So, I finally made the switch from ActivePerl to Strawberry Perl. Though I was aware of it, I had never looked at Strawberry Perl before because even though I had experienced some minor annoyances with ActiveState's Perl (and one major one, when they completely broke Tk a while back), it worked fine for me most of the time. In addition to ActiveState's Perl, I also use Perl under Cygwin.
The reason I use Windows is not because I'm a huge fan. I'd have an easier time with these types of issues on a different OS like Linux. I started out preferring Windows because I was an avid gamer, and I ended up developing a bunch of tools that I use routinely, so until I port them, I'm stuck for now. This story involves Windows 7, if you were curious.
Get a source tarball for libxml2-dev. On `apt` systems:
apt-get source libxml2-dev
Configure it to install locally, and then install it:
cd libxml2-dev/
./configure --prefix=/home/peters/perl5/alien/
make
make install
Ignoring all other options like LIBS, INC, and the rest of the stuff that's kindly recommended, you only care about showing Makefile.PL where to find xml2config:
You propably seen that rant as well as what caused it. I'm neither core dev nore have 20 Modules on CPAN, but I have talked to lot of people online and in person over the years.
I've started revitalizing the Perl Power Tools. I love this project, also known as the Unix Reconstruction Project, but there's been a some bit rot and I think we can make it easier to find. Googling "PPT" means so many other things, including PowerPoint. I've always had a hard time finding it, and I know it's there! Many of the links to it are dead or buried, and when I talk about it (such as in my Stackoverflow post about paste or my lightning talk at the Swiss Perl Workshop).
Some of these programs date back to the 1990s and I've discovered weird syntax things that Perl 5.22 won't support. Did you know that you could %hash->{$key} with a normal hash? Not after v5.20 you can't! Also gone is defined( @array ).
Dana Jacobson already fixed a bug in the factor program, which now has tests.
Not specifically about Perl, but I did write a post this week about the software development business in general over on my Other Blog. Might be worth checking out if you want to listen to me ramble on for a bit on that topic.
The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop Organizers are happy to announce our 7th annual event this November 7th through 9th in downtown Pittsburgh, PA. Our web site is now live and accepting registrations. We are also accepting talk submissions through September 26th:
Thanks to Mark Jason Dominus and Tom Christiansen for volunteering talks for PPW already. And thanks to Infinity Interactive for covering the costs for John Anderson to come to PPW and teach our famous “From Zero to Perl” class on November 7th *at no extra charge* for anybody buying a ticket to PPW.
In the recent year I notice more and more instances that mail to ribasushi@cpan.org is silently swallowed. I know this because I communicate with the senders through other channels, and I've even received forwards of copies of emails which as far as the sender is concerned are delivered. I am also increasingly hearing the same story from my PAUSE-peers. Bottom line: it seems that the SMTPD cpan.mx.develooper.com is configured to do rather aggressive *silent* spam filtering.
I am writing this for 2 reasons:
I want to gauge whether the problem is indeed pervasive, or it is just bad luck on my part.
I want to solicit opinions on how to properly fix this if it is indeed a large-scale problem.
I personally would prefer to get all my mail forwarded my way directly, unfiltered and I would deal with it however I deem appropriate. Of course there are bound to be differing opinions on this.
Anyhow - please share your experience, both positive and negative!
The Swiss Perl Workshop did not disappoint, although as a featured speaker there was plenty to worry about. One of the organizers, Matthias Bloch, was well trained to take care of the chaotic situation of herding cats and programmers. He was a trained primary school instructor, in which he explained the getting a group of first graders to do anything is much harder. I'm dubious, having been to many workshops, but everything went well. The trick is to embrace the fear.
Perlybook integration: Each pod page and each release page now have two additional links to download MOBI and EPUB version of the current pod or the combined pod of the whole distribution.
The CPAN Author dashboard (can be reached from the 'Lab') now lists all of the distributions of the currently logged in CPAN author providing some overview of all the distributions.
The right panel can be now hidden (and then shown again) giving more real-estate for the documentation. Especially useful for smaller screens. This is persistent in the browser, but currently only works on the POD pages. This feature is also, still under discussion. Your feedback would be valuable!
You can now change the number of items shown on each result page. See the buttons
at the bottom of the search result pages. This choice is persistent in the browser.
I'm here today to talk about the venerable perl documentation tool perldoc. Working with Koichi KUBO, I think I have a perldoc which works effectively with encodings in files like perlop, perlfunc and perlvar.
Preliminary results with the Japanese docs have been pretty successful, but it would be nice to get some positive results with other encodings/languages. So if you use a Perl with core documentation that isn't "plain old ASCII", would you please give Pod-Perldoc 3.24_01 a spin in your environment?
If you accept this task, please email results to bug-pod-perldoc at rt.cpan.org, open a github issue, or comment here.
Earlier this week I gave a presentation to the Boston Perl Mongers via Google Hangouts. This was the first time that I've done a presentation remotely, but everything worked flawlessly[1].
I would love to do more of these. If your local PM group or team at $work would like to learn more about static analysis with Perl::Critic, or dependency management with Pinto please get in touch with me. I am thaljef@cpan.org.
I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
[1] Big thanks to Tom Metro for extending the invitation, and Rick ... for handling the technical setup.
Perhaps you remember Padre, The Perl IDE. It was started around 5 years ago, had a lot of development, and ended up being a quite decent programmer's editor.
Alas it's been suffering from lack of care for a couple of years now. Not because of lack of need or interest, but because nobody seems to have the time. And perhaps somebody needs to step up and grab the torch. Perhaps it's you?
Currently I feel it is good to prepare for Christmas.
To read in a larger file, /usr/share/dict/words in my case, I do
my @dictionary = split /\n/ , slurp '/usr/share/dict/words';
That is a cool piece of short code for the task. But - this is slow because I run a regex across a large file, I am told. Also, it is unnecessarily lots of code for the task. Look at that:
my @dictionary := '/usr/share/dict/words'.IO.lines;
Wow.
But also, that was slow a few hours ago. It has become much faster since. (Don't tell anybody, the trick was going to a Perl Workshop and talking to some people. Nice people, and very, very helpful. I am tempted to some day try and run a hackathon for them..)
Next task was searching for lines containing a $search_string:
for @dictionary -> $line {
if $line ~~ m/$search_string/ {
say "match: $line";
}
}
Looks pretty straightforward but is programming Perl 5 in Perl 6. Brrr. ;-)
[Cross-posted by invitation from
its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog.]
1960:
The ALGOL 60 spec comes out.
It specifies, for the first time, a block structured
language.
The ALGOL committee is well aware
that
nobody knows how to parse such a language.
But they believe that,
if they specify a block-structured
language, a parser for it will be invented.
Risky as this approach is, it pays off ...
Want to install Net::SSLeay on a Debian or Ubuntu system that you don't have root on, and doesn't have `libssl-dev` installed? Let me see if I can save you some time...
You are going to need to keep a compiled version of libssl around, and so you need to decide where that will live: I went for: `~/perl5/alien`...
mkdir ~/perl5/alien-src
mkdir ~/perl5/alien
cd ~/perl5/alien-src
apt-get source lib64z1-dev # Or the 32 bit version
apt-get source libssl-dev
cd zlib-1.2.3.4.dfsg/ # Or whatever it is
./configure --prefix=~/perl5/alien
make
make install
cd ..
cd openssl-1.0.1/ # Or whatever it is
# These options took me approximately 15 years to figure out
./config shared -fPIC --prefix=~/perl5/alien
make
The Alps, Western region. Northern Switzerland. Halfway between Zurich and Basel. Here you can find Olten, a nice little city which these last few days had an unusually high concentration of Perl aficionados roaming its streets. I'm talking about this year's Swiss Perl Workshop, the second incantation ever, and a very successful one.
"There is more than one way to enjoy it" is a slogan of YAPC::ASIA 2014. This is also another way that you can enjoy my story from photo on My Photo Gallery
The YAPC::EU 2015 conference in Granada will officially begin on Wednesday Septermber 2nd and will end on Friday 4th.
We also encourage you to be in Granada by Tuesday September 1st: we will be having other interesting events to warm up before the conference. For instance, if you'd like to use the venue to organize a meeting, a hackathon or a workshop just drop us a line.
In any case, make sure you don't miss the pre-conference meeting on Tuesday evening.
Most of my recentblog posts about Mojolicious have revolved around its non-blocking capabilities.
I like to write about those because I think that it is those capabilities that can bring new eyes to Perl from other languages, much like Node.js brought eyes to server-side javascript (for the same reason).
That said, lately I have had excuses to show off Mojolicious and when I have done so, it has been some of the other cool features that have garnered the “Ooooh”s and “Aaaah”s from onlookers.
In this article I will show you some of those extras, like accessing your generated pages and even app itself direcly from the command line.
I will also show how testing can be easy, powerful, expressive and yet still readably beautiful.
