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GitHub now holds a pmtools Git repository. Since I have some time right now to attend to pmtools (and other personal programming), I thought it would make my life easier to move my pmtools development into Git while making pmtools development more collaborative.

(Yes, I will accept pull requests, but I reserve the right to review all changes before making a formal release.)

Following my recent move into the World of Android I’ve been looking into notification apps that I can hook into and send message to using Perl.

Luckily for me there was already a perl module, WebService::NotifyMyAndroid, that had already done the hard work of communicating with the API at Notify My Android.

As with all thing, it hadn’t seen a release in about a year, and the sneaky NMA guys had changed all their URLs - breaking the module’s calls.

As an interested hacker I took a copy of the code and made the appropriate changes to get it up and running again.

Last night, after emailing the module’s author and having a short conversation I became co-maintainer of the module.

This morning I uploaded v0.0.3 to the CPAN.

Merry Festive Time!

I generally have no problem understanding what's in a CPAN distribution and why, but lately (for years, now), it seems that tools are building files that I don't know about. Is there a canonical place to find information about what absolutely, definitely needs to be in a CPAN distribution? I generally rely on my tools to do this stuff for me, but honestly, what's META.json, MYMETA.json, META.yml,MYMETEA.yaml? And then I wind up with files like MANIFEST.bak and MANIFEST.SKIP.bak and I honestly don't know the format of many of these files, why they're duplicated or where to look up this information. Which of these files should I commit to source control and which of these files should git ignore?

It's an embarrassment because honestly, I should know this stuff, but I don't. Surely there's a place where I can find all of this explained at once, perhaps in conjunction with a description of the files in my .cpan, .cpanm directories?

Most of you love programming and shut ears when its only starts to buzzing anywhere but please hold on, its for a good cause and maybe even you might benefit from it.

Having seen the Javascript developer survey, I thought that Perl should have one (there was one in 2010).

Here's my current list of questions. I've got these in a Google docs form, but won't show the options for each question.

• Is Perl your primary development language?
• What level of Perl experience would you give yourself?
• How long have you been programming in Perl?
• What version(s) of Perl do your systems run on?
• Is programming in Perl part of your daily job?
• How do you find reusable code, libraries and tools?
• Have you released any code to CPAN?
• Have you written any code in Perl 6?
• What is your preferred OO framework?
• What development environment(s) do you use for Perl?
• What framework, if any, do you use for web development?
• Other than Perl, what are your primary development languages?

What other questions should be on the list?

If you program in Javascript, go fill in that survey as well.

Happy 25th Birthday, Perl! I made you a card:

perl -C -e'print map+(v9635 x8^unpack B8).(v10)[++$n%9],(unpack u,"MK__^=^WW_S_WK)FNO\$3F5U\$7BJJ.=>U51S-WK)GNM>UF=W%[K[N>?___SW__")=~/./g'

I recently wrote about finding duplicate code in Perl and I've just uploaded Code::CutNPaste to the CPAN. Hopefully folks will find it useful.

However, what's not yet on the CPAN is Test::Class::Moose. People have asked me repeatedly how to mix the two, so I whipped up a quick alpha.

Assuming someone would like to help with Windows, how could he generate a list of modules that are especially problematic on Windows?

Is there a way to fetch all the distributions that have no successful test reports on Windows?

Is there a way to create the ratio of (failed test reports)/(all test reports) on MSWin32 for each distribution, and then show the top 100 of that list?

Tomorrow is the 25th birthday of Perl. The Perl programming language.

When I've first heard about it, it was named PERL, the spelling that now is a nice indicator of awareness in the row with Perl and perl. Honestly, I never thought of Perl as of a practical extracting and reporting language, I simply had no clue about which reports and which extractions were mentioned in that definition.

I have first seen the name of the language on the book covers in a book shop in my home town years ago. I cannot tell you when exactly, but it was definitely before 1998. At that time it was only something related to web and programming for me.

Perl is not my first programming language. The first one was C++ (with ++ from the start), and I still find it one of the best languages and tend to use it as soon as there's a small need.

OK, so I decided to hack in support for submitting CPAN testers reports into cpanminus. I've uploaded the result to CPAN in case anybody else wants to use it. After CPANPLUS and cpanminus, the logical name for it was cpantimes.

Here's how to use it...

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

Topics this week include:

• security notice: Storable
• security notice: Locale::Maketext
• Does Unicode mandate a collation order?
• a job for someone? SvREFCNT_dec_NN()
• CERT Perl Secure Coding Standard

As a Perl programmer on Windows, I've often had moments of supreme frustration. I can't use SSH or SFTP from Perl, and I can't use some of the mail handling modules. When I got started back in the early years of the century, I couldn't even use CPAN; I had to compile my own Perl and accept the fact that tests just mostly had no chance of working. Over the past year or two, however, especially as I've come to rely on CPANtesters for my own modules, I've started to realize that one reason for this is the lack of dense testing of modules on Windows. (Yeah, Paul Evans had something to do with that realization, too.)

But then Gábor Szabó posted on Google+ that he hoped to make it to #20 on the Windows smoke tester leaderboard. (As of today, he's at #19 - congrats!)

Wait. There's a leaderboard?

A few times every month someone asks me how is it to work at booking.com. People know that I worked there some time ago and they tend to gather more information about the company in which they are going to be interviewed for a position of a developer.

The dates before the 21 December 2012 are the best ones to stop thinking about the company where I spent 1.5 years. Although both booking.com and I are strongly related to the Perl programming language and its community, the text below the cut-line is not about any technical issue in Perl, but is about the way booking.com stops the contracts with their employees. I intentionally use the feature of MovableType that allows splitting the abstract and the body. So, please do not read further if you don't want to read things that are there.

Recently got hit with this error:

Goto undefined subroutine &Carp::shortmess_real at /usr/share/perl/5.10/Carp.pm line 41.

What's going on?

In this article, we'll develop a basic search application using Dancer and Sphinx. Sphinx is an open source search engine that's fairly easy to use, but powerful enough to be deployed in high-traffic sites, such as Craigslist and Dailymotion.

In keeping with this year's Dancer Advent Calendar trend, the example app will be built on Dancer 2, but it should work just as well with Dancer 1.

Alright, let's get to work.

In the recent month or two I did not have any time to work on DWIM Perl, the Perl distribution with batteries included, but yesterday I managed to do something little that might help.

I created a Task distribution listing all the modules DWIM Perl should contain. Actually, it is only a first list, but it already has quite a few modules.

Hi,

This week I didn't fix the countdown week counter but I think I will do it next time. This week Viacheslav (vti) was negotiating the contract with the venue, and I am happy to tell you that he managed to save a few thousand euros by reorganising the room configuration that was initially proposed. We did not lose any space, and we still have the big and nice concert hall, so no worries. Huge thanks to vti! We hope to sign the contract next week.

It is very likely that we will have no extra paid classes around the conference. But still, if you are reading this and would like to give a class, please contact us.

I finally sat down and organized my unsorted bookmarks in Firefox. In doing so I came across Jeff Atwood's blog post describing the FizzBuzz test:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

I must have bookmarked the link while preparing for interviews before graduation. After skimming over the material I was curious to know the smallest amount of Perl code I could use to write a solution.

Here's my attempt:

Any shorter solutions? I suppose I could just use print if I wanted a one-liner...

The other day Andy Lester posed a question Where can someone find Perl modules to contribute to? My first answer was to look at the dists with the most bugs. I continued thinking about it, wondering how you could identify a module that is ripe for help.

This post outlines my next idea, and the top 20 dists based on my first implementation.

If your website is powered by Joomla! but you want to display your PHPUnit HTML coverage results like the rest of the webpages, you can stick the coverage results in a subdirectory of images, like http://developer.example.com/images/coverage/.

I haven't tried it, but I expect this trick would work for other CMS-driven sites.