I have enjoyed actively participating in the Los Angeles Perl Mongers and Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers groups, but recently relocated to Salt Lake City, UT. So, what stands between Salt Lake City and a Perl Mongers group? You (you know who you are). Anyone interested in participating in a Perl Mongers group in Salt Lake City, please follow-up here or get in touch with me via email.
A request has been submitted to the folks at pm.org for a mailing list, a pm.org hosted site, and a link to the main pm.org map page. Since those nuts and bolts are fastened by volunteers it takes awhile. But we don't have to wait. The time to start organizing something is now.
Perl Mongers groups provide excellent opportunities to get to know others in the local Perl community, to introduce newcomers to Perl's many ways to do it, to learn, to share, and to socialize.
Just a little note to announce the release of Galileo version 0.023. Galileo is my CMS that aims to be 100% CPAN installable, all you have to do is this:
$ cpanm Galileo
$ galileo setup
$ galileo daemon
This release makes installing even better, because now when you run galileo setup you get a web interface to configure your CMS and then install the database!
Ok that image is just slightly ahead of what is now on CPAN, but its close :-)
We are proud to announce the full schedule of talks at Swiss Perl Workshop 1. As you'll see,
there is a very interesting range of speakers and topics through the day.
There are a few small and big things that we did last week for the conference. Let us tell you about them.
First of all, we signed a contract with the river cruise boat and are thinking now of the best possible route so that we can both see the incredible Kiev landscape from water and have enough time for the social part on board. Also, we are working on the buffet menu. All in all, the cruise is going to be an amazing conference experience. Just take a look at their official video.
Let us also remind that less than a month is left until the Early Bird price expires. If you buy a ticket today, you can save 18% of its price. This is only possible before 1 April.
At the moment, I'm writing a presentation about Mason2. The goal is to somehow convince my colleagues to consider using Mason. Instead of Template Toolkit.
As part of it, I thought I'd do a bit of performance benchmarking against Template Toolkit. So I put together a reasonably complex mini set of templates using both systems. Well, as complex as TT can take in reality. Which is not very much.
Notes from a Newbie document the creation and deployment of yardbirdfanclub.org with Perl Catalyst on shared hosting. They are intended for a Perl Catalyst Newbie who would like to study the creation and deployment of a simple Perl Catalyst application.
Now that we've experimented a little and are confident in what we're doing, we'll start over from scratch, beginning with authentication and authorization as explained in the Catalyst tutorials.
Let's compare the latest constant.pm to a minimal equivalent:
$ ./perl -Ilib -le 'print $^V'; /usr/bin/time -l ./perl -Ilib -le 'use constant X => 1..5; print X' 2>&1 | grep 'maximum resident'
v5.17.10
3829760 maximum resident set size
$ /usr/bin/time -l ./perl -I/tmp -le 'use constant X => 1..5; print X' 2>&1 | grep 'maximum resident'
1200128 maximum resident set size
That's 2.6MB bloat to define a constant. (The culprit turns out to be
utf8, natch, to handle Unicode constants. (Why, God?!)). For reference,
/tmp/constant.pm
, which does most useful constant-type stuff, is here:
If you are still undecided on joining us at Swiss Perl Workshop in Bern on March 22, it's probably because you are worried that the venue may be hard to reach. You can put your mind at rest. :-)
This was the second course I've attended from Dave Cross, and the first one under the Perl School banner. Dave has been using Perl heavily for around two decades up to and including this year, which gives him a very deep knowledge that is also firmly up-to-date. He is also an excellent presenter and trainer, so all that knowledge I just mentioned comes pouring out freely in a way that is easy to understand.
It is time for Chapter 4 of Allen Downey’s Think Python refashioned in Perl 6. I just needed some time to make a simple wrapper for his Swampy framework. Feel free to install and play along, but don’t rattle Swampy.pm6 too much. I have only implemented enough to finish this chapter.
Starting from today, you can sign in to Play Perl using email, even if you don't have a twitter account. (It won't ask you for password; it uses Mozilla Persona.)
Quick recap: Play Perl is a new social and gamified website for Perl developers, where people can declare their open source plans and get points for completing them. I launched it 2 weeks ago.
This week was much slower than the last, due to me being back to my daily job from vacation. Still, I managed to get more than a 100 commits in, including:
EplSite ETL is an open source tool, developed using Perl, to do easy the data migrations, doing extraction, transformation, validation and load in a very fast way.
It is very low resource consuming and use a web interface for data transformation creation.
The transformations can run using the web interface or a batch process and as a batch process you can schedule tasks to run in automatic way.
EplSite ETL runs in all the environments where Perl runs, Linux,Windows,OSX, Unix.
It was built by people involved in data migrations so, it contains the necessary to do the migration(Extract Transformation, validation and load) and do it well.
The last release is 1.1, it is running in production environments now, EplSite ETL can be downloaded from here:
Crypt::RSA is a module that's been around since 2001, when Vipul Ved Prakash put it on CPAN. It's had only very minor updates since then, and gets used by a few other modules. However, it's had one big problem: it uses Math::Pari for all its calculations, and two of its dependencies (Crypt::Primes and Crypt::Random) also use Pari. Debian in particular has been pining for a version that gets away from the Math::Pari dependency (see RT52689 for some reasons).
I decided to go ahead and do the Pari removal, and it's on CPAN as Alt::Crypt::RSA::BigInt. This uses Ingy's Alt framework -- install the Alt version and you get a new shiny Crypt::RSA. Install the old version and you're back again. There are no Pari dependencies, and if Math::BigInt::GMP is used, it's 5 to 11 times faster. I decided to use Math::BigInt directly, as that makes it very portable, though the speed without either the GMP or Pari backend leaves much to be desired.
