Grant McLean

• About: Perl hacker since 1995. Coordinator of Wellington.pm in New Zealand.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Update to XPath Sandbox
  You're welcome - it's always nice to hear from a happy customer....
• Posted Update to XPath Sandbox to Grant McLean

  As part of my project to create a tutorial for XML::LibXML, I created an XPath Sandbox tool that allows you to try out different XPath expressions directly in your browser. I've recently enhanced that tool to add a couple of useful…

• Posted Update to XML::LibXML Tutorial to Grant McLean

  I've just updated my tutorial document Perl XML::LibXML by Example to include a section on Working With Large Documents.

  This new section introduces th…

• Posted User group topic: Script Spotlight to Grant McLean

  Wellington Perl Mongers had their monthly meeting this week and we tried something new that worked reasonably well so I thought I'd share it here. A little bit like lightning talks but with a more specific focus. From the announcement email ...

  ="https://blogs.perl.org/users/grant_mc…

• Commented on Happy 15th Birthday, Devel::Cover!
  Thanks Paul! Devel::Cover is definitely one of the tools I miss the most when I have to work with other languages. I can only marvel at the level of commitment you've shown in supporting and improving the module over the...
• Commented on A Tutorial for using LibXML from Perl
  Thanks for the feedback Brian, glad you like it....
• Posted A Tutorial for using LibXML from Perl to Grant McLean

  In my ongoing crusade to direct people away from XML::Simple and towards XML::LibXML, I've recently published a documentation project called "Perl XML::LibXML by Example". The primary target of this documentation is the desperate Perl…

• Posted Is Perl still a useful, viable language? to Grant McLean

  Three years ago someone asked the question "Is Perl still a useful, viable language?" on programmers.stackexchange.com. I'm not sure what would happen to a "useful, viable language" over…

• Commented on The ghost of CPAN Days past
  That block of Acme uploads featured at 1:43 in the Map of CPAN movie :-)...
• Commented on Which code to read?
  Thanks for those suggestions Nate....
• Posted Which code to read? to Grant McLean

  Peter Seibel has written a great blog post on code reading - learning more about programming by reading good examples. The final model he describes has someone diving into a piece of code like a 19th century explorer and then reporting back…

• Posted Another time-tracking post to Grant McLean

  Following Steven Haryanto's post on how he tracks his time, I thought some people might be interested in the time tracking solution…

• Posted Map of CPAN - The Movie to Grant McLean

  If you've visited the Map of CPAN more than once, you'll notice that it…

• Posted Idle alerts with bcvi to Grant McLean

  In case you haven't met it before, bcvi is a crazy backwards tool (written in Perl of course) that lets you type commands on a server to make things happen on your workstation. I've just released an update to the notifications plugin so…

Comment Threads

• Ether commented on The ghost of CPAN Days past

  I have a Task-Kensho-* release planned soon. Challenge accepted. :)

• Neil Bowers commented on The ghost of CPAN Days past

  Ether: if we can get INGY to do one of his bursts of releases, we should have the raw numbers covered, and then it comes down to the number of authors.

  Hmm, I didn't give the top stats for that. I'll have to fix that later!

• Steven Haryanto commented on The ghost of CPAN Days past

  What will really be interesting is to compare 2014 CPAN Day (which we'll about to pass) and the subsequent years. 2013 and the preceding CPAN days were not celebrated.
  

• Michael J commented on A Tutorial for using LibXML from Perl

  Another suggestion is use an XML::LibXML document object with
  

  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 I expect many users of that are looking for, rather than xpath queries for every node. It also has the advantage that it fixes most of the parsing problems inherent in the XML::Simple (especially with the default options), so potentially increasing the robustness of code by enforc…

• Shlomi Fish commented on Happy 15th Birthday, Devel::Cover!

  Happy birthday, and thanks for all the effort! Devel::Cover is great!