Stupid Unix Tricks: Workflow Control with GNU Make. So simple -- it's brilliant! (And so brilliant, it is simple.)

Having read commentary about coding practices, meditated, contemplated, posted a blog entry about my app and begged for constructive criticism, I found my way into a significant refactoring.

I haven't seen much about the step-by-step process of dividing and modularizing code. Here how I am approching it.

The app already uses OO, but suffers from some 260 global variables and about 6k lines of code in the main namespace.

I broke that code into about 30 different modules, testing after creating each new module, with the help of git for source control, and a couple scripts showing which files and in which subs each variable appears

Most modules still occupy the same namespace, however have access to only the minimum necessary subset of global variables. I did this using a structure like this:

[Audio_engine_setup.pm]

 package main;
 our ( $sampling_frequency,.... )
 sub configure_freq { say "configuring soundcard at $sampling_frequency" }

We have a non-Moose class but want to make a Moose subclass of it. In the first post, "Subclassing Tricky Non-Moose Classes: Don't Do It", we looked at a way to extend non-Moose classes without actually subclassing them. It is pretty straight-forward, and typically will cause less headaches.

Sometimes that method might not meet your needs, and you might really want to make a Moose subclass of a non-Moose class. This tutorial will get you started with a couple modules that will help you do just that: MooseX::NonMoose and MooseX::NonMoose::InsideOut.

The nitty-gritty

If you're looking to get your hands dirty and find out how this really works, your first stop should be Recipe 11 in the Moose Cookbook. It is optional reading for our purposes, though. It does a great job explaining how to subclass a common, blessed hash, non-Moose class "by hand," and points us to MooseX::NonMoose which handles those details for us.

Yesterday I booked my flights to/from YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga. Yay!

I also started the traditional TravelTeams Wiki page, which you can find here. If you're planning to come, please consider adding your travel info to this page. Maybe you can meet up with some fellow Perl hacker at your departing airport, or meet somebody in Riga (and maybe share a cab to the hotel...)

Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to this years YAPC, especially since I missed the last one...

Next step: Submit talks...

So we launched the new look moonfruit portal site today:

http://www.moonfruit.com/

It got some coverage in techcrunch.

It uses the rather awesome Dancer.

I mentioned it on the Dancer-users list, who seemed to like it, and wanted to know more. Below is reproduced from a post to the dancer-users.

The main Moonfruit service allows users to create sites in flash in a handy draggy droppy way (it being flash).

To do this we have a sprawling, slightly legacy, (but getting much better) Plack based set of API's.

The plan was to upgrade the portal from this (which was basically completely static html).

To a shiny web 2.<whatever we're on now> dynamic system.

MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal.pm MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal/API.pm MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal/Support.pm

1: Serving the HTML

I tweeted something last night knowing full well that few people see my tweets and most of those that do aren't programmers. So I decided to post here in case anyone else experienced the same problem.

I installed the new LWP (v6) last night via cpan.

The next time I tried to install a module my cpan client barfed red errors (see below). CPAN::Reporter was erroring when trying to send test results via Metabase.

I updated all SSL modules (cpan> upgrade /SSL/) and installed Mozilla::CA as suggested in the LWP Changes (and a tweet by miyagawa).

No luck.

I noticed something else in the LWP Changes file:

For https://... default to verified connections with require IO::Socket::SSL
and Mozilla::CA modules to be installed.  Old behaviour can be requested by
setting the PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME environment variable to 0.  The
LWP::UserAgent got new ssl_opts method to control this as well.

so I added this to my .bashrc and all is well again:

The Server Is Down

1. No it isn't, I didn't get paged.
2. Wait a minute, why didn't I get paged?
3. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU--
4. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

Diagnosis

The client reported that the site sometimes took more than a minute to load. Doesn't respond very slowly to me, and the pager is only primed to ping me if there is a sustained downtime (hiccups are not something I want to wake up for every night at 3:00am).

Strangely, load hovered around 7 most of the time, only spiking to 13 every few minutes. With a 16-core processor, this was well within operating parameters, if just a little worrisome. Nothing in the log files.

Oops, now I get a slow page load. Takes 30 seconds to load a page. Refresh again, and the page loads just fine. Clear browser cache, and the page still loads just fine.

Like I said in my previous blogpost, Module::Build has some serious technical problems. This causes another problem that I didn't discuss previously, but that's maybe the worst thing: no one loves it. MakeMaker also has some crazy internals, but it commands the love of a dedicated group of hackers. It's because of that more than anything else that I'm pretty sure its flame won't extinguish any time soon. Module::Build does not have such a luxury; no one seems motivated anymore to maintain it (if you are, do please take up contact with its current maintainer, David Golden). I fear Module::Build is screwed.

The way out

Last weekend I spend a few nice days in the Netherlands, thanks to the Dutch Perl Workshop 2011. It took place in Den Haag at the very cool Relevation Space (the pinball machines! the Space Invaders carpet! the LackRacks!)

It just got official today, although already listed in Dancer Web Site for some time. Livro-Aberto, is a Dancer website to track current progress of Portuguese on Gutenberg Project and Distributed Proofreaders. Therefore, it is written in Portuguese, sorry.

There isn't much that I can say about the website. It still lacks a backend (we are editing the database directly) although one is planed, using Dancer::Plugin::SimpleCRUD. Current database access is performed using Dancer::Plugin::Database, emails are being sent with Dancer::Plugin::Email and all templates are Template::Toolkit powered (through the respective plugin).

It is running in Apache fast-cgi (fcgid), and the database is MySQL.

What are the Perl modules you immediately install when you get a new Perl? Jesse Vincent, the Perl 5 pumpking, opened the door, albeit slightly, to possibly considering maybe thinking about provisionally expanding the Standard Library. Is that modally weak enough for you? (Jesse tells me I misread him, so, maybe the door is not open and never was).

Larry designed Perl 5 to be extensible, which is another way of saying that he designed basic Perl 5 to be small. CPAN is great, but we also know that through various social and technical factors, mere mortals struggle with the idea of having to get their wheels, fenders, and mirrors separately once they buy a car. Distributions such as ActivePerl and Strawberry and popular partly because they come with the extra bits. Non-perl people with their fingers in the pie tend to think about those included parts differently than the "third-party" parts.

• 2000 год
• три серии документов
• Apocalypses — Определение (список идей от автора и пользователей)
• Exegeses — Разъяснение
• Synopses — Тезисы

• основная идея — предварительное компилирование в байт-код, а затем выполнение в виртуальной машине

• Parrot -> Pugs -> Rakudo (Parrot) — переходящая пальма первенства
• Существуют и другие интересные реализации компиляторов Perl6:

Чуть подробнее про Rakudo (Rakuda-do — путь верблюда)

• Очень мало — Все начиналось в STD.pm — Набора грамматик Perl6
• perl6.ru
• perl6doc.ru — Авторы Наим Шафиев и Александр Загацкий — НУЖНА ПОМОЩЬ тестеров и переводчиков
• perl6.org
• perl.org
• rakudo.org

London Perl Mongers organises technical meetings every two months. The technical meetings are a chance to find out what has been going on in the Perl community, what techniques people are using and how Perl integrates with other software.

The next technical meeting will be on the 10th March 2011 from 7pm to 9pm (you may arrive earlier, please sign in at the reception). You have to sign up to attend, see below. It will be hosted by NET-A-PORTER.COM and held at their offices in Westfield London
Shopping Centre. Many thanks to James Hudson, NET-A-PORTER.COM and everyone involved for allowing us to use this wonderful venue. We have the following wonderful speakers:

Zefram - The new extendability features that are going into Perl 5.14
Dave Hodgkinson - Perl, Hudson and Selenium
Pete Sergeant - Something testy
James Laver - Spark Form

For more information and to sign up, please visit:

http://londonpmtech.appspot.com/

See you there, Leon.

I wanted to write up on the February TA.pm meeting we had two weeks ago but kept delaying it. I think it's about time!

As with every TA.pm meeting, we try to mix both beginner and advanced talks, in order to have something for everyone. It's proven very effective so far. We've also started doing lightning talks, which I really wanted to do for a while.

The beginner talk was done by Gabor Szabo, giving an introduction on how to get started contributing to an open source project. There were a lot of laughs and a lot of fun. We also got to see new faces, and that's always great.

Then we had a round of lightning talks, one by Shlomi Fish on how to solve a very specific problem in a ton of different ways, and one by no speaker at all, on how to write a nifty website in under a minute using Dancer.

We've now accepted the second round of talks. Thank you to everyone who has submitted so far! As for the first round, please be aware that just because your talk hasn't been accepted yet, it doesn't necessarily mean that it won't be.

You've got almost three weeks left to submit talks before the deadline on the 24th. We need many more still to fill out the available slots! Don't make us start volunteering people on IRC. ;)

As a bioinformatician and software developer of many years and avid Perl programmer and supporter, one thing I've noticed over the past few years is that Perl has been needlessly losing ground to Python in the major areas of scientific and financial computing, areas where it used to be *the* high-level interpreted language of choice. I am constantly having to correct people on blogs and forums that state incorrect Perl shortcomings when compared to Python or they were shortcomings from many years ago which don't exist anymore in the current language and ecosystem. If they spent two seconds researching Modern Perl and Enlightened Perl they would say WOW look where Perl has come!!!

This came up in a post-work discussion last night

How do the links to methods appear at the top of module documentation? Are they automatically generated?

A specific example of POD that does this is DBIx::Class::ResultSet

Since I wasn’t sure what the exact behaviour is off the top of my head, I thought I’d investigate.

search.cpan.org

As you may have already seen, the web-rendered version of the POD has a table-of-contents list of “stuff” at the start of the document.

perldoc

perldoc doesn’t produce the same table-of-contents. This makes sense to me, there’s not much scope for a clickable list of headings in text output

What magic markup makes this happen?

The simple answer is, “there’s no magic markup required”.

As long as you’re using pod2html, or something that behaves in the same manner you just need to use ’=head1’, ’=head2’ and friends in your own POD.

The DBIx::Class::ResultSet pattern

Checking the file source quickly with

By far the biggest change we've made in WebGUI 8 is the new Admin Console. Though parts of it may look familiar, it has been completely rewritten from the ground up to be a flexible, extensible, responsive JavaScript application making calls to JSON services in Perl.

I could talk about how to use the admin interface, but I don't think that's why you would read this blog, so instead I'm going to talk about how you can add functionality to it.

Asset Services

Since Assets are the basic unit of both application and content in WebGUI, much of the Admin Console is spent interacting with Assets. It does so by calling out to Asset Helpers.

By default, every asset has a helper to Cut, Copy, Duplicate, Delete, and more. When a helper gets called, it returns a JSON data structure explaining to the Admin Console what to do next.

We can simply show the user a message:

Although YAPC::Europe::2011 preparations are well underway in Riga, it is time for the venue committee of the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to think about the location of the 2012 conference. YAPC::Europe wouldn’t exist without dedicated teams of volunteers, and we are always excited to see the enthusiasm and learn about the new ideas the community has to offer.

Further information about preparing a complete application can be found on the YAPC::Europe Foundation website. Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit future organizers.

The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:

• Saturday, 30 April: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two organizers. This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the venue committee of your proposal.
• Thursday, 30 June: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe 2012.

Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to venue@yapceurope.org.