Steffen Schwigon will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as
In contrast to all my past talks about benchmarking Perl I now actually have a running benchmarking infrastructure and actual results.I this talk I will
- summarize again what I do at all
- present some obvious or non-obvious conclusions
that can be derived from the results
(depending on your and my prior knowledge) and
- tell what's missingAll that from my core-outsider's point of view.
I was just wondering if authors on blogs.perl.org know how how many people read their posts? I looked around the options inside Movable Type but could not locate anything.
If there is a way, could anyone explain please?
I have a solution ...
Following the concept of "if you haven't blogged about it, it doesn't exist", I'd like to let you know of a new Perlbal plugin, which you might find useful: Perlbal::Plugin::SessionAffinity.
Session affinity (also known as sticky sessions) is the ability to provide a user with a consistent backend from a reverse proxy, such as Perlbal. This is useful in case you cannot share the session data between backends, but do not want to lose the session.
Mind you, although Perlbal doesn't support session affinity in core, there is a plugin available on CPAN, but while trying to get it working, I've found a few major problems with it. It requires patches, it's outdated, and most importantly: it doesn't seem to work.
Since StickySessions was already taken, I've decided to take the SessionAffinity namespace and start using that term instead, in order to divert from the previous plugin.
Hi Folks
After spending a lot of fragmented time over the last 7-8 weeks, I've finally finished my 2nd comparison of JS libs. I can no longer find the first on the old blogs site, but by now I don't think it matters.
This one is in HTML because the original is in POD, and that gives me a much easier time of it in the proof-reading phase.
Cheers
Ron
Noirin Plunkett will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as
You might not feel like it yet, but if you're considering this talk, you have what it takes to make it in open source!If you just want to help and don't know where to start, we'll talk about how to find a project, and all the prerequisites. It's easy to think you don't have anything to offer--but you're wrong!
If you've found a project and don't know how to start contributing, this talk will give you tips on getting in the door, finding things you can help with, and learning how to work with the existing contributors.
And, if you already have a project, you'll still learn a lot from this talk--how to attract new contributors, and how to keep them once they've shown an interest!
With years of experience in community development, and as editor of the popular Open Advice book, Noirin knows what it takes to get involved from both sides. Come and learn from her experience, and avoid her mistakes!
Dear lazyweb, is there a highlighting scheme for vim which makes method calls more readable?
Compare:
How can I highlight either method calls or arrows between them?
Also, shouldn't we patch the standard color scheme for perl now that direct access to accessors is generally discouraged and lots of object-oriented code looks so monotonously blue?
I'm an avid horror fan, big surprise! I like horror movies of all types: zombies, slasher, B-grade, C-grade, gore and even oldschool thriller horror movies like Hitchcock. To this day, I host a Friday the 13th event at my house every time for my friends and I. We run a marathon of as many movies as we can. Sometimes we make it through two, sometimes five. It's not always easy to stay up! :)
These past few months have been pretty difficult and busy. At 10pm I got a message from a friend in Canada: "happy Friday the 13th!" - Shit! I missed one! Well, no matter. The question is: how do I make sure not to miss one again? This is something I considered more than once and was always too lazy to actually try out.
So, I jotted down this code to accomplish it. I'd be happy to hear of better ways you can come up with:
Yes, I was architect for more than 10 years, but here I'm writing about testing computer architectures.
The most heard complaints on perl or parrot testing is about certain unknown architectures and platforms. If it's Windows, 64bit, little-endian, sparc, hpux, AIX, solaris, arm and so on.
So why not test out all those OS and architectures by our own?
On Windows you only got VMWare, VirtualBox and Hyper-V, but on debian you can simulate everything easily with qemu-kvm. On MacOSX I was not so happy with virtualization.
I suppose you have an amd64/x86_64 system and linux, with more than 4GB RAM. 16GB was good enough for me to run 8 images and compile bigger programs. With kvm you got fast native support for i386 and x86_64, and the rest can be simulated with qemu.
If you arrive on or before Sunday, there is an informal meetup on Sunday evening, 18:30 in the Café Extrablatt near the Bockenheim Campus of the University.
It would be good for us if we have a rough estimate of how many people plan to attend. So if you plan on coming, please head over to the wiki and add your name.
See you in Frankfurt!
About the Perl Module Ideas posting series. Previous posts: #1, #2, #3.
1. JSON::Color, YAML::Color. I'm loving colors on the terminal. Only recently (yes, recently!) found out that terminals can support 256 colors. After Log::Any::App and Data::Dump::Color, I'm looking forward to see JSON::Color and YAML::Color, and might even write them myself someday if needed.
Since there are already several syntax highlighters targetting HTML (like those Javascript-based ones, search.cpan.org is even using one), a feasible approach is to convert HTML output of syntax-highlighted JSON/YAML/others to ANSI. Sort of the reverse of HTML::FromANSI.
Yet another approach might be to raw dump the output of color-supporting text-based browser like links2 (complete with its ANSI escape codes), though I can't seem to activate its color support in my terminal ATM.
2. Compress::smaz. An interface to the smaz compression library. Might be useful someday, since I deal with language text a lot.
3. RSS::CPAN::ReverseDepends. In a similar spirit to previous idea, RSS::Mention::CPAN::Module, this module can generate feeds to let CPAN authors know when there is a new module on CPAN using (one of his, or any of his) modules. This should be easily done using the MetaCPAN API.
I've just proposed the following talk at YAPC::Europe:
Networks are great in theory, but have some well-known limitations that you should bear in mind when using them. Come find out what they are so that you don't make the same mistakes.
I'm updating Geo::GeoNames, and my fork is on Github. I have a bunch of geo-coordinates where I want to know the country or city names so I can easily remember why I have those coordinates and tell them apart from the other coordinates.
Since it's last release, GeoNames changed the web services address and started requiring a username (which you can get for free). Once you respond to the email and enable free access on your account, you are ready to go. I've updated that.
I've also responded to all of the RT tickets and Google Code issues. I think I've fixed everything that I can fix.
The tests pass, at least for me. Many of the current failures come from the outdated interface before GeoNames required usernames. There's some tests that I've made TODO until I care about those features. If you'd like something that isn't supported, send a pull request.
I don't know if the current module handles all of the search types. I'm not particularly interested in making it definitive as long as it has the stuff I need. When other people need unsupported types, they can add those too. If there is someone who is motivated to maintain Geo::GeoNames long term, I can make co-maintainters.
We're happy to announce that Curtis Poe will be attending YAPC::Europe 2012. If you don't know him, he is a programmer, prolific blogger about living and working abroad and the author of "Beginning Perl".
The unofficial subtitle of his book is 'Get a job, hippy!' It's focused very heavily on real-world skills that you'll need in the marketplace. It's based not only on Curtis' 13 years of experience with Perl, but also on surveys that show what companies are actually using. For a short time, you can read it for free at http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781118013847/
We are very happy to have him visit Frankfurt and give a keynote.
I've written a review of CPAN modules for getting module dependency information. There are 8 modules on CPAN covered, plus I've included a module I've just written, as none of the ones I reviewed did quite what I wanted.
I've taken a slightly different approach to this review: previously I've spent a lot of time learning about each module, trying to fix any bugs I come across etc, so the first version published is fairly polished. As an experiment, this time I've done a much quicker first pass, and essentially published a first draft. I started off with 6 modules, but two more were pointed out by readers.
I wanted one of these modules for another review I'm working on, where I was curious what all the modules were getting pulled in by some of the modules under review.
Any comments on the review, and identifying missing modules, appreciated as ever.
My criteria for a perfect bug report...
Obviously all reports of genuine bugs are welcome, but that doesn't mean all bug reports are equal; some are better than others. Getting 10 out of 10 is a lot of work, but even 6 out of 10 is better than average in my experience.
Why is writing a good bug report important? Because the better the bug report, the faster the issue can be solved; and the faster the issue is solved, the sooner you can use the fixed software.
So let's look at those criteria a little more closely.
Since Joel has outed me already. :-)
At this year's YAPC::NA I had a chance to meet David Mertens and Joel Berger.
After some email exchange with David and Joel I decided to create a Google Group, The Quantified Onion, for discussing the use of Perl in science. This will hopefully work with Joel's Perl 4 Science site.
I hope we are in for a fun ride.
The Call for Papers is now closed! We'd like to thank everybody who submitted a talk proposal. Without you and your talks an event like YAPC::Europe would not be possible.
We recieved more than 80 talk proposals. And we've already accepted more than 50 talks. You can find the list at http://act.yapc.eu/ye2012/talks.
Today we start our final voting round and it ends on Friday.
It will take a few days to create the schedule. It will be announced here...
Yet another effort to add Log::Any logging to a popular module, this time LWP. Presenting: Net::HTTP::Methods::patch::log_request. Inside, tt's currently just a wrapper for format_request() method in Net::HTTP::Methods, which is where the raw HTTP request is being formed.
To use it:
use Net::HTTP::Methods::patch::log_request;
# now all your LWP HTTP requests are logged
use LWP::UserAgent;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $response = $ua->get('...');
Sample usage and output (by using LWP via WWW::Mechanize; you can see how Google redirects to the country-specific domain here):
Recently leprevost posted a comment on requiring better software in science. Its a good plea, read it! In response I started a comment, which got a bit too long, here it is:
A few of us have been talking about how to increase the use of Perl in the scientific community. While our efforts are in their infancy, we hope to fight this very problem. Some new sites are
In the meantime, all I can do is contribute that good code, and put it on GitHub and CPAN for people to see and use.
This week I recieved from a friend researcher a paper from the scientific journal Bioinformatics. The journal is very famous among bioinformaticians and it describes itself as 'The leading journal in its field'. I'm not gonna specify who is the author or what is the name of the paper because I don't think necessary. In a simple way, the paper is about a software written in Perl designed to increase the performance of a database searching using protein mass-spectra.
I became interested so I downloaded the .rar, what I saw was 7 .pl scripts, 2 .xml and a readme file telling me the right order of execution and the correct inputs and outputs. The first impression I had was not good, there was no organization at all, the documentation was limited to comments above functions and the most important, the authors did not made test files. The scripts were a little messy too, no 'warnings' and 'strict' pragmas were used and some scripts weren't even indented.
My point here is that I think scientific journals should have better peer-review systems for papers based on softwares, specially those between biology and informatics, I know that it could be hard for someone who don't code in Perl to see some of those points, but good practices are a common thing among all languages. In scientific projects if bad laboratory work can be refused why can't bad coding be refused as well? This kind of project became a publication in a scientific journal and with this software I can't have sure that it works exactly like the authors described and I can't know if I will have reproductible results.
Good practices in software development are as important as laboratory good practices, everyone should respect it.
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