Spreadsheet::WriteExcel includes over 70 example programs so I put together a program that could be called from the makefile to build a Pod document of the examples.
Example programs are invaluable. They act as a first line of defense against frequently asked questions and they also help people who prefer a "Cookbook" approach to learning a new API or language.
I'm looking forward to use this new blog portal. Blogging from use.perl.org was starting to be a bit painful as sessions tend to expire randomly and the posts are limited to text only.
Congratulations to those who had the initiative to start the project and the volunteers that made it possible.
I've finally found some time to play again with the Rackspace API manual, and added a couple features to the Net-RackSpace-CloudServers module I hadn't touched since moving home some months ago.
On the scripts/ directory there are some examples on how to use the module: it's possible to list all images, flavors, and servers you own, as well as delete servers by ID or create new servers in what I think is quite a simple syntax.
After a substantial round of tweaking, I've managed to assemble a more complete and non-broken release of the Australian 2006 Census (in formats that don't suck), focusing on the SQLite version.
This second release resolves my previous problems with the broken SQLite file, and supplements the 45 raw tables (and 7600 raw columns) with a table metadata table, a column metadata table, and a hierachy table that will allow the generalisation from the raw Census Collection Districts (around 200-1000 people) into larger areas such as Local Government Areas, Postal Areas, States, and so on.
In addition to the fixed file formatting issues and the metadata tables, I've also added in a permalink for the main gzipped SQLite file. Shortly after the OSDC conference and my sister's wedding next week, I'll be throwing together and uploading a ORDB::AU::Census2006 module to automate the process of fetching and ORM-bootstrapping the census data.
The streets were pretty quiet, which was nice. They're always quiet here
at that time: you have to be wearing a black jacket to be out on the
streets between seven and nine in the evening, and not many people in the
area have black jackets. It's just one of those things. I currently live
in Colour Neighbourhood, which is for people who are heavily into colour.
All the streets and buildings are set for instant colourmatch: as you
walk down the road they change hue to offset whatever you're wearing.
When the streets are busy it's kind of intense, and anyone prone to
epileptic seizures isn't allowed to live in the Neighbourhood, however
much they're into colour.
- Michael Marshall Smith, "Only Forward"
It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.2.
So, like I mentioned in my intro post, I work a bit on a project called CPAN testers. My current project is to get a smoker running for perl 5.11.1.
My system is set up in an odd way. Reports aren't sent out right away. Instead, each smoker (a separate environment, differing in the version of perl installed) saves reports as files in a set directory, and then a script which I run manually will send these reports out via Gmail.
I got my new smoker set up, and am in shock at the number of failing distros. Test::Warn, for example, threw about 100 pages of errors at my terminal (in red text, even!). The strangest thing is that many of the distros which initially failed are now passing without me changing anything except installing a few new modules, which should only happen it a prerequisite wasn't present, and now is. Which shouldn't happen. This makes me suspect prerequisite finding as being broken.
Or something. Has anyone else had issues with 5.11.1 and modules failing tests for lack of a prereq that was never installed or tested?
I'll spend a while hacking at this, but do need sleep, since tomorrow is the third and final show of a series I'm working at the local theater.
I'm hoping this will let me finally leave use.perl.org and move to somewhere that supports more-interesting post elements such as pictures and what not.
For example, when I talked about Padre's iconography a few months ago, I would have preferred greatly to have been able to show this.
And now, thankfully, I can do that kind of thing.
Of course, for reasons I don't understand, my posts have no look and feel at all, because (I guess) some files aren't being written properly?
Fortunately, that problem now seems to be resolved
Is it really possible that this is the first outsider's entry on the shiny new blog site? That's exciting! This site ticks all the boxes, and that cannot be said for most of the alternatives. Well done to the Dave Cross and the developer team! At #perl6 on irc.freenode.net there are occasional discussions about writing a blogging engine in Perl 6. Search for "yarn" in http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/today and you will see how little has been done so far. When it does begin to grow, it will be a good idea to stea^W adopt some layout annd style ideas from this wonderful site :)
(This will not become a Blogging Iron Man entry - guaranteed the flow of postings will be fairly sparse). Right, let's try the Save button...
As much as the title is cliche, especially in a programming community, it's something that has to be done.
I'm Dan Collins, a CPAN contributor, though not recently, with userid DCOLLINS. I mostly wrote and maintained a framework for bots using Wikipedia and other similar websites. I've since moved on from that project.
Mostly now I work on CPAN testers, which is an amalgamation of a number of people who all simply report via email on the success or failure of CPAN installs. There are a number of tools which make this easier and more automatic, and at this moment I have 5 dedicated testing environments for new CPAN modules.
I really don't know what I'll blog about here, I don't much see the point, since I don't do too much Perl actively. But we'll see.
Over on Perl Hacks this morning, I
announced
the existence of this site. Ovid followed up with a mention on his
use.perl journal
. Which means, I suppose that we're live and can expect people to try to register, log in and actually use the site.
All of which is slightly problematic if the site decided to throw dozens of resource allocation errors which turn into generic web server errors by the time they get back to the user's browser.
Sorry about this. We are working as hard as we can to resolve this issue. I'll let you know when we think it's fixed.
If I recall correctly, this project started a year and a half ago in Copenhagen when several of us were talking about the idea of having a modern blogging platform for the Perl community. Naturally, it had to be written in Perl. We've deliberately kept this low-key as we have known others talk about this before, but nothing came of it. It's good that we kept it low key because it's been a long time coming.
There was a private mailing list and we (participants can out themselves if they choose) discussed at length the various features we might want. While we never had complete agreement, a compromise set of things was pretty much agreed upon.
A multi-user blogging platform.
Must be written in Perl.
OpenID support (for commenting, but not blogging).
Tags.
Images (yay!)
Syntax highlighting.
The images were very important to me, at least, because sometimes I want to do stuff like have a quick image of a class hierarchy:
Well, it's taken me 6 weeks of evenings and the odd weekend, but I'm proud to say the new http://www.perl.org/ site has just gone live.
This is a complete redesign and content review. Hopefully it's cleaner and easier for people to actually get the information they are after.
Whilst I was at it I also implemented this skin for http://dbi.perl.org/ and http://learn.perl.org/ (which needs a lot more loving now you can actually see what's there... not much).
My work (http://www.foxtons.co.uk/) have donated some of my time, and also some of the designers on my team's time, without which it would have taken even longer.
I'm planning to write a long article about alternatives to inheritance. Part of the issues with multiple inheritance in Perl programs seems to stem, in part, because there doesn't seem to be enough written about this from the Perl perspective
There's also not enough perspective from a "large-scale" standpoint. I still recall one person defending "mixins" because in years of programming, he's only been bitten by the mixin ordering problem once. However, when you start working on large scale, mission-critical applications with teams of programmers being rotated on and off the project, issues with multiple inheritance, silently overriding methods, mixin ordering and other issues are much harder to notice, much less track down. And even comprehensive test suites can miss that subtle bug which depends on a very unusual combination of factors. I speak from very painful experience here.
The 2009 conference season hasn't ended yet and already I am booking flights for next year's conferences. It looks like I will be attending both Perl Oasis and Frozen Perl at the start of next year. I won't be travelling back to Japan between the conferences so I should also get some time to meet up with the Perl Mongers in Pittsburgh and New York.
There is so much happening in the world of Perl at the moment...
New blogs (this was posted to https://blogs.perl.org/!)
New web designs (more on this another time)
New approaches (Moose, Catalyst, DBIx::Class etc etc etc)
New initiatives (Iron Man, TPF marketing etc etc)
I haven't historically been a blogger, but I think some of the projects I do at work (http://www.foxtons.co.uk/) as well as home might be of interest, so I'll try and do the occasional wright up here.
Currently I'm trying to convert our work test suite over to Test::Aggregate::Nested. This is an alternative to Test::Aggregate which is much cleaner internally and relies on nested TAP, available in the latest versions of the Test::Simple distribution. Using it is pretty simple:
use Test::Aggregate::Nested;
my $tests = Test::Aggregate::Nested->new( {
dirs => $aggregate_test_dir,
} );
$tests->run;
There are a few more features I need to hack in, but two nice advantages this provides are:
The restriction on __END__ and __DATA__ tokens goes away.
"Variable will not stay shared" warnings go away.
Regrettably, it turns out that I've introduced a regression in Test::Aggregate itself. Apparently, "no_plan" tests don't work correctly, but this may be the nasty hacks to the Perl internals which Test::Aggregate relies upon. Fortunately, the nested version minimizes those hacks quite a bit.
