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Another quick fix postette today in the Moose-Pen

ok 46 - Second Gather element does not inherit view
not ok 47 - Third Gather element inherits view

Can't call method "predicates" on an undefined value at 57_dad_elements.t line 486.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 49.

The latest release of Test::podimage, version 0.05, shows a few interesting experimental ways to include images in CPAN modules.

It seems there is a way to show image files from the distribution on metacpan by using a leading slash, which I'd never heard of until now. There's also a new "=for image" tag. Oddly enough, although this was proposed five days ago, the CPAN grep search site tells us that this tag actually appears in some CPAN modules such as this one from 2010, although the above don't actually display on metacpan, perhaps because there is no leading slash in the image name.

A data URL can also be used.

Most of the image formats don't work on search.cpan.org.

Problems with concurrency, a post from the hard reality.

This worries me a bit I must admit; a few years ago, before the official release of P6, I tried my hand at concurrent programming in rakudo and it was so broken that i simply shelved P6 for over a year, it was simply not ready for a lambda dev like me. I would have loved to be in the trenches but I did not have the time to fight with core dumps.

As the speed of P6 is not stellar, I believe many of us, lambdas, will try to run things in parallel, it's also fun, to make them more attractive. The concurrency mechanism in P6 look good on paper, good enough so I can find myself dreaming of throwing in a few keywords in places I think concurrency would make a difference.

There is a nice silver lining to this one, It took a very short time before a lead developer answered me. I believe his answers may be interesting to read.

A description of the problems I encountered is here: gist

We recently did an interview with Daisuke Maki on the Perl community in Japan.

This is what came out of it - http://blog.builtinperl.com/post/perl-in-japan.

Have a look/read.

Its another quick test postette today in the Moose-Pne

So things are moving along now I just just going to finish off '57_dad_elements.t so it will be a short one today. Nothing much to Add I just have to add in dynamic link, gather, and sort.

Hey everyone,

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

Enjoy!

I’ve got this example “awk” script:

$ cat x.awk 
BEGIN { print "Month Crates"
    print "----- ------" }
    { print $1, " ", $2 }

we can convert AWK to Perl with “a2p”:

$ a2p x.awk > x.pl

now create a test input file:

$ cat > x.txt
a b
d e
1 2

and try it out in Perl5-Java:

$ java -jar perlito5.jar x.pl x.txt 
Month Crates
----- ------
a     b
d     e
1     2

yay!

So I'm gearing up to write a "Howto Raspberry Pi with Perl" multi-chapter tutorial, and as I finalize a few last things, I thought I'd put together how all of the software is laid out and is continuously tested.

The RPi::WiringPi distribution is essentially a class that provides access to external sub distributions, and provides several benefits such as maintaining a registry of in-use GPIO pins, and ensuring your Pi is cleaned up back to default on exit, or if an error or signal is caught. The sub modules do none of those things.

I use the automation and dispatching capabilities of my Test::BrewBuild software to handle the test management. This software runs your unit tests on any/all Perlbrew and/or Berrybrew installed instances, with the ability to dispatch your test requests over the network to remote machines. I'm not getting into those details, just know I use the bbtester binary to listen for test requests, and the bbdispatch binary to send them, both on the same Raspberry Pi hardware.

Its back to view day here in the Moose-Pen

Today I am going to carry on with getting full coverage for test case '57_dad_elements.t' and fixing the bug I found in yesterays post.

At TPC in Amsterdam I gave 2 lightning talks under the title perldoc -O. It was a questionary for the attendance which should give me some orientation which feature to prioritize or how to modify them best. I also spoke and mailed with all people I deemed relevant and want now to lay out the feature set I want to achieve with the rewrite.

SPVM project is improved day by day. SPVM is the project which provide static type data structure to Perl, and improve the performance of numeric and array operation.

I start to write SPVM specification. Most of all are Perl syntax.

Latest change is the following.

Finally the day arrived, I have been waiting for, since the reminder blog by Neil Bowers. It is like double celebration for me, as we celebrated 70th year of independence, yesterday i.e. 15th Aug.

I was working on couple of ideas to make it special CPAN day. One of them was to create map for Kolkatta Metro. Since it is special occasion for all Indians, I thought why not release something related to India. Kolkatta Metro is the first metro ever started in India.

So Map::Tube::Kolkatta finally made it to CPAN with love. This is not the only thing I have planned for today. I am going to submit at least one pull request as well. If it gets merged same day then it is going to be icing on the cake.

It the great test round up here in the Moose-Pen today

I've had many ideas for introduce Perl conference beginners into the community. Dom also had some ideas in How to make Perl conferences beginner friendly. Steal what you like, share what works!

Most notably, Domm had the idea of talk topics (or even outlines) that a beginner could claim (or be assigned). I certainly think this would help. I hate coming up with topics and love it when the organizers assign me one.

But, I've done other things too. I think the conference should be much more than talks and the spaces between talks. I'd like to see more small group activities.

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 ...

Script Spotlight

Briefly tell us about a script you've written and use regularly. Things you might talk about:

• What problem it solves - how it makes your life better
• An interesting feature of the code
• Ideas you have for making it better
• What made it super easy (e.g.: a CPAN module, a feature of Perl, etc.)
• Did you write your script in Perl - why/why not?

If you can't immediately think of a candidate script then here are some places to look to jog your memory:

• your $HOME/bin directory
• /usr/local/bin
• your cgi-bin directory
• scripts called from cron jobs
• scripts called from your editor
• scripts attached to a hot key
• Nagios checks

See you there - with your script :-)

Obscure bugs occur with the following type of code:

 unsigned int len;
 c = SvPV (sv, len);

The bugs occur typically on a 64 bit system. They happen because unsigned int may be a 32 bit integer, but the second argument to SvPV should be STRLEN, which is unsigned long int. Giving a pointer to a 32-bit integer where it expects a 64-bit integer causes some very odd bugs, and may even crash the interpreter. So, one has to always do like this:

 STRLEN len;
 c = SvPV (sv, len);

and never use anything which is not STRLEN type.

I have a collection of more weird and wonderful XS bugs, found through CPAN testers, here:

https://www.lemoda.net/perl/perl-xs-cpan-testers/index.html

Its condiment day here in the Moose-Pen

Now it is time to play catch-up with my Database::Accessor and make the same changes for 'links' that I did for 'conditions'.

I noticed that I have been working on Data::Dump::Tree for 18 months which makes me a Perl6 developer with almost 2 years of "experience", \o/. What I know is that I am going to need a few more years to get around all it has to offer. But after two years it is still fun to learn new things about Perl6.

I also noticed that 90% of my time went into DDT, the rest went into two puny modules not worth mentioning, except that 3 modules sound better than one. Development takes times, development with documentation and test, and trying to get quality and functionality takes ages, no wonder Perl6 took this long; Actually it is pretty impressive what was achieved 2 decades.

Inspired by domm, I'm posting my takeaway of the Perl Conference in Amsterdam (which I wanted to present in-house anyway):

I searched on CPAN but was unable to find a way to split a .pm into a .pod and a .pm, so I made this script:

https://www.lemoda.net/perl/split-pod-from-pm/index.html

It's proved quite handy so far. Recently I took over maintenance of an old module called Net::IPv6Addr as part of the CPAN day. Today I upgraded the documentation a little so that the synopsis example is machine readable:

https://metacpan.org/source/BKB/Net-IPv6Addr-0.7/examples/synopsis.pl

https://metacpan.org/pod/Net::IPv6Addr#SYNOPSIS

Since most people probably don't read the documentation beyond the synopsis, I think it's important to make sure that the code example in the synopsis actually works. There are quite a few modules on CPAN where the synopsis code doesn't work. In the case of Net::IPv6Addr, I even have a test that the synopsis example works:

https://github.com/benkasminbullock/net-ipv6addr/blob/master/t/synopsis.t
https://metacpan.org/source/BKB/Net-IPv6Addr-0.7/t/synopsis.t