Ironman Archives

ATGR (another tiny grant report)

I almost could repeat the last post, But in an effort not to be boring: here are the exciting parts. I turned over to do something almost daily. Sometimes not much, but it turned out that i discover this way some dark dark corners of the spec and the tablets as well that really need some attention. And its so much fun to come up with keywords in the #perl 6 channel present people never heard of.

Much work went further into the details. I standardize almost everything not only that th…

YACGR (yet another creepy grant report)

I mean creepy in the sense that results slowly creeping in. People who follow my tweets know that 2 smaller milestones are achieved: predefined subrules and regex quantifier are now all in place (in Index A and B). This was of course a byproduct of my upcoming Perl 6 Regex and Grammar talk.

Ho…

sorta Perl 6 grant report

uh yes I have a running grant and want to close it in 2012 even it will take much more effort than just written down in the proposal. I was a bit shy with that to don't get rejected. I don't want to open any new projects til I get this done.

Recently I updated Index A, which is still the most usable part, because its a quick overview of all builtins and operators. There were tons of details I did: setting new links, cleaning up things I didn't understood myself exactly, making better examples, more "see …

GCL Plans

DISCLAIMER: this text is lengthy - if yor not interested in GUI programming or API design, you should stop reading now.

This year I held at YAPC::EU, italian and german Perl workshop a lightning talk about an idea - complete vaporware, but an idea of a better world where Apps are a breeze to write. But this will maybe change since I'm much inclined to do it, it just will take some time. The problem: GUI programming sucks badly. Its way to complex and too much to type, especially in Wx. There are some techniques to ease the pain (a talk about that I will submit to this years YAPC) but …

starting my twitter account

I think I want to use this account from now on to write more essay like pieces. Many of my posts here were just short reports of the existence of slides, talks, articles and other things. Maybe I will do comparing and reflecting summaries on such things, but for recent informations please subscribe my twitter channel. Some messages there might be German. Please don't mind.

https://twitter.com/#!/kephra_lk

Document Driven Development

Maybe the most ibnteresting talk I held this season was about this DDD. This is just a sneak preview since I give it once more in Vienna and my concept will be much better after it. Then i will publish here entirely.

I borrowed the term a bit from the django-guys, even Al Iho (the a in awk) tought 20 years ago this way. (thanks cromatic to bring this to my attention). it solves several issues documentation and test driven development face (if your honest). And I don't think it eats up any exra …

my YAPC::EU summary

first some ad for Gabor, you might want to skip that *g*. I read "perl testing" and listened to some talks on that topic, even gave one, but until 2 days ago i actually hat had some misunderstanding about Devel::Cover and that it actually marks code pieces "already executed" when tests just call subs with different options and not by calling the pieces directly. Just a short comment by Gabor has lightend that up. thank you.

What i like most about yapc even more than about perl workshops: you get more high profile people. just grab them and discuss things that needs to get done. I met …

My YAPC::EU Update

2 of 3 talks ( / days almost) done and I roll some ideas in my head what I do next weeks. I spoke with brian d foy (brought lot of insights on the state of perl docs) and damian (thanks for helping on my slides) and with lot of ather people. I heard about twin city workshop, which I try to attend (Turin and Frankfurt too).

When I come back to germany, next $foo needs 2 more article (recension and wxperltut9) and I have to think about the 4th part of the fm-perl.tutorial a…

thank ask

CPAN mail no longer blacklists github.

And BTW Graham Barr last month fixed the linking of licences in the package view. it now recognises gpl as gpl and not as Postgres license and also gpl_1 .. gpl_3 with much more verbose and precise links. Thank you both. Im just the guy who keeps nagging (one more ticket about pause packages status coding is still underway).

State of the Doc II

As an update and continuation of my last post: lot has happened. This is also a kind of Grant report since the Perl 6 Tablets are rolling again and I plan to cash in the first half of the TPF grant around YAPC in Riga but definitively before Frankfurt (german perl workshop).

You may ask what took so long or why I believe to be now much faster. I just…

State of the Documentation

The Perl 5 tutorial for freiesMagazin (the first and hardest part) is complete and I'm very happy about it (read it in the next month issue). It was a great teamwork and all who read it so far, like it very much. The result will reside in the wiki of perlcommunity.de (link later when arrived there), so it can be further expanded/improved/updated and can help a lot people more. Because its the most visited Perl forum in German and thanks to tinita++ we have there banners that link to different important pages in the wiki which gets 20 times more visited…

the "everything is a file" metaphor

Frankly I never got it until recently. Sure, I had some informal contacts with plan 9, the OS that is entirely designed around that concept. First when Linus talked about the features he borrowed for Linux, later I borrowed myself features from Plan 9's editor acme for Kephra. But yesterday I saw a talk from the author of MacFuse and I really got a hang of it.

And suddenly I realized the implications for a better Kephra that I currently design. When it read and writes FIles it should have hooks to do whatever (aka *). Not only …

Kephra Rewrite called xp

I just started a huge and deep rewrite of what I believe is the most useful editor overall. So why throw it away? (most imortant point is at EOF)

First it will still be maintained, a new version just came out today and i still will fix some remaining issues and even add some features. I will do so, till it can be fully replaced.

On the other side some issues are not that easy to fix, in modules with hairy dependencies, you know what I'm writing about. In fact, I have to write some test app eather way to toy wi…

Announcing Tie::Wx::Widget

its a small idea and a module. in fact I wrote the core code in a minute on a slide of my talk I held 2 weeks ago in Berlin. Now it becomes "real" :). from the "doc":

use Tie::Wx::Widget;

tie $tiedwidget, Tie::Wx::Widget, $widgetref;

# instead of say $widgetref->GetValue;
say $tiedwidget;

# instead of $widgetref->SetValue('7');
$tiedwidget = 7;

untie $tiedwidget;

Its just the simple idea to reduce visible syntax, but …

Why Perl 6 should be spelled roman

Yes it should spelled Perl vi (no pun intended). Just stays for vision. Perl 6 is the most visionary language i know of.

Lichtkind: 2010 / 2011

OMG yet another new year BS.

Since I live here on planet earth where biology by in large restarts with every spring, which happens in this part of the world in march, I'm bit reluctant to join the gregorian calender, which is named after a roman katholic pope and a calendar which prior to that changed its start to january by another roman dictator, which makes it further unatractive to me. don't get me wrong, I dont want to act here any more special then necesary, but its good to review and to make plans.

so here is my 2010:

* ="http://kephra.sourceforge.net/sit…

Grantreport - Perl 6 Tablets - 5th week // Perl 5 Testing

By week i mean 7 days in which I touched the tablets.

Basically i just read the advent calendar and other sources and check if the tablets missing something. This way Appendix A has 25 entries more, much more revamped finding even keyword fossils of ancient Perl 6, not even known to moritz++, jnthn++ was helpful too. Also wrote the section about quoting and some minor part…

Grantreport - Perl 6 Tablets - 4th week

in short: Tablet 3 is half ready, still added chapter to language design and trends, cleaned and added some corners in the index (now 594 entries) and tables.

You don't w…

Grantreport - Perl 6 Tablets - third week

Remember what I wrote in my first 2 reports? "tablet 2 is finished." And I still had to add something. And also the Perl 6 trends doubled in size since i first wrote: ready !! :) If you really wonder what Perl 6 is about here you have all the thoughtwork in a few lines.

The index has now 577 entries (many rewritten)…

Grantreport - Perl 6 Tablets - second week

Tablet 2 was ready, i just completed and moved the trends section, because there not really language design priciples, mere consequences from that and a great introduction into the Perldelta.

Most work gone into the third - Variable Tablet which now start to get substance. the basic structure and lot of content i took from the ge…

Interview with Neil Hodgeson - new things for perl editors

He ist lead dev of Scintilla the edit component, Kephra, Padre and Kommodo are using. And I was very happy to read that he will open up the internal API. So Perl editors will be able to do even more.

Exciting.

new things in Kephra

as the next release 0.4.4 is about basic editing, I filles there several feature holes.

like e.g. inserting rectangular selections properly, making the brace nav more consistant (jumping from inside to inside matching braces or from outside to outside). then i also added left and right to moving text(line/block) to indend/dedend tabwise which makes refactoring easier. Now im working on the proper DND of rectangular selections, which isnt delt properly even in kommodo 5.

here on austrian perl workshop the friendly guys helped me to fixe an issue with Module::Install and thanks …

First Grant Report: Perl 6 Tablets

Not that I was too lazy but my time was very compartmentalized. So i just start slowly and since I don't get bucks til its done, you don't have to worry anyway. I just completed Tablet 2. Its a nice and dense overview what Perl 6 is about and whith which mindset Larry is designing Perl 6. (already got very positive feedback from #perl6 people).

On other hand It's small and not part of the official grant, but it belongs to the overall concept of the Perl 6 T…

The Pearl Metaphor

After "What Weird Al and Larry have in common" and "some thoughts about Pearls" comes here the showdown of our little trilogy about the meaning of the name of our favorite language.

Some people asked me, why I don't use more words to explain some terms like binah and give more links. I try to do it this time a bit more. Some Jews may even say thats not good to talk about such things at all in…

Kephra 0.4.4 on the verge

I fixed some nasty bugs lately and get these days ready for the next testrelease. Im happy that this release brings also some new features. And I don't mean new for Kephra, but literally unknown to many editors. and in this episode I will highlight just 2 of them.

I already mentioned, that if you select a text by holding the left mouse button and while its still pressed you push the right too, the text gets deleted (opposite of acme). Now i just seperate the direction you selected it. If its from left to right, its cuts, meaning remember in the clipboard. if you do it backwards, its …

some thoughts about Pearls

While preparing some major technical stuff not yet released, here some more philosophical items. Last time i was comparing Larry with Al Yankovic. A funny thing with some mostly well known insights. so lets go even deeper. What's a Pearl really?

Like many Perl scripts also Pearls start with a pain. A mussel gets a stone or something else painfull into his shell and has to deal with it and something shiny takes birth out of it. Perl is also more focussed to solve practical problems t…

What Weird Al and Larry have in common

Both can be funny with words come from LA and and wear sometime a moustache and wild coloured shirts. But this is a Perl blog and not about trivia right?

Both believe life should be fun and are not afraid if people lough about them. But to go deeper than that, to actually manufacture something like "white and nerdy" you need to know a lot about rap have a feel for rythm and know enough about "neird culture" to be funny. to be funny you need a feeling what people expect and how they there emotional reaction will be.

Thats where we slowly get to a difference between them. Al hel…

Kephra 0.4.4 and release cycles

In the next days, Kephra 0.4.4 will arrive.

Back on the track for Perl 6

Yes, Dave Vaux, one of the british daves helps me translating my perl 6 tutorial and I'm writing here and there new lines into it. More important I'm reading synopses again. Im chatting with the Perl 6 crew again. What a great feeling, even jnthn is currently traveling. But I'm doing it more focussed then earlier. And when I learn something it gets immediately into stuff i write for the wiki, talks, slides. And to all of you who also stay at perl booths, I will try deliver them also in english. At least in a…

spreading perl on multiple level // please help with your codexp

jejky, I got a TPF grant. Even if scheduled it for 7 month, I plan to be ready end of this year. I think it will also appear in the first Module I ever uploaded to CPAN: Perl6::Doc, so you can grok perl 6 too. More info about that on my Perl 6 related blog.

Last week…

I'm now on Slide Share

So far I stored my slides on my homepage. Now that I saw that every speaker at Pisa put his slides on that site. So I simply did too.

Kephra is doing very well. Still 7 or 8 issues to be fixed till 0.5 plus some feature, but we will get there I think before the german perl-community workshop in Frankfurt. We n…

Pisa Résumé

its been a great YAPC, emotionally. Not as many technical talks where really compelling, but lot where really funny. But I met a lot of people I like. martin berends, jnthn and the bunch, finally i met mattia barbon which was also releasing and intresting (our interview will come soon on radio YAPC). I met a lot of germans, larry who tried to talk to me german too. and there were a lot more. great people, great food, wonderfull ice cream, fantastic hostel, great rides. it was the best possible holiday for me now.

my talks were both very well recieved but attended by few. Kephra is now…

croaching Kephra

finally 0.4.3.2 does install under all sane linux systems and will be packaged to become a .deb package. thanks jozef++.

recently i got 3 new ideas what to put into kephra. elastic tabs i cant implement, like MC hammer said it: can`t touch it. an spelling checker will be implemented for me and wil propably become the first real Kephra plugin and an idea by stefan suicu I will implement ASAP because it seems to me helpfull, especially in oop programming. insert the variable from the last line on curso position.

my talk abo…

Selfhosting WxPerl documentation

I already reported about WxDocular and about the WxPerl course I will give in Pisa. I even wrote about Kephra which will have a new release really soon.

What i want to tell now, touches all these 3 topics. For the WxCourse i write a specialized Editor-App for easy skipping between the many examples, alter and run them and browse some docs. And this App is also the goal, all these examples dri…

Kephra under Linux

Because of technical problems I was stuck to xp but recently using more and more my ubuntu boot partition. That was the main reason it was not on top of my priority list to to fix the remaining problems Kephra had. But finally, 0.4.2.33 is the first version that installs like a breeze. Of course its a dev release but a stable/testing release will come soon (1 blocker left).

But when you run Kephra, you will get a bag of GTK errors. That's not because i can't code. It's because i was too quick. I thought of features that in the end GTK considers as bugs. So i will rethink the autogener…

state of Wx Documentation - announcing WxDocular

As I prepare the material for my 5h WxPerl training course in Pisa (attendees are always welcome :)) I like to post some information you may find useful if you're a WxPerl user. Today I started to prepare my slides, which will cover only the theoretical part/first chapter. After that we will just deal with code that we do run live. For this I prepare many scripts which are snapshots of an real app in development. After doing this kind of teaching last year…

hacking bread

no my next ubercool software project isn't called bread, i mean real bread. the bread i bake since nearly a year. and there is just my reciepe, partially as answer to the perl 6 enthusiast sushee.

first of all - why I'm doing that: partially because most breads i ate suck badly (bad taste, cheap ingredients, unnecessary gimmick ingredients, poor manufacturing). I want to stay healthy and these morons try to ruin it. time to gain control here. Another reason is: I want to learn to manage my life. i mean…

people are stupid

i dont like it when people say that. because i like I love people. they deserve some understanding, tenderness and indulgence. and its a decent behaviour to do so anyway.

But on the other hand:

most people on this planet I see as incredibly limited. and in many different ways. whats the most limiting factor are prejudices and be stuck to the own point of view.

in the 19th century scientists measured that womans brains are smaller and therefore concluded their less capable of thinking and thatswhy it would be a waste to let them study at university. that was rational an…

back to quiet

hooray I will give my first training course at YAPC. As every quarter, i written another wxperl article for $foo which will get part of the teaching material as well as my code examples for the wxperl workshop last year. i really need to prepare better for such incidences.

horray my first article for heise got published. it was about the german perl workshop some days ago, $foo got an e…

bla bla bla bla bla

After Kieren Diments talk in schorndorf I held a spontaneous lightning talk about the state of the project called Perl 6. The slides wouldn't tell you much, since i pushed them together in 1 hour while listening to others. But i had to do it, since lot of people in the audience I talked with had no clear knowledge and some even said things on stage, that were hardly bearable. Get me right. i can listen to any opinion. No problem if someone says…

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