blogs.perl.org

For several years I've been using a shell script that runs once a day from a cron job, and automagically subscribes me to the RSS feeds that rt.cpan creates for my modules. That means that whenever I release a new module, within a day or two I'll be subscribed to its bug reports, and within another day or so I'll start getting bug reports automatically emailed to me.

At some point RT got upgraded and my script broke. When I became aware of it, I fixed it, and I also put it on github. I hope you find it useful.

To run it you will need to set the RTUSER and RTPASS environment variables and possibly edit the variables at the top of the script. I assume that you use rss2email for reading RSS feeds. Use of any other tool for RSS is a bug, but if you wish to be buggy I'm sure you can work around that.

"First we ask, what impact will our algorithm have on the parsing done in production compilers for existing programming languages? The answer is, practically none." -- Jay Earley's Ph.D thesis, p. 122.

[ This is cross posted from its home at the Ocean of Awareness blog.

In the above quote, the inventor of the Earley parsing algorithm poses a question. Is his algorithm fast enough for a production compiler? His answer is a stark "no".

This is the verdict on Earley's that you often hear repeated today, 45 years later. Earley's, it is said, has a too high a "constant factor". Verdicts tends to be repeated more often than examined. This particular verdict originates with the inventor himself. So perhaps it is not astonishing that many treat the dismissal of Earley's on grounds of speed to be as valid today as it was in 1968.

But in the past 45 years, computer technology has changed beyond recognition and researchers have made several significant improvements to Earley's. It is time to reopen this case.

I'm on IRC just about all the time (my handle is "thaljef"). But I thought it might be interesting to actually schedule a session and invite people to come in and ask questions about Pinto, suggest a feature, report a bug, or just say "Hi".

So there will be two one-hour jam sessions in the #pinto channel on irc.perl.org this Thursday, May 2. The first will at 14:00 and the second will be at 18:00 (all times GMT). If you haven't used IRC before, this is an excellent guide.

Hope to see you all then!

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Monthly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list. This is the last monthly catch-up. I am planning to do weekly summaries for the week starting April 29, 2013. (But the road to hell is paved with yada yada yada...)

Topics from this month include:

• DAVEM TPF Grant Month 2013 report
• On eliminating external tools from the release process
• Blead on s390x
• archlib - (ed. RJBS asks, "Should we keep it or not?")
• Status of z/OS/EBCDIC
• NWCLARK TPF grant March report
• status on 5.18.0 (as of April 24, 2013)

cachegrind gives you information on the callstack and callcount, dependencies and efficiency. You can easily see hotspots in your code.

I use it to check the JIT and objmodel efficiency of potion, which is the vm for p2.

See my first post today Install kcachegrind on MACOSX with ports if you are on a Mac.

cachegrind

The first run with:

$ make bin/potion-s
$ valgrind --tool=callgrind -v --dump-every-bb=10000000 bin/potion-s example/binarytrees.pn
Ctrl-C

generates this sample

 $ open qcachegrind

Open one of the generated callgrind.out.pid.num files.

Especially for the weekend readers, here is my
interview with Michael Schwern. Enjoy and share!

Hi all,

Yesterday I released another IRC plugin for POE::Component::IRC: POE::Component::IRC::Plugin::WWW::Reddit::TIL

The plugin simply fetches a random title and link from the front page of Reddit's TodayILearned subreddit.

I used WWW::Shorten::Simple to return bitly links, and Mojo::JSON to decode reddit's API.

example:

curtis: !TIL
ircbot: curtis: TIL that the fighter squadron with the highest number of kills in the Battle of Britain during WWII were actually from Poland, and showed up two months after the battle had begun. http://bit.ly/ZN0qdB

links:

CPAN
Github

Hannover.pm is organising the 16th German Perl Workshop 2014 ( GPW 2014 ) in Hanover.

An official act.yapc.eu website is currently in the making and will be published in early June. Give us some time to understand and fully configure its back end.

The gpw2014 will take place from March 26th to 28th 2014 (Wednesday to Friday). The CeBIT will take place from March 11th to 15th, the Hannover Messe will take place from April 7th to 11th. We're smack-dab in the middle of those two big fairs, but hotel rooms will be affordable during that week.

I'll blog about the gpw2014 at least every month to keep you informed. But please also have a look at the official act website for major news.

If you like to chat you can join the IRC channel #gpw (#gpw2014 is for the organisers) on irc.perl.org.

German version: http://www.perl-community.de/bat/poard/thread/18295

Well, you don't want to install kcachegrind with port.

$ sudo port search cachegrind
kcachegrind @0.4.6 (devel)
    KCachegrind - Profiling Visualization

Because building KDE takes hours, and you wont need it other than for cachegrind. But there's a QT variant coming with kcachegrind, called qcachegrind. Maybe ports wants to use this variant. Or not, because kdelibs3 is listed as dependency.

$ sudo port info kcachegrind

kcachegrind @0.4.6, Revision 1 (devel) Variants: universal

Description: KCachegrind visualizes traces generated by profiling, including a tree map and a call graph visualization of the calls happening. It's designed to be fast for very large programs like KDE applications. Homepage: http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/

Library Dependencies: kdelibs3
Platforms: darwin
License: unknown
Maintainers: nomaintainer@macports.org

cross posted from my blog

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Monthly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.

Topics from this month include:

• CVE-2013-1667: important rehashing flaw
• Some facts/observations on *early adopter* perl use
• Bleadperl v5.17.9-200-g0e0ab62 breaks MLEHMANN/JSON-XS-2.33.tar.gz
• the freeze: it's getting cold in herre
• NWCLARK TPF grant February report
• more efficient precomputed hash keys
• Perlfunc for each(), keys(), values() has been changed

The title is mostly for search engines for anyone who encounters this in the future.

I have, for no particular reason, decided to implement the fractal diamond-square terrain generation algorithm in Perl. Sometimes it's nice to just play.

My first job was as a bus conductor, and my second one was as a student trainee in an engineering company - proper engineering, with production lines, big machines, hot things, and "danger of death" notices on equipment. In both of these, safety was an important concern, and especially in the second one it was drilled in to me that safety and quality are closely related and arise from systems, not merely from individual endeavour. While I never completed my degree in manufacturing/systems engineering (I dropped out because I was fed up after too many years in the classroom) I still retain an interest in the subject.

I recently came across the excellent Disastercast podcast by Drew Rae. Of particular interest to programmers is the sixth episode, which looks at the report into a fatal rail crash caused by a poor safety and testing culture.

4 reasons:

1: Right man.I was there when it started. At German Perl Workshop this march in Berlin Richard ignited with his inofficial keynote a lot of controversy. All what said wasn't new or IMO just opinion or chatter/not relevant. Later I spoke with him @ the social meeting in the computer game museum. (seriously, is there a better place for such an event?)

During our conversation I found out: he listens to people, he really loves Perl and he's the right kind of Person to do that, with the right experience set. Even if I don't share some of his fews/considerations what is important.

cross posted from my own blog

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Monthly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.

Topics from this month include:

• Will 5.18 also be smartmatch-challenged?
• Perl 7 or Perl 2013?
• EBCDIC support is on the chopping block
• perlopentut
  • perlopentut modernization
  • Don't patch perlopentut: rewrite it completely
• blockers on 5.18
  • blockers of 5.18.0: a foreword
  • blocker: $ENV{foo} = undef
  • blocker: disable new COW by default
  • blocker: "in cleanup" warnings from destructor
  • blocker: something about Data-Util
• Salvaging lexical $_ from deprecation
• deprecate @*, %*, &*, ** too

Stratopan is a new service for hosting custom repositories of Perl modules in the cloud. Private beta trials will begin early this summer. If you'd like to participate in the trials, please stop by https://stratopan.com and leave us your email address. We'll contact you with all the details when the trials begin.

Stratopan will host both public and private repositories with any combination of proprietary and open source Perl modules. And Stratopan is built on Pinto, the open source tool for creating custom CPAN-like repositories, so it has the same helpful tools for managing your application dependencies.

I didn't actually intend for this to be a series of posts, but hey, that's the consequence of going with the flow rather than rigidly planning everything out beforehand and it nicely mirrors the theme of:

• How to be agile without testing
• When must you test your code?

If you have not read those, I strongly recommend that you do so before continuing on this post. Mostly the comments have been positive, but Adrian Howard has offered some interesting counter-points and some good resources for further reading. I will not say that he's wrong, but there is a different way of looking at this situation.

During Apr 7 - 19, I conducted a web questionnaire targeting Japanese Perl users, which I titled "Perl5 Census Japan 2013" ;)

I purposely asked people spreading the news to specifically state that this was not just for hardcore Perl users, and that even if you did't use Perl much these days, I still wanted your input.

So over approximately two weeks I got 394 replies, and I've compiled the results in my blog. However, this is all in Japanese, and even with Google Translate, the outcome was pretty um, poor.

So here's a (terse) version in English so y'all can see. This will probably give you an insight into how the Japanese Perl community looks like, and what type of technology they prefer.

Cross posted from my own blog

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Monthly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.

Well, that was a nice little break. I didn't intend for it to be so long but there you go. Life gets real sometimes. To catch up I'm basically going month by month through most of April. I plan to resume monthly summaries starting the week of April 29, 2013.

Topics for this month:

• COW: big slowdown in simple pattern matches
• Who is the perl5 security team?
• module deprecations for 5.18
• NWCLARK TPF grant December report
• Perl5 blead now contains experimental (?[]) regex sets feature
• Why does Perl have its own regexp engine in 2012?
• perlopentut modernization
• use of LIKELY() and UNLIKELY() branch predictors

These are all of the "read the thread" link variety.

I have been trying to conduct interviews for, I think at least a year, but I was never able to figure out the technology. It is still not what I'd like to have, but I think it is reasonably good already to get started.

So let me show you the first interview with
Jeffrey Thalhammer, author of Perl::Critic and Pinto

Today I was glad to read that the successful merge of Pinto::Remote and Pinto::Server into its main Pinto repository made Pinto::Remote work again.

I wanted to know how difficult a setup of a Pinto server could become. The requirement behind was to access a single cpan-like repository for deploying server machines. The repository should contain company-provided distributions optionally combined with a collection of cpan-available distributions.