Mark Allen

• About: Singer, dad, nerd, not necessarily in that order. @bytemeorg

Recent Actions

• Posted Net::Amazon::EC2 now with v4 signature support to Mark Allen

  I just released 0.30_1 of Net::Amazon::EC2 to CPAN. This test release contains support for AWS4 signatures. It is based on a pseudonymous patch on…

• Posted If your core perl documentation uses =encoding, please test the new perldoc release to Mark Allen

  I'm here today to talk about the venerable perl documentation tool perldoc. Working with Koichi KUBO, I think I have a perldoc which works effectively with encodings in files like perlop,

• Commented on Try rakudobrew and play with concurrency
  Something I did not properly appreciate until I started writing Erlang all the time was that Amdahl's law dominates highly concurrent code. I really like the notion of Channels that Perl6 seems to have implemented in the spirit of the...
• Posted Test::RequiresInternet now on CPAN to Mark Allen

  During my talk at YAPC I recommended that people writing functional tests for a web service client ensure that Internet access is available before running the rest of the test. Later, a question was asked about an easy way to test for…

• Posted Dear Perl lazyweb: how to construct read-only data objects out of JSON? to Mark Allen

  I recently updated a client called WebService::Geocodio for the Geocod.io geocoding service. Traditionally, geocoding means turning a mailing address into latitude/longitude coordinates (or the reverse…

• Posted What about HTML to Markdown? to Mark Allen

  Neil Bowers released a survey of markdown to HTML formatters recently. I thought it was an interesting coincidence, because I have recently written a CPAN library to go the opposite way,…

• Commented on Why I use cpanfile (and you should too)
  @miyagawa: I meant that git clone https://github.com/mrallen1/perl-Tombala && cd perl-Tombala && cpanm --installdeps . works But that it is awesome if cpanm https://github.com/mrallen1/perl-Tombala will work in the future....
• Posted Why I use cpanfile (and you should too) to Mark Allen

  CPANfile is a simple way to declare your project's dependencies in a build system independent manner.

  1. In recent versions of cpanminus, it makes your entire project installable from a git repository, and,
  2. it also allows you to "pin" your dependencies on a specific …
• Posted Steal this for Perl hackathons to Mark Allen

• Commented on Thank You For Supporting Pinto!
  Thanks Jeff. That's incredibly generous....
• Commented on Introducing Net::EC2::Tiny
  @steven It's an admirable goal to strive for, but there are several ::Tiny modules which have non-core dependencies. That being said, I could easily revert the Moo and the URI::Escape portions of the code, but once you opt for SSL...
• Posted Introducing Net::EC2::Tiny to Mark Allen

  One of the fun / cool things about Perl is that it can easily inhabit that space between "too complex for bash" and "too insignificant to invest in a C implementation." In my opinion a lot of the command line tools for EC2 are pretty terrible - they have a large learning curve, a high amount of…

• Posted Pod::Perldoc at 3.19_01 to Mark Allen

  One of the things that brian d foy worked pretty hard on for Perldoc inside of 5.16 was better UTF-8 support. We found that there are a huge number of variables for getting good Unicode support out of the "man" formatting pipeline. perldoc internally uses the "podulators" distribution to turn…

• Posted Net::Amazon::EC2 0.22 released; supports AWS v2 signatures to Mark Allen

  I just released 0.22 of Net::Amazon::EC2 to CPAN which resolves RT #80407 about EC2 requiring version 2 signatures.

  Until today, this module had been using …

• Commented on I love Github
  Actually, the hardest part about submitting this patch was finding the github repo name. :)...
• Posted Please help improve Pod::Perldoc 3.17 to Mark Allen

  Pod::Perldoc is a "dual-life module" that ships with Perl core, but also sits outside of it. Over the weekend, I released Pod::Perldoc 3.17 which incorporates several bug…

• Posted DistZilla from one newb to another to Mark Allen
  I'm giving a talk tonight at Houston.pm about Dist::Zilla. The slides from the presentation are after the cut. Also, there's a set of links about DistZilla here.…
• Posted Exploit Git Hub tags! to Mark Allen

  If you put your Perl code on Git Hub, I'd like to encourage you to use a a feature that isn't (at all) intuitive: tags.

  Basic tags in git are a human friendly label that point to a certain commit. Basic tags don't have a git object associated with them so they're mostly for use on your loc…

• Posted Looking for Jeff Kim to Mark Allen

  I'm trying to contact Jeff Kim about his Net::Amazon::EC2 module. I have a repo on github that closes most of the open tickets on

• Commented on GitHub is an amazing service that much of the Perl community has...
  Very cool!!...
• Commented on Try the new perldoc
  Thanks for the pointers! I have an experimetnal branch of Pod::Perldoc on github exploring the Pod::Text::* family https://github.com/mrallen1/Pod-Perldoc...
• Posted Writing API clients in Perl and Python to Mark Allen

  I recently released a couple of API clients for the Ge.tt file sharing service, one in Perl and one in Python. (I am just a fan of the service, not an…

Comment Threads

• smls commented on Try rakudobrew and play with concurrency

  They're finally working on making Perl 6 fast. In some examples, it's actually an order of magnitude faster than Perl 5

  To be fair, I think that's only the case for micro-benchmarks that compare Perl 6 built-in features with the equivalent features provided by bloated/unoptimized/neglected Perl 5 modules. For example, Perl 6's built-in Rat type vs Perl 5's Math::BigRat.

  In macro-benchmarks that use many different language features to achieve something resembling a real-world task, Rakudo Perl 6 still tends to be very s…

• Nate Glenn commented on Try rakudobrew and play with concurrency

  I'm quite excited to use this! I wonder if it will be possible to patch rakudobrew to work on Windows.

• Aristotle commented on Try rakudobrew and play with concurrency

  To be fair, I think that's only the case for micro-benchmarks that compare Perl 6 **built-in** features with the equivalent features provided by bloated/unoptimized/neglected Perl 5 **modules**. For example, Perl 6's built-in Rat type vs Perl 5's Math::BigRat.

  No, actually, that is no longer true. There are cases where Rakudo/MoarVM keeps up with Perl 5 at built-ins, or beats it handily. At built-ins. Check out the benchmarks and see for yourself. There is a little “[Code]” button ne…

• smls commented on Try rakudobrew and play with concurrency

  There are cases where Rakudo/MoarVM keeps up with Perl 5 at built-ins, or beats it handily. At built-ins. Check out the benchmarks and see for yourself.

  I only see 3 kinds of micro-benchmarks on that page where Perl 6 comes in faster or as fast as Perl 5:

  1. Empty loops combined with integer arithmetic: while_empty_native, postwhile_nil_native, loop_empty_native

     This seems like an altogether archaic use-case from a P5 point of view (that is, probably not very meaningful with regards to real-life code).

  2. Rational number ar…
• Aristotle commented on Try rakudobrew and play with concurrency

  But lets not call it before it happens... :)

  The way I understand these results is “here is proof positive that it can”: a plausible promise. There are still seasons’ worth of low-hanging fruit ahead, anywhere you look, so the fact that we have these results now is an encouraging indicator of how high the effort might be able to reach.

  Before this point, that was always the claim and the idea, and for some people it was the reasonable expectation, but there was no tangible evidence. It remains to be seen if the promise can be fulfilled, but th…