blogs.perl.org

The talk submission process for YAPC::NA 2012 closes on March 15th. After that time we’ll finish building out the schedule with the talks that have been submitted. So if you’d like your talk considered, please submit it today.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Since I’ve never used MT before I signed up to blogs.perl.org, it’s only recently that I found that MT does have some spam settings, which unfortunately are not turned on or default to the most conservative value. Along with other settings, you can reduce the number of spam comments being posted/notified to you.

1. You can increase spam detection aggressiveness (Preferences → Spam). By default this is set to 0 which allows many spams to pass through. I set this now to 5 which seems to be okay (so far only 2 spams after a couple of days).

2. You can disallow anonymous comments (Preferences → Comments → Setup Registration) or at least require email verification. By default anonymous comments are turned on and email verification is not required.

3. You can use CAPTCHA! (Preferences → Comments). By default this is off, and unfortunately when I tried to turn it on (either using MT’s own CAPTCHA or reCaptcha), no image is displayed and yet all comments got rejected with the message “Text entered is not correct”. I guess this is currently a bug.

I noticed today that my firefox has been really slow lately. I use a firefox plugin named vimperator which provides vim-like keybindings for firefox. I have it configured it to store 5000 command history entries, which is considerably more than the default (500). It has always been in the back of my mind that this might come back to bite me one day. So today I decided to check how many entries have so far been saved in the history file. I easily found that the history is stored in a json file located at ~/.vimperator/info/default/history-command. Running wc (word count) wouldn't help because all the data is stored on one line. I noticed that the file simply contains a serialized json array. To determine the size of this array, I used App::p and whipped up this simple one-liner:

    p 'p @{jl r "history-command"} + 0'

http://svn.ali.as/cpan/releases/Test-NoWarnings-1.04.tar.gz

One of the common gotchas with Test::NoWarnings is that the warnings are collected up and displayed in one go at the end of the script.

While this is strictly speaking the correct time to show them and has the least likelihood to result in a collision with some other test module resulting in an explosion, it makes debugging test scripts much more difficult.

Since I took over Test::NoWarnings a number of people have asked me to “fix” this problem.

After much thought, I’ve decided to leave Test::NoWarnings default behaviour the way it is and show everything at the end.

Instead I’ve added a specific debugging aid in the form of an :early pragma.

use Test::NoWarnings 1.04 ':early';

The :early pragma explicitly turns on emitting warnings at the time they occur instead of gathering them until the end.

brian d foy will be giving a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

A modulino is a module that also can act like a script. This talk explores how a typical command-line invocation of the script, with switches and standard input and output, can connect with a module’s interface without sacrificing flexibility.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

GitHub is a great place to host open-source projects and expose them to a wide community of developers, so it's not surprising that more and more Perl modules are making it their home.

One of the features of GitHub is that it checks if a repository has a README file in its root directory, and displays it on the home page of the repository. This makes the README file a good place to introduce your project to the public.

GitHub also understands a number of markup languages, such as Markdown and Textile, and if the README file is in one of these formats, it will be transformed into nicely formatted HTML. One of the supported formats is POD, which means that the standard documentation of a Perl module can be used as its README file and serve as the repository's home page (much like on CPAN).

This is the first of a series of posts that will detail a Marpa-based "Ruby Slippers" approach to parsing liberal and defective HTML. As an example, let's look at a few lines taken more or less at random from the middle of the perl.org landing page. That page is exactly 400 lines long. Here is line 200 and some lines lines to either side of it.

</td>
<td>
<div class="module">
<a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/">
<img alt=""
    src="http://mc-cdn.pimg.net/images/icons/onion.vee5cb98.png"
    width="45" height="45" />
</a>

<h4>
<a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/">The Perl Foundation</a>
</h4>
<p>
The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement
of the Perl programming language through open discussion,
collaboration, design, and code.

For readability, I've rearranged the whitespace, but otherwise the above is untouched. My more-or-less-random extract is part of a table, and captures the end tag of one cell and the beginning of another.

A very tiny handful of you may know that I was trying to push YAPC::Cuba. Later I expanded the idea to be a more general open source conference in Cuba as that would likely be a better fit. Sadly, it appears that it's not to be (or at least, not to be through me). There was a fair amount of excitement at the idea from those I spoke with. Quite a few said they wanted to be involved and would contribute time and effort to it, but as is often the case with volunteers, time is at a premium and dedicating volunteer time to a long-shot opportunity is understandably low on their priority list.

And of those who I spoke with who said they wouldn't attend? They were invariably not US citizens. They expressed concern about repercussions from the US government for attending a conference they were legally allowed to attend.

Isn't that sad? People are afraid of the US and it kills the chance to have an interesting conference at a time when it seems perfect for Cuba and the world to be talking.

Steffen Mueller will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Booking.com is the world’s leading online travel agent for hotel reservations. It is a wildly successful enterprise that was built with Perl at its heart. The company’s IT team runs millions of lines of Perl code on thousands of servers.

In this presentation, we will outline how we migrate(d) one of the world’s biggest users of Perl across 14 stable releases of Perl from 5.8.5 to 5.14.2, why we did that, what bit us, and what we learned from it.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Net::SSH2 (ssh client library based off libssh2) now has agent support, something that i've been wanting for a while and had just sat down to write. Very happy it had already been done! Thanks fellas!

DBD::SQLite 1.35 has been released to the CPAN. If your mirror has not updated yet, you can install it via pip or cpanm from the following URL.

http://svn.ali.as/cpan/releases/DBD-SQLite-1.35.tar.gz

Normally the release schedule of DBD::SQLite is tied to that of SQLite update recommendations, as this module is used in an enormous number of places and having relatively large gaps between releases is considered an advantage for downstream distributions and corporate users in particular that have very large testing burdens for each release.

This is the first DBD::SQLite in a long time that was not done as the result of an update recommendation from the SQLite maintainers.

In addition to a number of Perl level bug fixes, this release gains the SQLite 3.7.8 and 3.7.9 updates, the former of which contains a new merge sort for indexing resulting in an order of magnitude performance improvement to indexing and performance improvements to any queries that do index lookups.

I'm looking for Ilja Tabachnik.

I want to fix his only module on CPAN (POSIX::RT::MQ), but his public email address no longer exists. If I can not reach him I will ask the PAUSE admins for permission to take over this module.

We’d like to thank our sponsors for stepping up to support us. We really couldn’t do this without their support.

You too could sponsor YAPC.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Hi Folks

Does anyone know why perlsphere.net is off the air? Is it just because I'm in Melbourne (Aust)? Is it temporary?

TIA.

I've been working on Redis::Client for a while now. It's not ready for production use yet, and there's a lot of work yet to be done, but it's much better than anything else on CPAN right now for talking to Redis.

I hate boilerplate with a burning passion, and I will often go to extreme lengths to avoid typing it. (I typed it once already, dammit! Leave me alone!)

After having a great time learning to mess with Dist::Zilla, I decided to give another of Ricardo's projects, Pod::Weaver a try. Here's the cool stuff I was able to do after not a lot of work.

In a previous post, I listed the four ideas that are essential to Marpa. This post delves into one of them: Ruby Slippers parsing. In Ruby Slippers parsing, the parser imagines ("wishes") that the language it is parsing is easier to parse than it actually is. The part of the application that handles input (the "lexer") manipulates the input to make the parser's "wishes" come true.

As an example, take liberal HTML. "Liberal HTML" is HTML as it is found "in the wild", with missing and spurious tags. I've written a Marpa-powered liberal HTML parser which uses the Ruby Slippers as its primary technique. The grammar behind Marpa::HTML assumes a fantasy world, one where no element ever occurs out of place, and where all HTML elements have both start and end tags.

Linode has blown my mind again by increasing their sponsorship of YAPC::NA 2012 to the Platinum level. I can’t say enough good about them, not only as a sponsor of YAPC, but also as a great hosting company. Thank you Linode!

Recently named by Inc. magazine as one of the top 500 fastest growing private companies in America, Linode delivers virtualized cloud services from six regions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia to some of the most innovative companies in the world, such as The Onion and Creative Commons. The company’s proven IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering enables customers to deploy and manage Linux virtual servers in the Linode Cloud with the ability to scale deployments to meet business demands - paying only for what they use with no long-term commitments. For more information, visit http://www.linode.com/.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

The YAPC Conference Surveys site has now been updated with the results of the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop and the German Perl Workshop.

The site has also been update to provide a tabbed display of the different types of event, to make it a little easier to find results. Over the next month or so I am looking to get more of the past data online, as well as the feedback that I normally send to just the organisers. I have lots of data waiting in the wings, and its only been my lack of free time that has prevented me from finishing off the sanity checks.

This is a reminder for the upcoming meeting.

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

So I thought I’d kick off my inaugural Perl blog post by answering the question I’m sure you’re asking right about now: who am I, and why should you care?

Of course, the short answer is: “you shouldn’t.” I have another blog whose title sums up how I feel about blogs.  The short version is, they’re crystallizations of other people’s opinions, and, as we used to say in grade school, opinions are like assholes: everybody’s got one, they’re all different, and they all stink.

But notice how that didn’t keep me from starting a blog myself.  Also note that there are 83 posts on said blog.  So obviously I’m a big ol’ hypocrite.