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Please note: the following was done as an exercise in intellectual curiosity and not in any way an example of a real optimization. Any comments about "premature optimization" will be downvoted as soon as we get a voting system ;)

We're deep in the heart of micro-optimizing some extremely performance-intensive code when I stumbled across this:

if ( $number == -1 ) {
    # do something
}

Clearly a numeric comparison isn't expensive and I managed to find a few areas where we could improve some performance, but out of curiosity, I decided to benchmark $number == -1. The -1 is returned if a function failed (because throwing an exception would be far too expensive here) and we test for that. In reality, we only care if the number is less than 0. I was mildly curious to know if I could get a tiny performance increase in bit comparison (again, this was curiosity only. If I have to get this deep in optimization, I have more serious issues than this).

[ crossposted from its original blog ]

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl5-porters email list. Normally, I'd have a dusty thread and some "witty" banter here, but I'm just running too far behind for that this week.

Topics this week include:

• Perl 5.17.4 is now available
• Parrot 4.8.0 "Spix's Macaw" Released!
• WANTED: "whole program" benchmarks
• Changing the Perl error message when a module is not found
• Subroutine signatures on the blog
• Why ugly Perl is a guide for optimizing Perl

Hi

If you're using AT&T's Graphviz and you're interested in finding fixed length paths thru your graphs, there's a new module to help.

You'll need Marpa, and GraphViz2, and GraphViz2::Marpa. These will be installed as pre-reqs.

Then all you need is GraphViz2::Marpa::PathUtils, after it hits CPAN.

You can start reading the docs here.

Cheers

The time has made its 2% and brought us one week closer to the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev!

This time our main news is that we are also closer to the point when we are able to fix and announce the dates of the conference. This week we explored a couple more venues, and there are only two left in our list.

Interestingly, we found a venue we did not met before, and it is the venue that a Python Pycon conference is exploiting in October. So far, there're President Hotel and European University that we will see in the following days. And then -- we select the venue based on different metrics :-)

I'm trying to get Plync to work with my Nexus 7, mainly because I want non-Google calendar synchronization between my mobile, my desktop and this shiny toy. Authentication works, but the Nexus 7 does not want to list the available folders at all and does not attempt to synchronize the Calendar folder.

To further debug this, having a good+free (or at least, available) ActiveSync server that I could use to debug the network traffic against would be very convenient. $work does not use ActiveSync, so it won't be much use there...

Here's my closing talk slides.

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 was great. All the guest speakers were great. Tim Bunce, Adam Kennedy, Ingy dot Net, Larry. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The official attendee count (based on ticket sales) was 743. If you added the speakers, it was 798, and if you added the staff, it was 841. At any given moment there were about 400 ~ 600 people in the venue. There were some no-shows too, but we haven't counted it. Thanks for all our attendees, our staff.

I'm honestly baffled by how big this event was. I seriously don't know if we can beat these numbers in the future. I'm tired. I want to see my son now (who has been with my grandparents and my wife since 3 nights ago).

We still got a few things to do, but YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 is over. We had a blast.

Hope everybody enjoyed it, too!

[Quick note: This is mostly a Git story, although there’s plenty of links to Perl code and Perl discussions.  It also turned out to be quite a bit longer story than I originally intended.  But, even though it gets pretty deep into Git features, I think it should be interesting enough for anyone who has a CPAN module and uses Git.  I hope.]

The Backstory: So, a couple months back, I look in my email and spy a message from Damian Conway.  Now, some of you fine readers probably know Damian personally, and I’m sure I’ll get several comments pointing out how he’s just an ordinary bloke and all, but to you I say: hush!  You may be all jaded and world-weary, but I’m still just a regular Perl schmoe, and when I see an email from The Damian addressed personally to me, I get all goosebumpy.  So hush up and allow me my fanboy gushes.

Would a site like vworker but perl-specific, where freelancers could pick up (small bits of) work from others in the community, have any legs?

Here's an idea (actually, Michael Schwern's idea): Custom CPAN-like repositories hosted in the cloud. Imagine if you could put all the CPAN modules that you depend on (including any proprietary modules of your own) into a private (or public) repository up in the cloud. You just send your tar.gz files into the cloud where they are stored and indexed so you can build, test, and install them with the standard Perl toolchain. Every time you build your application, you'll get exactly the same versions of those modules.

Now imagine this repository in the cloud has a version control system, so you can review changes and roll back your module dependencies like you do with source code. You can also branch and merge your dependencies to experiment with upgrades or alternative modules. You can search & read the documentation for all the modules in the repository (including your proprietary modules). And you can do all this through your web browser or right at the command line!

Whoa, it's already 9/29, which is Day 2 for YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012.

This year's YAPC is going extremely well. I don't know, as an organizer I'm finding myself not having to hassle much. Something tells me we've passed a glass ceiling of sorts: I think we've reached the point where our reputation and our brand recognition is enough for the event to take life on its own. The speakers roll the show. The hallway tracks bring up the excitement. The attendees are finding more ways to enjoy the show.

I'm just going from room to room where the speakers non-Japanese, translating questions/answers, taking care of extra, unforeseen costs, checking out on our guests from abroad, and organizing the lightning talks - which may sound like a lot, but compared to previous years that I have been involved in this event, is a lot less stressful stuff.

I think that with only the minimal effort, YAPC::Asia Tokyo (or wherever in Japan) will probably be able to stand on its own.

I must admit that I rarely feel comfortable with (web application) frameworks - each system facilitates a certain type of task but it complicates the missing parts. Good frameworks support extension via plugins, but each framework has its own plugin architecture to learn. That's why I like PSGI so much - it only specifies how to connect things. This is how PSGI looks like to me (image CC-BY-SA by CMG Lee):

This month's technical presentation at Chicago Perl Mongers was about Sean Blanton's project called App::Services. It's an interesting project that uses Bread::Board to access resources like databases, logging, ssh, and others.

Along the way, we discussed logging practices (most of us are using Log::Log4perl), and the best way to get a Perl module ready for CPAN (I suggested using Module::Build directly, but Dist::Zilla outvoted me).

Sean mentioned in passing the Salt stack for executing commands across multiple machines, which looks like a very interesting alternative to more detailed tools like Puppet or Chef. Salt seems to be just a simple way to execute commands on multiple machines. Those commands could be administrative (restart httpd), or they could be the application.

Hi all i had tried to execute the following perl script to plot tha data but i am getting ocate object method add_chart via package Spreadsheet::WriteExcel error can u help this ...!!!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Workbook;

my $workbook = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new( 'chart.xls' );
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();

my $chart = $worksheet->add_chart_ext( type => 'column' );

# Configure the chart.
$chart->add_series(
categories => '=Sheet1!$A$2:$A$7',
values => '=Sheet1!$B$2:$B$7',
);

# Add the worksheet data the chart refers to.
my $data = [
[ 'Category', 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ],
[ 'Value', 1, 4, 5, 2, 1, 5 ],
];

$worksheet->write( 'A1', $data );

test begin~

I am trying to fix some issues in Term::ReadPassword and to unite it with Term::ReadPassword::Win32.

A few weeks ago I tried to contact Tom Phoenix at his CPAN e-mail address but no response so far.

Can anyone help me get in touch with him?

I'm not a Unicode Guru, but working with third parties, I often find that a lot of people consistently fail to get the basics right about Unicode and encoding. So here's yet another set of slides about unicode/utf8 in Perl.

It's not meant to be a comprehensive presentation of all Unicode things in Perl. It's meant to insist on a couple of guidelines and give some pointers to get a good start writing a unicode compliant application and avoiding common issues.

View them here.

Hi

A couple of weeks ago I emailed the author of Tree::DAG_Node,
offering to take over maintenance, to help stop the bitrot.

I've had no response, so if anyone can contact David Hand,
or Sean M. Burke, please do so, so we can discuss this.

Alternately, in a few days I'll get the CPAN maintainers to let
me have co-maint.

Cheers
Ron

I'm quite happy to say that Beginning Perl has now been released. You can buy it on Amazon or a number of other online bookstores, and I'm guessing a few local bookstores, too. There are also a couple of translation deals, too, but they're not finalized, so I'm unsure if I can talk about them.

If you're interested in Perl but worried about the title, the book actually takes you all the way through OO programming and even has introductory sections on Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Plack, and other tools. It's fairly comprehensive.

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 is almost upon us!

Tomorrow, 9/27, is Day 0, where we will hear a few talks and have some snacks and socialize. Doors open at 17:30. Anyone with a ticket can attend this event. See the timetable here.

9/28 is Day 1. This is when YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 really starts! Doors open at 9:00, and goes all the way until 19:00. Free dinner is available starting at 19:00, at the area right next to the main hall. See the timetable here.

9/29 is Day 2. Doors open at 9:30, and we have talks all the way until 19:00! See the timetable here.

Don't forget to bring your QR codes! You can't check-in without it!

Oh, and some bad news. Apparently a tropic typhoon is on its way to hit Tokyo area right on 9/28. Bring your rainwear and/or keep checking the weather news!

If you have problems (especially with English/Japanese) please find me (@lestrrat)

I'm pleased and excited to announce that Yanick Champoux has joined the Dancer core team.