David Cantrell

• Website: www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/
• About: I'm in yur test resultz analyzn yr failz

Recent Actions

• Commented on A Perl Community Dashboard
  Can you measure use of tags like 'perl' on common blogging and other techie platforms such as dev.to and Stackoverflow?...
• Commented on Learning from other industries, part 1 of n
  I'm now blogging elsewhere. Part 2 is here: https://dev.to/drhyde/learning-from-other-industries-part-2-of-n-4dj3...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  For persistent connections I find it better to use the %C token in ControlPath. It produces a shorter string, so will help get around some path length restrictions. Also, that really ought not to be a path in a world-readable...
• Commented on Paging TOBYINK
  lexical::underscore is broken on 5.24, which in turn breaks Scalar::Does and Data::Domain, and probably some other stuff that I've not noticed....
• Commented on Pure-Perl XML
  I should point out that I wrote XML::Tiny with the explicit aim of annoying and trolling the hell out of people who take the religion of XML far too damned seriously. It worked....
• Posted CPAN reverse dependencies as a tree to David Cantrell

  CPANdeps has always shown what your code depends on as a tree. But the reverse dependencies - that is the report of what code depends on yours - has always just…

• Commented on Are you the one person left on the planet using a Palm Treo?
  I used to think like that. Then I grew up and realised that it was the applications that matter. It's the same reason that I use a Mac instead of sticking with CP/M....
• Posted Are you the one person left on the planet using a Palm Treo? to David Cantrell

  If you are, then I have two very important things to say to you.

  First, why the hell haven't you upgraded to something - anything! - else?

  Second, I just released updated versions of Palm::SMS, Palm::Treo680MessagesDB, and Palm::TreoPhoneCallDB. Now they should build with a vaguely…

• Commented on Instant podcasts, in 50 lines of perl
  Or perhaps not. Silly website are the link. Here: https://github.com/ben-xo/dir2cast/blob/master/dir2cast.php...
• Commented on Instant podcasts, in 50 lines of perl
  Sure. It does do a bit more than mine, but mine does what I need and I'm not sure that the extras are worth 1250 lines of code!...
• Posted Instant podcasts, in 50 lines of perl to David Cantrell

  I have a directory full of stuff that I've recorded off the radio. I'd like to listen to it on my phone on the way to work. And the most convenient way to do that is to create a podcast of that directory. That way, whenever I record more stuff, I just have to update the podcast and the files…

• Posted CPANdeps and cpXXXan scheduled downtime to David Cantrell

  CPANdeps and cpXXXan will be unavailable for some of the evening of the 28th of May, for a data centre move.

• Posted Meta-testing to David Cantrell

  A year and a bit ago I wrote about measuring the coverage not of the code I was testing but of my tests, and how doing so had helped me find some problems. Today I dived further down that…

• Posted CPANdeps pass/fail display now working again to David Cantrell

  Some months ago the way that third parties got access to the CPAN-testers results database changed. Instead of just downloading a SQLite database, there is now an API. This is good. It means that to get all the new reports since your last query, for example, you only need to transfer a few…

• Posted Bugs in the compiler to David Cantrell

  After I posted my previous blog entry a couple of things were pointed out to me, to do with my fourth point about ignoring warnings.

  It turns out that unreachable code doesn't necessarily produce wa…

• Posted Lessons to learn from Apple to David Cantrell
  Apple's most recent iOS software update which fixes a horrible security flaw has been all over the interwebs recently. This is yet another post about it. Here's the buggy code:

  static OSStatus
  
  SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange(SSLContext *c…

• Commented on Software Test Podcast
  Most programmers in almost all languages are artisans (the exceptions being those who use Ada and those who work in safety-critical areas where people can die expensively, like avionics and railway signalling), but I agree, perl programmers are even more...
• Posted Another great podcast to David Cantrell

  I've recommended Disastercast here before, and I know that some of you have since subscribed. However, for those that haven't, episode 13 is worth listening to. It is about…

• Commented on The Problem With Perl Testing
  Bravo, sir! Bravo. We both appear to be thinking about the same thing - quality control vs quality assurance. The perl community does quality control pretty well, but most of us have barely heard of quality assurance, and fewer of...
• Posted Software Test Podcast to David Cantrell

  I've recently been listening to Software Test Podcast. And I was particularly struck by episode 41, in which the presenters interview James Whittaker. He used to be Head…

• Commented on Who's relying on that CPAN release?
  Making CPANdeps do recursive reverse deps is on my to-do list....
• Commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers
  Let me address one of your points in detail, before I get to the over-arching point: Or maybe in the summary for this package the line listing 5.19.0 should note that this release was more unstable than the others? This...
• Commented on <sigh> META.yml is not my friend today
  The gory details: ExtUtils::Makemaker uses the v1.4 META spec, whereas CPAN::Meta::Spec documented the v2 META spec. They are very different. I see that on Github EU::MM has been patched to support both....
• Commented on <sigh> META.yml is not my friend today
  And here's the fix, thanks to the lovely Mr. Deflatermouse: https://github.com/DrHyde/perl-modules-CPAN-ParseDistribution/commit/818bfda6febd7e5b645c6d44af59a1454a9d3e1b Executive summary: ignore CPAN::Meta::Spec....
• Posted <sigh> META.yml is not my friend today to David Cantrell

  I want my github repo to show up in a module's META.yml file. And given that META.yml is generated by ExtUtils::MakeMaker, I put some META_MERGE stuff in my Makefile.PL, having carefully checked the documentation in CPAN::Meta::Spec to see what we're supposed to do this week (META.yml's structure…

• Posted Small but hideously formed to David Cantrell

  For several years I've been using a shell script that runs once a day from a cron job, and automagically subscribes me to the RSS feeds that rt.cpan creates for my modules. That means that whenever I release a new module, within a day or two I'll be subscribed to its bug reports, and within…

• Posted Learning from other industries, part 1 of n to David Cantrell

  My first job was as a bus conductor, and my second one was as a student trainee in an engineering company - proper engineering, with production lines, big machines, hot things, and "danger of death" notices on equipment. In both of these, safety was an important concern, and especially in the…

• Commented on Three-value logic in Perl
  anyone who puts interns and volunteers into the list of empoyees should be fired too! if they're employees they get minimum wage and can't be got rid of on a whim....
• Commented on Devel::Cover and meta-testing
  Forgot to add the footnote ... * the debugger fails horribly when you use anonymous subroutines which have :Attributes. This is a bug in perl itself, not in Devel::Cover....
• Posted Devel::Cover and meta-testing to David Cantrell

  At work I recently set up a Jenkins instance to run all our tests whenever someone pushes changes to the master branch of our git repo. And, after changing some stuff in our code that made the perl debugger cry*, I added

Comment Threads

• Smylers commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers

  Both good ideas. %C didn't exist when I wrote the above.

  On a laptop only used by me, I was using /tmp/ (it avoids need to know your username to put in the config), but for shared computers it isn't a good idea.

• domm commented on A Perl Community Dashboard

  So you're planning to count user visits to the listed websites, not what happens on those sites (e.g. modules released, posts published, etc)?

• Dean commented on A Perl Community Dashboard

  Yes, if that data can be aggregated somehow then those sorts of channels would be perfect for phase 2

• Dean commented on A Perl Community Dashboard

  Initially it would just be the javascript snippet which gives details on what users are visiting.

  Then once it's going, we could hook in to things more to get better data. I mentioned the example of cpan downloads.

• spb commented on A Perl Community Dashboard

  Can you measure use of tags like 'perl' on common blogging and other techie platforms such as dev.to and Stackoverflow?