days when the TV had only 4 channels and Teletext was the closest thing to internet. Desiring such regression is now getting much of a habit for me. But we change what we can, accept what we can’t and trust, often foolishly, that those blessed with control do the best for all of us. Ah, look. Another teen fantasy horror romance movie. Thanks a heap, Netflix.
Map::Tube now supports Unicode character in station names.
Please check out the link below for more information.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/map-tube-unicode
We were all present.
CVE-2024-56406 is published and has been addressed by new point releases. Please upgrade or patch your perl promptly if affected. We thank Steve Hay, Andreas König and Stig Palmquist for doing the heavy lifting, as well as Nathan Mills for discovering the problem, and Karl Williams for providing the fix. We re-/learned a number of old and new lessons about the handling of security issues, which we will write up as new process for the PSC, the Perl Security Team, and the CPANSec group, to be jointly reviewed and agreed at the looming PTS.
We started winnowing this release cycle’s pull requests for potential release blockers. We briefly reviewed all 72 pull requests and identified 11 of interest for a closer look.
We reviewed the 2 new issues filed since last week for release blocker potential and put one of them on our list for closer review. We then started a closer examination of the 20 issues we identified as candidate blockers. We got through 5 issues, none of which we considered blockers.
In the last months of the previous century, I had to learn Perl to be able to teach it to professionals. It was my 28th language to use, but still took two years to understand deeply. As experienced assembler and C programmer, I was astound how much more of my ideas I could achieve with this new Swiss army knife in my hands. I fell in love with Perl.
Of course, the only way to learn a programming language well, is to use it for a larger project. So, I started to re-code the business shell scripts and websites to Perl. Part of it was sending automated emails to colleagues.
Your phase in life is probably different, but for my personal feeling it was not too long ago; for Internet's lifespan, the year 2000 is ancient history. The first spec for MIME headers in email were just 8 years old at the time, and many email features were still evolving.
Find out all about CVE and how we deal with it in Perl.
Please checkout the post for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/cve-in-perl
Lots has been going on. All of us showed up, though Aristotle had to join late and Philippe had to leave early, so the meeting was short but productive:
Die Hochschule der Bayerischen Wirtschaft unterstützt den Perl Workshop 2025 in München.
Wir freuen uns über die Unterstützung durch die HDBW!
Von der bayerischen Wirtschaft, mit der bayerischen Wirtschaft, für die
bayerische Wirtschaft: Die Hochschule der Bayerischen Wirtschaft (HDBW) ist
eine private, staatlich anerkannte Hochschule für angewandte
Wissenschaften - mit Fokus auf Wirtschaft, Technik und Digitalisierung. An der 2012 gegründeten HDBW mit Sitz in
München-Riem studieren derzeit knapp 500 Studierende.
This announcement comes a bit late in the year, but the preparations for the next Perl Toolchain Summit have been going on for several months now. Today I am proud to announce that the 15th Perl Toolchain Summit will be held in Leipzig, Germany, from Thursday May 1st till Sunday May 4th, 2025.
This post is brought to you by Deriv, a Gold Sponsor of the Perl Toolchain Summit 2024.
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Cellgraph 0.7 is out. (I introduced it here and there.) And I will tell you about the great new features in the next paragraph and how it helps you to play with logical structures and deepen your understanding of them. But first please let me mention the why!
The three of us attended.
Originally published at dev.to
In a previous blog post, I explored the modern way to write CGI scripts using frameworks like Mojolicious. But as pointed out in comments, despite the many benefits, there is one critical problem: when you actually need to deploy to a regular CGI server, where the scripts will be loaded each time and not persisted, frameworks designed for persistent applications add lots of overhead to each request.
CGI scripts have historically been written using the CGI module (or even more ancient libraries). But this module is bulky, crufty, and has serious design issues that led to it being removed from Perl core.
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