July 2012 Archives

Revitalizing LinkedIn's Advanced Perl Users Group

Deven Corzine is revitalizing the Advanced Perl Users group on LinkedIn, and I've volunteered to help. We're going through all of the join requests to approve everything we can, delete the obvious spam and HR requests, and figure out what to do with the rest.

But, besides clearing out the backlog, I want to quadruple the number of members in the group by the end of summer (which is sooner than Christmas). We have 250 members right now. I want that to be 1,000.

LinkedIn is essentially a trust network that relies on connect…

Import Github projects to Ohloh

I wrote a program to import my Github repos into Ohloh. It works, mostly. It can read the projects from Github, add them to Ohloh, but it's broken in ways I don't understand when it comes to claiming them in Ohloh. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn't. The Ohloh API is read only, so I have to screen scrape to go through their awful web forms. To claim the rest of the stuff, I search for my name under "people" and claim what's left. Even then it doesn't always work and it seems to want to…

Use the latest ISBN data without upgrading the module

I've made Business::ISBN much more fresh, and allowed users to freshen it themselves without installing a new version.

A long time ago, I created the Business::ISBN to help me cleanse a publisher's database. That is, to help them cleanse the Excel workbook that they were using as their database. About 10% of their ISBN's were wrong in the file, and this little bit of Perl identified the problem (while an intern took those titles and looked them up online and correc…

Updating Geo::GeoNames

I'm updating Geo::GeoNames, and my fork is on Github. I have a bunch of geo-coordinates where I want to know the country or city names so I can easily remember why I have those coordinates and tell them apart from the other coordinates.

Since it's last release, GeoNames changed the web services address and started requiring a username (which you can get for free). Once you respond to the email and ="http://www.geonames.o…

Finding Unused Subroutines, but with PPI

Can I find all unused Perl subroutines with PPI? Ovid tried it with a quick shell script, which is probably good enough for his purposes, and certainly shorter than my solution.

I don't know if I've covered all of the cases, but it seems to mostly work.

About brian d foy

user-pic I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).