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I went back to Perlmonks for the first time in quite some time, and was greeted with by a poll titled "How many man-hours would you estimate you have invested in learning Perl?" - okay, could have been hours, not enough to make a big deal of, I'm trying not to make every interaction on the site about male privilege...aw, dammit:

None - I refuse to acknowledge the term man hours, you patriarchical pig. But I have many person-hours. And let me tell you...

Oh, COME ON.

This is going from microaggression ("man-hours") straight into pure jackassery. Straw feminists are just as much a stereotype as any other. Making jokes that require me to be complicit with a stereotyped view of the world really gets up my nose.

It sends the message that "we here at Perlmonks think this kind of thing is really funny and we don't care what you think. We especially don't care if you're the kind of person we're enjoying making fun of."

More features

1. cpanfile output format, prereqs (requires, recommends, on test, on develop)

   midgen -lf cfile

2. Basic scanning of Dist-Zilla Plugins

here is a sample, with cpanfile and dist-zilla plugins, see wiki for more examples.

EplSite ETL 1.2 Release Notes

Release date: 02 April 2013

Bug Fixes
- Catalog checking can be done against any fields.

Improvements
- Everything is saved in the sqlite database, from the external scripts until
reports, in this way if you backup or migrate your scripts, you only need to
copy the sqlite database EplSite.sqlite located in folder htdocs/eplsite/Storage/
- Better error handling, now there are logs for xref and catalogs.
- Log reports can use runnumber to display data.
- Better layout maintenance.
- Now you can use the field descriptions to insert the data into another table, see
sample 001.
- Better control panel, the most important scripts edition has been improved.

You can download from here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/eplsiteetl

Enjoy it =)

When you're using Redis, you can issue the select index command to use a different database (think "namespace"). By default Redis provides you with 16 different databases numbered 0 to 15 (you can configure it for more). All keys and values will be separate from any other keys and values in other databases. So how do you know which database you're in? As it turns out, Redis doesn't offer a command for directly querying that information.

That title may remind you of a certain song by The Fixx.

Last week a new version of CPAN::Meta was shipped to CPAN. Unfortunately, it caused a test to fail in Module::Build. In turn, that set off a whole chain of downstream failures in hundreds of distributions that depend on Module::Build.

So if you were building up a complete application stack last week (like on Stackato or Heroku) and you were pulling the latest dependencies from CPAN, you were hosed. This sort of thing happens all the time, and when it bites you, it will be at the worst possible time.

Pinto also uses Module::Build. But those who were building it with the installer at http://getpinto.stratopan.com were completely insulated from the failure. This is because the installer pulls dependencies from a private repository. Unlike the public CPAN, that repository is stable and only changes when I decide to upgrade or add a dependency.

Fortunately, the problem with CPAN::Meta was short-lived. Dave Golden had released a fixed version only 23 hours later. But I think this perfectly demonstrates why you should lock down your dependencies with a tool like Carton or Pinto.

I recently gave a talk on perlbrew, cpanminus, and local::lib at $work. I've uploaded the talk to Speaker Deck

Click keep reading to, errr, keep reading.

This is because I put the text of the entry in MT's 'Extended', and now I've just added this stuff to 'Body'.

Also, the 5th tut is on Autocomplete.

This week's newsletter

A few days ago I published some data on the distributions of visitors of the Perl Maven site and the people clicking on the links in Perl Weekly newsletter. (The number of visitors there is not that interesting.)

One intersting part of the data is that the 11.68% of the visitors of the Perl 5 Maven site are from India while they only generate 1.60% of the clicks in the Perl Weekly.

Why is the difference and what can be done with this information?

Is the PAUSE module list (www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html) useful anymore? Do any cpan clients, or other tools, make use of it?

I've seen many users (via http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.modules) isubmit their module for registration immediately after upload, so there seems to be an impression that it is a necessary step, despite the PAUSE documentation saying it's not (however it is quite vague as to *how* useful this measure actually is).

This list doesn't even seem to be up to date - e.g. I don't see my module Test::LWP::UserAgent in the list, despite registering it many months ago.

At this month's Chicago.PM meeting, I gave a presentation on Dependency Injection and my new module, Beam::Wire.

[EDIT: The presentation doesn't appear to work on mobile devices. I'm trying deck.js, and I'm not sure I like it.]

Role::REST::Client is a small module to be used as a Moose role. It will enable your module to call REST services in a clean, transparent way. It was originally a part of Catalyst::Model::REST , and I guess that is still the main use case, but it can really be used in any module needing to call a REST service. To use it, all you have to do is

use Moose; 
with 'Role::REST::Client';

and you will be able to use ->get, ->post, and so on with Role::REST::Client handling the encoding, (de)serialization, etc of the call. Thanks to many contributions from Wallace Reis, Matt Phillips and Mark Stosberg it is very configurable and robust.

I've been getting error reports for some time, but a cursory glance through the code showed no faulty use of hashes. I've used all my ressources at $work, so I haven't had time to dig into this problem, until Сергей Романов (sergeyromanov) poked me with a pointy test case. The problem was easy to find, two parameters to ->new relying on their individual order.

Problem is fixed and uploaded to CPAN as Role::REST::Client 0.15

While working on Pinto, I discovered that a fair number of distributions on CPAN have invalid or incomplete metadata. This makes it hard for the toolchain (Pinto especially) to fully utilize them.

Usually the offenses are pretty minor -- misspelled or missing keys in the META files, or a non-parsable version number. Some of us have probably made local patches of these distributions to fix those problems. But there's no reason everyone should have to do it.

So I had an idea -- what if there was a secondary public CPAN where folks could contribute patched versions of these older distributions? Read the rest of the story here:

https://github.com/Stratopan/Patchpan/blob/master/README.md

Via this blog entry which I'm sure some of you have seen before, the following PHP prints "horse".

<?php
  $arg = 'T';                                                                                                                
  $vehicle = ( ( $arg == 'B' ) ? 'bus' :
               ( $arg == 'A' ) ? 'airplane' :
               ( $arg == 'T' ) ? 'train' :
               ( $arg == 'C' ) ? 'car' :
               ( $arg == 'H' ) ? 'horse' :
               'feet' );
  echo $vehicle;
?>

No fun shooting fish (or a horse) in a barrel, but wow. Just wow.

What is the favorite module you have released to CPAN? For me, its not some shiny CMS or fancy scientific simulation. In fact, mine is probably horribly inefficient, maybe even a little evil, but I like this one best because it is clever.

Today I used my favorite of my modules in order to accomplish a difficult task, and in doing so I found a little bug, which I have just fixed. Which one is it? Let me introduce you to Tie::Array::CSV.

So, I went to Cluj.pm's anniversary meeting this month. It's been a year since Cluj.pm was formed and I've been lucky enough to be invited to the event. Here's my report of it.

Ok, that title is a bit of a teaser. But I do think that code should be sexy. In this full-color high-definition world, we've come to expect things to actually look attractive.

I'd love to see pretty logos or icons for each module on MetaCPAN. Perhaps we could add a new attribute to the META spec that points to an image file inside the distribution, or a URL somewhere.

I have written a few articles and more than a few essays for school/class. I know most of the major citations styles (MHRA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). Mostly, however, I use biblatex to format them all. However, I have begun to think that most of these citation styles are really just pointers to other resources or more generally they are really just URLs with a arcane special formatting rules. Many academics are obsessed with these bits of meta-data as they validate that the writer knows the rules of the road. When I read academic articles or books, I generally don’t notice or skip over citations as, while they are necessary and useful, they don’t always help with digestion of the actual argument. Although, occasionally in fields I know well, I will scan the citation to see who they are referencing just for credibility purposes.

plenv is so cool that I'd like to use it for my personal project. Then, I have to hack up chef cookbooks for automated provisioning. I tried to write Chef LWRPs for the first time.

• https://github.com/kentaro/chef-plenv

Using the cookbook, you can easily install perls via plenv and CPAN modules via cpanm.

I'm waiting for your feedback.

Usage

Using Attributes and Recipes

Add these recipes below into run_list:

recipe[plenv]
recipe[plenv::install]
recipe[plenv::global]
recipe[plenv::cpanm]

Then set attributes described later.

Using LWRPs (Recommended)

Only recipe[plenv] should be added into your run_list.

recipe[plenv]

Then use LWRPs in your own recipe.