blogs.perl.org

DuckDuckGo has launched a new plugin system that enables individual developers and Perl community members to build plugins on DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckhack.com/). The plugins will be available for all our users. Gabriel’s post introduces the plugin platform and different ways to get started: http://ye.gg/ddh

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

As this is only my second post—my first merely being a plug for a Damian Conway talk at my local Perl Mongers meeting—I thought I’d keep it short and silly.

At OSCON 2008, Amazon had a prominent booth advertising heavily that they were hiring. They didn’t want to hire just anyone. No, the question posed on the large sheet of poster board was, “Are you a ninja coder?” This was combined with a raffle, which as anyone who has ever been to a conference knows, is the most common tool used to get people to hand over their contact information. To enter, one had simply to look over some Perl code written out on that same poster board and tell them what it did. It looked a little something like this:

After last month’s breakneck development pace, I knew this month wouldn’t be as gratifying, and indeed it turned into quite a slog.

This month involved lots of little bug fixes, posting dev releases to CPAN, then waiting for test results from CPANtesters. As a side note, there are a larger number of reports coming from Solaris and BSD than I would have expected. Sadly one of the bugs that still hasn’t been sorted out is this recurring Solaris bug when changing working directory. It would appear that I am going to have to find a Solaris box or VirtualBox appliance, since waiting for test results for every fix attempt would take far too long.

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, it’s been quite a few years since I last gave a public talk in Zurich. Happily, we’ve been able to remedy that on this visit.

Digicomp run a regular seminar series entitled ”Open Tuesday” on the first Tuesday of each month, and I’m going to be speaking at that event on (no surprise) Tuesday May 8, from 6pm. Specifically, I’ll be giving my Fun with Dead Languages seminar.

The event is completely free, but they do need people to register so they can manage numbers correctly (just follow the “shopping cart” link on the Open Tuesday webpage)

Meanwhile, my various Perl-related classes at ETH are slowly filling, but there are still plenty of places left if you’re interested in some (entirely new) classes on Test-Driven Development, OO or API design, or optimizing your Perl development processes.

So if you’re in Zurich in early May, sign up for one (or more!) of my events. At very least, drop in to the “Open Tuesday” talk and see me do great and terrible things with ancient langauges.

Damian

Scott Walters will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Many Perl programmers, given a free weekend, can’t think of anything more fun than playing with computer graphics.  This talk shows off a number of my own adventures as well as hacks by other members of the Perl community.

I’ll talk about:

• Opening that window or going full screen
• Reading from the keyboard and mouse
• Getting stuff onto the screen
• Animation
• Gravity and velocity
• Collision detection
• Simple enemies (finite state automata)
• Geometry for games

Seeing several examples of Perl SDL and how they were written should educate and inspire you to dabble with your own ideas.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Lenz Gschwendtner will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as

Continuous Deployment is a big topic if you want to push out code to production as fast as possible. The little pitfall is that it is not that straight forward if you want to use a PP approach. We at iWantMyName came up with a pure perl tool chain all the way from your git repository via integration testing to deployment to your production servers.

write down my thought, experience and life about perl.

So I recently learnt about Template Toolkits META directive - I mean I've seen it scattered around here and there but never really seen it do much more than provide default page titles.

I have been annoyed at the inelegant workarounds I've had to use when organising a web app with a site wrapper template and keeping all the view control in the right templates rather than in either the controller or as special cases in the wrapper.

Today I finally sorted that.. yesterday I used the meta tag to add javascript and css links to the header part of the page from a template deep inside the body of the html and today I replaced a special case flag with a sub-template specified by the meta tag, which then contains the wrapped content - rather elegant.. AND it allowed me to solve the layout issues I had after I moved the app from bootstrap 1 to bootstrap 2

*edit*

At YAPC::NA 2012 we’re introducing social badge ribbons. At the registration desk you’ll be able to choose ribbons to apply to your badge as a call out to other attendees about who you are or what you do. You’ll be able to choose from interest areas like “DBIx::Class” and “Web Frameworks” to roles like “Author” and “Speaker” to fun stuff like “Crotchety” and “Rockstar”. There will be dozens of different types of ribbons available. We hope you make use of this tool to make new social connections at YAPC.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Padre, the Perl IDE has just hit version 0.96, only 1 more release before, numerically speaking, it hits 1.0.

Now this is interesting, as one of the big coders for Padre is Adam Kennedy ( Alias ), and he wanted to use the remaining release version numbers to get various bits and pieces of housekeeping in order before hitting the big 1.0.

However, it seems that Adam is moving (has moved by now) to the US, and to date, seems modus incommunicado, and lots of work has been done by Kevin Dawson (bowtie) and Ahmad Zawawi (azawawi) and as such I have been asked to roll out a new Padre 0.96 for the world to enjoy.

So given the last release was at the beginning of the year, and clearly from the Changes file for this release a lot has been done, it was well and truly time to don my Release Managers hat and get on with getting Padre out the door.

Hi Folks

Yep - See it in all it's glory:

A Perl-powered Toyota hybrid.

Actually, up close, with the sun reflecting on all the little rainbow coloured dot means this pix doesn't do it justice.

And yes, I should have caps on the 'open source' part...

Sigh... Next time. These last about a year exposed to the weather.

PS: Luckily for me a Toyota Prius has an almost-vertical window at the back.

It's been almost a year since my last Ubic post.
So just a quick remainder: Ubic is a polymorphic service manager which makes creating daemons easy, while being extensible in a several different ways.
(github; cpan).

This post is going to be pretty long.
If the rest of it is tl;dr for you, but you have any opinion about what constitutes a perfect service manager / daemonizer tool, or about what would convince you to use one, please consider commenting anyway :)

Technical improvements

# cat /etc/ubic/service/foo.ini
[options]
bin = sleep 100

Mark Allen will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

There are a lot of “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) providers popping up all over the place like dotCloud, Stackato and OpenStack.  They all say they support Perl.  How do these services compare to one another in price, performance and ease-of-use?

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I came across some Perl used for defacing websites. Not the standard stuff that adds a picture or scriptkiddie text, but adds an iframe to a website that was used (probably unknowingly) with the Eleonore Exploit Kit.

The Perl just globs standard html files (e.g., html, asp, php, etc), opens them, and appends the iframe to it (and remembers to CLOSE the file handle, too). That's it. Pretty manual. Not as automated as I thought it would be. I expected that it would at least change directories to the standard html directories or delete logs or something, but no... and it's clearly not used for attacking the servers which would host the "defaced" sites either. I suppose that since some servers host dozens to hundreds of sites that maybe it doesn't have to be so automated.

Anyway, if I had to guess, the index.php file from the iframe probably leads to exploits seen in the Wepawet link below.

In other news, Perl's not dead.

Links:
Pastebin link for Perl: http://pastebin.com/8KjZkMUn
Wepawet link: http://wepawet.iseclab.org/view.php?hash=20ff2743085c19354b5c6a57de099178&t=1264351976&type=js

(The Hebrew text will be followed by an English one).

English Version

Note: the meeting was delayed due to the Israeli Memorial day

Yes this is in a way my 5th grant report in a row, but even for Perl 5 people that might get insightful and even useful.

As I prepared a piece for the Perlzeitung which will not happen, i interviewed several people - some names you know for sure - about the current state of the core documents. Yes there slowly improving, the d did IMO good stuff, the new ooptut is good but there needs to be much more done. And instead of dropping here a blob of text, just have a look (Appendix A is really impressive). Its hardly started but I'm sure you get the idea (short but comprehencive explanation of everything + 7 different appendices giving alternative entry point to find what you need). Please just think about. The dream needs the hands of many.

Bradley Anderson will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

If you are new to Perl, chances are one of the first things you’ll be doing is some light system administration.  You will soon discover that there are several things you do repeatedly … like, every day, or, multiple times per day.  My rule is: if I have to do it more than once, I write a script to do it.  In this talk, I’ll show you how to hop along as a system admin if you’re a Perl programmer.  It’s better than unicorn meat.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Nearly a week late, but I've finally managed to write a short report about the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshhop 2012 which you can find on my Perl blog

In the mold of Buddy Burden’s great post Stepping Up, I wanted to share a recent pleasant result of contacting a wayward author.

One or two of you may have seen my MooseX::Types::NumUnit which brings “dimensional” (read: units) types to Moose objects. I had been using two different unit engines Math::Units::PhysicalValue and Physics::Unit. This was essentially because I hadn’t been able to figure out how to get the functionality of both out of just one, though I was rather sure it should be possible. Recently though, I spent some of my diversion time on the problem and settled on using only Physics::Unit. This is new version was pushed to CPAN a few days ago.

Today I wasted a few hours tracking down this delightful bug:

Undefined subroutine &main::main:: called at 
...lib/site_perl/5.12.4/YAML/Mo.pm line 5.

So what does YAML::Mo line 5 look like?

That's right. That's line 5. I've wrapped it to make it easier to read. When you load the latest YAML, you load YAML::Mo and that contains the above monstrosity. And it has a serious bug. Do you see it?