Sunday Moose Test

Test postette day again here in the Moose Pen.

Time to re-run my tests suites again to check the 'Sate of the Onion' before I move on. I expect this will be a very short post.

For Database::Accessor as expected I did not have many changes since last week

 2 files changed, 70 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)
and the test run was;

All tests successful.
Files=29, Tests=490, 81 wallclock secs ( 0.23 usr  0.06 sys + 77.55 cusr  1.71 csys = 79.55 CPU)
Result: PASS
Now Driver::DBI which had a modest number of changes;

 6 files changed, 358 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-)
and the test results for it are;

Yancy - Mojolicious CMS - Version 1 released

I'm happy to announce the release of version 1 of Yancy, a simple content management system for Mojolicious websites. Yancy is designed to be added to your website to make it easier to develop a web application and manage the content inside.

screenshot.png

Yancy features a responsive web application that uses your database schema to build forms to edit your site's content. Yancy currently understands databases like Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite, and the DBIx::Class ORM.

Perl Module Tools (pmtools) v2.1.2 Released - Version Fixed

Perl Module Tools v2.1.2 has now been released to fix the version number everywhere.

Pi Day!

Yesterday, when I published and wrote a blog about my new RPi::StepperMotor distribution, I didn't even think that the very next day was Pi Day.

So, although nothing significant could be done in the meantime, I updated that dist with a cleanup() method which resets the GPIO pins at the end of your script, and published version 2.3623 of RPi::WiringPi, which is the top-level framework that allows you to safely pull in all of the other RPi:: distribution objects.

Changes include:

  • bumping GPSD::Parse prereq due to having added some convenience methods to it

  • Documentation fixes and updates (all broken links now work!)

  • incorporation of said RPi::StepperMotor distribution

Nothing major, but since most of my personal programming time the last two years has gone into Raspberry Pi work for Perl, thought I'd do at least something :)

byterock, this one's for you...

byterock_moose.jpg

Final Moose Case

ts final Case postette day here in the Moose-pen

For the final clean up of Case I am going to add in a few tests in Database::Accessor that should have been there in the first place.

First I will add this;

Try::Tiny::Tiny

Last year I released this new module.

I want to talk about its purpose briefly, because in the time since, people have published benchmarks of how it performs compared to other modules that offer alternatives to eval. The latest example of such a benchmark is part of the Exceptions chapter in Minimum Viable Perl (via), but they go as far back as Diab Jerius’ shootout right after I released the module.

It is, of course, interesting to see the figures to see where Try::Tiny::Tiny falls.

However, simply treating it like another contender in such a contest misunderstands its purpose. Try::Tiny::Tiny is not meant to compete with any of the other modules. It is not meant to be your choice for exception block syntax.

I do not recommend that you use Try::Tiny::Tiny in your own code.

Building a Software Consulting Firm

Hey, I'm not dead! I just haven't posted in a while because I've been so busy on Tau Station (which, if all goes well, will be open for everyone real soon™).

In the meantime, I've written a bit about building a software consulting firm. You might find it interesting.

If you need to outsource software development with a firm you can trust, contact us.

The Perl Conference Newsletter: 3/11/18

The latest TPC Newsletter is out!

Last round of talks submissions. CFP closes 3/18/18!

Round 1 and Round 2 Speakers/Sessions announced.

Still on a Moose Case

It case out day here in the Moose-Pen

After looking at some more examples of 'CASE' in SQL I cam across one I have not encountered yet;

SELECT CASE 
              WHEN Products.Price < 10 THEN 'under 10$'
              WHEN (Products.Price >= 10 
                 AND Products.Price <= 30) 
                    OR (Products.Price >= 40 
                 AND Products.Price <=50) THEN '10~30$ or 40~50$'
                ELSE 'Over 50$'
                 END 
    FROM Products

A decade of classes in Lausanne

I'll be back in Lausanne again this May...my tenth visit to UNIL and my second to EPFL. Both of these prestigious institutions were founded well before my own country became an independent nation (and UNIL actually dates back to 50 years before the first European even set foot on the Australian continent).

To celebrate a decade of visiting lectures at the University, we're going to offer a rare public performance of my classic Fun With Dead Languages presentation. It's many years since I had the chance to give the full two-hour version of this talk and I've been busily updating it for the occasion. The talk is completely free, but we do want people to register in advance if possible so we can schedule a suitable venue for it.

In addition to that event, of course, we'll still be running a full range of classes on technical and presentation topics:

Stupid Lucene Tricks: Full-Text Search Without the Full Text

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 now search against "fulltext" for all of the text in your Lucene document without having to know whether, for example, "physical" is in the document body, the abstract, or only in the keywords.

Note that fulltext should be created dynamically from the fields for the particular document, rather than from a fixed set of named fields so you maximize the amount of text you can search against.

And yes, you are duplicating the text of the all of the other fields in this field :(.

Help improving the Perl Maven Tutorial!

As you might know I wrote the Perl Maven Tutorial along with most of the 800 other posts on the Perl Maven site during the past 6 years or so.

It became the most frequently read Perl Tutorial and the site is the 4th most visited Perl-related site after cpan.org, perl.org, and perlmonks.org.

I've received many comments on the individual articles that make up the Perl Tutorial. Some required and immediate fix or answer, but many included suggestions that need a lot more work to implement.

There are also a number of missing articles. Some can be seen as comments in the source of the Perl Tutorial page.

It is time to update the tutorial incorporating the comments made on the individual pages,
filling in holes where some topics have not been covered, and making the whole tutorial more like pages of a book.

I need your help in two ways:

  1. Helping with the content (the source can be found on GitHub)
  2. Helping with the funding via Indiegogo, PayPal, or Patreon

Stuck on the Moose Case

Another Case Day here in the Moose-pen

So I decided to do some more case work today specificity their rather odd little SQL to start;

SELECT CASE WHEN Price < 100 THEN 'under 100$' 
                           WHEN Price in (105, 110,120) THEN Price 105,110 or 120$'
                           ELSE 'Over 120$' END 
               FROM Products
and the above comes out as this test;

Perl 5 Porters Mailing List Summary: February 19th - March 4th

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past two weeks.

Enjoy!

YAML::PP Grant Report February 2018

Hi there,

I had another busy month and did only hack a bit. I'm even so busy that I forget to use my time tracker, so I estimate about 20 hours.

See also my previous reports on blogs.perl.org (Aug/Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan )

Stupid Testing Trick: Inconstant Constants

I have a piece of Perl containing manifest constants that have the same value, but which signify different things. In my testing, I wanted to make sure I was getting the right one out of my code. That seems to mean changing code to test it, which is anathema to me.

It occurred to me today that if I held my tongue right I could change the values of the constants without touching the code they were defined in or exported from. Holy aspect-oriented programming, Batman!

The trick is based on the fact that what use constant really does is to define a constant subroutine with an empty prototype. Now, Perl will allow me to redefine a subroutine -- grumpily if use warnings qw{redefine} is in effect, and happily if not. So I thought all I had to do was load the module that exported the constant, hammer its symbol table, and voila!

Sorted Moose Case

Its Sort the Case day here in the Moose-Pen

It appears that one of the more common uses for the CASE statement in SQL is in a 'GROUP BY' or at least a good 80% of the tutorials for SQL I have looked at have it as an example so let see how well the present Driver::DBI handles it.

To start I just add this test to the '60_order_by.t' test case;

Perl Module Tools v2.1.0 Released - Windows Fixes

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 note, in Windows you may need to "use FindBin qw($Bin);" so your programs can actually find the Perl to run. (I had wondered if this use of FindBin was just cargo-cult programming carried over from old versions of Perl - now I know better.)

Controlling a stepper motor with the Raspberry Pi

I live in an extremely remote part of Northern British Columbia, Canada. It is a minimum of an hour to get to the nearest town. We are exceptionally sparsely populated with a vast amount of land right on the second-largest lake in the province.

To that end, we have a wild abundance of wildlife everywhere. Bears, moose, wolves, coyotes, deer etc etc. I set out to set up a series (eight) wildlife cameras using Raspberry Pis (four on my house, the other four each on a separate cabin), all streaming to a central server that I can display on a television set, with all eight camera streams within a single window.

After I accomplished the bulk of that work, I wanted a way to pan and tilt my cameras individually. The tilt part I use a standard servo with the the servo() functionality of the RPi::WiringPi distribution.

Safely load untrusted YAML in Perl

Usually people deal with YAML files from trusted sources. But maybe you want to load input from a Website as YAML. This can lead to problems, and this article will talk about what you can do to make the loading safe.

The problems I'll talk about are loading objects, cyclic references and general parsing problems.

I will cover YAML.pm, YAML::Tiny, YAML::XS, YAML::Syck and YAML::PP.

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