blogs.perl.org

I've released pmtools-1.20 with these fixes:

• pminst now only displays unique names.
• pminst now ignores non-existent directories in @INC.
• I added pmcheck, a utility to check whether Perl is set up for Perl modules. At the moment, pmcheck just reports problems with @INC (missing directories, etc.)

A little confession/reasoning/backstory: I love CPAN surfing. You know, watching the latest releases, browsing module dependencies and other modules by the same authors... And favoriting the interesting stuff. Stats show that I'm not supposed to be the only one. If so, wouldn't it be nice to provide a crowdsourced recommendation for CPAN modules? Think: "People who favorite Mojolicious often favorite: AnyEvent, Data::Printer, Devel::NYTProf, Dist::Zilla...". Plus, given the user's favorites, own releases & own release dependencies, a custom-tailored module suggestion list could be build for any PAUSE ID subscribed to the MetaCPAN. Enter the CPAN::U experiment.

November turned out to be a very eventful and productive month. Aside from various code updates with some CPAN-Testers distributions, including porting many of the tests to Test::Database, and discovering the usefulness of Test::Trap for testing some of the scripts, we also got a handle on the missing reports. For the past few months, questions about missing reports has increased. Back in August I started to look at a more thorough catch-up. After some suggestions and ideas from David and Andreas, I also added some to code to collect data in a similar way to the tail log. As a consequence of the tail parsing, the improved catch-up code and the rewritten generate code, it now means that not only have we caught up, but we now have a much more robust mechanism in place to ensure we're not missing any reports.

While at the Quack and Hack, I wrote Code::CutNPaste. This tries to find duplicate code in Perl and does a fairly decent job, right down to finding code where people have changed the variable or subnames.

At the suggestion of Liz, I add a --jobs switch. For one project with almost 400 .pm files, I originally had this:

time find_duplicate_perl lib > report.txt
real    65m52.922s
user    39m2.998s
sys 24m27.776s

I now have this (a multi-core machine helps):

time find_duplicate_perl --jobs 4 lib > report.txt
real    22m49.700s                                                    
user    41m22.387s
sys 34m36.146s

The "cpan-2-ebook" site perlybook.org comes with some minor updates for winter holidays.

Below the "front lid" there are some interesting changes. We replaced the caching module CHI with the wrapper Mojolicious::Plugin::CHI. The module is quite new. But after some exchange with and bugfixing by (thanks!) the module author this module can now be recommended together with Starman and nginx - as we use it at Perlybook.

BTW: the Perltuts Tutorial ebooks finally get their title and author in the meta information... (I'm actually wondering why nobody ever complained about this).

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

Topics this week include:

• rand() on Windows only uses 15 bits of entropy
• RFC: Removing several undocumented functions from the Perl core
• 5.18 VT in \s
• Comment period extended for Unicode's changing some common characters from Punctuation to Symbol

Yes there are still some (hard to find) bugs, but Kephra, the most curious and perlish editor had a small and silent breakthrough. The new (complete) rewrite is now self hosting and will be from now on used to program Kephra in itself.

When writing on blogs.perl.org, you can provide the first paragraph or two as an abstract, with the rest of your post as the "extended" body. In this post I'll try and convince you that doing this is more considerate of the readership, and good for you too!

Perl community motivation survey is over. Thanks to all those who participated in it!

Here are the results: berekuk.github.com/perl-motivation-survey/.

The results contain various aggregated statistics, as well as the link to the raw data, so I'll spend the rest of this blog post talking about my interpretations and my overall experience from organizing this survey.

Dear attendees,

We are very close to signing the contract with the venue. There are a number of things we have to do before we finally sign it. So, please excuse us for doing that so long. We have to negotiate, for example, the place for catering, internet connectivity infrastructure, sound and media equipment, -- all that goes into the contract.

Today I will quote the site of our venue, The Ukrainian House (ukrdim.org.ua, UA). We will rent the following rooms.

Concert hall (782 m²). The room for hosting concerts, literature and art events, congresses, conferences and presentations. It has 490 stationary seats, the stage and a screen. It is equipped with theater, regular and dynamic lightening systems (whatever that means :-) and the 7 kW system of sound amplification. There is a direct connection with the radio studio nearby.

A new post in my blog about Cartesian products.

Problem: You have a number of sets and you want all the combinations when choosing one element from each set.

In mathematics, these combinations are called the Cartesian products. They are also known as cross-products. In the database world, they are sometimes called cross-joins.

I've often thought it would be interesting and useful to read about how various companies are using Perl. Richard Jelinek's talks at LPW 2012 have encouraged me to see whether (a) there's enough general interest in this to make it worth while, and (b) I/we can kick-start it. In this post I'll outline what I'm currently thinking about, to get feedback.

Yesterday's (not so pleasant) experience of trying to deploy Pastedance *) on an internal web server at work makes me appreciate the simplicity of CGI. CGI might be out of favor for production sites, but for personal and internal applications, it's still the best choice for me.

When working with legacy code, it's useful to have a variety of tools that let you better understand your code base. For example, I recently wrote about finding unused subroutines. That heuristic approach was fine because I was still going to inspect the code manually rather than automatically remove the code.

So now I hacked out a rough "duplicate code finder" for Perl. It focuses on cut-n-drool code and has found more than I would have thought (even in my code!). If a developer changes variable names, it won't find it, but if I hacked around with B::Deparse, I could fix that, too.

Well, it's no longer a secret that I'm craving to join the "100 CPAN Distributions Club" by releasing some code that is hopefully not too useless. Here I would like to blog about the two new additions to my CPAN page which are the 83rd and 84th distributions respectively. The story is a bit more complicated than that.

The first upload is SDLx-Betweener, which allows for creating high-performance and smooth animations in SDL by making use of Perl/XS. Almost all of the coding (and a related YAPC::Israel talk) was done by Ran Eilam, who is a very cool guy, a good friend and a former boss of mine, and I've just done (with his permission) some last-minute cleanups and did the initial upload to CPAN. So I kinda feel like the frog that sat on top of the elephant who crossed the river and said "We did it!".

OK, Moo is actually a rather nice little OO framework. It's inspired by Moose but not a clone of it.

When Moo detects Moose has been loaded, it "inflates" all Moo classes and roles into Moose classes and roles, so Moo code integrates with Moose code perfectly. Because of this, and Moo's very light memory and CPU footprint, many Moose-based projects are migrating to Moo. High profile migrations include Throwable, Message-Passing and MooseX-Role-Loggable.

Not all Moose-based projects are easy to port to Moo. Some require a high level of introspection and meta-hackery that only Moose can provide. But if Moo does seem to be a good fit for your project, switching to Moo is not as simple as dropping the "se" from your "use Moose" lines. There are a number of incompatibilities between the declarative syntaxes of Moo and Moose.

I've recently released MooX-late to help smooth over the differences and translate Moose code to Moo. Currently it handles:

Rename the web to hide it from left pane. Say the directory is ZAdminTest, rename the folder to zAdminTest

Access it using: http://host/foswiki/bin/view/Main/ZAdminTest/WebHome

I am not sure if this works on *nix system though..

Macros are a powerful feature of Excel and are a frequently requested feature for Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Excel::Writer::XLSX.

It is also a feature that I've wanted to add for some time but it wouldn't be feasible, with current human lifespans, to re-implement Excel's VBA in Perl. So instead I implemented a scheme to "borrow" the VBA code from Excel and add it to an Excel::Writer::XLSX file.

At its simplest an Excel 2007+ file is a collection of XML files in a zip container. Here is a look inside a sample file that contains macros:

When you log data structures with Log::Any, e.g.:

% DEBUG=1 perl -MLog::Any::App='$log' -e '... $log->debugf("ccls=%s", $ccls); ...'

do you often see something like this?

[38] ccls=[{fmt => ['integer','integers'],text => ['integer','integers'],type => 'noun'},{expr => 1,fmt => 
'default value %s',text => 'default value 1',type => 'clause'},{expr => 1,fmt => '%(modal_verb)s be divisi
ble by %s',multi => 1,text => 'must be divisible by 2 and 3',type => 'clause'},{expr => 1,fmt => '%(modal_
verb)s be at least %s',multi => 1,text => 'must be at least 1',type => 'clause'},{expr => 1,fmt => '%(moda
l_verb)s be at most %s',multi => 1,text => 'must be at most 100',type => 'clause'}]

Log::Any uses Data::Dumper with Indent setting of 0. This is compact, but hard to read. Tired of scanning hash keys with my fingers or mouse pointer, I finally spent about 5 minutes creating two patch modules to fix this annoyance. The first one is Log::Any::Adapter::Core::Patch::SetDumperIndent to let you set indent level, and the second is Log::Any::Adapter::Core::Patch::UseDataDump to use Data::Dump instead of Data::Dumper.

For convenience when typing these module aliases are provided: Log::Any::{DD,DI1,DI2,DI3}.

Now you can conveniently do this:

% DEBUG=1 perl -MLog::Any::App='$log' -MLog::Any::DD -e'... $log->debugf("ccls=%s", $ccls); ...'

The 5th Annual Orlando Perl Workshop, aka Perl Oasis, is coming on January 11th. That's only about a month away. Obviously the organizers are behind on things but they have announced the call for speakers! Please sign up now! If speaking isn't your thing, you can simply come and enjoy the company and geekery. Details are on the website: http://perloasis.info/opw2013/.