We are happy to announce that AffinityLive is sponsoring the Perl QA Hackathon 2015.

What language do you use? Whether I'm talking to investors, prospective hires or just curious clients, many people are surprised to hear AffinityLive is written in Perl. Part of the reason was luck - I started hacking away on what would later become AffinityLive over a decade ago. As someone who went to university before Java became the lingua franca of colleges trying to shape job-ready graduates, I cut my teeth more on C++ and found the unshackled freedom of Perl and its incredible list of Internet-friendly modules incredibly appealing.

I've never had a reason to use multiple beginning-of-line anchors in a regex, so I wondered if it would work. I guess it does.

Hosted by us at Broadbean. The address is Level 8, 9 Hunter Street, Sydney 2000.

The front doors close promptly at 6pm. If you arrive before 6pm, then walk straight in (there's no sign in process). When on the 8th floor, there's signs to say we're to the left. Come on in!

If you arrive after 6pm then please give Peter me a call. His number is 0414 331 769. Someone will then come and let you in.

Tonight Stuart Cooper will present a talk on using perl in a perl hostile environment. Ivan Wills will also present on a mystery topic. There will also be some house keeping discussions for the group to decide upon.

Test Driven Development is the topic of the night at MadMongers tomorrow night. If you’re in Madison, come, have a beer, and hear about TDD. 

[From my blog.]

Some ideas on how to document your web applications and modules...

http://openbedrock.blogspot.com/2015/04/serving-up-pod-five-cs-of-good.html

Here's a quickly thrown-together version of "Fun with logical expressions", written in Haskell:

Introduction

The M4 language is a powerful macro processor, turing complete as well as a practical programming language. It is the core tool behind GNU Autoconf, in particular.

MarpaX::Languages::M4 package is a Marpa::R2/Moops powered implementation of it, 99% with the GNU M4 version ([1]) and have switches to alter its behaviour as wanted, so that one can have e.g. POSIX M4 as well.

Command-line

MarpaX::Languages::M4 is distributed with an m4pp command-line, with all the GNU M4 implementation options, plus some other handy items, for example:

conversion to UNIX native end-of-line

comment start and end delimiters

string start and end delimiters

and some "advanced" options to alter the behaviour or extend M4 as you wish:

buffers unwrap order at the end (LIFO or FIFO)

any default can be altered on the command-line

unlimited number of bits for eval arithmetic (thanks to the really remarquable Bit::Vector package)

use perl or GNU Emacs regexps (via the new re::engine::GNU package)

etc...

Using Amazon SES and SNS from Perl.

[From my blog.]

Part II of a series on Apache's mod_rewrite.

http://openbedrock.blogspot.com/2015/04/using-apaches-swiss-army-knife_6.html

Addendum 2: This set of rules is incomplete. See Fun with logical expressions 2 for an improved version.

Addendum: I've written a more or less equivalent Haskell version of this program.

Some programmers, when confronted with a boolean expression, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions". Now they have true problems.

This post was inspired by the TAUT exercise on SPOJ.

You're given a boolean expression consisting of variables (each being either true or false), a unary operator (not), and several binary operators (and, or, implies, equals). Your task is to determine whether the expression is a tautology, i.e. whether it evaluates to true for all possible variable values.

To make parsing easier, we're going to use a very simplified syntax:

Today we would like to announce that Booking.com is sponsoring the 2015 Perl QA Hackathon. Booking.com has been supporting many Perl events and was the main sponsor and host of the QA Hackathon in 2014.

Booking.com is one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies.
Each day, over 800,000 room nights are reserved on our websites and apps by both leisure and business travelers.
Truly international, Booking.com is available in 42 languages, and offers over 600,000 properties in 211 countries. Over 8,600 people all over the world are dedicated to serving Booking.com’s customers, and we love having the opportunity to create an even better experience for them. We have our IT Department with over 750 employees and more than 54 nationalities based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Booking.com is a dedicated contributor to the Perl and MySQL community.
Will you be joining us? Please following this link to see our current vacancies workingatbooking.com.

The last three months have been some of the most professionally productive months I've had in years. In true Perl fashion, it all boils down to a Perl-related "hack" with StickK.com.

I am looking to contact Jochen Wiedmann who is the BZ::Client author (amongst other modules) whom I am guessing resides in Finland. I have emailed the associated cpan.org email address and I created an RT ticket 1 year ago. Hopefully ownership of this module can be shared and development continued.

In the interim, users of BZ::Client (i.e. Bugzilla XMLRPC Client) might be interested in my GitHub Repo which includes a number of patches.

Update: Contact has been made! Persons with patches for BZ::Client are encouraged to submit them via GitHub for inclusion in a soon to be released new version.

Influenced by the original Pull Request Challenge, I am excited to announce that NYC Perl Hackathon 2015 will have its own Mini CPAN Pull Request Challenge.

Here's how it works:

A list of CPAN distributions will be published in the Mini CPAN PR Challenge project page one day before the hackathon begins.

On the day of the Hackathon, Hackathon participants will choose 1 distribution and start hacking on it.

If you are new to this challenge, we have a list of suggestions to help you get started on your assignment.

If you want to be part of this challenge please register as a Hackathon Attendee and add yourself as a participant in the projects page.

When I click on "login" from the front page and type in my username & password, I get a "Permission denied." error message. If I need to log in, I have to reset my password, and then I'm logged in.

Maybe you are already registered for this year’s MojoConf in New York City (June 4th-6th) or maybe you are still thinking about it. Either way, a great way to introduce yourself to the Mojolicious community is to give a talk! But what should you talk about? The cool stuff you do with Mojolicious!

Last years talks were on a wide range of topics. When I write a talk, I usually write really technical talks; I’m always trying to pack too much code into each slide. But when I’m in the audience, the ones that really knock my socks off are the ones I don’t expect.

Last year, Rich Elberger (this year’s host, incidentally) gave a talk that took me completely by surprise, he’s gaining traction using Mojolicious in an Enterprise system! How cool is that?!

The HTML::FormFu module is well known enough to be mentioned in detail in both published Catalyst books. Despite a reasonable learning curve, once mastered saves enormous time in creating web-based forms.

The author/maintainer, Carl (aka fireartist), has been nice enough to allow me to get involved and I have pulled in a number of patches that kind people have submitted via github and RT. Only minor changes thus far, but it's great to have something so useful that people take time to tweak, fix and repair it - then submit their changes for inclusion. I am readying a release for the near future.

Which brings me to the point of my post.

If you or your organization are harboring some fixes or enhancements to HTML::FormFu, please send them through for inclusion via https://github.com/fireartist/HTML-FormFu

I was reviewing some code I had written for a simple RPG dice algorithm (although there's already a good module for this, Game::Dice) and I realized again that I have a prefererence for functions that can fit on one screen. One strategy is breaking up the code into smaller routines but I sometimes like to compact it vertically as much as possible first.

This function roll, given a string of "dice language," should return the results of such a dice roll. An example of this would be "3d10+1" to roll three 10-sided dice and then add 1, or "4d6b3" which says to roll four 6-sided dice and take the best three.

more

Just to tell that there is another regexp engine coming out, re::engine::GNU. that will hopefully show how perl's regexp facility is well done, thanks to its perlreapi.

This library will bring into perl POSIX BRE, Gnu Emacs, AWK regexps etc...

The funny thing is that I took the liberty to exploit what perlreapi says: "Since any scalar can be passed as a pattern, it's possible to implement an engine that does something with an array etc...". The idea is have a default syntax (GNU Emacs), and to use an array or a hash at the right-hand side to specify the syntax of the regular expression string, i.e.:

use re::engine::GNU;
'test' =~ /\(tes\)t/ && print "ok 1\n";
'test' =~ [ 0, '\(tes\)t' ] && print "ok 2\n";
'test' =~ { syntax => 0, pattern => '\(tes\)t' } && print "ok 3\n";