C::Blocks Advent Day 7

This is the C::Blocks Advent Calendar, in which I release a new treat each day about the C::Blocks library. Yesterday I illustrated the many ways you generate or modify C source code. Today I discuss basic facilities for handling pointers and building C data structures.

Dist::Zilla Plots Version

Even more POD here at the Dit-pen.

In my last postI wrote about the rather simple [Name] section today I am going to move onto something a little more complex the [Version] section.

[Version] does not produce a lot of POD just

=head1 VERSION

version 0.01
in the case of my distribution. It is getting that '0.01' from my 'dist.ini' file

Introducing JIRA::REST::Class

Over the past couple months, I've had to take over project management for my DarkPAN project at $EMPLOYER, and the software they're enamored of for that purpose is JIRA.

Unfortunately, JIRA can be a pain in the ass sometimes, and since we're not the only group at $EMPLOYER that uses JIRA, getting things set up the way we need them is not always possible. However, it was possible to manually go through and fix up issues to our standards...

Well, whenever something is manually possible, I look for a way to automate it. I quickly discovered that JIRA has a REST API, so I went looking for a tool to help me use it in Perl.

I found JIRA::REST.

Saving Breakpoints in the Perl Debugger

I'll state right off the bat that I have re-invented the wheel here. However, I did not know that until I asked on Perlmonks and was pointed to the resources that I couldn't find on Google. It was suggested on Perlmonks that a blog post, even for a re-invented wheel might be good, just for the purpose of getting the information out there. So, here it goes.

If you use the Devel::ptkdb debugger, then you know that one of its features is the ability to save breakpoints (and other info) in a *.ptkdb file that is reloaded the next time you run that debugger.

It's a feature I missed on those occasions where I needed to use the default debugger, not Devel::ptkdb. However, after scrounging around what docs there are on the default debugger, I was able to cobble together the following process:

1 - Create a file .perldb in your home directory and add this code to it.

C::Blocks Advent Day 6

This is the C::Blocks Advent Calendar, in which I release a new treat each day about the C::Blocks library. Over the last few days I have illustrated how to use C::Blocks to write procedural code, how to get data across the Perl/C divide, including using types to do that concisely, and how to write code that is shared across modules and scripts. Yesterday I provided some benchmarks that I hope give a sense for the performance of C::Blocks, and start to indicate the circumstances when it might be useful. Today I am going to illustrate the many ways you can generate and/or modify your C code using C::Blocks including source filters, interpolation blocks, and the good old string eval.

Dist::Zilla Takes it in the Name

Another Pod post here in the Dist-pen.

In my last post one saw how you can change the order of the 'sections' of your POD by simply not using the '@Default' template and using you own custom template. You also saw haw you can use other peoples templates by simply installing them and the swapping them out for the [@Default] template.

Today I am going to have a closer look at the [Name] section.

This is one of the more simplistic section templates, it only produces the following;

=head1 NAME

Database::Accessor::Manual - What is Database::Accessor, and how do I use it?
It will look in your POD fro the following comments
  • # ABSTRACT:
  • # PODNAME:
So to produce the above my original Pod is;

meta::hack 2016

MetaCPAN is the community developed and maintained website and api for finding and learning about Perl modules. This year, we dedicated a long weekend to improving it and oh what a weekend it was!

You can import your Metacpan favorites into perlmodules.net!

PerlModules.net is a website that notifies you when your favorite modules get updated, via e-mail or RSS.

As of today, you can now import your favorites from metacpan.org into perlmodules.net.

And if your metacpan favorites list changes in the future, no worries: the corresponding feed in your perlmodules.net account will adapt accordingly.

C::Blocks Advent Day 2

This is the C::Blocks Advent Calendar, in which I release a new treat each day about the C::Blocks library. On the first day I demonstrated how to weave procedural C code into your Perl code. Today I will show how to get data across the boundary between Perl and C.

Dist::Zilla On Style

Even more POD here on the Dist-Pen today.

I my last post I finally figured out how Pod::Weaver works, a template, weaver.ini file, that has 'Sections', [Name], [Author] etc, that you can change to create your POD document.

I wanted to test just how Pod::Weaver works so I replace '@default' in my 'weaver.ini' whith what the source code of Pod::Weaver::PluginBundle::Default said it was supplying;

Static code analysis with Perl and SonarQube

When managing code quality for bigger projects, SonarQube is the de-facto standard for many programming languages. Not for perl, as there has not been any perl integration into SonarQube yet.

We have Perl::Critic, a fantastic linting tool, but what if we could track our Perl::Critic issues in our projects over time? What if we had a webinterface where we could extract statistics about certain issue types? What if we could combine this with code coverage information? All this is about to come...

Come join me on my new open source project "sonar-perl": https://github.com/otrosien/sonar-perl -- I'm looking forward to it!

Perl 5 Porters Mailing List Summary: November 21st-30th

Hey everyone,

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

Enjoy!

meta::hack Wrap-up Report

We had a great four days at meta::hack a couple of weeks ago. I've tried to briefly summarize what we accomplished.

Dist::Zilla Tempate

It is still POD day here at the Dist-Pen

I spent the day trying to get a little deeper into POD::Weaver to understand how it works rather than just aping the three lines I have seen in the odd tutorial or should I say tuturial-ette;

[@Default]

[-Transformer / List]
transformer = List
The fist thing to know about POD::Weaver is if you want to use it any deeper than the above then don't bother going to its home-page on CPAN there is not much there to get started on.

Not faulting the documentation at all it is quite comprehensive and perfect if you are going to create a project like podweaver.

Introducing Net::ACME

I’ve recently finished porting cPanel’s implementation of Let’s Encrypt’s ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Envirionment) protocol to a new CPAN module, Net::ACME.

Net::ACME offers a number of attractive features:

- It’s based closely on cPanel’s widely used Let’s Encrypt plugin.

- Memory usage is light: no Moose/Moo/etc.

- It can run in pure Perl, as long as you have an OpenSSL binary. (Otherwise, it needs Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA.)

- Thorough error checking—even Perl calling context!

- Errors are represented as typed, queryable exceptions. (The framework includes its own exception class hierarchy.)

- It’s “global clean”: no careless overwriting of variables like $@, $!, $?, etc.

The object hierarchy also closely mirrors ACME’s own object hierarchy: separate classes exist to represent ACME registrations, authorizations, challenges, and certificates.

The distribution includes example scripts that demonstrate usage of the module and should also give a good feel for the protocol itself.

I hope it’s useful!

Backticks and tests in Perl 6

Perl was created for systems administration, and Perl 6 has all the chops you've come to expect from the brand. Here I needed to use MD5 checksums from my collaborator to verify that I downloaded all their data without errors. Each data "$file" has an accompanying "$file.md5" that looks like this:

$ cat HOT232_1_0770m/prodigal.gff.md5
a36e4adfaa62cc4adb8cea44c4f7825f  HOT232_1_0770m/prodigal.gff

So I need to read the contents of this file, get just the first field, then execute my local "md5" (or "md5sum") program on the file without the ".md5" extension and determine if they are the same. All standard stuff, and I think Perl 6 gives us elegant ways to accomplish all of these, including a dead-simple testing framework. Here's my solution:

Security release - use after free in DBD::mysql when using prepared statements

DBD::mysql is the perl DBI driver for MySQL and the primary way Perl applications and scripts access MySQL and MariaDB databases. The source repository is at https://github.com/perl5-dbi/DBD-mysql.

A vulnerability was discovered that can lead to a use after free when using prepared statements. This vulnerability is present in all releases at least back to versions 3.0 of the driver, which were released in 2005.

The CVE identifier for this vulnerability is CVE-2016-1251.

Version 4.041, including the fix for this vulnerability, is available on CPAN at https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD::mysql

Users of DBD::mysql with prepared statements are advised to patch their installations as soon as possible.

Many thanks to Pali Rohár for discovering and fixing the vulnerability.

The DBD::mysql maintainers, Patrick Galbraith Michiel Beijen

Dist::Zilla and Weaver. Play Nice!

Small problem solving day here in the Dist-Pen.

Just a quick post-ette today to resolve the problem I was having in my last post, where I was trying to get [PodWeaver] to work with 'Pod::Elemental::Transformer'.

I was trying to get this;

=head1 Table Of Contents
=for :list
* Database::Accessor::Tutorial::GettingStarted
* Database::Accessor::Tutorial::Basics
=cut 
to work for my POD but it just did not want to play ball with me. I know this should work as I have seen it used in all sorts of other places and in the two tutorials I ran across.

C::Blocks Advent Day 4

This is the C::Blocks Advent Calendar, in which I release a new treat each day about the C::Blocks library. Yesterday I showed how to get information across the boundary between Perl and C with minimal boiler plate. Today I explain how to declare and use C functions. I also explain the killer feature of C::Blocks: declaring C functions and other things within a module that can be used throughout your code.

Shadertoy progress - playlists

The last two weeks, I didn't do much programming with OpenGL and GLSL. I used the weekend to catch up with some of the bug reports on Github and made the application more robust against missing input data or broken shaders. The net result is that it now can also cycle through a set of shaders:

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