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 Perl Catalyst application.
In these notes I begin to explore what it might take to create a blog application.
Earlier today I wanted to install git on Windows so that I could keep my distroprefs synced between smokers. I almost installed Git for Windows but I waited.
A little bit ago, I was asked to test a new version of Net::Printer (after I submitted a bug four days ago that the tests were hanging on Windows) which resided in a GitHub repo. There was this shiny button labeled "Clone in Windows" which I clicked. I was taken to GitHub for Windows which I downloaded and installed. I already like this better than the last time I used Git for Windows (not that it is bad). Now that I've got it installed, I seem to remember seeing this before so I guess I had just forgotten about it.
It turns out that there is also GitHub for Mac, Git in Eclipse and GitHub Mobile. Pretty cool.
A very small script to check the masking information for each of the cloned devices.
Please note that this is the first and very basic version and I will post an updated version as soon as possible.
The Symmetrix Storage Arrays have a concept of "clones" where in the storage devices are paired for data transfer. During certain activities, it is important for a storage administrator to ensure that the correct device is made visible to the correct server. During this checking process, the command to check masking records (masking refers to the act of making the SAN Storage Devices visible to hosts) of each of the hexadecimal devices shown below has to be run individually. The command to check that is -
symmask -sid 000190101234 list assign -devs BB01, where sid is the symmetrix array ID and the BB01 part is the device ID. The script automates the process. Here's the output of the clone device command - :
symclone -sid 1234 list
This is fun. Maybe even too much fun, I didn't get enough sleep last night :)
Hacking on a live website with real users is so much more interesting than developing it in a local sandbox.
(I'm developing and supporting a big website with >1M hits/day at my daily $job, but somehow it's just not the same.)
In the last 24 hours, I implemented:
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.
I started smoke testing on Windows a short time ago. I already had Strawberry Perl 5.12.3 and CPAN::Reporter. I installed CPAN::Reporter::Smoker and started it up.
Then I did the same thing on my laptop that was running Strawberry Perl 5.16.2.
I quickly discovered that many modules will hang during the make or make test phase. I looked around the CPAN Testers Wiki and found out about Distroprefs (http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/Distroprefs). I didn't pull down anyone's repo though. I just started compiling a list of my own one by one as I encountered problems (making sure to check for bug reports too).
After a few days, I had pretty much the same list of hanging modules on both PCs. I thought "hey, I already have Dropbox installed on both computers, why not just link the prefs to a directory under Dropbox?"
Open a command prompt with Administrator rights and run:
mklink /D target source
play-perl was only just announced, but I've already fallen in love with it. There seems to be some confusion about how it works, so I thought I would lend my interpretation. Note that I did not write it nor am I affiliated with it, but I think it's awesome and want to get people using it!
If you're like me, you have a lot of ideas floating around in your head for open source projects. Mine tend to be oriented towards computational science, but it could be anything. And, if you're like me, a big part of your open source experience centers on making others happy by helping them solve their problems. The question naturally arises: among all your random ideas, what would be the best thing to work on? What will make the most people happy if you complete it? Should you write a blog entry explaining a feature, or add a new feature?
This is what you get after only 2 days of Perl version numbering scheme discussions - #perl on freenode:
10:17 < someone> i have been hearing rumors about a certain Perl 7.0
10:18 < someone> is it true? Any links / confirmation about that ?
10:21 < someone> last time i was in this channel (one year ago) perl 6 and perl 5 were two different entity....
10:21 < someone> is it still the case ?
10:21 < someone> does that mean perl 7 will merge those two ?
^^^^^^^^^^^ Yeah, this is probably what many people would expect - I didn't even THINK about that..
10:25 < someoneElse> when i proposed that some time ago in this channel, the reaction was "that'll only create more confusion." guess that's still true...
10:26 < someone> the fact that perl 5 and perl 6 are two different entity is confusing enough
^^^^^^^^^ Here is what the average Perl user thinks about all this...
10:27 < anotherOne> python2/3 has this issue?
Yes, that immediately comes to mind, too...
I hope that SAN Admins find this helpful.
Whenever HBA WWNs are entered in Cisco SAN Switches on the command line prompt, A colon (:) character needs to be added at every second position in the WWN. Also, the WWN has to be lower case.
So in case you get a WWN like so - 10000000C9ABCDEF it needs to be converted to lower case and : needs to be added. The following script does this.
Here it adds ":" and lowercase. It also checks if the characters entered are Hex, if the length is correct and if any unwanted characters are given or not. In these cases, it takes you back to the prompt to enter the WWN.
It also does it the other way around, i.e. if you enter a WWN with ":", it removes them and does all the checks as mentioned above.
The Ever Helpful Monks at PerlMonks gave a lot of suggestions, and I've tried to incorporate them here.
Thank you, Damian an rba!
Every year I count the number of jobs posted to jobs.perl.org (and sometime last year I put it all in github). I make no hard interpretation of these numbers and don't take them to mean anything. I think the rise in numbers up to 2006 are merely from people finding out about the service. I have no thoughts on the decline after that.
A fairly cheap kludge to encode metadata into a Git repository would use special directories that link to the files that need metadata. (I suggest prefixing the directory names with "...", as that is ignored by default in some popular OS shells.)
An example of this is probably easier. Say we have jenkins.our-config and git.our-hooks in our repo configuration :
configuration
jenkins.our-config
git.our-hooks
We want to include that both files are about our production server. If we set up a directory structure in the repo like this:
Hi, I am a Storage Administrator. I was on a lookout for a scripting language that would help me automate some of the work that I do. Started learning Perl, but it was ( and still is) a sort of intermittent process. Work load has a tendency to mount when you least expect and I end up not learning/writing Perl for days together.
Signed up here to write about Perl. I am still in the learning phase, yet, I'll post whatever small scripts I write.
It saddens me when, without any valid research, some people, even a few of my colleagues bemoan the state of Perl. They think that Perl is stagnant, that its not "alive and growing" any more..In my own small ways, I am trying to change that perception. If I can get a few of my colleagues and friends to change their opinion, it would be fine by me :)
This is my take on the version debate. Bear in mind that I'm not a p5p nor a Perl 6 developer, so I don't get a vote. I can still have an opinion though...
Perl 6 represents the future of Perl. But given the amount of time taken to get to where it is today, and the amount of work still needed before it can be put forward as a serious replacement for Perl 5, it realistically represents the distant future of Perl.
Anybody else interested in starting a perl devops mailing list or other group - there is a load of cool stuff out there, and few people have heard of half of it - would be nice to be able to keep up to date, discuss ideas, etc.
Good example : rexify.org - wish I'd heard of this sooner, would be even cooler to hear about people's experiences with it too
play-perl.org is up.
It's a very, very early alpha. There are no achievements, no news feed (Upd: news feed is in), no pre-set quests, not enough quest metadata and almost no introductory texts.
Still, I chose to release what I have now, because I want to start dog-fooding it myself, and because I want to see if anyone will care enough to try it.
(Also, my self-inflicted deadline was February 1st; I wanted to launch it with more features, but other projects and procrastination got in the way, as usual.)
With that being said, here's what already works:
TL;DR: Not if it can never have a major release. Please read on.
Note: I’m now not talking about soon, or what it would be named/numbered. I’m talking about ever.
Let me tell you my story, some of you may know it. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Physics. Programming is woefully ignored in science education now. All my professors learned FORTRAN in courses during their Ph.D. (or B.S. in some cases) but now, given the ease of Mathematica, we seem to be expected to pick it up as we go on.
One day I had a nutty idea, I wanted to parse one of the temporary files created during LaTeX compilation. A friend, who knew next to nothing about Perl, suggested I needed Perl and Regexes. I can here you out there, saying “now I had two problems”. Not so. I learned, I improved and finally my first Perl script was out in the world. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to its current form but it worked.
So I have been avoiding talking in public about what Moe is, mostly because I would much rather spend my limited free time actually writing code rather than talking about code. But seeing it mentioned in a number of the Perl 7 discussions and often mischaracterized, I felt it was the time to say a little something.
The github description for Moe says this:
An -OFun prototype of an Ultra Modern Perl 5
And I recently pushed live a website for Moe which states simply:
Moe is a thought experiment to try and envision what Perl 5 might evolve into as a language and a runtime. It borrows much from Perl 6, but still aims to be true to its Perl 5 roots.
And that is all that it is (for now).
I am drawing my inspiration from the Pugs project in that Pugs was an experimental version of Perl 6 to help drive the language development forward, and I am trying to do the same thing with Perl 5.
Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but we will never know unless we try.
I heard back from Andy Orr and Aaron Mitti, and they were happy for me to put in some work and a fresh release - already created the github repo and outlined a brief roadmap.
More to follow soon
Once upon a time, in August 2012, there was a Perl Reunification Summit in the town of Perl, near Schengen.
Back then a couple of people have wrotten about it and today finally I have also posted about my experience.
I think it might be a good time to remind everyone about that meeting and link to the posts I found.
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