blogs.perl.org

Addition: I've made a more detailed list of event ideas.

This Perl marketing thing you know.. I'm really thinking about it every day. I've always wondered how those mechanism of "being THE it-language" or "the tool the cool kids use these days" or "success" in terms of "spreading everywhere" really works.

I've started with Linux in 1995 in Germany and I remember for example how the increasing database support on Linux was celebrated ".. and now XY is available under Linux" and how the success of Linux went hand in hand with the raising success of the Internet and the Web of course. Those were fascinating times.

Over the years I've done something else but Perl but then I went back at a point when I felt "Web is cool again" - and then I had to realize that PHP basically took over the Web. Bad. That's abolutely not what I wanted to spend my time on - coding PHP. So of course I had to notice Ruby.

Taco bell programming


This is a great article on simplicity and Unix. Very relivent to anyone that wants to understand Perl.

Just about anyone can help out with CPAN Testers. You can be a heavy-weight tester submitting thousands of reports a month, or a casual tester submitting reports for the distributions you install. You can also help promote CPAN Testers on your blog, or join the group on cpan-testers-discuss mailing list (or associated channel on IRC) and help answer questions testers and authors may have.

However, there is a further way you can help, which is a great way for new testers to get an idea for what and how they can contribute, as well as getting to know the whole CPAN Testers eco-system, and that is by updating the CPAN Testers Wiki.

Lucene (in the Java and .NET versions, at least) does not create a parse tree when you use Lucene(.Net)?.QueryParser.QueryParser.Parse() to parse your queries. Instead, Lucene rewrites the query into a set of parenthesized terms that are either optional, required, or prohibited -- i.e. AND, OR, and NOT operators are replaced by +, -, or nothing (optional terms have no prefix).

For example: (ampicillin AND mcnc) OR (penicillin AND NOT scnc)
is rewritten into (assuming that the default operator is OR): (+ampcillin +mcnc) (+penicillin -scnc)

(Written up here because I couldn't find anything useful on the InterWeb about Lucene parse trees.)

(If I am wrong about this issue, please tell me.)

File::ShareDir is a module to allow you to fetch files that were copied during install-time of your distribution/module. Things like templates, images, XMLs or any other data that you need falls under the category of things you might want to have installed.

The installation itself is done by the module distribution toolchain (initially implemented in Module::Install but now available on all, including Dist::Zilla). You can read on how to add a share files in a directory on the respected documentation of you toolchain selection (or Dist::Zilla).

To reach the files after they were installed you need to use File::ShareDir. It has a few functions that fetch files or directories by module or distribution. It's comfortable, it's easy, it's simple.

However, I was reluctant to use it since I've heard about it mainly since I don't know what to do if I want to use the data files without actually installing the module each time.

• Perl
• Templating System
• Small
• Few Depenencies
• Lightweight

The framework doesn't get in the way. It also doesn't shove paradigms down your throat like a lot of other frameworks do.

~/Perl/B-C-work
$ /usr/local/bin/perl5.6.2d-nt -Iblib/arch -Iblib/lib -MO=C 
    -e 'use Class::Accessor; print "ok"' | grep DynaLoader::dl_install_xsub
-e syntax OK

vs

~/Perl/B-C-work
$ /usr/local/bin/perl5.6.2d-nt -Mblib -MO=C -e 'use Class::Accessor; print "ok"' | grep DynaLoader::dl_install_xsub
Using /cygdrive/d/data/urbanr/My Documents/Perl/B-C-work/blib
    gv_list[42] = gv_fetchpv("DynaLoader::dl_install_xsub", TRUE, SVt_PV);
    GvCV(gv_list[42]) = (CV*)(newXS("DynaLoader::dl_install_xsub", XS_DynaLoader_dl_install_xsub, (char*)xsfile));
-e syntax OK

What does blib do to fix the old compiler? Note that cwd contains spaces in the path.

The compiler uses something like

December turned out to be a very interesting month. After a lot of tweaks, I updated several parts of the ecosystem from the Generator, which takes the metabase reports and parses them for the cpanstats database, through to the Builder, which builds the files used by the Reports website, to the Uploads mechanism, which monitors the changes in CPAN and new uploads to PAUSE. It has all helped to streamline the process a little, which means the processing from a report submission to appearing on the CPAN Testers Reports website is getting quicker.

So I'm back to posting, and apparently I'm not the only one.

As much as I'm impressed by the work done by Reini Urban on LLVM and the compiler, I disagree with his last post.

When I started writing CPAN distributions, EU::MM looked to me like something I will never write. Take this Makefile.PL for example, taken from Test::Simple. Compared to many other Makefile.PL files, this is actually clean and straightforward. It still looks like something I would never write. Why would I ever want to?

Another gift I prepare for the annual winter gift-giving season [0] is a mixtape [1] containing my favorite songs of the past year. As you might know, I still buy (most) of my music, and I buy it on vinyl. So once I year I haul my second turntable into our office (where my other turntable and mixer lives), set up an impromptu studio, and spend a few hours preparing the mixtape. You can view my past mixtapes here (if you can read German..).

I also create a nice cover and write up some liner notes, maybe fiddle a bit with the raw recording (using audacity) and then burn some CDs. As my mixtape is a continuous stream of ~75 minutes of music, I want to burn the CD without gaps between tracks, i.e. using DAO (Disk At Once). My preferred tool used to be gcdmaster, which lets me load one big 80 minutes wav file, set some track marks and burn the CD.

I've struggled a bit to start blogging again after the demise of use.perl.org.

I was so used to it's ways, it's foibles, and the mass of historical posts to refer back to that I've struggled a bit to bring myself to post here.

But having finally gotten past one of my biggest barriers, I find myself motivated to try and push a post through to completion (there was something to be said for use.perl's one-shot approach to posting, at least you couldn't procrastinate and abandon the draft once you started one).

And this momentous event?

The arrival of git as a version control system that I can actually take seriously now.

For years I've struggled with the git'erati and their zealotous ways.

First it was "It's awesome, just use Linux".

Then it was "It's fine, just use cygwin" ignoring the fact it clashes with Strawberry.

Later, this because "It's fine, just use msysgit" when most people on Windows don't like command lines and don't want to use them.

I wanted to know if people wanted Role::Basic as a stepping stone for Moose or just for roles. The results of my question are in and every person who has commented on this blog or in my Twitter feed has said the same thing: just roles. They know where Moose is if they want it.

That said, I still want to minimize pain if people upgrade to Moose. That leaves me with three issues.

• Allow people to easily add getter/setter methods (gets around a limitation in Perl's OO)
• Probably add -alias and -excludes methods to requires
• Find out why Role::Basic is sometimes failing on 5.6.2

I never understood why Module::Build attracted people at all

It is limited, broken and has less features than the good old EU::MM (ExtUtils::MakeMaker).

Limited:
1. dependencies, like the equivalent of make or make clean never works.
It does not check or clean important intermediate dirs and object files.
I always have to do a make realclean, to start testing with a new perl,
or updated xs file.

2. You cannot use a XS as a submodule in your package.
E.g. with Base\XS.xs windows builds will fail. Windows only!
You'll never find that out until someone else will blaim Windows.
It is just a bad Module::Build and ExtUtils::CBuilder design.
It is even not documented.
See https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=64476

How have you set up your environment to work with Unicode? I want to make a cheat sheet for the Perl newbies. There is some information in the googlesphere but it's disperse and unfocused.

I'm working Unicode into the next edition of Learning Perl. The most frustrating part of this for newbies (Perl, Unicode, or otherwise) is getting all the pieces to cooperate. Even if you get it right inside your Perl program, your terminal might not handle Unicode. If your terminal handles it, you might not have the right fonts. And so on and so on.

I know what I've set up for my system and the programs I use, but that's just for the tools I use. What did you have to

A recent push at work has been to use TAP everywhere that we need to test something. It's great for a variety of reasons.

• We are finally trying to test as much as possible.
• All of the myriad pieces of software, written in a variety of languages, can use the same text-based interface.
• Anyone in the group can look at the output and understand it.
• The test results can be read by a single process that parses and displays the results in a uniform fashion.

It's very refreshing to hear C++ programmers talking about TAP.

OMG yet another new year BS.

Since I live here on planet earth where biology by in large restarts with every spring, which happens in this part of the world in march, I'm bit reluctant to join the gregorian calender, which is named after a roman katholic pope and a calendar which prior to that changed its start to january by another roman dictator, which makes it further unatractive to me. don't get me wrong, I dont want to act here any more special then necesary, but its good to review and to make plans.

so here is my 2010:

* Kephra 0.4.3

** important version that stabilized a lot.

* WxDocular

** a wxperl based documentation browser that doesn't went far yet.

* first articles for heise.de

** about the german perl workshop and perl 6

** It is the major german IT-news vendor

* WxPerl class at YAPC::EU

** was very well recieved and maybe it will become a book

* TPF Grant for Perl 6 tablets

2011

My first post on blogs.perl, here goes.

This is a short narrative of how I 'discovered' Perl and why I have stuck with it for the last three years.

Back in October 2007, I had recently joined a financial services firm as a fresh graduate. During a meeting of the corporate charity committee it was suggested that a website should be created to set up a charity auction. In an impulsive moment I went ahead and raised my hand. The key motivation was the sense of satisfaction that always accompanies voluntary work. The fact that the chairperson of the charity committee was a very pretty lady whom I was keen to impress may or may not have something to do with my decision.

A little about my background. At that time I had dabbled a bit with different programming languages. I had modified a perl script here and there but had not written a complete application from scratch, let alone a website.

Gentle reader, I need your advice.

Some years ago I created the Net::Appliance::Session Perl module. It allows the user to automate interactions with CLI-based networked devices (think routers, switches) - a sort of Expect but with some helpful domain knowledge. The module has turned out to be quite popular (which is important to my story), in use by many organisations.

There is a shopping-list of problems with the code, though, which makes both bug-fixing and feature development really hard. I've been planning a rewrite for over a year, and finally completed most of that in the past few days.

The new version is completely different internally, but that shouldn't matter much. The problem comes in that I've engineered a new "phrasebook" system for the scripted CLI interactions, and also the programmers' API has changed. [Edit: I should add that lots of long-asked-for features are included, so the rewrite did bring benefits for the user.]

For the annual winter gift-giving season [0], I usually prepare a printout of nice pictures I took during the past year for the grandparents of my kids and other relatives. This involves going through 2839 photos [1] and filtering out the 10 to 30 pictures a given relative might care most about (there is some overlap, eg. the birthday of one of my kids, but not that much).

So the task is:

• go through a lot of photos quickly
• select/tag some with different criteria
• export the selected photos.

I once wrote a thing called fotagger, but currently my SDL is broken and I wasn't in the mood to fix it. So I took a closer look at the tool I'm usually using to view pictures: qiv.

These are the things that are likely to happen: