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So part two of support day here in the Dist-Pen

In my last post I had a look at the [Support] section plug-in and now I am going to have a closer look to see if I can create my own custom version of it.

[Support]
++perldoc = 0
[Legal]

Well, all of the learning and testing I've done with C, XS, managing bits, reading and understanding hardware datatsheets etc in the last few months is really starting to pay off, with a lot of kudos going out to many Perlers for providing guidance and help with my questions, particularly with XS and C.

We now have reliable, working Perl code to output and receive input analog signals on the Raspberry Pi. This example uses an MCP41010 digital potentiometer for the analog out, and an ADC1015 analog to digital converter for analog in. I still have two different ADCs to write code for, two more models of digital pots, and later this week I should be receiving my DACs (digital to analog converter), my GPS receiver chip, and my MCP3004/8 ADCs.

If you're looking for ways to be more involved and have more influence, here's your chance!

The Perl Foundation's Grant Committee is looking for new members to the Committee Member position and the Committee Secretary position.

You can find more information on TPF blog.

When your hammer is Perl, every other language looks like a nail!

It is support day here at the Dist-Pen

Today I am going to look a the [Support] section plug-in. This is one of the more fancy plug-in that I have looked as so far as it tries to add in not one section but up to four all under the 'Support' section.
The four are 'Perl Doc', 'Websites', 'Bugs / Feature Requests' and 'Source Code'

Obviously this plug-in will be very useful on large projects that may need for all four of the sections or perhaps the lazy programer who wants to cover off a number of things with only one plug-in.

Dancer2 0.204003 is on its way to CPAN now, and provides the following changes:

• The CPANTS testing service reported that some dependencies for Dancer2 were not specified in the distribution. This has been corrected, and we apologize for any issues this may have caused.
• When a route exception occurred, Dancer2 would catch the error first, and would prevent any custom exception handling from trapping the exception. There were some ugly hacks for working around this, but this fix puts things right, and lets the exception hook fire first, and then will trap the error.
• Several changes were made to Dancer2’s Template Toolkit integration, the most significant of which being the removal of the ANYCASE option.
• Various documentation improvements.

A big thank you to those who contributed to this release and helped get it out the door.

The full changelog is as follows:

I've been writing a lot of software lately that deals with direct hardware access (specifically analog and digital hardware for the Raspberry Pi). This means that I've had to learn some C, as well as get proficient with bit manipulation and the bitwise operators.

As part of my learning, I thought I'd write a module to do this bit manipulation for me, hence Bit::Manip was born. (There's also a Bit::Manip::PP for those who can't/don't want to use XS. It should be indexed shortly).

Here's a scenario based example of how the software can be used.

You have a 16-bit configuration register for a piece of hardware that you want to configure and send in. Here's the bit configuration

A couple weeks ago we had our first meeting for the Perl Adventure Series. Despite a terrible ice storm we still had 3 new people turn out in addition to our regular cast of characters. I hope we see them (and more) back. 

During the meetup we set up our Dist::Zilla config file, and a new GitHub repository for the adventure series. And we got started designing the mission data structure. 

We had a great time discussing all the implications of this design. There was a heated argument about including code snippets inside the config file in order to keep the game engine generic. However, I’m going to argue to the group that we should be putting these code snippets out into individual modules (or perhaps roles) and then just name those plugins in the config file. I hate the idea of code in a config file. It makes my skin crawl. 

Post-ette day here in the Dist-Pen

Today I am going to have a quick look at the [Requires] section plug-in. As the name implies this plug-in will add in a 'Requires' section in your POD. It will snoop though your '.pm' and '.pl' files with 'Module::Extract::Use' and lists these out.

[Generic / SYNOPSIS]
++[Requires]
[Generic / DESCRIPTION]

Strawberry Perl 5.24.1.1 and 5.22.3.1 are available at http://strawberryperl.com

More details in Release Notes:
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.24.1.1-64bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.24.1.1-32bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.22.3.1-64bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.22.3.1-32bit.html

I would like to thank our sponsor Enlightened Perl Organisation for resources provided to our project.

So we all know the COMPSCI 101 method of swapping two variables:
  $tmp = $x; $x = $y; $y = $tmp;
And we all know the better way of doing it:
  ($x, $y) = ($y, $x);

And yet, I found the following in PRODUCTION CODE, that a contractor was PAID ACTUAL DOLLARS TO WRITE:
  ($tmp_x, $tmp_y) = ($x, $y);
  ($x, $y) = ($tmp_y, $tmp_x);
Weird that they knew about parallel assignment but not that you could just apply it to two variables directly.

Anyhow, this wasn’t nearly as bad as the code I found in a different module (same vendor) to swap all the 1s and 0s in a string. Now this is a somewhat less trivial problem than simply swapping two variables, but
  $str =~ tr/01/10/;
does the job nicely. Alas, in the same vein as the variable-swap, the method that vendor went with was:
  $str =~ s/0/2/g;
  $str =~ s/1/3/g;
  $str =~ s/2/1/g;
  $str =~ s/3/0/g;

Hey everyone,

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

Enjoy!

It is Legal day again here in the Dist-Pen.

So a quick look today at three section plug-ins all dealing with the LEGAL section of you pod. All three offer the same basic output as the [Legal] sections we saw in this post, buit each adds a little.

So to start lets have a look at [Legal::Complicated] the name is a little misleading as the plug-in is easy to use and by complicated it meas that the license holder is more complicated that a single author. This plug-in is best used when code is coming from an organization where ownership is shared between the organization and the writer of the code.

This plug-in works with comment tags your add to any of the PODs you want to have extra content on. There are three you can use '# AUTHOR:', '# OWNER:' and '#LICENSE:'. I don't really have a use for this plug-in in my project but here is an example of how to use it.

Hi!

Here is my latest post about Sparrowdo configuration management tool written in Perl6 - Sparrow plugins vs ansible modules - an attempt of informal comparison of sparrow and ansible eco systems.

Regards.

Alexey

I've been rather quiet lately because between building Tau Station and working with some clients, I'm running around faster than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

I'll be in Brussels for the February 4/5 2017, FOSDEM, talking about Building the Tau Station Universe in Perl. I was planning on giving a talk about testing, but I was specifically asked if I'd talk about Tau Station. While I love the project, I tried to think of a way it wouldn't sound like a 40 minute infomercial at an open source conference.

Jonathan Leffler has sent me a very slightly updated set of SQL BNF files for SQL-92, SQL-99 and SQL-2003. I've put them on-line.

Still stuck in weaver land here in the Dist-pen

Today I am going to look at [GenerateSection] section plug-in. This one look very interesing to me as it lets on generate a section from with-in the 'weaver.ini' file.

Now in my case I would love to have a common header and footer for my Tutorial pod without having to add the same section over and over again in each POD doc. I am hoping that this plug-in will get most if not all of what I need.

Right now I am just going to go for a simple all text version for now as I am not 100% sure how to get extra variable content into Dist::Zilla and Pod::Weaver.

I recently ran across an article (http://neilb.org/2016/08/08/quoted-words-arrayref.html) by neilb, advocating for a qa() operator that returns an arrayref instead of a plain array:
  our $cars_ref = qa(sedan hatchback coupe);
I love this idea, and I would use it a lot.

I’d like to add onto this proposal another qw()-style operator to quote the keys of a membership hash. I suggest qk() for “quote keys.” So
  our %is_color = qk(red blue green);
is the same as
  our %is_color = map { $_ => 1 } qw(red blue green);
or
  our @colors = qw(red blue green);
  our %is_color = map { $_ => 1 } @colors;

Unlike my previous entry (symbolic “xor”), I wrote this line of code ALL THE TIME. Taking a cue from neilb, I looked on CPAN to see how often other people do this. It turns out the answer is “a really, really lot”: http://grep.cpan.me/?q=map%5Cs*%7B%5Cs*%5C%28%3F%5Cs*%5C%24_%5Cs*%3D%3E%5Cs*1%5Cs*%5C%29%3F%5Cs*%5C%7D%5Cs*qw

Hi! Sparrowdo is a modern configuration management tool written on Perl6. If you wonder how sparrowdo makes a difference you may read this article - Sparrow plugins evolution - an informal introduction to core part of sparrowdo - sparrow plugins.

A Perl BoF (Birds of a feather) meeting has been officially organized for this years linux.conf.au Conference in Tasmania Australia.

Further details can be found at: https://linux.conf.au/wiki/conference/birds_of_a_feather_sessions/perl_bof/

Or drop in to #australia on irc.perl.org