Mark Leighton Fisher
- About: Perl/CPAN user since 1992.
Recent Actions
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Posted Roles and Responsibilities in Scrum to Mark Leighton Fisher
You might find my Roles and Responsibilities in Scrum of interest (Scrum is not Waterfall).
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Posted TIL - Object Method: Named Arguments Unpacking to Mark Leighton Fisher
TIL (or re-learned) how to unpack an object method that has named args, thanks to the Modern Perl book:
my ($self, %args) = @_;
This idiom unpacks $self, then throw the rest of the arguments into %args.
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Posted Stupid Lucene Tricks: Hierarchies to Mark Leighton Fisher
(reposted from the now-sadly-extinct http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/_Mark+Leighton+Fisher/journal/40449.html)
You can search on hierarchies in Lucene if your hierarchy can be represented as a path enumeration (a Dewey-Decimal-like style of encoding a path, like "001.014.003" for…
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Commented on Perl Module Tools (pmtools) v2.2.0 Released - Many RT Fixes
Except, of course, for the 2 spelling error tickets still in rt.cpan.org. (sigh)...
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Posted Perl Module Tools (pmtools) v2.2.0 Released - Many RT Fixes to Mark Leighton Fisher
Perl Module Tools (pmtools) v2.2.0 has been released (and updated on GitHub). The focus was on fixing RT bugs. The only outstanding RT issue will be 52851, which is a feature request for pmeth to also display a description for the method. This will require some contemplation to see if I can do…
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Posted Perl Module Tools (pmtools) v2.1.2 Released - Version Fixed to Mark Leighton Fisher
Perl Module Tools v2.1.2 has now been released to fix the version number everywhere.
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Posted Perl Module Tools v2.1.0 Released - Windows Fixes to Mark Leighton Fisher
It turns out there are several tools in the Perl Module Tools (pmtools) that need to execute other commands with the current Perl specified, like:
system "ls -l " . `$^X -S $Bin/pmpath $module`;
(note the additional "$^X").
As a side no…
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Posted Stupid Lucene Tricks: Full-Text Search Without the Full Text to Mark Leighton Fisher
This is a really stupid (and kludgy) Stupid Lucene Trick: how do you search the full text of your document + metadata without the full text? Simple - you create a separate field (call it fulltext, for example), then populate it with the text of all of your other fields. Voilà! You can…
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Posted Lunatics, Perl, and Java to Mark Leighton Fisher
So I don't forget this - my expanded version of something our Larry Wall once said:
"Looking at Perl code, it is easy to tell whether you are looking at the ravings of a lunatic. With Java, you can be several weeks into the project before you realize that you are dealing wit…
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Posted Using Docker to Check for Prerequisites to Mark Leighton Fisher
While updating Set::Jaccard::SimilarityCoefficient to v1.6.1, I realized that I should install it on a clean, clean system so I find all missing prerequisites (not just the ones I already knew about). So where do I get a clean, clean system? Aha - a minimal Docker container (like the…
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Posted Set::Jaccard::SimilarityCoefficient v1.6.1 Released to Mark Leighton Fisher
Somehow I missed most of the prerequisites for Set::Jaccard::SimilarityCoefficient, so I have released a version v1.6.1 that:
Has all of the prerequisites in the Makefile.PL.
Uses the new (and internally simpler and more correct) ReadonlyX…
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Posted Mocking Should Not Require Interfaces to Mark Leighton Fisher
Exploring the ecosystem outside Perl, I have found multiple examples of languages and frameworks that require you to implement your classes as an interface + an underlying engine class when you want to mock that class during testing. This is all fine and dandy if the interface can be used as part…
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Posted Simple (Date) Range Overlap Detection to Mark Leighton Fisher
I started down this particular rabbit hole when (a) I had to check for date range overlaps when worrying about scheduling appraisals; and (b) my attempts to use SQL BETWEEN resulted in complicated, hard-to-read SQL.
Now you would think that BETWEEN should give you easy-to-understand SQL fo…
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Posted Stack Overflow Considered as a Grimoire or Trove to Mark Leighton Fisher
Back in the day, when I came upon a particularly juicy tip/hint/trick/kludge/etc. I would write it down somewhere (way back -- in a paper notebook; more recently, somewhere like TiddlyWiki). But I don't do that anymore -- why?
The answer is Stack Overflow. When I have a question, a web sea…
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Commented on Perl5 to Java compiler - symbol tables, typeglobs, and call stack
Wow! Reasonably high wizardry there, Flavio. (Certainly more than just a parlor trick.)...
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Posted The Seven Steps to Perl Mastery by Tom Christiansen to Mark Leighton Fisher
(Reposted - originally by Tom Christiansen, preserved by Ilya Chelpanov at http://i72.narod.ru/perl-mastery.html, reposted here for convenience and posterity.)
The Seven Steps to Perl Mastery
by Tom Christiansen.A Perl Novice ...
- Thinks CGI and Perl are inte… -
Posted Way OT: James Mickens - The Funniest Person in Computer Science? to Mark Leighton Fisher
Read The Night Watch and tell me that I'm wrong...
(The syntactically-correct Perl script mentioned in the article is indeed syntactically-correct. (Extra points if you can tell me what it does.))…
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Posted OT: PLOS ONE Has an RSS Feed to Mark Leighton Fisher
If you like to follow academic progress in CS, PLOS ONE has an RSS feed. (I don't know my feed types upon inspection -- it…
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Posted How to Coexist With the Bad People to Mark Leighton Fisher
Is There An Alternative To Long-Term Secrets? presents the mechanism used by LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) to ensure that the data you are preserving stays preserved in the face of attacks.…
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Posted 11,000 Global Variables to Mark Leighton Fisher
11,000 Global Variables -- 'nuff said.
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Posted When you want to preserve your digital data: how few copies to Mark Leighton Fisher
Dr. Rosenthal's classic "How Few Copies" examines in detail just how few of copies you might need to preserve your digital data. (The context is Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, which you need to know…
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Posted Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names to Mark Leighton Fisher
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (with 544+ comments) is a thorough dissection of the various falsehoods programmers believe about names.
Two takeaways for me:
- Depending on…
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Posted Stupid Lucene Tricks: Storing Non-Documents to Mark Leighton Fisher
Lucene's search capabilities are so powerful that it is tempting to store more than documents -- and that is OK. Here are some hints to make storing non-documents easier:
- Do you want to allow phrase searches on your fields? A drawback of allowing phrase searches occurs when you keep …
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Posted 1-line Endianness Detection in the C Preprocessor to Mark Leighton Fisher
Yeah, it's evil (or at least chaotic), but...
Go see 1-line Endianness Detection in the C Preprocessor.
(As someone who had a write a C preprocessor (we needed a consistent preprocessor across several archi…
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Posted Xerces-C++ for Validating Against Multiple Schemas to Mark Leighton Fisher
Xerces-C++ is Apache's C++ implementation of the Xerces XML parser. It turns out that it ships with a simple example program, stdinparse, that can validate your XML (which many tools do) against multiple schemas simultaneously…
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Posted POE::Session object_states: handlers are sub names not CODEREFs to Mark Leighton Fisher
This works as expected:
sub _poll_start { my $self = $_[OBJECT]; [...] POE::Session->create( 'object_states' => [ $self => { '_start' => '_poll_start', 'Work' => '_poll_work', '_stop' => '_poll_st…
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Commented on Why Puppet is Intrinsically Better Than Chef
One word - perlbrew....
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Commented on OT: DataCite Recommends "doi:" Scheme Prefix
I don't know of any DOI providers for Perl modules, alas....
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Posted pmtools v2.0.0 - Now with pmtools::new_pod_iterator()! to Mark Leighton Fisher
pmtools (Perl Module Tools) v2.0.0 has been unleashed upon the unsuspecting world.
v2.0.0 accommodates when the POD (.pod) file is separate from the module (.pm) file. (I gather that this is the case in upcoming Debian.) As I had to modify…
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Posted Set::Jaccard::SimilarityCoefficient v0.5.1 to Mark Leighton Fisher
Set::Jaccard::SimilarityCoefficient lets you calculate the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient for either arrayrefs or Set::Scalar objects.
Briefly, the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient is a simple measure of …
Comment Threads
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Mithaldu commented on
Stupid Unix Tricks: Workflow Control with GNU Make
I wasn't saying that generating parts of the makefile programmatically is bad. It's a step in the right direction. I mentioned it to point out just how *bad* the situation had become.
The end goal of taking steps in the right direction is this: A control flow script that handles the logic the make file usually does, but does it in a language everyone in the office is *fluent* with and that actually lends itself to expressing program logic.
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Olivier Mengué (dolmen) commented on
pmtools-1.20 (Perl Module Tools) Released
An URL in a README is useless as it can not be seriously processed by programs.
Please fix the metadata.For your MetaCPAN profile issue, can't you just modify temporarly the e-mail address of your PAUSE account just for the time needed to register on MetaCPAN?
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Neil Bowers commented on
Perl Module Tools (pmtool) - Now with Kwalitee!
You might want to make the text "put your changes on a topic branch" a link to a tutorial, as I didn't know what a topic branch was. Eg: http://navinpeiris.com/2011/05/25/quick-guide-to-working-with-git-topic-branches/
(Everyone can use google, but it would help if someone who understands / knows topic branches provides a link to a good / practical introduction, there may be a much better page than the one I found, for example).
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Olivier Mengué (dolmen) commented on
Perl Module Tools (pmtool) - Now with Kwalitee!
@Neil: On Github, the proper way to put that information is in a CONTRIBUTING{,.md,.pod,...} file. Check this Github blog post.
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James commented on
Perl Module Tools (pmtools) v2.2.0 Released - Many RT Fixes
And the issue with the pfcat.t test on older perls
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