John McNamara

• Website: search.cpan.org/~jmcnamara/
• About: Just another Perl hacker

Recent Actions

• Commented on Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX
  Thanks. Typo fixed....
• Commented on Nicer dumping of data structure in Log::Any
  This is very nice. There probably isn't any advantage over the Data::Dump format, which is already quite nice, but you could also try it with Data::Dumper::Perltidy....
• Posted Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX to jmcnamara

  Macros are a powerful feature of Excel and are a frequently requested feature for Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Excel::Writer::XLSX.

  It is also a feature that I've wanted to add for some time but it wouldn't be feasible, with current human lifespans, to re-implement Excel's VBA in Perl. So i…

• Commented on YAPC::Europe 2012 - The Survey Results
  I looks like the Perl community, or just the conference going part of it, is aging: Count Description ===== =========== 1 under 20 17 20 - 29 63 30 - 39 30 40 - 49 12 50 - 59 1...
• Posted Sparklines in Excel::Writer::XLSX to jmcnamara

  I've added Sparklines to the latest version Excel::Writer::XLSX.

  Sparklines are small charts showing trends that fit in a single cell. They were …

• Commented on Excel::Writer::XLSX
  Please report bugs to the Excel::Writer::XLSX bug tracker>....
• Commented on ExtUtils::MakeMaker make release
  @steven: I don't think the goal of Pod::Weaver is to automate documentation. Its job is to munge POD, like sorting/adding/removing sections. You are right. I shouldn't have conflated Pod::Weaver with Javadoc. It isn't doing the same thing at all....
• Commented on ExtUtils::MakeMaker make release
  You aren't feeling any love for this but I appreciate it at least. If nothing else the sub depend{} is neater than the way I've done this in the past. It is probably worth noting that this has to go...
• Posted Goodbye // I'll miss you to jmcnamara

  When I started Excel::Writer::XLSX I had, more or less, a clean slate to start with. So I chose to use perl 5.10.

  It was mainly because I wanted to use the defined-or operator //. There were other reasons as well but Excel:…

• Commented on search.cpan.org down
  I saw similar behaviour for a while yesterday whereas it was fine for other people when I checked on Perlmonks. This is probably due to the fact that search.cpan.org uses a lot a mirrors and the one that I was...
• Commented on Introducing PrePAN - Social Reviewing Site for Perl Modules
  Well done. I think this is a great idea. "Request for Comments" style posts in relation to new modules appear quite frequently on Perlmonks so there is clearly a need for this type of forum. Also, it is executed really...
• Posted Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is dead. Long live Excel::Writer::XLSX. to jmcnamara

  Last week I released a new version of Excel::Writer::XLSX to CPAN that was 100% API compatible with

• Commented on Perl's Built-In OO
  I guess the corollary is that there are people who insist that there is nothing wrong with the alternatives as well....
• Commented on Ouch - Exceptions that don't hurt.
  The functions names ouch(), kiss() and bleep() seem opaque (and also a little too cute). In particular kiss() doesn't give any indication of what it is doing: if (kiss 404) { # do something } Perhaps you wanted to...
• Commented on Syntax highlighting for search.cpan.org
  I'd love to be able to support this in pod2cpanhtml. Could you drop me a line at jmcnamara@cpan.org to lay out what work needs to be done around Pod::Simple to enable this....
• Posted Excel::Writer::XLSX with charts to jmcnamara

  I've released a new version of Excel::Writer::XLSX to CPAN with support for charts.

  The output looks something like this:

  

• Commented on Syntax highlighting for search.cpan.org
  That is really excellent. Well done to everyone involved....
• Commented on Test Driven Development of Excel::Writer::XLSX Part III
  It may be overstating the case a little to say that this is an example of "pirate testing". If it is an example then it is only the third such example after the two that you link to and according...
• Posted Test Driven Development of Excel::Writer::XLSX Part III to jmcnamara

  In the first and second part of this post we looked at how…

• Posted Test Driven Development of Excel::Writer::XLSX Part II to jmcnamara

  Test Driven Development of Excel::Writer::XLSX Part II

  In the first part of this post we looked at how I used auto-generated code and tests to speed up the re-write of Spr…

• Posted Test Driven Development of Excel::Writer::XLSX Part I to jmcnamara

  For the last few months I have been porting Spreadsheet::WriteExcel to the new Excel 2007+ file format.

  The older Excel file format was comprised of sequential binary records whilst the new file format is a collection of XML files in a zip container.

  The newer module maintains the …

• Commented on Excel::Writer::XLSX
  The formats are somewhat similar in that they are both structured as XML files in a zip container. The Excel::Writer::XLSX interface and documentation could also be repurposed as an ODS writer interface. Apart form that though I don't think that...
• Posted Excel::Writer::XLSX to jmcnamara

  
  

  It uses the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel interface but is in a different namespace for reasons of maintainability.

  …

• Commented on So who knew...
  This is something that I end up doing quite frequently so I wrote Data::Dumper::Perltidy. That won't help you with 110MB data dumps though....
• Posted Pod to ePub to iBooks (Part 2) to jmcnamara

  I blogged a small while back about converting Pod to ePub format for reading with iBooks or with other eBook readers.

  The first release of App::Pod2Epub and pod2epub is now available on ="http…

• Commented on Pod to ePub to iBooks
  The covers shown are the default used by iBooks but adding a user defined cover via Ebook::EPUB is very easy....
• Posted Pod to ePub to iBooks to jmcnamara

  Olaf Alders's recent post about CPAN on your iPhone gave me the impetus to look at an idea I had after iBooks became available on the iPhone and iPad: to…

• Commented on iCPAN: CPAN on your iPhone
  I installed the app and it is very nice. Well done. I was thinking, along similar lines, of converting some of the perl* manpages, and possibly some modules, from Pod to ePub so I could sync them to the...
• Posted Yet Another Perl 6 Logo to jmcnamara

  I recently saw Sebastian Riedel's designs for Perl logos, which I like quite a lot, and it reminded me of some of my own ideas in this area.

  When the Camelia logo came out I created a few designs for a vari…

• Commented on Looking for help with decryption in Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
  That's great. Tell him to get in touch with me. I'll fill in the details from there....

Comment Threads

• Ron Savage commented on Nicer dumping of data structure in Log::Any

  Hi Steven

  I would have patched Log::Any to use Data::Dumper::Concise.

• Steven Haryanto commented on Nicer dumping of data structure in Log::Any

  Hi Ron,

  Deparse and Useqq settings are nice. Perhaps all Data::Dumper settings should be configurable from the patch.

• crasshopper.wordpress.com commented on Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX

  Thanks for writing this! Is there a way to read the code lines of the vbaProject.bin as text?

• Rohit Murarka commented on Adding Macros to Excel::Writer::XLSX

  Hello John,
  While working with your method I am running into following error with MACRO while trying to execute it on Excel created.
  Run Time Error '429'

  Can you please help me with some workaround?

• simonde commented on What are the best Perl one-liners you've written?

  Nothing fancy, but it's handy when you want to pull IP addresses out of log files

  cat /var/log/messages|perl -e 'while (>) {/(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/ && print "$1\n"};'