blogs.perl.org

Hey guess what no tests today and really not much of a blog either.

I and now moving into actually creating a distribution for this little mod of mine now that I have all the code written and all the tests done, though I really should do the POD next I am going to step out of order a little and look at different ways to create a distrabution

Well the reason why I am doing this is that I have only ever done it the craftsman way. Or in other words by hand and hope for the best.

So I have been shopping about looking for something that will help me out. Well went to META::CPAN and just entered 'dist' in the search box and hit enter. Well got over 1000 hits. So this is a subject that has a good deal of potential or perhaps it just something that every programmer likes to do her own way.

Recently one of our readers checked if Tie::ExtraHash was installed on his system running perl 5.18.0.
He used perl -MTie::ExtraHash -e1 but it said the module was not installed. So he wanted to install it from CPAN, which then offered to upgrade perl to perl-5.18.2.

It turns out Tie::ExtraHash is declared in the pm file of Tie::Hash and you should not use it on its own.

That set aside, wouldn't it be better if all the packages, at least in the Perl core, had their
own pm file with their own version number?

It certainly has some advantages.

BTW If you'd like to make sure in your code every package has its own pm file,
you can use the Perl::Critic policy Prohibit Multiple Packages in the same .pm file. It could be used to improved your code one policy at a time.

Perl, I like you just the way you are. There's been some interesting features and fancy OO modules in the last ten years, but my code is still 5.6.0...

Perl prototypes are fascinating. They enable: making argument count enforceable at compile time; adding an implicit argument; changing how a list of arguments are parsed; changing how individual arguments are parsed; and even allowing Perl to optimize away a call to that function. Unfortunately, it's also impossible to count on any of these things; those changes only take effect if the sub can be reliably looked up when the call to it is being compiled, and since calling a sub with a & specifically prevents doing that look up in the first place.

Well I really mean it this is I think the last last .t for this module. This time I will be testing the use of my new module as a trait. So here goes

I start with the usual suspects

Three days ago, Ovid was nice enough to write about variable highlighting in vim. When I tried that vim script myself, I soon ran into the bug that was also found by Robin: If the cursor is above a hash, the actual use of the hash won't be matched.

So I took a look at the vimscript code and ... found that it's way too much code for my taste.

Math::Prime::Util 0.41 was released, with new functions (valuation, invmod, vecsum, binomial, forpart), and the usual crop of performance improvements. In particular, primality testing on x86_64 got another big speedup.

I recently posted a quick update on the p5-mop project the other day, something I have been meaning to do for a long time. I am sure given the slow and often rocky progress of this project that many people have their doubts if will ever see the light of day, and to be quite honest, some days I found myself doubting it as well.

Well been eating way too much over the past posts so I though i would go though today's little upset for a change in pace.

Well today I was going back in time a little and had to write up a little script that would get the latest file on a dir and count the number of lines in it (don't ask why) and the do a little more processing.

Well it seemed simple enough and I have done similar before but for kicks I decided to do a Google search for 'Get the latest file with Perl'

Well my eye got sore after reading the endless variations on the same theme, from 30 line monstrosities to one line wonders that would befuddle even Peteris Krumins?

Well then I harkened back to something that Lary said in his YAPC::EU 2010 Keynote talk, that Perl was denounced in the Unix world because it does everything but doesn't do it well.

After viewing an interesting post in Reddit about programming in color (syntax highlighting that focuses on data flow instead of syntax), I saw that one user had developed a very similar feature for PHP. The idea is to highlight the variable that your cursor is currently on. I liked what he wrote, so I modified it for Perl.

Summary: you can use CatalystX::LeakChecker to check every request in your test suite for memory leaks.

From my blog, here.

A while back, Mark Fisher wrote about DOIs. As an academic, I asked about how I might cite a DOI for some Perl work. I was recently made aware of two possibilities.

Well if you believed the title of this post then you will believe this one as well. So I left off yesterday with a failing .t

 
my $test2 = test_one_of_fail->new();
eval {
   $test2->ping();
};

ok(scalar($@),"test_one_of_fail");

In the case I was able to run the 'ping' sub so it fail because I got nothing in the '$@'

Following in the footsteps of Booking.com, NET-A-PORTER and All Around The World I am happy to announce that Nestoria is launching a developer blog as a sister site to our more general company blog.

You can find it here: http://devblog.nestoria.com.

Bookmark it, Feedly it, follow it on Tumblr - whatever the kids are doing these days.

As you can see we've already made four posts since we launched on Tuesday, 2 days ago. We don't intend to keep up that kind of pace, but we do intend to post at least once a week on various topics that interest us and we hope will interest you. If you're interested in Perl, Linux, web servers, database servers, JavaScript, testing, mobile web, software development, virtual servers, physical servers, and/or system administration then you should find something interesting in the blog sometime in the coming months :-)

If you want an overview of Nestoria I've actually given quite a bit of information away in an interview I did with Ovid right here on blogs.perl.org: Perl Startups: Lokku/Nestoria.

As a sneak peak one of our next posts on the Nestoria Dev Blog looks like this:

Of course I couldn't give away the winner here - you'll have to read the blog to find out who wins this month's Gittip donation :-)

So, in my most recent careering of things, I'm doing QA/Special Projects work for a startup in California. (Cytobank, if you're curious. I have rarely worked with more splendid folks, I have to say.)

Under the 'Special Projects' umbrella is a crusty little batch testing tool I'm cobbling together. Nothing spectacular (and in deep need of refactor already, I keep seeing stuff that needs work), but it's nice to get back into an editor and actually see code I wrote do work.

It's also pretty nice to think about the possible long-term implications. The mail monitoring system I wrote over a decade ago, Matriarch, is still in use as far as I know. Now, I've got Octypus: We have Sauce, we have Selenium, and Octypus gets tentacular in both of 'em. We tell it what to run, tell it what platforms to run it on, and it makes the runs requested happen. Boom boom boom.

I'm still working on the reporting features it needs, but oh, I have missed this stuff. I really, really have. It's good to be back in the text editor, y'know? Maybe I'm waxing a little too ecstatic, but it's the day after my nhhhhmpth birthday, and I feel the elation of ten years ago. That's something to remember, at least for me. :D

Does anyone know the answer?

It's currently just publishing anything that has the word "Perl" in it. You'd be surprised how many people have "Perl" as their last name.

If you know who the person is behind the account, please contact me, or contact them telling them I would like to contact them about it.

It's getting ridiculous.

Well nearing the end of my test now, I have done the basic stuff in this post,the api parts here, the validation bits in this one and the instance bits with my last one. So to carry on I think it would be prudent to test this in a composed setting though I doubt anyone would use it like that.

I decided to add a binomial(n,k) function to Math::Prime::Util, and found some interesting things while doing it. Overflow detection and mitigation in C and Perl were the first thing. Next was looking at negative arguments, which led to finding some differences in various solutions as well as filing a bug report for Math::BigInt.

Video of Dorothy’s Jenkins presentation from MadMongers

[From my blog.]

The Perl community on gittip has 499 members right now (Wednesday morning, GMT). Who will be the 500th member? It could be you!

Jerome Eteve was the 500th member! Jerome is the author of Alien::ImageMagick, and more.