Well Why Not!

A question I relly have to ask myself more often. Well today I really got tired of my little solution to yesterdays Moose woes. I just couldn't take the sight of all of these

 
authorized bin_swap =>  [qw(Product::BRULE::Bin ], sub {
...
},(verifier=>Product::BRULE::Authorize->new())

instance calls in my nice clean code base. I did try a few little changes such as a global variable uck, and a singleton not bad but in the end I bit the bullet and decided that I need to add in some code of my own under MooseX.

The main reason is I liked how this worked and in a very elegant solution to to my code-base that can essilly extended with only a minor code change to a few roles if need be.

Questioning the Role of API Design in Perl

or Querying the Designated API of Perl Roles

Perl Encryption Primer

Timm Murray gave his Perl Encryption Primer talk last night at MadMongers. He’s been blogging about it for the past month. The posts are quite informative so you should check them out. There’s also a video up on YouTube about it now.

[From my blog.]

The everywhere trick

After reading Eric's Plack blog series today, I also stumbled upon his other blog post about a nice little Devel::Dwarn trick.

I also pepper use Data::Dump; dd $something; in my code a lot! So many that I created DD and DDC to lessen the typing. But this trick is better because I don't have to put the use statement at all. Plus I get some safety (I do accidentally check in these debugging print statements from time to time).

But putting -MData::Dump or -MData::Dump::Color on the command-line or PERL5OPT will only work for the code in the main package. What if I pepper debugging statements in some module? That's where another nice module written by Brock Wilcox comes in: everywhere. This module lets you use a module, well, everywhere. It works by installing a coderef at the start of @INC that will trap every require statement and import the modules you want to import everywhere to the target module. By the way, this @INC handler trick is also employed by some other cool modules, among others: App::FatPacker and PAR.

So now you can just put "dd" statements in your modules and test your application with:

perl -Meverywhere=Data::Dump yourapp.pl

or some shorter alias which I'm sure you'll soon create if you use this often enough.

Well Back on The Moose Track

So after my little crash yesterday I had to revisit my decision to use 'MooseX::AuthorizedMethods' as I was using it totally wrong. It seems to have been defaulted to use a 'User' class of some sort that has a roles method on it which is checked against a passed in array-ref of roles.

Here I was thinking it was checking for 'Moose::Role' classes applied to the calling class and doing all sorts of neat Mossey stuff when in fact this is more 'Instance/Application' code rather than foundation code. Well looking at Daniel's other CPAN offerings I could see how this could be a very very useful default for him. Anyway my bad I should of looked at it closer.

So what to do?

Well after much trial and a whole lot of error I finally got the 'verifier' to work (an example in the POD and or a test would of helped, hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink wink).

How to Coexist With the Bad People

Is There An Alternative To Long-Term Secrets? presents the mechanism used by LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) to ensure that the data you are preserving stays preserved in the face of attacks. (Think peer-to-peer voting to start with.)

Might be something that Bitcoin and the other digital currencies would want to think about...

The Hidden Benefit of Data-Driven Programming

Often we hear people talk about making your programming more "data-driven". When you can convert procedural code to a data structure (generally with a small procedural driver), instead of replicating procedural code, you just add another entry to your data structure. This is great with dispatch tables, repetitive chunks of code and state machines. However, there is a hidden benefit of it which will not only make you a better programmer, but it will make later maintenance programmers fail to notice a common flaw that your code lacks. They'll curse you if you have the flaw, but if you don't have it, they'll find that data-driven sections of your code are so easy to work with that they won't even think about it.

Grants Committee May Schedule

May round schedule will be similar to the March round, with several changes as below.

  • Longer period to solicit community feedback
  • Longer voting period
  • Shorter CFP period

In the long run, CFP period should be shortened further as every round will look the same and preparation can be done beforehand. Or even easier, we may always keep the CFP open and evaluate the applications every two months.

Here is the May schedule:

  • May 1: CFP opens
  • May 10: CFP closes
  • May 11: Solicit public feedback
  • May 22: Voting
  • May 31: Announcement of the results

CFP will be posted at news.perlfoundation.org.

Just Call Me Lucky

It seems I lucked out big time with my last post it turns out I was a little mistaken on how 'MooseX::AuthorizedMethods' works.

As you see I ran into this problem today

 

Can't locate object method "user" via package 'Product::Move at C:/Dwimperl/perl/site/lib/MooseX/Meta/Method/Authorized/CheckRoles.pm line 13.
...

That is very odd I thought as it was the same sort of code I used the other day

Statistics for perl hash tables

The following data is from a 64bit perl-5.19.10 (i.e. 32 bit jenkins - corrected from 64 bit siphash - which randomly shuffles the 2 first entries of collisions), running the core test suite with -DH.

number of hash keys:

Announcing App::Midgen v0.32

So what’s new?

  • Follow the meta-2 phase-requirements naming.
  • The ablity to recast phase-requirements.

Plus theres more

  • App::Midgen v0.30 which was a refactor to support Perl 5.8.x

A Couple of other blogs that now make sense to share with you

for the rest of the blog go here

Any comments leave them here.

Perl Encryption Primer: Presentation for Madison Perl Mongers, 2014/04/08

You Can't Get there From Here

My last few posts you may of noticed I have been using Moose with a more professional end in mind rather than my usual playing about with AD&D so I figured I might as well keep going on with it a bit as these are real world (well at least my world) situations rather than contrived gaming stuff. As well my latest round of work is a great source of posts.

Well on the platter today is 'MooseX::AuthorizedMethods' char broiled au jus with in season mixed vegetables with Gorau Glas served on the side.

So this module really doesn't do a whole lot it simply add a little more sugar to your Moose stew, by exporting the "authorized" declarator so now you can stop the invocation of a method if the invoker does not have a specific role.

Some ideas for improving the community - The ANA initiative

The following is posted on behalf of Roman Filippov and Al Newkirk, kindly share your thoughts on the mentioned points.

I would like to propose the following items for discussion, in no particular order. This is just a brain dump of the ideas I have been thinking for a while now.

Why Companies Turn Me Down For Contracts

My current contract is lovely. I'm having a lot of fun and the environment is awesome. However, it's a short contract. I took it, in part, because it was a problem space I wanted to do more work in. Because it's a short contract I'm already working on negotiating my next contract (a perpetual hobby for freelancers), but I thought I'd experiment with a different approach: asking you to reach out to me. If you think I can help your company and you're not in a position to hire me directly, go to those who are and talk to them. If you want to hire me or one of the talented developers who works with me, drop me a line (I can't guarantee that I'm available, but you never know). If this approach works, I can do more work on open source or Veure instead of spending all of my "between" time negotiating contracts.

That being said, I don't always get contracts I negotiate for and sometimes I turn them down. However, if you're an individual considering freelancing, I thought it worth discussing some of the obstacles I've faced.

Dear Perl lazyweb: how to construct read-only data objects out of JSON?

I recently updated a client called WebService::Geocodio for the Geocod.io geocoding service. Traditionally, geocoding means turning a mailing address into latitude/longitude coordinates (or the reverse operation, turning latitude/longitude into a mailing address.)

In a recent update of the upstream service they included the ability to fetch additional data fields including timezone, congressional district, school district and so forth. Is there a good CPAN module (or a recommendation) to take a Perl data structure like a hash and turn it into a Moo(::Lax) object "automagically?" I had a look but I didn't find anything especially suitable.

These data structures are purely informational in nature and just have getters for their attribute names. This would be less difficult to accomplish using Moose (obviously) but I'm wondering if there are any suggestions for something that installs getters for hash keys dynamically and is Moo-friendly.

Thanks!

A Little Moose Help

Well I was busily writing some tests for a large processor interface where you would pass an object too it and it will merrily process away on it. Well all of the object I was passing into it are written in Moose and I did not need to test the 'State' or 'values' of these object, what I needed to tests where some of the lower-level admin functions in the interface, that really had nothing to do with the objects themselves more about reading config files connecting and alike.

The problem I was having was to test the 'Interface' I had to give it a valid 'object' as that was a 'required' attribute. That I could live with it was all the objects I was was going to pass into it needed to be instancates and they all had a large number of 'required' attributes as well.

\r, \n, and ... \R ?

It's common knowledge that on Windows, a line of text generally ends with a \r\n characters sequence, and on a POSIX system a line of text will end with \n.

Less well known is Perl's support for the escape sequence '\R'.

What's \R?

It's definitely not the inverse of \r.

It's a pattern (so for now its only useful in regexes) that matches Unicode's TR-13, The Unicode Consortium's guidelines for what counts as a newline. It's useful in a regular expression to match \r, \n, \r\n, or a few other character sequences that are used to represent newlines, so you don't have to remember them. It's worth noting that it is a character sequence, not a character, so it doesn't really make sense in a bracketed character class.

Custom DBIx::Class ResultSets

On my personal blog I wrote about Veure, an MMORPG that I'm writing in Perl. I followed that up with a post about the roadmap to an invite-only alpha. It's a lot of work, but my company has now decided to commit to it and figure out how to finance the work. This browser game is huge in intended scope, but fortunately, Perl has given me the power to get much of it done quickly. In fact, according to my private Veure github repo, I now have 17% of the ALPHA tasks done. That's up from 0% when I posted the roadmap a little over a week ago. In short, progress is fast.

Currently I'm working on character combat and that's where custom DBIx::Class resultsets have made my life easier.

List of Running Grants

We maintain a list of the running/completed grants at www.perlfoundation.org.

Looking at the running grants list, there's one thing I can clearly say: We need more grants!

In the next few blog entries, I'd like to discuss the efforts we made and we will make so that the grants program is more useful for the community.

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