Seamless Proxy Auto-Config for CLI apps

Suppose you are in a corporate network environment and often times find yourself manually setting/unsetting the HTTP_PROXY environment variable in order to access different hosts (for instance, "yay proxy" for the external hosts and "nay proxy" for the internal ones). Sounds familiar? In this case, a pure-Perl tool I've written might help you :)

YAPC::EU 2013 afterimage

This was the biggest Perl event I've attended so far. Also, it was the first one I've attended outside of Brazil. And I'm happy to see that there is so many people in Ukraine who are passionate about Perl! So, listing some of my impressions below.

Ludic Perl

Yep, indeed, contributing to the Perl community can be a very ludic activity (not to be confused with luddite!). I tried to list every Perl-related web resource where participants are encouraged to build up some kind of score. Most have charts where participants compete for the highest rank while some has an absolute goal (like 100% test coverage). The list has no specific order. Feel free to post the resources I forgot/am unaware of in comments!

Web Scraping with Modern Perl (Part 2 - Speed Edition)

tl;dr

Grab the gist with the complete, working source code. Benchmark it against the one featured on the previous article:

$ \time perl mojo-crawler.pl
23.08user 0.07system 2:11.99elapsed 17%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 84064maxresident)k
16inputs+0outputs (0major+6356minor)pagefaults 0swaps

$ \time perl yada-crawler.pl
8.83user 0.30system 0:12.60elapsed 72%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 131008maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+8607minor)pagefaults 0swaps

How can it be 10x faster while consuming less than a half of CPU resources?!

Put a fancy CPU/RAM usage chart in tmux status bar

Prologue

So, once upon a time I had a crazy idea: to put an almost complete resource meter into the tmux status bar. You know, the clock is so boring. Let's add a battery indicator there. And the load numbers. And the memory usage...

Needless to say, this resulted in an unbearable user experience:

a:2.96G c:4.37G f:5.41G i:2.98G l:0.65/1.73/1.41 23:47

Actually, the data is OK, the "gauges" work fine on every Unix I tested them. If only it was a bit fancier...

Puke rainbows!

Then I discovered Battery. And then, Spark. I just couldn't resist myself, so I revamped my messy Perl usage data parser to output this gorgeous ANSI art scrolling chart:

Screenshot

It was tested on Mac OS X 10.8.2, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 11.10, Debian 6.0.6 and works fine with the default system Perl; there are no external dependencies at all.

Liked it? Go ahead, grab your copy and follow the installation instructions: https://github.com/creaktive/rainbarf