Ben Bullock

• Website: www.lemoda.net/
• About: Perl user since about 2006, I have also released some CPAN modules.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board
  Thanks for fixing it (submitted via the preview page)....
• Commented on Switch lots of things on at once
  Thanks for commenting, I will be taking a close look at your module when I next need to update/add something. Today I added signatures to this Z thing, I've decided to start using them, since it seems there is some...
• Posted Switch lots of things on at once to The Incredible Journey

  Many people already have codes like

  use strict;
  use warnings;
  

  and so on at the top of each script they write. For scripts which I don't intend to publish anywhere, I have a module (which I accidentally called Z not knowing there was already a module of the same name on CPAN),…

• Commented on "My half-life with Perl" from OSCON 2013 live encore performance
  I get "This video is private". https://photos.app.goo.gl/WdSaceG8Kb4Fc5Cu5...
• Posted Relatively easy ways to catch memory errors to The Incredible Journey

  If you're using XS and C in your Perl module, you might have to worry about memory errors. There are tools like valgrind or memory sanitizer which you can use of course:

  valgrind perl -I blib/lib -I blib/arch ./mytestscript
  

  or if your problems …

• Commented on A blog post about blog posts
  I think I've read most of what is posted here, but I haven't seen the blog posts you mention full of quotes from unspecified political figures which are offputting for some reason or another. For example a search of this...
• Commented on I failed to pause before blogging
  There are some very long modules on CPAN, like this one I saw yesterday: https://metacpan.org/release/Lingua-EN-Opinion/source/lib/Lingua/EN/Opinion It has a dictionary of English words, and each word has its own hash reference, with ten different keys. It might be better not to...
• Commented on I failed to pause before blogging
  https://gist.github.com/benkasminbullock/a55283a3b74aac94b8eedbf45e892260...
• Commented on I failed to pause before blogging
  Which of those wouldn't be followed by a semicolon? I think package NAMESPACE and package NAMESPACE VERSION are both always followed by one. BLOCK just means {something} doesn't it, so the matching is package\s+.*?\s*(;|\{)....
• Commented on I failed to pause before blogging
  I think it will help for the next version. It seems to me that PAUSE could check for a semicolon, but there are probably exceptions for that. This line: https://metacpan.org/release/Go-Tokenize/source/lib/Go/Tokenize.pm#L43 also produced an unusual error message, refer to the comment...
• Posted I failed to pause before blogging to The Incredible Journey

  I got this email from PAUSE just now:

  Failed: PAUSE indexer report BKB/Go-Tokenize-0.01.tar.gz
  
       module : switch
  

  It looks like it doesn't like this line of code containing Go keywords:

• Posted Gzip::Zopfli - another compression module to The Incredible Journey

  Following on from the Gzip::Libdeflate I mentioned before, I also made this: Gzip::Zopfli

  It is based on the Zopfli gzip compression library from Google Research.

  Both Zopfli and libdeflate seem to excel at compressing JSON fil…

• Commented on Inline::F2003
  It's OK to upload unfinished modules to CPAN. File::Find is not only on CPAN but in the Perl core and yet it is insufficiently mature to have sensible functionality or documentation. Just think "My module cannot possibly be worse than...
• Posted New compression module Gzip::Libdeflate to The Incredible Journey

  I've turned the libdeflate compression library into a CPAN module:

  Gzip::Libdeflate

  This is the gzip compression method, but updated.

  It's supposed to be much faster and better than libz (the original gzip library).…

• Commented on Inline::F2003
  I downloaded it and tried it out. On Perl 5.32.1 there is the problem that you now need to use use lib "."; when the library is in the same directory. This was changed a while ago due to some...
• Commented on Perl 7: A Modest Proposal
  I went to sign up for the dev.to and it asked me to agree to a bunch of insane gibberish conditions....
• Posted I found the truth about GameStop, Qanon, the Biden adminstration, and the British Royal Family to The Incredible Journey

  …

• Commented on Regarding the closure of rt.cpan
  It seems that it's not possible to log in there any more already, so they've already half-shut-down the whole thing....
• Commented on Regarding the closure of rt.cpan
  Has there actually been any effort to email people about this being closed? I think a lot of people don't even know about it. You can find lots of recent distributions on CPAN where the author says to report bugs...
• Commented on Regarding the closure of rt.cpan
  You can approve/disapprove comments on blogs.perl.org. I get lots of spam comments, or "asdfg" comments, you can easily remove them....
• Commented on Mood Lighting
  Video of bulbs would be nice....
• Commented on You think you're an X, but you're only a Y
  Generally I use the "boolean" module from CPAN if I want to force things: https://metacpan.org/release/boolean It's pretty effective. Probably some Perl person will tell you there is some dreadful thing or another wrong with this module, since that always seems...
• Commented on You think you're an X, but you're only a Y
  Most people seem to end up using "looks_like_number" in Scalar::Util for these kinds of jobs. https://perldoc.perl.org/Scalar::Util#looks_like_number Apparently it's based on an internal function that Perl uses to distinguish the two: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlapi#looks_like_number I suppose I could use that in the JSON...
• Posted You think you're an X, but you're only a Y to The Incredible Journey

  The other day I was converting the output of a ="https://meta…

• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 94: Group Anagrams and Binary Tree to Linked List
  > "Actually, I even suspect that Perl and Raku arrays are in fact implemented as some form of linked list behind the scene." Perl arrays/lists use C arrays, not linked lists. Here is the source code of av.h (perl 5.32):...
• Posted ABC Mart to The Incredible Journey

  

  One thing which I like about Mojolicious is that they put all the functions and methods …

• Commented on From a Reflection on The Weekly Challenge 092 Task 1
  Some people on reddit also answered your query: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/koahhf/from_a_reflection_on_the_weekly_challenge_092/ The replies might sound a bit sarcastic but that is because it's actually quite a well-known problem....
• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 93: Max Points and Sum Path
  Checking for collinearity of three points in the completely general case is a matter of calculating the determinant of 1 x_1 y_1 1 x_2 y_2 1 x_3 y_3 like this https://github.com/benkasminbullock/perlweeklychallenge-club/blob/master/challenge-093/bkb/perl/ch1.pl#L37-L48 Some other people such as Dave Jacoby had examples...
• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 93: Max Points and Sum Path
  Does your method find (0,0), (1,2), (2,4) collinear?...
• Commented on From a Reflection on The Weekly Challenge 092 Task 1
  https://gist.github.com/benkasminbullock/79836f8a979f5f2e84d2aa1a8f7b3fea [ben@mikan] {17:30 05} ~ 514 $ perl ch-1.pl '茫茫人海' '夜夜笙歌' 茫茫人海 夜夜笙歌 1 The secret is to bang the rocks together: use Unicode::UTF8 'decode_utf8'; binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(utf8)"; my $l = decode_utf8 ($ARGV[0]); my $r = decode_utf8 ($ARGV[1]); print...

Comment Threads

• Tom Wyant commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board

  Thank you all for supplying a credible and desperately-needed voice of reason.

• markov commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board

  I was co-organizer of YAPC Europe 2020. As such, I had very long discussions with mainly SawyerX because he (as contact person for main sponsor Booking.com) forced the American Code of Conduct on our conference. He did not (want to) care that those rules are unconstitutional in Europe. It made me leave the Perl society.

  Societies have written regulations, which you MUST follow: it is what participants expect and what defends your actions in case of court cases. There never, ever is self-elected elite which will be able to solve conflicts.

  Expressions and behaviour of part…

• BooK commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board

  Both events you used as examples seem to have a code of conduct:
  

  • FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2021/practical/conduct/
    
  • CCC: https://help.ccc.de/principles.en.html

• markov commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board

  Certainly BooK. There is nothing wrong with explicitly state that you want everyone to be pleasant. As organizers of a big event, you are also required (by law) to solve problems which emerge: being explicit on such procedure is also a good thing. That's where FOSDEM and CCC end.

  But forbidding people to say unpleasant things beforehand is not allowed in the EU. Kicking people out solely because a few non-elected others do not like your expression is not acceptable. But it has been done a few times now. Giving your own interpretation on very sensitive terms as harassment is rea…

• Dean commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board

  TPF's domain of control is limited to its official services & assets. This needs to be clarified.

  TPF should offer a boilerplate set of community guidelines which perl affiliated projects may elect to adopt.

  Beyond that, perhaps a mediation service should be offered to assist in resolving complaints. Projects may then wish to opt-in to the outcome of these resolutions.

  This is not the first time this has happened, it is however the first time the perl community didnt pile on to someone. That's something *everyone* should think about.

  ="http://blogs.perl…