Michael J

Recent Actions

• Commented on A Tutorial for using LibXML from Perl
  Another suggestion is use an XML::LibXML document object with XML::Compile::Schema. Together with an XSD it makes it really easy to go from an XML string or file to a Perl data structure and vice-versa, which is what XML::Simple provides and...
• Commented on A Date with CPAN, Part 1: State of the Union
  No historical dates? You've never put dates-of-birth into a database?...
• Commented on A survey of table rendering packages
  there are several packages to add tables to PDF::API2 documents: https://metacpan.org/pod/PDF::Table https://metacpan.org/pod/PDF::TableX https://metacpan.org/pod/PDF::Report::Table...
• Commented on Great Mystic Mystery Revealed
  Just a minor typo: your PrePAN link points to PAUSE and not http://prepan.org/...
• Commented on Variable Names
  new programmers possibly also tend to avoid long variable names because they end up writing them more often than more experienced coders (who will use Perl-isms like 'my $var = fn() or return;' rather than three separate lines for 'my...
• Commented on Directory size calculator
  are you able to install CPAN modules? (if not, then that's a big drawback to learning Perl) searching for 'dir size' finds https://metacpan.org/module/Win32::DirSize which sounds like it might already do this for you...?...
• Commented on Moose and Fatal Type Constraints
  don't you mean George Orwell there, not Aldous Huxley, or is that some reference I'm missing?...
• Commented on use strict;
  There's also a good case for leaving warnings on in production, and ensuring that log files/cron STDERR emails are kept tidy by either fixing code or explicitly ignoring unavoidable warnings from sections of code or noisy modules (PDF::API2 being our...
• Commented on Deploying Perl code with git, local::lib, Minicpan and cpanminus
  Thanks! yes, the system has been working very well for us. Something that I should have mentioned is regarding updating MiniCPAN - I had to delete the CPAN Index files each time before the update, otherwise they were not picked...
• Commented on Deploying Perl code with git, local::lib, Minicpan and cpanminus
  This was a while ago now (last summer), and I'm not sure we looked at Git::Repository, but I do recall git's STDOUT/STDERR mess being a bit of an issue - depending on the command, we sometimes need to parse STDOUT...
• Posted Deploying Perl code with git, local::lib, Minicpan and cpanminus to Michael J

  At $work we're nearing the end of a long upgrade process, that's included moving from Debian etch to lenny, from svk to git, from Perl 5.8 to 5.10, from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2 (and then to Plack), and moving to recent versions of DBIC and…

• Commented on WTF Perl Books
  BetaScript publishing (they also use the name 'AlphaScript') are also publishing Wikipedia content in book form. more info in the comments here: http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/27/odd-tale-alphascript-publishing-betascript-publishing/...
• Commented on DateTime and Excel difference
  I guess it wasn't that simple - keeping 29/02/1900 after importing a Lotus 123 file would make sense, but what about a worksheet created in Excel (with the correct leap year formula) and then exported - would any affected date...
• Commented on DateTime and Excel difference
  The 1900 leap year bug originates from Lotus 123, which either deliberately (to simplify the calculation in limited RAM days) or unintentionally had it wrong. Excel then replicated this in order to import Lotus worksheets......
• Commented on The Definitive Guide to Catalyst book
  Seeing as this book gets recommended everywhere else, I thought I'd offer a contrary opinion - as an existing user of Catalyst, DBIx::Class, etc, I didn't think very much of the book. It's ok (and obviously the authors know what...
• Commented on 4 days at Eth0 Summer 2010
  Any thoughts on how younger programmers get some of these opinions though? I can understand people who maybe used Perl 10 years ago or were starting out with PHP then having these views, but I'd have thought that younger programmers...
• Commented on Syntax highlighting comment keywords in TextMate (TODO, FIXME, etc)
  Thanks, I'd forgotten about that, although have used it a few times in the past. In this though case I just wanted to make them stand out a bit more in comments when actually working on a file, rather than...
• Posted Syntax highlighting comment keywords in TextMate (TODO, FIXME, etc) to Michael J

  mst's State of the Velociraptor talk at YAPC::EU inspired me to start a blog here, although this first post has nothing to do with Perl...

  After reading Chisel's post on highlighting useful words like TODO in Vim…

Comment Threads

• blog.urth.org commented on A Date with CPAN, Part 1: State of the Union

  I can live without support for arbitrary timezones. I’m willing to be satisfied with two timezones: UTC, and whatever timezone I happen to be in. If you think about it, this is exactly what’s built into Perl itself: gmtime and localtime.

  So you never plan to write code that presents information to the user in their local time zone? Really?

  I think good timezone support is pretty crucial to most applications that have to interact with users outside of a single office.

• blog.urth.org commented on A Date with CPAN, Part 1: State of the Union

  Also don't forget locale support, which is also quite useful for any app that has to support a wide variety of users.

• Mark Grimes commented on A Date with CPAN, Part 1: State of the Union

  One more to consider: DateTimeX::Immutable. Like Moonpig, it makes DateTime immutable, but it leaves the rest of it unchanged. It can often serve as a drop-in replacement for DateTime. Used with aliased you might be able to change just one line of code and never be bitten by mutating dates:
  use aliased 'DateTimeX::Immutable' => 'DateTime';
  
  Plus, you can make all your DBIx::Class date objects immutable with ="https://metacpan.org/pod/DBIx::Class::Inflate…

• confuseAcat commented on A Date with CPAN, Part 1: State of the Union

  I'm in the same boat. I rarely deal with times, I often have to deal with dates.

  I sometimes feel like a freak because I rely on Date::Parse and especially Date::Format so much.

  Literally all the dates I deal with are well past 1970.

  I let the JavaScript in our front-end deal with locales and time zones.

  Plus the length of docs for the popular DateTimePiecMoment modules scares me off.
  

• Buddy Burden commented on A Date with CPAN, Part 1: State of the Union

  Thanks everyone for the great comments!  I’ve been swamped at $work, so I haven’t had a chance to respond until now.  I’m going to answer everyone’s thoughts here in one post instead of trying to reply to each individually.  Hopefully everyone’s okay with that.

  First of all, the compliments.  Ron Savage and Bull Ruppert had nice things to say, and I think them for the kind words and the encouragement.  confuseAcat popped by to commiserate; it seems like we have similar perspectives, so hopefully this…