Esperanto may be a saner language than English in every way.

But English is the language of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Byron, of Dylan Thomas; the language of Arthur Conan-Doyle and Agatha Christie; the language of Tolkien and C S Lewis; of Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. It's the language of Stoker and Shelley.

Wikipedia notes that over 100 original novels have been published in Esperanto. Big woop-dee-doo(!)

I want to be able to use Perl 6 day to day, but not if that involves missing out on Perl 5's literature (i.e. CPAN).

People may have noticed my absence from the Perl world lately. I have been writing my Ph.D. thesis (179 pages on Ultrafast Electron Microscopy with my Physics::UEMColumn Perl module featured) and defense.

Ack is a tool for searching code and text. It works much like the unix tool grep, although it is imbued with the power of Perl. To mark the release of Ack 2.0 though I wanted to mention a few one-liners that made my life easier in this stressful time.

Source: https://github.com/languages

JavaScript 21%
Ruby 14%
Python 8%
Java 8%
Shell 8%
PHP 7%
C 6%
C++ 4%
Perl 4%
Objective-C 3%

Co-workers often ask me, what is faster. This or this?

Of course you can benchmark the real speed, but theoretically you can look at the optrees and predict what will be faster.

We are getting the version check failed on the perl Mozilla LDAP module installed from redhat package.
#Perl -MMozilla::LDAP::Utils -e 1

Mozilla::LDAP::Utils does not define $Mozilla::LDAP::Utils::VERSION--version check failed at /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/Mozilla/LDAP/Conn.pm line 52.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/Mozilla/LDAP/Conn.pm line 52.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/Mozilla/LDAP/Utils.pm line 49.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/Mozilla/LDAP/Utils.pm line 49.
Compilation failed in require.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted

I'm pleased to announce that mod_perl 2.0.8 is coming to a CPAN mirror near you, as well as the following Apache project website links (note that the Apache.org links may take a few hours to propagate to the mirrors).

Thanks to all the contributors on this version!

http://apache.org/dist/perl/mod_perl-2.0.8.tar.gz
http://apache.org/dist/perl/mod_perl-2.0.8.tar.gz.asc (pgp sig)

Congratulations to Nigel Horne for submitting the 30 millionth CPAN Testers Report. The report itself was a PASS for DBI.

Perl 5.18 will ship with a change in behaviour when using getline() (aka the <$handle> operator) on handles marked as returning Unicode where $/ is a reference to an integer.

I've started a new Perl website at perltricks.com. Through the website I'm publishing articles on all things Perl such as basic syntax guides, quick tips and tricks and community related news / profiles.

The site has been up for a few weeks and there are 19 articles so far. Check it out - I'd really like to hear any feedback or criticisms you have of the site. Particularly any suggestions on the style of the site, and ways to improve the programming examples.

If you would like to publish your own article via the site or have an idea for an article, please email me.

Edit: the site is powered by Catalyst and DBIx::Class using Template Toolkit.

Thanks !

The end of the Perl QA Hackathon 2013 in Lancaster was as busy as it started. My drive to Manchester Airport with 3 hackers was enjoyable. I dropped two of them of at the airport and the third one at a lovely small hotel/b&b near the airport. The drive back was filled with Sevendust, rather loud, nice heavy metal, missed that for days.

Just before we left we were told to our big surprise that at 17:00 the building had to be empty, because of university rules. So nobody had time to do a standup and tell what they accomplished. So no list is made. Yet. Bit of a strange ending to an otherwise well-organised meeting. I hope the accomplishments will be collected and publicised in other ways, because it was a lot.

Pre-hackathon:

We Tux

Day 1

My first day was largely spent analyzing and fixing bugs in the Module::Build::Tiny toolchain, and some Lancaster consensus discussions on various toolchain pieces. This was a very useful day, that ended with some wonderful food.

Day 2

Spent the first part of the day fixing bugs I made the day before, then helped out with other people's issues. Didn't participate in all consensus discussions as PAUSE isn't really my thing.

Day 3

Only

Since the crowd funding campaign for Pinto is already off to such a great start, I figured that I better roll up my sleeves and start writing some code. The primary goal of the campaign is to enable Pinto users to pull specific versions of modules into their repository without having to know precisely which distribution they came from. Read on to hear what I've done so far...

A co-worker came to me today with a curious error message:

use DateTime;
my $date = DateTime->new( year => 2013, month => 4, day => 15 );
$date->set_time_zone("Australia/Sydney");
print $date->today;'

This code gives the error Can't locate object method "_normalize_nanoseconds" via package "2013-04-15T00:00:00" at /usr2/local/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.16.3/lib/site_perl/5.16.3/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DateTime.pm line 252.

The package "2013-04-15T00:00:00" is the curious part: It looks like a stringified DateTime, but who could possibly be stringifying a DateTime object and then using that as a package name?

I blogged about visiting Evozon and giving a Perl pitch talk to students, trying to get them interested in Perl. I've decided to share the draft I wrote a day earlier with the ideas I wanted to express. So, here it is:

Type::Tiny is a tiny (no non-core dependencies) framework for building type constraints. OK, probably not that exciting. How can I grab your attention?

                         Rate            WithMoose WithMooseAndTypeTiny
 WithMoose             8071/s                   --                 -25%
 WithMooseAndTypeTiny 10778/s                  34%                   --

The benchmark script is shown later so you can check I'm not doing anything hideously unfair to disadvantage Moose.

How can I hold your attention?

Converting JBrowse into a Catalyst Application

Background

JBrowse is a genome viewer written in javascript, html, allow with the usual Bio::Graphics modules. It can be run in the catalyst framework.

This assumes you have Catalyst, Catalyst dependencies, JBrowse, and JBrowse dependencies (mostly perl/bioperl/bio::graphics things) installed.

Get rid of your old distributions on CPAN! A couple of years ago, I asked CPAN authors to visit their delete files PAUSE page to "increase their Schwartz". Sadly, the use.Perl page has disappeared; the Schwartz Factor is the ratio of latest distros to the total size of CPAN. I named it after Randal Schwartz, who invented MiniCPAN.

Wendy noted that deleting distros was a topic at the recent Lancaster QA workshop. She didn't say much, but it sure sounded like people were looking to create policies and work to police something.

CPAN has never been curated, and that's by design. Let's keep it that way so the rules committees leave it alone. :)

Hi All

Here's an image displaying various options re SQL joins.

Wish I'd see this years, nay, decades, ago.

First of all, I have written my recent hacktivity log over on my new dreamwidth.org blog, and I am not posting it here, because it involves a lot of non-code hacktivity, which I expect to do quite a lot more of from now.

That put aside, I am copying here something that I wrote in a Slashdot comment about why I am looking for a job not in IT. Especially of note there are my frustrations with employers being too domineering and control-freaks, and not letting the good developers do things the way they most prefer to do it. Here goes:

The QA Hackathon 2013 in Lancaster went today into its last day. Still busy, bustling with energy, concentration, typing.

First thing to do was bring somebody back to the hotel because he forgot a bag, and bring him back to the university. Ah well, nice car trip.

This morning I finished up the other pages of the meeting of yesterday. I was just 2 minutes away from finishing when the next meeting started, about Testing. A lot of Testing. I filled 12 pages with notes about Testing. And after that I had lunch while transcribing those 12 pages. I handed the written notes to David Golden and emailed them to him too.

Topics today were "Automated testing vs non-automated testing" (which involved using some environment variables of which I think they should have existed years ago) and "Installing tests" (but what the real topic of that last one was, I still do not understand, I hope I will read it when David makes a report of it).