blogs.perl.org

I’ve uploaded a new version of the GreaseMonkey script I introduced in my last entry (to let you use search.cpan.org for searching but with links to MetaCPAN in the search results).

This version is updated for GreaseMonkey 1.0, and also includes a small link at the top right of a search results page which links to the same search on MetaCPAN:

var query = document.querySelector('input[type=text]').value;
if (query) {
    document.querySelector('.t4 small').insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend',' <a id="goto-metacpan">&#x2192; MetaCPAN</a>');
    var link = document.getElementById('goto-metacpan');
    var href = 'https://metacpan.org/search?q=' + encodeURIComponent(query);
    link.href = href.replace(/%20/g,'+');
    link.style.setProperty('float','right');
    link.style.setProperty('padding-right','.4em');
    link.style.setProperty('color','inherit');
}

Easily installable from userscripts.org. Share and enjoy.

First of all, I am glad to announce that the Perl Foundation grant committee has accepted my grant proposal for adding tests and refactoring the built-in perl debugger. Here is the announcement for which grant proposals were accepted. My grant manager for this grant is Alan Haggai Alavi, whom I've been talking with online and have collaborated on a few projects, so I'm really happy to work with him again.

I have already made some progress with the grant (and this post is part of it), and sent a log for Alan Haggai to post as a grant update.

That put aside, I'd now like to publicise some of the new distributions I have uploaded to CPAN, as I had some ideas for new ones, and am also contemplating making enough uploads to have 100 CPAN distributions or more:

I've been lurking here for months - there are some serious experts that blog here, along with a few absolute newbies. I figured my experience level didn't matter. I could have blogged elsewhere too....But...

I'll admit that part of the reason I chose to write my blog here is due to the recent amount of posts I've seen over Sexual Harrassment and what it means to be a Member of a Community that has standards. The more voices in a community speak out, the more the community *is* those voices.

I won't post anything else about it - this isn't 'my community' in that I don't attend conferences, I don't go to meet ups or anything like this, I have a Perl Monks account but never log (every question I need to ask has already been asked!) I guess I'm making it my community by actively voicing my concern and opinion, and it would be nice to talk about perl problems with people who actually know perl!

Hi everyone. It has been about 13 years since I last used Perl CGI. Recently, though, I was going through my old books and found an old Osborne Perl Reference guide and thought "Hey! I would mind having a brush up with Perl". Like the market place, I moved from Perl CGI to Classic ASP and then to .Net. One has to earn a living doesn't one? But I used to enjoy Perl. Thing is, I have just configured IIS 7 on a Windows 7 machine (running 32 bit version of Active Perl) and I am getting odd behaviour. I can open my browser, type in my local host website url (http://localhost/MyWebsite/Something.pl) and the request is picked up by the web server and returned. Problem is the the browser things its a download, prompts me to Run or Save. If I select Run it runs the script in a command window. This happens in all browsers so it must be an IIS issue. I have been through everything in IIS laboriously one setting at a time but can't see why this is happening. Does any of y'all have any idea why this might be happening? Cheers. Ray.

The day at the venue began at 7 a.m. and it was already very hot at that time. We did the final preparations at the registration desk and we made coffee. Then a lot of stuff was delivered: water, apple spritzer. We opened the doors at 9:30 a.m. and about 350 people came to the registration desk. They all get their name badges, their wifi credentials and a conference bag (thanks to Webfusion to sponsor the bags!) with the proceedings.

All people had to sign for the wifi credentials so the people had to wait in a queue a few minutes... But I think it worked quite well, because we started only 5 minutes late. At 10:35 Max opened YAPC::Europe 2012. After the opening session the host of next years' YAPC::Europe was announced: Kiev. Congratulations to the Kiev guys. We really look forward to next year!

There had been several posts recently about disgusting sexist idiotic behavior on PerlMonks. Most people know my opinion on these issues very well, but I don't think that's good enough. I think we need to actually bring it up and discuss it. I want to thank all the people who wrote about it and specifically Joe McMahon who both spoke of it on blogs.perl.org and on Perlmonks here. No, this is not to be taken lightly. And no, I will not shut up about this. And yes, my post is probably gonna be long. I'm sorry, but I need to put it out there.

I use perl, at home, at work, and I've been using it for over a decade. I recently switched job titles and had to relearn The Web outside of the old CGI forms that I used to know back in the crusty old days of web 1.0.

Handrolled mysql connections and 50k lines of code aren't good practice anymore - not that they ever were, but it was at least accepted and common practice. I've started using MongoDB as well, and its collection of documents metaphor makes a lot of sense when you can pair JSON and perl data types so easily.

Yeah, another emotional bla and even lengthy - but might be insightful and its not tiring, promise.

Yesterday listened to Schwerns talk on youtube and it triggered some memories of things I wanted talk about over and over again but mostly kept quit. I mean my talk about Perl articles in Wikipedia some years ago that was largely motivated by the dysfunctional community there and how prevent this in Perl realm - but the actual talk was mainly about Perl, presenting Perl, writing wiki texts and how to get along inside Wikipedia.

I feel as a part of the community. I feel welcome in most forums, irc channels, conferences, perl monger meetings.
Sometimes I see or hear things that make me and others feel a bit uncomfortable.
This has been discussed also here and here.

Let me make one thing clear: I wouldn't use the term "offended" here. Offense is something more personal for me. Maybe it's just a linguistic thing. I can't be offended by such a comic, and I won't be shocked and start to cry or anything. Feeling uncomfortable is the best I can describe it as a non native english speaker.

[ This is cross-posted from the new home of the Ocean of Awareness blog. I have given in to the lure of static blogging. ]

Writing your own language

Creating your own language has been A Big Deal (tm). What if you could create a simple language in hours or minutes? There's been a serious obstacle up to now. No practical parser "just parsed" BNF. With Marpa, that restriction is lifted.

In this post, I will describe a small, sample Marpa domain-specific language (DSL). In designing it I am inspired by Mark Dominus's description of the "Worse is Better" philosophy, and its implementation in the form of Blosxom. This DSL is feature-poor, but short, simple and extensible.

A calculator

I've been working on a project for a client that is being hosted on dotCloud. And as part of the process I have spent a good deal of time familiarizing myself with this PaaS provider. My experiences thus far have been quite positive. I've found dotCloud to be highly receptive to working with Perl developers, and they seem to value building a relationship with the Perl community.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation to Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers, and last night another presentation to Los Angeles Perl Mongers discussing using dotCloud with Perl. There were a few simple examples based on Mojolicious.

The Libre Office Impress slides along with a working example are on Github. Another working example, the Perl Regex Tester also has a public Github repo.

The presentation's slides (which were reviewed by dotCloud for accuracy) are viewable on slideshare.

What are all the different ways that a dependency on a module can be introduced?

    use Foo::Bar;
    require Foo::Bar;
    use parent 'Foo::Bar';
    use base 'Foo::Bar';

And if you're using Moose:

    extends 'My::Parent'      => { -version => 0.01 },
            'My::OtherParent' => { -version => 0.03 };
    
    with 'My::Role'      => { -version => 0.32 },
         'My::Otherrole' => { -version => 0.23 };

Or the aliased module:

    use aliased 'Foo::Bar' => 'Foobar';
    $foobar = Foobar->new;

Or the namespace module:

It always starts out as something simple and innocent and then the Internet ruins it.

So I am giving a data mining talk at Ohio LinuxFest 2012 and surprise, surprise there is going to be a nice helping of Perl. So I am on the internet doing research looking for some simple scrapers and collectors to mention in my talk. I always prefer to give multiple examples for any problem since programming does not have a one size fits all model. To make a long story short I found a bunch of different social media scapers. The problem I found with most of them was the same. Things like this Ruby example:

another Ruby example (the comment is from the original source):

The Python ones I found were a little more deceptive. Here is what I found on the surface:

So I see BeautifulSoup included and I am thinking that must be like HTML::Parser right? Wrong. Instead I find these:

What about HTMLParser? More of the same:

I generally like MetaCPAN better than search.cpan.org, but as fREW mentioned in Using search.cpan.org AND metacpan, the latter’s search result ranking algorithm is far superior to the former’s. So fREW’s idea was to use GreaseMonkey – or actually not GreaseMonkey – to rewrite the links in search.cpan.org search results so that he could use that site for searching, but go to MetaCPAN for everything else. In fact though, he used dotjs and took advantage of the built-in jQuery it ships with. Thus his script does not work with vanilla GreaseMonkey.

Here is a version that does. As a bonus, above and beyond fREW’s version, it also only rewrites the distribution and author links rather than just the module links.

We read on Twitter etc. that many attendees were on their way to
Frankfurt. Now we knew that YAPC::EU arrived ;-) Our crew met at the venue to prepare the event: check the rooms, build the paper seats, prepare registration desk, print a lot of stuff like the name badges, hang the signs and banners, prepare conference bags with proceedings and the eGENTIC flyers and much more.

After the preparations we headed to the pre-conference meeting at Café Extrablatt where we enjoyed the weather and cool drinks. We assume that there were about 200 Perl people at the meeting. Those pre-conf meetings are always a good chance to chat with old friends and conference newbies ;-)

Some of you may have noticed that the blogs.perl.org front page recently acquired a new “Page 2” link. This is a feature we’ve been wanting for quite some time, to help readers scan back through the thousands of entries our users have posted in the nearly three years we’ve been running.

As ever, we’d be delighted to hear about any problems you find with this (or any other aspect of the site), as well as your ideas for making the site better. Please get in touch with us, or raise an issue on GitHub.

A couple days ago, a comic strip was posted to Perlmonks that really got up my nose. For those of you who don’t want to bother linking through, the strip compares Perl with Moose to Perl having a “boob job”, then wanders off into creepy territory because sexualization and creepiness are really, really funny, right?

This bothers me, as it’s not friendly to the women in our community – and I said so. You can read the response I’ve gotten so far. They’re all pretty much ignoring the fact that sexualizing a computer program (with the added implication of large breasts being equivalent to personal value) is exactly the kind of thing that makes women feel unwelcome by focusing on “well, ‘boob job’ is a perfectly fine term” and “I bet you do feel uncomfortable imagining you’re female!”. (By the way, no, I don’t. This is that funny thing called “empathy”.)

This is an idea I've discussed with Gabor (szabgab++) during the last conferences - we could use perlito as a tool to write educational pages about perl, that would embed executable code that can be modified by the reader.

There is a possible alternate implementation, use remote execution in the server. But I like the idea of running the code in the browser.

This perl in the browser would be a "full" perl implementation (not necessarily fast), with I/O redirected to local variables or even local storage. Modules would be loaded from a remote "lib" using HTTP requests.

Here is an older article that shows the basic idea. This is in portuguese, it was written for Sao_Paulo.pm using perlito6.

It all started with the Cluj.pm summer meeting on the 9th of August. I happened to be around there, so popped in. Cluj.pm is a refreshingly young perl monger group (I might even have been older than the average age there, that's a first for me). At first I didn't know anyone, other than the guest speaker Mark Keating, but after my presentation I had lots of people approaching me and I had a brilliant evening.

A short week later I flew to Germany, for the Perl Reunification Summit in Perl. Like Schwern I arrived a day earlier than most, so I had a calm start of the meetup. It was mostly a gathering of familiar to me faces, though a significant number I hadn't really spoken to before, specially the Perl 6 guys, -Ofun attracts awesome people. I spent most of the PRS talking to people, and doing a little coding (both related and unrelated). It was a very enlightening meetup.

I think some people did not interpret my last post correctly, I think I hated YAPC::EU::2012 (or at least, that is what I understand from Gabor comment on his Perl Weekly). Well, no, the post points three things I did not like, meaning that everything else was fun.

But I would like to point some details. First, congratulations to the organizers for the courage to prepare proceedings. Of course I was angry because the article I took some time to write was not there. Also, because although I mailed the organizers, they did not answer or said anything. Nevertheless, I like the idea of having proceedings for YAPC::EU. Not like the mojolicious article with screenshots of the slides, but like mostly all the others articles. And the proceedings are with great quality, both in printing, paper and design. I hope they make the final PDF available as well (paper is hard to find after some months).