This week in PSC (160) | 2024-09-12

Just Aristotle and Graham.

The notes from this meeting were lost, but have been reconstructed from memory.

  • We had a discussion about what future versioning (Perl 7) should look like.
  • Discussed if we will need to make changes to apostrophe as package separator, and smartmatch removal, given the fallout they have had.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Perl Weekly Challenge 288: Closest Palindrome

These are some answers to the Week 288, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 29, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Closest Palindrome

You are given a string, $str, which is an integer.

Write a script to find out the closest palindrome, not including itself. If there are more than one then return the smallest.

The closest is defined as the absolute difference minimized between two integers.

Example 1

Input: $str = "123"
Output: "121"

Example 2

Perl wiki updated, 4 other wikis uploaded - Take 2

Hi All

Note: The first 3 links point to my personal page

The Perl wiki has been renamed from Perl.html - which was too generic - to Perl.Wiki.html:

The Mojolicious wiki is at:

The Debian wiki is at:

Note: The next 2 links point to my new website which accompanies my upcoming Youtube channel

The Symbolic Language wiki is at:

The Personal Security wiki is at:
https://symboliciq.au/misc/Personal.Security.Wiki.html

LPW 2024 Will Have A Third Track

Hi All! Given the number of talks submitted to this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop we have decided to reserve a third room in the venue. This will give us a bit more room on the schedule for talks, which is good as the other two rooms are now 90% full.

However, we would also like to use this third room for something else. Its capacity is relatively low, 15 people including the person presenting, so we feel it might be suitable for use as a breakout room / mini hackathon(s) / birds of a feather; and we will probably reserve two large slots for this. If you have an idea of something you'd like to use the room for then please get in touch with us.

Another way we can make more space for talks is to opt for lunch at the venue, this will free up space for three more talks. To do that we need a couple more sponsors so if you would like to help with that then please have a look at the options here: https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/sponsoring.html

The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:

This week in PSC (157) | 2024-08-23

Just Aristotle and Philippe this time (Graham chipped in on IRC):

  • we discussed the apostrophe situation: we will watch 5.41.3 break CPAN, and then evaluate the actual fallout. We like the idea of guarding this with a feature (which might need to be split in two, for the string interpolation case)
  • we had a long discussion about backwards compatibility and use VERSION. Should "did you use VERSION?" become the new "did you use strict and warnings?"

[P5P posting of this summary]

Perl Weekly Challenge 287: Valid Number

These are some answers to the Week 287, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 22, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Valid Number

You are given a string, $str.

Write a script to find if it is a valid number.

Conditions for a valid number:

- An integer number followed by an optional exponent.
- A decimal number followed by an optional exponent.
- An integer number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by digits.

Decimal Number:

A decimal number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by one of the following definitions: - Digits followed by a dot '.'. - Digits followed by a dot '.' followed by digits. - A dot '.' followed by digits.

Exponent:

XE.com From The Command Line

xe.com is a well known site for calculating the exchange value between the currencies of the world. However, there are times I’d prefer to query it from the command line. They have an API, but it’s not free, so I ended up writing a quick and dirty script that scrapes the web page and uses regexps to extract the data.

I know you’re not supposed to parse HTML with regexps, but sometimes, you can get away with it for a while. Also, this script is not that serious, so it can fail without hurting anything.

Why does this not work

Why does this not give flinstone and rubble?

$fn{"fred"} = "flintstone";
$fn{"barney"} = "rubble";
foreach $per (qw< barney fred >) {
print " he's $per $fn($per).\n";
}

This week in PSC (155) | 2024-08-08

Just Graham and Aristotle this time.

  • Discussed tracking perl authorized releasers updates and storing historical data
  • Dual-Life modules need some cleanup to get a more normal release process that can be done more regularly. Cleanup has been done on Storable.
  • Time::HiRes by default doesn’t seem terrible, if possible
  • X509 in core could make sense as part of a more complete interface to OpenSSL
  • Discussion about how it would be possible to have support for Markdown or other new Pod extensions in a more backwards compatible way. Possibly a way to define alternate formats for =begin/=end sections.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Perl Weekly Challenge 287: Strong Password

These are some answers to the Week 287, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 22, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Strong Password

You are given a string, $str.

Write a program to return the minimum number of steps required to make the given string very strong password. If it is already strong then return 0.

Criteria:

- It must have at least 6 characters.
- It must contain at least one lowercase letter, at least one upper case letter and at least one digit.
- It shouldn't contain 3 repeating characters in a row.

Following can be considered as one step:

First Batch of LPW 2024 Talks Accepted

Yep, that's right - the first dozen talks have been accepted for this year's London Perl and Raku Workshop. This puts our schedule at approximately 50% full, so if you are thinking about talking at the workshop then submit your proposal now!

If you aren't thinking about talking then have a think about what you've been doing in the Perl and/or Raku space the last five years, or even just the general IT and development space. Perhaps there's something interesting you can talk about? If you don't feel it's a full fat talk then submit a lightning talk instead.

The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:

If you would like to sponsor LPW then please have a look at the options here: https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/sponsoring.html

How I use PostgreSQL's timestamptz fields in my Mojo apps

I created a function in Perl called pg_dt, that will convert PostgreSQL’s datetime values into Perl’s DateTime values and vice versa. This is useful both when you want to store DateTime values into the database, or want to convert the pg datetime/timestamp value from the database into a DateTime object value that Perl can use.

I really can’t seem to include code blocks in my posts on this platform (tried Preview with Markdown and Markdown With SmartyPants without success), so you can read the rest of this article on my blog.

Updated, curated, Perl module TiddlyWiki

Download the Perl TiddlyWiki

Read about TiddlyWIkis

Cheers

Perl Weekly Challenge 286: Order Game

These are some answers to the Week 286, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 15, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Order Game

You are given an array of integers, @ints, whose length is a power of 2.

Write a script to play the order game (min and max) and return the last element.

Example 1

Dancer2 1.1.1 Released

The Dancer Core Team is happy to announce that Dancer2 1.1.1 is on its way to CPAN. This is a maintenance release that deals with the following issues:

[ BUG FIXES ]
* GH #1712: Fix use of send_as in templates (Andy Beverley)

[ DOCUMENTATION ]
* PR #1706: Document missing logging hooks and log format option;
  fix typo in logging test (Jason A. Crome)

Happy Dancing! Jason / CromeDome

TWC 277: Strength Uncombined

In which thousands become millions, as we achieve a near-linear solution.

How to use perl v5.40's boolean builtins in Mojo::Pg queries

Perl v5.40 introduced native true and false keywords. Unfortunately not all CPAN modules are ready to use them. One of those not yet ready is Mojo::Pg.

Normally you'd want to pass booleans to your queries as just 1's and 0's. However, since Mojo::JSON's true & false stringify to 1 and 0, my 5.38-using codebase is full of Mojo::Pg queries with Mojo::JSON's true and false as arguments.

This is a problem if I want to upgrade the perl interpreter of that project to Perl v5.40, because if I write "use v5.40;" in the file that contains those boolean keywords, Perl's builtin booleans will be used instead, which don't stringify to 1 and 0, but to 1 and the empty string, which can't be used by DBD::Pg in boolean fields and makes DBD::Pg throw an exception.

The solution I found was to subclass Mojo::Pg::Database, and wrap the query method, so that if Perl's builtin booleans are found, they are replaced in the query with native Pg booleans.

The source of the module and a lot more information can be found in my blogpost, here.

Perl Weekly Challenge 286: Self Spammer

These are some answers to the Week 286, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 15, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Self Spammer

Write a program which outputs one word of its own script / source code at random. A word is anything between whitespace, including symbols.

Example 1

If the source code contains a line such as: 'open my $fh, "<", "ch-1.pl" or die;'
then the program would output each of the words { open, my, $fh,, "<",, "ch-1.pl", or, die; }
(along with other words in the source) with some positive probability.

Example 2

Technically 'print(" hello ");' is *not* an example program, because it does not
assign positive probability to the other two words in the script.
It will never display print(" or ");

Example 3

Second Batch of LPW 2024 Talks Accepted

Yep, that's right - the second half dozen talks have been accepted for this year's London Perl and Raku Workshop. This puts our schedule at approximately 80% full, so if you are thinking about talking at the workshop then submit your proposal now!

The CFP will be closed at the end of September to give speakers sufficient time to finish their presentations and to allow the schedule to be created. We encourage all attendees to mark talks they are interested in as that will inform some of the schedule choices.

If you aren't thinking about talking then have a think about what you've been doing in the Perl and/or Raku space the last five years, or even just the general IT and development space. Perhaps there's something interesting you can talk about? If you don't feel it's a full fat talk then submit a lightning talk instead.

The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:

If you would like to sponsor LPW then please have a look at the options here: https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/sponsoring.html

This week in PSC (156) | 2024-08-15

Just Graham and Aristotle this time.

  • Discussed some patches to include in a perl 5.38 or 5.40 point release.
  • We will be watching the fallout from the removal of apostrophe as package separator.
  • Discussed what could be done for lexical method calls.

[P5P posting of this summary]

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