blogs.perl.org

I've been doing a fair amount of mentoring work over the last couple of years with the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (now Outreachy). I've tried various ways of tracking progress of the interns, with varying degrees of success. What I've settled on and what has worked best for me is iDoneThis.

The beauty of this service is its simplicity. It's calendar-based and it lets you track two things: what you plan to do on a given day and what you've actually done on a given day. Teams can share this info and then "like" and comment on them. That's basically it. You can either log in to the site or just respond to an email. I have to say that I really like the simplicity of email as an API, even if I do prefer to log-in to enter my "dones".

Note: If MMORPGs are of interest to you, please read through this and answer the simple questions at the end.

I'm still diligently hacking away at Veure. About a year ago I wrote that I had 17% of the alpha tasks done. Given that I've added a number of alpha tasks (and pushed some back to beta), I'm relatively pleased that as of this writing, I have 81% of the alpha tasks finished, with over 90% of the commits by me. It's daunting single-handedly writing an MMORPG, but we've a developer who's been working on it and will be returning to it in June, so that's going to help. We're also looking at hiring a narrative designer to flesh out content. Writing a game is hard, but filling it with content? Hoo boy! It's the difference between outlining a novel and writing it (well, not exactly, but cut me some slack, eh?).

And that brings me to content. Much of $secret_mmorpg_name (legal stuff, sorry) will be impacted by missions, but what are missions?

The German Perl Workshop will take place as planned. The following mail was sent out to (I assume) all attendees:

Upcoming YAPC Europe in Granada will have at least two master classes, 34 talks and there's room ready for hackathons on September 1st.

Do you want to be part of it too? You can still register the conference and the master classes, submit talk proposals, or organize a hackathon. Find the details on the conference website.

This is just a quick PSA to bring it to anyone's attention who needs to know and doesn't already yet: The association of german train drivers has announced a general strike of person transportation from tuesday to sunday (5.5. - 10.5.). No further details have been announced by Die Bahn yet, but this might call the German Perl Workshop this year in jeopardy. Organizers have been sent messages, but have not replied yet.

Edit: The GPW organizers have posted an update.

I must be doing something wrong. Surely. I have a REST service. I get data using HTTP::Tiny and use JSON::Tiny to decode it.

If I try to print to the Term::ReadLine::Gnu OUT filehandle, I get double encoded strings, like this:

    coração

If I try to binmode it to utf-8, things get worst, with triple encoded strings:

    coração

Resolved it decoding (Encode::decode) from UTF-8 and using the internal Perl character representation. It worked.

The problem was when I tried to feed a pre-defined input line to Term::ReadLine::Gnu. Result looked something like this:

Hi,

Did you see that the brand new code editor just released by Microsoft (https://code.visualstudio.com) ships with the Perl 6 syntax support?

Just a quick reminder to those of you that would like to benefit from the early bird price for the upcoming YAPC Europe conference that will take place in Granada the first week of September: purchase your ticket by May 15th.

See full details on prices and dates.

As promised here is the list of CPAN distributions for the Mini CPAN PR Challenge at the
NYC Perl Hackathon 2015.

Mini CPAN Pull Request Challenge Distros

If you are attending the hackathon and participating in the challenge please add yourself to the wiki page as a participant.

At the previous QA hackathons, I spent most of my time on improving various aspects of CPANTS. However, I usually couldn't see what I implemented there online, because it takes about a day to analyze everything. All I could do was to start the analyzer before I fly back and confirm the result at home.

This year, things went differently for me. I spent three days on porting PAUSE Web UI using Plack toolkit, and was able to actually see the result there.

Why ported?

..because I didn't include mysql utf8 cruft in a connection string in something.

Thing is, I've done tonnes of localisation, from parsing named entities in german, to dealing with misconfigured mysql databases, localising currency, numbers and dates to dealing with special cases of greek capitalisation in pattern matching.

So for future reference, if you're relying on connection strings client side, you're doing it wrong - that's brittle and will eventually fuck up when somebody forgets to do it or uses a dodgy my.cnf - instead force it at server side and don't risk messed up encoding : http://blog.oneiroi.co.uk/mysql/mysql-forcing-utf-8-compliance-for-all-connections/

You're welcome

I'm happy to say that I'll be participating in the 2015 New York Perl Hackathon. I'd like to thank Bloomberg, L.P. for sponsoring me so that I can attend this event.

While I'm at the hackathon, I hope to continue my work on MetaCPAN as I did at the QA Hackathon one week ago. I've put together a list of possible MetaCPAN projects. If anyone would like to take on any of these projects, feel free to get in touch with me in advance if you have any questions on what might be involved with any of these proposals.

I'll also be available to help out with things which aren't MetaCPAN-related: Perl, Git, GitHub, etc. There's more general information at the hackathon wiki.

I will, of course, report back on my progress at the hackathon after the event has taken place. I'm looking forward to a productive day of hacking with a group of smart, motivated people.

The German Perlworkshop takes place next week, Wednesday to Friday, May 6th - 8th, 2015 in Dresden, Germany.

Hurry now while stocks last!

Schedule: http://act.yapc.eu/gpw2015/schedule

In brief, SiteSuite have agreed to host on the 14th of May.

Dates beyond that are up for grabs, and speakers are welcomed for any and all meetings.

Help promote by printing and hanging either the A3 or A4 poster around your workplace, university, college, local hang outs etc. but please ask for permission before hanging them!. Other PM groups are welcome to use them if they seem useful.

More details to come, or subscribe to Sydney-PM mailing list

I recently read an article about Aha! – A Hacker’s Assistant, a superoptimizer used to find branchless algorithms with brute force. There's a problem for which I always wanted a short branchless solution: finding the length of a UTF-8 byte sequence without a lookup table. So I gave Aha a try.

The length of a UTF-8 byte sequence is determined by its first byte. The possible sequences are:

• 1-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0x00-0x7F
• 2-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0xC0-0xDF
• 3-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0xE0-0xEF
• 4-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0xF0-0xF7

(There are a couple of other restrictions but I'm only interested in valid UTF-8 strings and don't care about the results for invalid sequences.)

I too was among the crowd that attended the Perl QA Hackathon 2015 in Berlin. Here's my report.

After looking at today's issue of Perl Weekly, I remembered of a nice advice by MJD that basically boils down to: make faces look at the content, or at least not look away from it.

My photo loaded on Gravatar was looking towards the right, which is good when your photo is put on the left of the page, but a disaster when it's placed on the right (which is what happens on Perl Weekly and here on blogs.perl.org, by the way).

The fault is totally my own: the general photo that might end up anywhere SHOULD look at the camera, so that it will be at least neutral in the general case! I changed it of course, even though I'm not sure I like the results... time passed!

One week ago I was in Berlin at the Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (QAH), happily hacking away on MetaCPAN. Today I'll summarize the good, the bad and the ugly about my time in Berlin. Spoiler alert: it was all good.

The full post is here.

Hi everyone,

I am proud to announce another release of Dancer2, carrying many changes and improvements, with 9 contributors and 21 tickets closed[1].

This release carries the following major changes:

* Workaround for multiple plugins with hooks.
* "send_file" is asynchronous by default. Fallback to synchronous.
* "prefix" now supports the entire route path spec ("/:var" now works in prefix).
* Clear up prefix inconsistencies ("/var" vs. "/var/").
* Proper package reported in logging.

The QA Hackathon wouldn't be possible without the support of all of our generous sponsors. In this post we cover the sponsors not previously thanked here, including the individual members of the Perl community who made personal donations.

You can read about some of the things done at the hackathon in the blog posts, linked off this page on the QAH website.