blogs.perl.org

Article in Russian about Test::Spec benefits and gotchas/internals

I deal with a lot of modules that promise backwards compatibility with older versions of perl, usually back to perl 5.8.1. Since I don't regularly use perl versions that old when developing, accidentally introducing incompatibilities is always a risk. Having a continuous integration system check this for me makes it much easier to catch mistakes like this before they get released into the wild.

Travis CI is a very useful continuous integration service that is free for any public repositories on GitHub. There are issues with using Travis CI for the kind of testing I need though. First, it only provides the last revision of each perl series. Especially in the perl 5.8 and 5.10 series, there are substantial enough differences between them that testing only the latest isn't adequate. Additionally, some of the testing needs to be done on perls built with threading, which isn't included on most of the versions available on Travis. It also is sometimes useful to test without any additional modules pre-installed like Travis does.

Strawberry Perl 5.18.4.1 is available at http://strawberryperl.com

More details in Release Notes:
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.18.4.1-32bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.18.4.1-64bit.html

I would like to thank our sponsor Enlightened Perl Organisation for resources provided to our project.

Some idiot has just uploaded a purely spam distribution: THEMA-MEDIA. He clearly knows it's idiotic, because his README.md begins with "CPAN-foolishness".

The subject of integer partitions comes up regularly, with multiple threads over the years at PerlMonks, a big chunk of Chapter 5 of Higher-Order Perl, and some pages from Knuth TAOCP volume 4A. Last year I added a partitions function to my ntheory Perl module, for counting integer partitions (OEIS A000041). A few months ago I added a partition iterator (forpart) since I liked the one Pari/GP added last year.

Yes, in my warped mathematics, 0.042 is nearly 1.000000.

Exporter::Tiny is a module I split out of the Type::Tiny distribution. It's an exporter, offering roughly the same capabilities as Sub::Exporter, but with a lighter footprint. I've not massively promoted it, but have been using it in a bunch of my other modules, and other people seem to have picked up on it and started using it too.

The documentation requires a bit of work, but from my perspective the implementation is effectively complete. If you're using it, then I'd appreciate any feedback you have before it's "stable" and thus too late to change.

Friends,
I have found certain outward challenges in perl and have always found someways to overcome them. Some of the common challenges i found specific in India are:
India being such a large country have a number of software development centers across it like: Noida, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune etc. Though there are excellent developers in perl but they are less in number and find them sparsely located across these development centers , ie. few in each centers which makes connecting with each others rather difficult. Though there are some perl monger and other groups here but still as the developers are geographically sparsed in India, they dont connect well, eg. a developer in Delhi will not want to subscribe to Bangalore group because he may not find any merit at it. Same is with the recruiters .

My idea is to create a all india perl group, and also list profiles of most of the people here. There will be a weekly or monthly mailer from the group with a list of opportunities , I am willing to use the domain perl.org.in for this and use catalyst for the same.

Also we will plan remote sessions / google hangouts.

Any person here want to comment on this, and / or will want to contribute towards the design / anything just comment here or at https://twitter.com/perl_org_in ?

I tried to get co-maintainer bit for Text::MediawikiFormat, but his e-mail does not get delivered. do you know Derek? Could you help me get in touch with him to become a co-maintainer?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "What this world has too few of, is recruiters. The world definitely needs more recruiters". And given that shocking lack of people trying to get you a job, I've launched Perl Careers.

My eventual goal is to try and do something like O'Reilly did back in the day - divert a significant portion of profits back in to the community via paying for high-quality Perl content/articles, sponsorship of conferences, and sponsorship in to TPF and similar organisations. This is going to take me a while to achieve; I'm planning to sponsor November's London Perl Workshop, and I'm flying to London for it, and I hope to start paying for high-quality Perl-related content at the beginning of next year. ORA used to pay $200-$400 for articles on Perl.com, and I think that's where I'll be aiming.

However, in the interim, I'm hiring for some great roles. I'm only willing to take on roles for companies I'd want to work at, so please get in contact: pete@perl.careers.

I gave a talk at NY Perlmongers this past Tuesday. We streamed it -- though didn't really publicize that ahead of time due to me working on my slides up until the last second -- and Devops in the cloud with perl is up on YouTube. The slides are here. I used the excellent reveal.js.

This is my second time giving a talk at perlmongers, and SocialFlow's fifth time hosting. Every time I've attended perlmongers it's been fun, interesting, and worthwhile, so if you're on the fence about going to your local meetup you should give it a shot. And it you're on the fence about streaming your local meetup you should give that a shot as well; it's really not very hard.

The Audio compression came out really bad this time, probably because our upstream speeds were severely limited by being on a cable modem, but I still stand by my HOWTO live stream a talk in pretty much the laziest way possible.

Note: I am not a lawyer and the following should not be considered legal advice. Double-check everything and hire a lawyer.

As I continue to work on Veure, I have the added fun of less time spent working on it while I try to understand the legal problems. If you're going to create and publish your own game, you'll invariably hit legal issues. What's worse, you might discuss them publicly and some bright spark will vaguely remember an online article, dumbed down for mass consumption, regarding a complicated libel lawsuit for the print industry and swear up and down that it applies to you. They won't supply a link.

In fact, software games seem to have some peculiar legal issues all their own, compounded by the fact that they're often indie games created by hyper-intelligent, well-read individuals who either don't think of legal issues or assume they already understand them. On the off chance that they're right about a given issue, there's also one tiny detail they often overlook.

We recently saw an example of an elasticsearch token filter called the catalan_stemmer. The Catalan language has other token filters available:

• catalan_stop
• catalan_elision
• catalan_keywords

Let's see what they do.

Stop

The catalan_stop filter removes a list (common) of words. Given the example search:

  porros amb balsàmic

applying the catalan_stop filter will remove the word amb (with) from the indexing.

  "catalan_stop": {
    "type":       "stop",
    "stopwords":  "_catalan_" 
  }

and it is customizable.

Elision

The catalan_elision filter removes elisions. Given the example search:

Getting started with Travis

I felt like I should give Travis a try and picked a recent github project of mine that I knew had a decent testsuite.

The instructions on how to get started with travis were quite simple and soon the project had its own travis page.

Unknown build failure

I wondered why the build failed after adding a very simple .travis.yml file to the project.

$ cpanm --quiet --installdeps --notest .

! Configuring . failed. See /home/travis/.cpanm/work/1411809721.1412/build.log for details.

The command "eval cpanm --quiet --installdeps --notest ." failed. Retrying, 2 of 3.

It explicitly includes more than 400 CPAN modules, but with their dependencies it is probably a lot more. The idea behind this distribution is to make it very fast and easy to get started with Perl. Without learning how to brew perl and how to install CPAN modules. Without fighting external dependencies or some failure in the latest release of a CPAN module.

I need your help to test-drive the distribution and to fill the holes. The modules that might be really needed but have not yet been included.

It would be of great help if you downloaded the latest distribution. Configured it as described on the website and let me know which additional modules your application might need or if something is broken.

Thanks to our generous sponsors we can provide free breakfast, lunch, live band
and social event for every attendee of the Perl::Dancer conference in Hancock, New York.

Attendees and speakers from USA, Canada and Europe are coming to have lots of fun at
the marvelous venue.

There are still tickets available both for the training and presentations days, please
go to registration to purchase your ticket.

Somehow long ago I wrote some additional rules for Perl in my .ctags file and published it. I even invited you to help improve and polish it or simply use it and modify it as you wish.

Recently I tried the Atom editor which is very trendy now.
I was happy to find it uses Exuberant Ctags and the rules in my ~/.ctags file just worked.
Then I just made a pull request to https://github.com/atom/symbols-view. The pull request got finally accepted and the extended support for Perl is available since version 0.65.0.

Exuberant Ctags can be used with Vim, jEdit, Sublime Text, Ultra Edit... any IDE/Text Editor that uses it natively or has a plugin for it. I use it to quickly jump around in my Ado project.

Keymaps: ctrl/cmd+r to see current file symbols; shift+ctrl/cmd+r for project symbols.

Enjoy it, modify it as you wish and improve it.

When dealing with elasticearch, one has to consider how they want to manage the analysis of the content that is ingested. The use of templates is a way to ease this burden of managing analyzer settings. Let's learn by example...

Catalan Stemmer

Here's a template that defines an analyzer, cat_stems, which utilizes the built-in catalan stemmer. For example, both singular: porro and plural: porros will be reduced to porr when analyzed by the stemmer. Moreover, this template will be applied to any index created with a name that starts with cat.

Template

Now I call DBD::SQLite 1.43_08 a release candidate of the next stable DBD::SQLite. Please test it with your modules/applications and let me know if you find anything. Due to some change(s) in the upstream SQLite library (since SQLite 3.8.5), this release candidate is known to break older versions of DBIx::Class (prior to 0.082800 released on 2014-09-25). If you use older versions of DBIx::Class, you might also want to upgrade it, or keep DBD::SQLite 1.42 (bundled with older SQLite 3.8.4.1 library) for now. Other major O/R mappers seem not affected by this upgrade. If there's no blocker nor request to wait, I'll release 1.44 in late October, hopefully on 26th.

Other notable changes since the last stable release follow:

• This release candidate contains new modules to support custom virtual tables written in Perl (by DAMI).
• If you set sqlite_unicode to true, SQL statements will be upgraded to avoid inconsistency between embedded params and bind params (RT #96877) (by DAMI)

See Changes file in the distribution for other fixes and improvements.