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Another less than insipred day here at the Dist-Pen.

Well ten more posts to look at.

Dist::Zilla Plan
In this post I sat down with my Database::Accessor code base and ran it though dzil test to make sure it was all working.

Very Little Dist::Zilla
Well went off on a tangent with this post. I had problems with this test case 31_elements.t and finally found a solution to the problem I was having was where to place some test classes so the tests would run without hard-codeing the paths.

Dist::Zilla Party Time
Well in post I finally mad a mile-stone in my porject, I got all the test cases to pass and I found another bug I fixed and my tests still passed.

Dist::Zilla is Sad or is that Happy?
Still stuck on the same bug but this time I actully found a better solution that got rid of a kludge I was using and did not like

The Mojolicious Core Team has decided to try group blogging on Tumblr. As such I’m trying out posting there. I recently posted on how I configure NGINX, read more at https://asyncthoughts.tumblr.com/post/157702503315/configuring-nginx-for-lets-encrypt

Hello everybody, this is my first post, so please go easy on me. I work with Perl for last 19 years and it always treated me extremely well in regards of interesting work or material compensation. Past December my company decided that it's time to finally join in the fashion of the day and start experimenting with ML.

I started researching and found out that's my lovely Perl is stuck in the past in regards to ML support and there's no any recent developments in this area (like full last decade).

Now look at Python! Tensorflow, MXNet, Keras, Theano, Caffe, and many, many more. Java has it's deeplearning4j, Lua has Torch and what had Perl ?

We had AI::FANN, the interface (good one, I used it, it's good) to the C lib that has not seen any real development since 2007, only feed-forward neural networks, no convolutional networks, no recurrent networks, all advances in last 10 years just were happening outside of Perl.

(Graphics credit to Leonardo Maia.)

Thanks to The Perl Foundation and our beloved sponsors, a large portion of the critical contributors to the Perl 5 Porters (p5p), the core group of Perl 5 developers, were able to get together on November 11th, 2016 at the Booking.com headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for our very first Perl 5 Core hackathon, nicknamed Perl 5 Hack.

This is our report.

Well it not a very creative day today in the old Dist-pen

So careering on from my las post here it the next bunch of posts to do with Dist-Zilla.

Dist::Zilla Takes Instructions

Another chore post this time creating the README file.

Dist::Zilla VCS Opps!
In this post I had a go at linking up my distribution to my VCS which in this case was GitHub. Though I am quite sure I did things corrctly I was just way to earl in the developement cycle to actually hook things up.

Dist::Zilla Do Kwallitee Test
This was a first of a series on how Dist::Zilla does its testing. The first time I really figured out the difference between author, release and automated test cases. I also put in my first Test plug-in [Test::Kwalitee]

Dist::Zilla Likes Critic

This post I played with the [Test::Critic] plug-in and also figured out how to run just the 'author' tests.

After spending a long time chasing a bunch of bugs (a lot of ones that boiled to a few lines of code had really weird consequences that needed to be painstakingly chased down) and implementing some missing parts I finally got Test.pm6 to compile and load.
This allowed rakudo to pass few roast tests (like S03-operators/not.t) for the first time. Once some remaining issues with the Test.pm6 get solved hopefully a whole bunch of others will pass.
Currently the coroutine ops needed for Test (for gather/take type stuff) to load are implemented in a node.js specific manner using the fibres. I previously had an pure js implementation of them using a CPS transform but it carried a large cost in terms of generated code and compile time so it got disabled as it was slowing down development. Some careful thought will be needed later on how to re-nable it with only paying for it for use.
Now that rakudo.js is starting to run actual Perl 6 code my current focus is to make rakudo.js easier for others to play it.
That includes means making the way it builds (at least remotely) sane and cutting down the horrible (10+ second locally) startup cost of loading the setting. A lot of the startup cost seems to be caused by the way lexical scopes are setup in rakudo.js which also needs a cleanup as it's currently to influenced by how nqp does things.

I am curious whether anyone else would like to see else clauses applied to for/foreach and while loops,  where the code in the else clause would be executed if the loop body was completely skipped due to the conditions/boundaries. So for example:

…with a for/foreach loop:

for my $temperature ($temp_lower_bound .. $temp_upper_bound) {
  set_temperature($temperature, $soak_time);
  push @data, get_sensor_reading();
}
else {
  die "Temperature upper bound must be greater than lower bound!\n";
}

foreach my $datum (@data) {
  print "processing $datum...\n";
  process($datum);
}
else {
  warn "No data!\n";
}

…with a while loop:

open LOG_FILE, "<", $log_file
  or die "Could not open log file: $!\n";
while (<LOG_FILE>) {
  process_log_entry($_);
}
else {
  print "The log file was empty!\n";
}
close LOG_FILE;

See part 1 and part 2 to get caught up. In our part 2 meetup (last night), we changed things up a bit. I decided that tackling the space mission to start was going to be a bit much (too much content), so I switched us to Action Castle, the first adventure in the Parsely series. And built out a mission config file with notes from the adventure using the structures that we designed in our first meetup.

After explaining the reason for the change, the group agreed, and we continued on our merry way. As we continued to define our mission spec, we figured out an API for plugging code calls into the spec. For example, you could replace an exit like this:

exits:
  North : catacombs

With a code call like this:

exits:
  North :
    code: PluginNameGoesHere
    params:
      destination: catacombs
      foo: bar

We built some sample code for exits, actions, and turns. None of this is final or anything, just building some samples so we could work through the the thought exercise. 

The great Dist-Pen wrap up part the first.

So has it been really sixty days of blogging about Dist::Zilla and Pod::Weaver? Yes it has so here is a quick round up of what is where.

For the first few post in this series I had a look at the basic install using Dist::Zilla

No Such thing as Moose-Zilla!

In this post I try my hand at building a distribution with Dist::Zilla. Here I found out about some of the required attributes that Dist::Zilla needs and how to use my first plug-in and generate my first distibution with dzil and had a quick look at the mass of Plug-in found on CPAN

Mmm! Dist::Zilla Tea

Carrying on from my first attempts I added in an 'Abstract' into the mix and then started to add in other Plug-Ins to really make a useful distribution for CPAN and learning that dzil has a clean as well as a build command.

'Dist::Zilla' A Bath for Your Distro

Hey everyone,

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

Enjoy!

You know, I’ve been trying to analyze my working patterns lately, and I think I’ve hit on something.  Looking back over the past few years, it seems like I get obsessed with one particular project, work frantically on it and produce lots of great stuff, then I get distracted and next thing I know I’m obsessing over an entirely different project.  And then sometimes I circle back around to the first project, but it’s usually a long time later.  I’m actually starting to wonder if maybe I have some undiagnosed ADHD (not only because of the easily distracted, but also because of the hyperfocus, and SQUIRREL!).  Anyways, that appears to be the pattern of my life, so I think at this point I’m just going to have to learn to roll with it.

NB: I've written a follow-up post

Before we start: this is my first post at blogs.perl.org. Awesome that you're reading it despite me being a noob! :)

Three years ago, I started to change the way I think about logging in applications. Before that, to me it was just printing lines into text files, in order to later read and grep my way through them.

Then, a friend pointed me to ElasticSearch and Kibana, with its infinite ways to search through, and visualize, large amounts of textual data. Due to the nature of my $work, I was well aware of the benefits of a full text search database, however, it soon became clear that text alone was only part of the deal. The real fun in ElasticSearch begins when you add structured data into it, allowing filtering, grouping, and get all businessy with pie charts and world maps and whatnot. This would be where you'd start to gain knowledge that wouldn't be available anywhere in text-based logfiles.

Well it is section end day here in the Dist-pen.

Today I am looking at the I think the last section plug-in the [WarrantyDisclaimer] plug-in. This is your standard blurb type plug-in that will dump a bunch of legal words that is suppose to cover your arse if someone uses you code to control a self-driving car that goes berserk and crashes into a children's hospital causing a fire as the cute puppy store.

This plug-in has a number of subclasses that you can use to match up the license you are using to the correct subclass. So far there are six sub-clases

• Default
• Artistic
• Custom
• GPL1
• GPL2
• GPL3

Whether you are operations guy, devops or developer from time to time you deal with scripts development for various tasks - handy utilities, automation scripts, monitoring tools, so on.

Outthentic - is universal, language independent framework to encourage scripts development in easy and fun manner.

Here is short introduction into it - "Outthentic – quick way to develop users scenarios".

The blogs.perl.org site will be unavailable for a few hours during the night of February 16th to 17th 2017. The site will stop responding at approximately 21:00 UTC on the 16th, and is expected to be back by 05:00 UTC on the 17th.

The reason for this downtime is that the data centre where the site hardware is hosted is being closed, so our hosting company is transporting all servers in that data centre to a new location.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks to some sterling work by ehuelsmann, not least of which was badgering me to commit some code, Test::BDD::Cucumber now integrates directly into prove. This means you can run your feature files in parallel, and in a shuffled order more easily. This is a bit of a mouthful to achieve:

prove -s -j 5 -r --source Feature --feature-option extensions=.feature --ext=.feature examples/

and any suggestions on how to make that a little easier gratefully received.

Well it 'T' day here at the Dist-Pen

Getting near the end of the section plug-ins I am looking at the [Template] plug-in. This one is much like the [GenerateSection] plug-in I had a look at in this post.

=head3 Database::Accessor Tutorial 
Welcome to  Page xxxxx

Welcome to Page {{$name}} of the {{ $main_module_name }} tutorial.

Hey everyone,

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

Enjoy!

We've had a few questions and discussions about the toolchain summit since our announcement in January. In this blog post we'll address some of those: why the name change, what things are fair game to be worked on, and who decides who comes?

The Perl Toolchain Summit is the new name of the Perl QA Hackathon, an event organised for the first time by Salve J. Nilsen in Oslo in April 2008. In Salve's words from 2008:  "The purpose of a QA hackathon would be to Quality Assurance-related problems that are easier to solve when everyone is gathered in the same physical location. This can include issues with packaging, testing modules, community support or with tools."

Over time, the event has grown in importance (it is now the major non-conference event of the Perl community), and moved around Europe, organized every year by a different team in a different European city. It is entirely financed by corporate and community sponsors interested in having a healthy and reliable Perl environment.

For a number of years Jonathan Leffler has been providing SQL docs, which I hosted on my web site.

At the prompting of Brian Van Klaveren I've converted Jonathan's index.html page into the landing page of a github pages project.