I'd like to see more people talk about their successes with Perl. I don't think we do a very good job of promoting successes. So while there are lots of great Perl apps out there, we as a community need to talk about them more. So I'll start, and I hope to hear more from you guys.
The Game Crafter is one that I'm very proud of. It's completely written in Modern Perl using Moose, DBIx::Class, Dancer, ElasticSearch, Image::Magick, and over 100 other modules, and deployed on Perl 5.12 (cuz 5.14 came out just before we launched it).
Earlier today a some dev work on MetaCPAN had the unfortunate side effect of dropping the ElasticSearch index. This has effectively forced us to re-index the site from scratch. What makes this particularly painful is that we've lost the author data (including +1) which so many Perl devs have lovingly created over the past few weeks.
The short story is that minicpan should be indexed within a few hours. The rest of CPAN and BackPAN will likely be in the next day or so.
Because we've been looking at adding new features and haven't spent time on a proper backup strategy, we're in a suboptimal place right now. The good news is that this didn't happen several weeks from now with much more author data. Also, we're now forced to find a workable backup solution as our first priority.
I have just released
Marpa::XS 0.008000.
With this release the core Marpa algorithm has been converted to C,
vastly speeding it up.
Marpa::XS is still alpha, but the additional development needed
at this point is a matter of packaging
(See Note 1).
It is my hope that Marpa
will become the standard parsing algorithm for problems too
big for regular expressions.
Marpa parses all
classes of grammar that are currently in practical use
in linear time.
(See Note 2).
Marpa is a general BNF parser -- that means if you feed it anything
written in BNF, it "just parses" it.
This includes grammars which are left-recursive, right-recursive and
ambiguous -- even infinitely ambiguous.
Marpa never goes exponential -- worst case, even for highly ambiguous
grammars, is O(n**3), which is considered optimal
(See Note 3).
Limitations and Comparisons
The foremost limitation of Marpa is, of course,
that it is alpha.
Development is well advanced, but the interface remains
subject to change.
Today on the way to work I almost finished off Test::BDD::Cucumber, but didn't quite manage it. So work having finished, I cracked out my MacBook Air and put the finishing touches in!
This entry is mainly about marketing and fundraising for YAPC::Asia Tokyo. Yes, $$. Stuff that artists and engineers don't really care about, but you should. This is also part of my talk from YAPC::NA 2011, "How to run Japan Perl Association"
So let's start out with the core funding: Every year Japan Perl Association (JPA) collets membership fees from its members. We have different levels of membership which vary from $500/yr to $6,000/yr. The expensive plans are actually divided up into two portions. 30% goes to fund JPA operation, and the rest is for YAPC. The sum varies from year to year, but we have worked with our members to collect around $12,000 ~ $14,000 as the core funding to run YAPC.
Our software dev team for YAPC::NA 2012 has begun the task of converting the venerable ACT conference management system, used to run many YAPC's, to Plack. It is currently directly tied to the mod_perl 1.x API. This modernization effort should make ACT more accessible to more developers around the world. Our hope is that this work will be completed and released to GitHub in the next few weeks.
Edit Notice: I edited this post because of a very valid point made in brian's comment below.
I use perlbrew for managing my Perl installs as I am sure many people do. I was searching around metacpan for helper modules for perlbrew and found
Bash::Completion::Plugins::perlbrew
. I think this might be useful so I install it,
cpan Bash::Completion::Plugins::perlbrew
and I get a “don't know what it is.” error. I changed my cpan urllist to point to http://cpan.cpantesters.org and reloaded the index and still no dice. I am still unsure why this is not working so I decided to try installing just Bash::Completion and it fails during t/05-utils.t .
So now what do I do? I really do not need to install Bash::Completion::Plugins::perlbrew or Bash::Completion but I do not like how they failed to install. Time to submit a test report.
We need more sponsors. I've been working on a few leads, trying to make sure we can pay for everything.
Web site updates
Working on schedule template for the event. There's a lot of debate over starting time. Traditionally, people complained we started too early. But, if we start any later it really makes for a short event once you subtract out all the breaks and meals.
TPF
Working with accountant. We need to get all the YAPC records reconciled with our bank account.
Made history this week by processing the first ever set of monthly recurring donations to TPF.
Paying bills. TPF is an associate member of the Unicode consortium for another year.
I've confirmed there's a problem with the YAPC checks. They were mailed to the bank for deposit. But, the bank never received them. Now, I'm kicking myself for not using delivery tracking. I've mailed in deposits several times in the past and never had this issue. At least I have a scan of all the checks. If they don't turn up soon, I'm going to have to write all the people that wrote checks. I'm really not looking forward to that.
There's a saying: "If you can't make money, at least have fun." My
open source projects have never earned a profit, but they've been
enormous fun.
They've put me in the position to meet a lot of great people and go to
interesting places. It's hard to imagine having more fun than I did
speaking at Perl Oasis and YAPC::NA this
year.
If anyone releasing projects in other languages has more fun than
this, how do they survive?
But giving away software is only fun when people use it. Otherwise
it's just saving public backups or something.
And write a blog post, which you're reading. Thanks, by the way.
So if you're using CPAN modules (and can talk about it, of course) let
us authors know. Because most of us aren't making money at it, and
you'll help us have more fun and release more code despite that.
You may or may not have noticed that you can't simply call PLPerl SPI subroutines from within your module. What happens is you get an error saying cannot find Package::Name::spi_*. This is because the PL/Perl SPI subroutines are not provided as perl CORE functions but rather local subroutines in the main:: package.
What can be done?
You may be tempted (as I was) to pass in an anonymous sub routine reference to your module like so:
return Package::Name->new()->process( sub { return spi_exec_query(@_) } )
This may seem like it would work, but you then run into problems because the spi_* PL/Perl subroutines have a prototype that restricts you from passing in an array. So you end up with code more like:
return Package::Name->new()->process( sub { return spi_exec_query($_[0], $_[1]) } )
Which, as you will agree is just plain ugly. So, to overcome the prototype you can instead call it like this:
return Package::Name->new()->process( sub { return &spi_exec_query(@_) } )
Recently I found some spare tuits and decided to spend them on MetaCPAN::API.
My main problem with the old MetaCPAN::API was that I had made a wrong design decision, and failed to take into account the flexibility of MetaCPAN. It really is flexible.
The second time around I decided I'll write it correctly, and test it thoroughly. I've moved to version 'v0' of the API (what was referred to as 'Beta API') and this helped clean up quite a bit. I was able to write it the way I wanted.
Tim Bunce (who I actually had the pleasure of meeting last YAPC::EU) had opened a ticket asking for complex POST requests. This got me thinking and that day I implemented complex GET requests, paving the way to the aforementioned POST requests.
Last week I posted an article on how CPAN authors could expand their profiles on metacpan.org. Since then there has been so much activity that I thought a quick recap would be in order. I'm not covering all activity, so my apologies to anyone whose efforts have not been replayed here.
At the time of the article, 91 authors had logged in to MetaCPAN and updated their profiles. That number after one week is 240. That's still a very small fraction of total CPAN authors, but it's also an amazing start.
On or just after the day of my post, Mo added +1 to metacpan.org. So, if you haven't already, log yourself in and start upvoting your favourite distributions. There will be more info on +1 to come, but this is a first step in making CPAN a friendlier place.
The NNTP injection host that I use to feed comp.lang.perl.announce had moved, and for some reason I had hardwired the old IP address into my posting script. Once I got that sorted out, it looks like it'll be business as usual for CLPA once again.
<hr></hr>, <br></br> and <img src="..." alt="..."></img>
at least, not if you want valid HTML.
I hit upon the idea of appending a single space:
for ($root->findnodes('//iframe')) {
$_->appendChild(XML::LibXML::Text->new(' '))
if !$_->hasChildNodes;
}
which works, because an extra space inside a previously "empty" iframe, script or canvas tag would be harmless. However this approach will cause problems when you come across "empty" <textarea> tags.