My situation: work on PC at the office, on laptop elsewhere. All of data already in git repositories--well almost, photos and videos are currently out, due to their size. I use SSD on both computers, and my partitions are encrypted.

Some of the data are public, like open source Perl projects. Some work-related, where we have our company git repos. And some private, like personal notes, addressbook, agendas/todos, ledger files, etc.

Since I've read that SSDs usually die without any warning, I am quite paranoid and install post-commit hook to backup data after each commit (however, when the lag due to backup is becoming annoying, I disable it momentarily).

For public repos, I've got it covered. There are services like github, bitbucket, or whatever which you can just push your work to.

The other day I was idly browsing Perl-related videos on YouTube. I saw quite a few with very low visitor count.

For example, I bumped into a presentation by Brabie about the Eco-System of CPAN Testers. It had less than 20 views!

I find it sad that all the energy Barbie put in preparing and giving the talk at YAPC, where maybe 50-100 people heard it, and all the work the organizers of YAPC put in recording the video and publishing it, and in the end less than 20 people watch it.

So I decided I go forward with my long-time plan and launched the Perl TV.

The idea is to collect interesting Perl-related videos, make them easy to find (e.g. cross linking based on their content, the CPAN modules they cover, etc.), provide a textual description and notes of the video, and promote them.

I've updated the Perl Nerd Merit Badge campaign with a candidate design using the velociraptor from Sebastian's perl-raptor repo. If you want a badge, pledge $8 to the campaign.

If you would like to get such a badge but can't use Crowdtilt, let me know how you'd like to pay and I'll reserve a badge for you.

If you're a Perl mongers group who wants to buy several at once, I can make a deal with you to get cheaper shipping to a single address.

I have recently returned to working on Arriba, the PSGI-compliant web server with support for the SPDY protocol, modeled on Starman.

I sort of released it (on GitHub only, not on CPAN) back in January, at that time the code was passing the tests in Plack::Test::Suite when running as a regular HTTP/HTTPS server. My next goal, before considering the module ready to be released on CPAN, was to make it pass those tests in SPDY mode. This meant I needed to add support for SPDY to good old LWP::UserAgent, which was used as the HTTP client in Plack tests.

Over the weeks/months that followed, I made a few attemps at tackling this problem, but had a hard time wrapping my head around the architecture of LWP::UserAgent and figuring out a reasonable way to add SPDY into the mix. Having very little time to devote to this project, I didn't get anywhere with it.

A couple days ago I uploaded a Perl-Critic policy to find and complain about things like foreach ( <FOO> ) {...}. The problem (or at least potential problem) with this is that it sucks the entire file into memory before performing the first iteration. Which may be what you wanted, but may not be too.

I plan to leave it at a development release for a couple weeks to allow time for comments and so on. You can find it at its CPAN Search page.

Today is a relatively minor holiday in the US, but I had work off all the same. I found myself experimenting (when I probably should have been working on my YAPC::Brazil talk :-/). Thanks to today’s PerlWeekly (you are a subscriber right??), I found out about an interesting post by Johnny Moreno which creates a tiny json service backend using Perl. Of course it uses CGI.pm to do so, which made me curious what a Mojolcious port would look like.

If there is one thing about testing in Perl which bugs me, it's that most testing in Perl is what cgi-lib.pl is to Plack. The following is mostly a rant and I'm also guilty of many of these sins.

Yes, we have a beautiful testing infrastructure around our tests. For example, if I want to know which operating systems and versions of Perl my Code::CutNPaste module fails on, I just go take a look. Or I can quickly see almost 3,000 passing test reports for aliased (woo hoo!). The Perl community is proud of tools like this and we should be. Just reading about Perl's test-infected culture is fantastic and other language which claim to be test-infected often come in a poor second.

Er, sort of.

This past May, The Perl Foundation awarded a grant to fund development of a couple features in Pinto. Pinto is a robust tool for curating a private repository of CPAN modules, so you can build your application with the right modules every time. This is my second progress report on that work.

In Perl, accessor access is about 30 times slower than direct access. For example,

  # Accessor access
  $obj->title;
 
  # Direct access
  $obj->{title};

"$obj->title" is about 30 times slower than "$obj->{title}". In current perl, we can't replace accessor access with direct access in general way.

but in mop, we can distinguish method and attribute. If so, we may replace accessor access with direct access. I want mop to rest capability to define this fast accessor.

Steven said "$self->title" is overhead, but if fast accessor is implemented, this is no longer overhead, and we can access attribute by unified way without performance overhead.

PDL (”Perl Data Language”) gives standard Perl the ability to compactly store and speedily manipulate the large N-dimensional data arrays which are the bread and butter of scientific computing.

PDL turns Perl into a free, array-oriented, numerical language similar to (but, we believe, better than) such commercial packages as IDL and MatLab. One can write simple perl expressions to manipulate entire numerical arrays all at once. Simple interactive shells, pdl2 and perldl, are provided for use from the command line along with the PDL module for use in Perl scripts.

As a frequent PDL user and occasional contributor, I am happy to pass along this note from Chris Marshall and the whole PDL team. Read the entire release message here.

It is with great pleasure that the PDL development team announces the release of the latest version of the PDL Data Language with 64bit platform support.

This release would not have been possible without the contributions of developersChris Marshall, Craig DeForest, Derek Lamb, Dima Kogan, Rob/Sisyphus, David Mertens, Diab Jerius, William Parker, and Henning Glawe.

A special thanks also to those who helped with bug reports, problem discussions, and, of course, participation in CPAN Testers which has helped to make the best tested PDL release ever!

Enjoy and Happy PDL-ing! The PDL Development Team

The slides from my MadMongers Real-Time Web Apps talk are now available online. 

[From my blog.]

The "perlito" perl5 to perl6 compiler is online at: http://perlcabal.org/~fglock/perlito5to6.html.

It is also available as an irc bot for snippets and as a command line script.

I've recently been listening to Software Test Podcast. And I was particularly struck by episode 41, in which the presenters interview James Whittaker. He used to be Head Testing Honcho at Google until moving to Microsoft a year and a bit ago.

Almost all of what he says is good news for the perl community. The way we value testing and make it part of the community and how in our day jobs with perl most of us have "testing as an activity not a role", as he puts it, is not common elsewhere, but elsewhere is catching up to what we've been doing.

There is some bad news for us though. Almost all perl code has terrible diagnostics, so if we happen to ship something buggy, it can be awful hard to figure out what's going wrong even if you've got a shiny new test case written for the bug.

Installation

Install irssi

sudo apt-get install irssi

Grab the script:

mkdir -p $HOME/development
cd $HOME/development
git clone https://github.com/chiselwright/irc-notifications.git
cd irc-notifications

Make sure you have required perl modules available

perl Makefile.PL

Install any missing modules. (TODO: make irssi scripts work with perlbrew)

Install the script:

sh SETUP.sh

You should see something like:

➔ sh SETUP.sh
mkdir: created directory `/home/chisel/.irssi'
mkdir: created directory `/home/chisel/.irssi/scripts'
mkdir: created directory `/home/chisel/.irssi/scripts/autorun'

If you now run

In my recent post about debugging perl using Devel::hdb I claimed that
Devel::ptkdb has not been released since 2004, but a commenter pointed out there
are recent released on Sourceforge.

Does anyone here know why is it not uploaded to CPAN?

Are there other projects that somehow stopped being uploaded to CPAN?

local::lib is a great way of providing a contained set of Cpan modules for an application. But it can be awkward if you wish to use it to provide an updated File::Spec.

I wished to use Path::Tiny, which I installed using cpanm to a local::lib directory. That requires a newer version of File::Spec than came with the Perl we're using, so cpanm downloaded and installed that to the local::lib directory too, just as you'd want.

Our programs specify their local::lib directory, so they can be run by users without them having to fiddle around setting up environment variables (on Windows). Unfortunately, however, using it in our programs like this didn't work for Path::Tiny:

use local::lib qw<Cpan>;
use Path::Tiny;

That complains “File::Spec version 3.4 required--this is only version 3.33”.

For quite some months I was running after crazy potion and p2 testing problems, which looked like compiler or stack alignment problems.

potion, the vm for p2 uses tricky volatile words to force the compiler to put all GC-able data onto the stack, and not in registers so that the GC only needs to walk the stack to find all accessible data. No need to come to tricks like the boem-weiser libgc does to spill registers somewhere to be able to track them. The second trick is to keep the stack properly aligned, at least 16 byte on darwin, but in case of SSE or AVX instructions or with double return values (e.g. atof) the alignment must be 32 byte.

But as is turned out the problem was not related to a missing volatile, which would have caused GC troubles, i.e. SIGBUS errors, nor stack alignment problems (i.e. random data corruption, esp. in the main interpreter).

I released GitPrep 1.3 at 2013/10/09. You can install portable GitHub system into Unix / Linux easily. It is second major release.

Because you can install GitPrep into your own server, you can create users and repositories without limit. You can use GitPrep freely because GitPrep is free software. You can also install GitPrep into shared rental server.

GitPrep (Document and Repository)

Features added in 1.3 are:

-Support Smart HTTP. You can do "git clone", "git fetch", "git pull" with high performance . And you can do "git push" via HTTP protocol. Authentication is Basic Authentication.
-Support Markdown syntax. If you put README.md, it is parsed as Mardown and displayed. and extension is ".md" file is also parsed as Markdown and displayed.
-Support submodule. Display link to submodule repository.

This version up have big advantage. You can do push and pull via HTTP by Smart HTTP support. This mean that you can complete all works only by normal GitPrep users, not gitprep user for SSH.

By this, we will do more good access controll in the future.

Example

You can try GitPrep example.

GitPrep Example

Download

Download

Document

GitPrep Document and Repositry

The estimated ticket prices for the German Perl Workshop 2014 in Hanover are now available.

Imagine the following scenario. Something has gone wrong. It's Monday (of course it is), you're doing your best to find the underlying cause, yet a strange force is actively interfering -- you are required to provide a status update every 15 minutes.

Trouble is, you can't give much of an update. The best you can do is write something like

We're still trying to find the source of the problems, and a possible workaround.

A while later, after several variations of the above phrase have been posted, you transition to another state. Now, you can write

We have found the underlying cause, and we're working on fixing it.

Again, it's not much of an update, but it's something. Both phrases are general enough that some problems later, you start to wonder ,,Could I generate those updates automatically?''

Of course you could.