Patch, Publish or Paw..

.. may it be Christmas sooooon! ;-)

cheers
:m)

Happy New Year everyone!

Here it is, only a few hours into the new year, and I'm already breaking a resolution of sorts. It wasn't a proper resolution, but given that I have plenty of things on my plate — not the least of which is a baby on the way — I had decided that I wasn't going to hack on Role::Basic for a bit until I saw the dust settling.

First, a simple question: if you're interested in Role::Basic, is it as a stepping stone to Moose, or because you just want roles and nothing else? The answer to this question could have a huge bearing on a fundamental problem that I face. This post is going to be rather long, so if all you do is answer that question, that's fine. I need to know. The reason this post is going to be long is because making things hard is easy. Making things easy is hard. Thus, in trying to solve a problem in an "easy" way, I have to think about a hard problem.

https://gist.github.com/761648

And what is most amazing about it? That 186 or 46% are either resolved or patched. That's a wonderful success rate.

If you have a login on rt.cpan.org you can issue this query to see the actual 401 tickets.

Very nice graphics and ad-hoc statistics are then provided by RT when you look at the bottom of the page. I've never noticed that RT footer under the result of a query before.

For example I can create a bar chart by CreatedMonthly that shows me when the rally started: 65% of the tickets were created from August to December. That's because on the first days of August was the relaunch of http://analysis.cpantesters.org/ after a few months break due to the cpantesters 2.0 launch. Analysis is the real work horse that drives me in this game. It's kind of playing solitaire with bugs. Analysis provides the deck: cards of many different shapes and colors, my job is to read them and find the ones that can be resolved quickly.

• No lambda functions/subroutines.
• == vs. ===
• 5 bazillion functions imported by default in top level Namespace
• The lanugage comunity is esentialy the VB6/JavaScript community -- Well at least JavaScript has clean semantics.

In other words php is not the market we want to go after.
I'm just saying that php is not a good model to base a language off of, except for ease of configuration.

It's been some time since I last blogged. My next post will be looking forward to what I'm planning to write next year, but first I should blog about what stuff I've come up with in the past couple of months.

Shared memory

I had already written POSIX::RT::SharedMem before, but even though POSIX IPC is a great idea (for being remarkably sane to use) it isn't widely implemented (Linux, Solaris and recent versions of OS X support it out of the box, FreeBSD does too but you have to enable it explicitly). Therefor I ended up writing SysV::SharedMem, which does pretty much the same thing, accessing shared memory as a string, but implemented using a different backend. It's largely derived from File::Map, unlike POSIX::RT::SharedMem that delegates most of the work to File::Map. Writing it has made my conviction that SysV IPC is an incredably crappy API even stronger, but fortunately that's largely hidden from the end-user.

Building blocks

James Clark in XML vs. The Web has finally said what needed to be said -- that XML is a singularly bad format for data transmission. Here is the crux of what Mr. Clark had to say:

It's "Yay", because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this. The fundamental problem is the mismatch between programming language data structures and the XML element/attribute data model of elements.

The Past

And I dived head first into great distributions like

• Dist::Zilla
• Moose
• PSGI
• Mojo
• Catalyst
• DBIx::Class
• XML::Compile
• ... and many more

Not all are from this year, or even new, but they are all great examples of the code quality of CPAN.

I had a short look at Perl 6. Alas there weren't enough time in a year to do share between the exciting stuff in Perl 5 and 6. But next year...

Connectivity

I wrote Catalyst::Model::REST to make it even easier to access other applications through the model layer of Catalyst.

Yesterday we had our first revived Tel Aviv Perl Mongers meeting. You probably came across the announcement once or twice in your RSS feeds, mailing lists or even through a personal message from me.

Apparently this worked quite well. The last Perl Mongers meeting included 5 to 6 times as many people as previous meetings. It was pretty awesome. We also scored pretty high on the variety of people.

I got to meet a lot of new people, hear interesting talks and mainly have a lot of laughs.

After the talks, the top-posters went out to dinner and had a great time. The discussion of how to represent a salad in pure OO form ensued and all hell broke loose from then on! :)

Next meeting we're hoping to get even more people to attend. My plans include shorter talks and a lot more fun (such as lightening talks) and getting more people to step up (help organize and give presentations on various issues).

Thanks to everyone who came, everyone who gave talks, helped with the website (DNS, hosting), graphics, flyers, advertising and so on.

See you next time!

Over the summer I had the privilege of attending a week-long workshop on CUDA hosted by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering. It was was free for students from the University of Illinois (and other partner institutions, I presume) and it was excellent. If you want to learn CUDA quickly and you want to learn it well, I highly recommend attending such a workshop.

Over the fall I started writing and using CUDA kernels in my research. This meant writing code in C. C is a great language, but it is not known for its whipuptitude. Almost immediately, I noticed that my main() function did little more than manage memory and coordinate kernel launches. This, I thought to myself, is exactly what scripting languages are for, and wished there was something out there to let me manage CUDA memory and invoke CUDA kernels from Perl.

This is how I started down the path of writing perl_nvcc.

As predicted in the October Summary, the latest milestone for CPAN Testers came just before Christmas. On 22nd December to be exact, as can be seen on the Interesting Stats page of the CPAN Testers Statistics site. Once again, many thanks to all the testers who have help to contribute to the milestone.

Congratulations to Chris Williams for posting the 10 millionth report. It was a PASS for App-cpanminus-1.1005.

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.

YES! I am extolling the greatness of Dist::Zilla! It really has a lot of greatness. I think it's finally reduced the friction enough that I'm going to start making dists for all my internal projects. A big thanks to all involved in building up such lovely infrastructure.

A long time ago I posted about Roles without Moose and while I still feel that for most cases Moose is the way to go, there can still be a bit of resistance to the idea. Matt Trout responded to my post with how one could have just roles (read his entire post to understand the context):

package Foo::Manual;
use Moose;
extends 'UNIVERSAL'; # get rid of Moose::Object

with 'Foo::Manual::Bar';

sub new { bless {} => shift }

This still involves putting Moose on your servers and when you're faced with a large dev team that is very conservative in their approach, this might be an uphill battle. So what are my alternatives?

Giving this a try. I have been brought back into Perl world about a couple of years ago, by my old friend Luis Campos (LMC), and I am now writing some of my own modules in Modern (or quasi-) Perl.

Cheers!
Russian

This Wednesday (Dec. 29th) we'll have a TA.pm meeting of the Tel Aviv area (and anyone who wants to come visit!) at Shenkar College in Ramat Gan.

If you're interested in Perl (to learn, to improve, to steal cool stuff, to meet new interesting people), this meeting is for you!

PNG flyer.
PDF invitation.

yacc was a major breakthrough. For the first time, automatic generation of of efficient, production-quality parsers was possible for languages of practical interest. Yacc-generated parsers had reasonable memory footprints. They ran in linear time.

But error reporting was overlooked. Then as now, the focus in analyzing algorithms was on power -- what kinds of grammar an algorithm can parse -- and on resource consumption. This leaves out something big.

Our frameworks for analyzing things affect what we believe. We find it hard to recognize a problem if our framework makes us unable to articulate it. Complaints about yacc tended to be kept to oneself. But while yacc's overt reputation flourished, programmers were undergoing an almost Pavlovian conditioning against it -- a conditioning through pain.

我有一台Ubuntu Linux服务器，想快速开启邮件服务。例如，我的登录帐号是pyh，并且有一个域名example.com，那么如何把服务器配置成可收发pyh@example.com的邮件呢？在Ubuntu下，这些都很简单，几分钟就搞定。（注：我的是Ubuntu 9.10版本）

假如服务器的IP地址是12.34.56.78，首先配置域名，给该IP地址分配一个名字，例如mail.example.com。然后，将example.com域的MX记录设置为mail.example.com，注意MX不能直接指向IP地址。

然后在Ubuntu里，运行如下命令安装Postfix（不想sudo的话就用root安装）：

apt-get install postfix

Postfix是一个MTA（邮件传输代理）。为什么用Postfix呢？因为一是它是Ubuntu的默认MTA，安装简单；二是它的配置文件大家都懂。

安装Postfix后，再安装sqwebmail，执行：

apt-get install courier-authdaemon
apt-get install sqwebmail

courier-authdaemon和sqwebmail都是Courier-MTA的标准组件。前者提供统一验证服务。后者是一套C写的webmail，简单快速，运行它后就可以通过网页来收发电子邮件。

执行上述几个apt-get后，MTA和webmail就都安装好并启动了，pstree看一下：

|-courierlogger---authdaemond---5*[authdaemond]
|-courierlogger---sqwebmaild
|-master-+-anvil
| |-pickup
| |-qmgr
| `-tlsmgr

第三行的master是Postfix的主进程。

安装完后就是配置，包括如下几个步骤：

（一）配置CGI

sqewebmail是通过CGI来运行的，要在web服务器里配置好它们。
系统里需要安装Apache。Apache是最广泛使用的支持CGI的web server，它的配置也大家都懂。

修改httpd.conf，加入如下内容：

1. ScriptAlias /webmail/ "/usr/lib/courier/courier/webmail/"
3. AllowOverride None
4. Options None
5. Order allow,deny
6. Allow from all

第一行设置脚本目录别名，用户访问路径包含/webmail/，就定向到/usr/lib/courier/courier/webmail/，这是sqwebmail的可执行程序目录。第二行及后述行设置该目录可执行CGI。

然后，在Apache的文档目录（htdocs）里，设置一个符号链接：

ln -s /usr/share/sqwebmail .

将/usr/share/sqwebmail目录链接到Apache的文档根目录，这里放置sqwebmail的静态文件，如图片、CSS等。

设置完后，重启httpd。

（二）创建Maildir

切换到个人用户身份（如pyh），在家目录（/home/pyh）里，运行如下命令：

1. maildirmake Maildir
2. maildirmake -f Spam Maildir
3. maildirmake -q 100000000S ./Maildir
4. touch .courier
5. sudo cp -r Maildir /etc/skel
6. sudo cp .courier /etc/skel

Hi Folks

Well, I'm living with my mother, who has Alzheimer's, which is a bit like being out of work, in that I sit around a lot. But I can go out - I just have to lock the front door and garden gate so she doesn't accidently let my 2 miniature dogs out.

Nevertheless, I hope to be still productive in the Perl arena.

So, post frequently, and that'll give me things to read :-).

~~@x ~~ ~~@y

is true if @x and @y have the same number of elements.

This rather elegant obfuscation uses the smart match operator as well as double bitwise negation.