Tussle, or "Tom's Unicode Scripts So Life is Easier", is a collection of some of the utilities that Tom created to explore various Unicode things. If you've read some of his Unicode treatises, you've probably seen him uʍop əpᴉsdn ʇsod. With his leo script, you can type just like Leonardo too. Some of this will undoubtably be in Pʀᴏɢʀᴀᴍᴍɪɴɢ Pᴇʀʟ (there's a script to do small caps too), ｂｕｔ ｙｏｕ ｄｏｎ'ｔ ｈａｖｅ ｔｏ ｗａｉｔ (that's not CSS doing that).
Besides the fanciful programs, there are various utilities to check the normalization forms, do better case mapping than Perl's builtins do, and various programs to search the Unicode Character Database. I've been having quite a bit of fun playing with them today as I tried to figure out how to write a short description for each.
Another tool to debug your Plack application is InteractiveDebugger
You can dive into your code, explore your stack and see all variables in each frame.
And execute arbitrary code at some level!
Just try it:
plackup idebug-demo.psgi
firefox http://127.0.0.1:5000/
It is only one month left before YAPC::Europe 2011 Modern Perl! The conference is on 15-17 August in Riga, Latvia.
Yesterday we reached another record of 200 committed attendees. We know that Perl community is much bigger and would like to see everybody in Riga. People from 40 countries and 60 monger groups are going to attend the conference.
Our talk list is enormous and dense. Three days of four or five talk tracks. Three hours of lightning talks. Track for beginners. Larry Wall Monday morning, Damian Conway Tuesday morning, Jesse Vincent Wednesday morning. Talks about Perl 5, 6, 5.14 and even 5.16. Talks on web frameworks, DBIx et. al., NoSQL and clouds, and much much more.
As an update and continuation of my last post: lot has happened. This is also a kind of Grant report since the Perl 6 Tablets are rolling again and I plan to cash in the first half of the TPF grant around YAPC in Riga but definitively before Frankfurt (german perl workshop).
You may ask what took so long or why I believe to be now much faster. I just see how much I was able to do in last months. There was the perl tutorial which was very successful in his first part, but 7 or 8 other will follow. You can watch them growing or participate in our wiki.
Yesterday I had a lot of work to push my code to dotcloud, using the new client, 0.4.1. This mainly because the structure of DotCloud services changed.
These are some pointers to help if you get into the same problems:
Now the dotclout push command doesn't copy your code to a specific service. It is copied to all services, even for mysql servers. Also, the copy is not performed directly to the server. First, it is done to an intermediate upload server, and then sent to all your service servers.
Back in May there was some discussion on the CPAN Testers Discussion list regarding the statistics available on the CPAN Testers Statistics website. As I was already in the process of cleaning up several pages, some of the ideas looked worthy of including in the next release. Two have made it, and are now available for those interested in the reporting statistics.
MetaCPAN went live with the switch over to Catalyst (previously we hadn't been using a framework at all) this morning.
The main aim was to make it easier for people to contribute and also to extend.
An unintended consequence was a significant increase in speed. We've not delved into the details - but the lesson learned is that using something as established and polished as Catalyst really makes a big difference compared to putting something together from scratch.
We've also added an experimental 'Sign In' button - have a play! You can use either Twitter, Facebook, GitHub or PAUSE to log in. Once you have authenticated against PAUSE, you will be able to edit your author's profile page via the front-end.
Sherm Pendley passed away this last weekend. He was a regular on usenet
and also the author of CamelBones, a Perl/Objective-C bridge. I got to
know him well over the several months as I placed him at his current
job. He was very well respected and liked at that company and all his
colleagues and I are all very shocked and saddened at this news. I
haven't heard an official cause of death but he was ill last week and
something must have gotten very bad. He will be missed.
Let this blog post be also an invitation to my talk that I'll have on this years YAPC::EU::2011 in Riga and a reason "Why?" there will be more questions then answers.
There is one question that keeps me busy for quite some months now already and that is: What if the knowledge and wisdom is not in answers, but in questions?
As it kept me busy for just too long and as I'm a full-time Perl programmer, I've decided to write a code to help me answer "Why?".
Sherm Pendley passed away on Saturday, July 9th. He was best known in the Perl community as the primary author and maintainer of CamelBones, an Objective-C/Perl bridge for use in Cocoa development. He was known among his friends and loved ones for his wit, humor, and intelligence. Sherm once wrote: "Simply put, my overall goal is to leave the world a better place than I found it."
I'm grateful to have found such a wonderful language to help me do almost any job at work better, and for keeping me entertained long into the night away from the office. I look forward to another 10 years. Thanks Perl!
Ran into an issue today and wanted to share in case anybody else hits the problem.
Using the good-old cpan client I found myself unable to install a module.
It took me a while to track down the problem...
I had CPAN::SQLite installed and that appears to have a bug
(which I filed as RT 69415):
If a greater version of a dist is removed from the CPAN,
CPAN::SQLite will fail to reindex the "current" (lesser) version,
which means the cpan client will spiral into a 404 loop and give up.
So if you try to install a module and cpan spews 404 errors for a different version than you're expecting, open up ~/.cpan/cpandb.sql with sqlite3 and delete that record with something like:
Ricardo wants to fix smart matching, which is horribly broken and always has been, although we're just starting to realize how bad it really is. He reduces the table to just a few operations:
$a $b Meaning
======= ======= ======================
Any undef ! defined $a
Any ~~-overloaded invokes the ~~ overload on the object, $a as arg
Any Regexp, qr-OL $a =~ $b
Any CodeRef $b->($a)
Any Any fatal
Module::Metadata::CoreList compares module pre-req version #s in your Build.PL or Makefile.PL with the versions of those modules in Module::CoreList, for a given version of Perl.
This can help you specify the minimum version # for the pre-req.
It used to be that my preference for Perl was considered niche; now it seems to be considered outdated. Google trends shows how Perl has declined over the past 7 or so years:
My previous post about a weird do-block bug I stumbled upon has been fixed as of 7c2d9d0,
the day after I posted. I don't know if anybody saw this post or if it was a coincidence, but thanks!
iCPAN hit the app store about a year ago. I didn't really expect there would be a lot of downloads, but the reality is that there was far more interest than I had expected, which is good. After the original app was released, I was able to release a couple of subsequent versions with updated Pod, but it soon became clear that some problems were not being solved.
The first issue was that it was taking a very long time to put a build together, because I had to parse all of minicpan with each run. The second issue was that my coverage was too low, around 60,000 docs. A lot of docs were being missed and there were a lot of edge cases to work out.
