blogs.perl.org

Graham and Philippe met briefly today.

Now that Perl 5.40 is out, and the nomination process for the next PSC is underway, there wasn’t much to discuss, so we cut the meeting short.

These are some answers to the Week 281, 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 August 11, 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: Knight’s Move

A Knight in chess can move from its current position to any square two rows or columns plus one column or row away. So in the diagram below, if it starts a S, it can move to any of the squares marked E.

Write a script which takes a starting position and an ending position and calculates the least number of moves required.

Example 1

The London Perl & Raku Workshop (LPW) will take place this year on Saturday 26th October and you are encouraged to submit your talk proposals now. We have already had 30 registrations for the workshop so we anticipate a good turnout this year.

We welcome proposals relating to Perl 5, Raku, other languages, and supporting technologies. We may even have space for a couple of talks entirely tangential as we are close to finalising the venue (very central London) and should have room for two tracks.

Talks may be long (40mins), short (20 mins), or very short (aka lightning, 5 mins) but we would prefer talks to be on the shorter side and will likely prioritise 20min talks. We would also be pleased to accept proposals for tutorials and discussions. The deadline for submissions is 30th September.

We would really like to have more first time speakers. If you’d like help with a talk proposal, and/or the talk itself, let us know - we’ve got people happy to be your talk buddy!

Following on from The bad days

We made the decision that our problems in Kubernetes were exactly the sort of thing that should not be distractions to the project. We had been trying to save costs when we choose Hetzner for hosting... especially as we did not know where our ElasticSearch cluster (needing 3x32Gig of ram) was going to live. The great news is last week ElasticSeach agreed to host this for us, which really is a game changer.

With this in mind, we reviewed hosting again... Digital Ocean (DO) provides a fully managed Kubernetes control plane, with high availability load balancer, Postgres Database integration and storage options e.g. we can focus on deploying to it and not managing it.

The three of us were there, and our discussion covered:

• 5.40.0 has no more blocking bugs 🎉
• It should be released by the end of the week
• PPC0021 progress continues with Paul and Veesh discussing debugging and development
• The maintainer of HTTP::Tiny delegates design decisions to the PSC. There’s one PR outstanding that we looked over and found agreeable

These are some answers to the Week 266, 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 April 28, 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: X Matrix

You are given a square matrix, $matrix.

Write a script to find if the given matrix is X Matrix.

A square matrix is an X Matrix if all the elements on the main diagonal and antidiagonal are non-zero and everything else are zero.

Example 1

Hey All,

Yes, we're back we'd like to announce this year's LPW:

https://act.yapc.eu/lpw2024/

WHEN: TBC, most likely Saturday 26th October 2024
WHERE: TBC

Please register and submit talks early - it gives us a better idea of numbers. The date is tentative, depending on the venue, but we'd like to aim for the 26th October 2024.

This will be the 20th anniversary of LPW (in terms of years, not number of events). We might try to do something special...

The venue search is currently in progress. The 2019 venue has turned into a boarding school so we can't use that any more due to safeguarding issues. We don't want to go back to the University of Westminster so we are searching for a venue.

I just received an E-Mail purporting to be from the PAUSE Team, claiming a compromise of a server. It was written with some thought, referencing the account name of someone well known and trusted in our community. On closer inspection however, it was merely an attempt to phish PAUSE usernames and passwords via a supposed alternative login server.

I'm sure many of us are old enough and experienced enough to detect and ignore this type of attack. But in case you aren't (welcome!) or if you are feeling a bit out of practice, then please remember to only log in via the official PAUSE entry point.

This week it was just Paul and Philippe; we discussed the final changes for the upcoming RC2 and stable release, and marked some issues/PR as release blockers.

Graham expects to release 5.40-RC2 before the week-end.

These are some answers to the Week 265, 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 April 21, 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: 33% Appearance

You are given an array of integers, @ints.

Write a script to find an integer in the given array that appeared 33% or more. If more than one found, return the smallest. If none found then return undef.

Example 1

The deadline for talk and paper submissions to the 2024 TPRC has been Officially extended through April 20th for both the regular Perl and Raku tracks; and also the Science Track.

• Main conference site
• Science Track Abstract Submission.
• Regular Talk Submission

Update for the Science Track submissions, we have a small, but solid set of submissions and are expecting a few more. The Science Perl Committee is committed to helping anyone submitting a serious entry to succeed. If you're hesitating at all because you're afraid of getting rejected, please be reassured we want as many people to be part of this inaugural Science Track, as possible.

Please note, acceptable topics DO include white papers discussing implementation details of the Perl or Raku interpreters, experimental language features, implementations, benchmarks, etc.

I personally and strongly encourage you to submit an abstract to the Science Track. And if you don't want to write a paper, I strongly encourage you to submit a regular conference talk.

Brett Estrade (OODLER)

1. Maintainers and authors are found everywhere throughout our dependency trees. This includes the authors of the tooling others use for maintaining, building, testing, writing and running the infrastructure they depend on. Even maintainers depend on other maintainers.
2. Maintainers’ mental health and well-being is also a dependency.
3. So is their outlook on the sustainability of their projects, both in personal, technical, systemic and economic respects.

This means that personal, technical, systemic and economic well-being in the end are all actual and real dependencies* for the businesses that rely on these people and their projects.*

What can an ecosystem provide to make the lives of these maintainers easier in this regard?

…continued

We were back from the PTS in Lisbon, and had a shorter meeting than usual, during which we mostly discussed the last remaining release blockers for 5.40.

These are some answers to the Week 281, 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 August 11, 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: Check Color

You are given coordinates, a string that represents the coordinates of a square of the chessboard as shown below:

Write a script to return true if the square is light, and false if the square is dark.

Example 1

Input: $coordinates = "d3"
Output: true

Example 2

Input: $coordinates = "g5"
Output: false

Example 3

Talk submissions are still open, and we are seeking proposals on a wide variety of subjects. This includes language features, personal projects, applications like Koha, and anything that may be of general interest to Perl and Raku programmers.

To submit an abstract, please see the authoritative Science Perl CFP or for a standard talk visit the familiar Papercall site.

Please note it is our (the Science Perl Editorial Subcommittee) goal to be able to accept as many perl+science papers and posters as possible, as such our editorial process is designed to be very friendly.

Science Track Deadlines (initial submission is same date/time as the standard talk tracks):

• Abstract submission deadline: April 5th, 2024 (23:59:59 UTC)
• Abstract acceptance emails sent: April 15th, 2024
• Draft full paper due: May 15th, 2024
• Draft full paper feedback emails sent: May 31, 2024
• Final full paper due: June 7th, 2024
• Final papers approved: June 15th, 2024

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

Thank you and I am looking forward to some very good things to see in Vegas, baby!

Brett Estrade (OODLER)

This week, we:

• Talked about some ideas for discussion at the upcoming PTS
• Discussed the current blocked state of bleadperl following the 5.39.9 release and how to unblock it
• Finished reviewing the release blocker bugs
• Discussed how MetaCPAN should better handle perl releases and permissions

These are some answers to the Week 280, 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 August 4, 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: Count Asterisks

You are given a string, $str, where every two consecutive vertical bars are grouped into a pair.

Write a script to return the number of asterisks, *, excluding any between each pair of vertical bars.

Example 1

Input: $str = "p|*e*rl|w**e|*ekly|"
Ouput: 2

The characters we are looking here are "p" and "w**e".

Example 2

Following on from day 1

Joel and I spent some more time working out disk provisioning and then decided to upgrade the nodes in the cluster... this is where the problems started...

I shutdown a node to resize it... and the site went down, no healthy backends was then displayed to all users by Fastly (our CDN) for any content that wasn't in their cache. This is not meant to happen!

We also couldn't connect to Argo (web UI for Kuberneties deployment and a view on the K8's API status) or even the kubectl command line tool.

Starting the node backup (after having upgraded) and all came back. We quickly realised that everything was using Round Robin DNS to all 3 node IP's. There was ` Traefik ` setup but it was tied to those IPs and something was not happy. We then looked at alternative tooling and thought it might be worth using rke2 instead of k3s as the underlying flavour of K8s as this would give us a little more flexibility.

What is it good for?

If you’ve never worked with MooX::Role::Parameterized or MooseX::Role::Parameterized, you might wonder what is a parameterized role at all?

Roles are used when you need to share behaviour among several classes that don’t have to be related by inheritance. Normally, a role just adds a bunch of methods to the class that consumes it (there’s more, you can for example specify which other methods the role expects to already exist).

A parameterized role makes it possible to provide parameters for the consumed role. This way, you can adjust the behaviour for each consuming class.