blogs.perl.org

While you won't notice any changes, there have been biiiig upgrades at CPANdeps. Here's the diff.

I'd heard that MooseX::Method::Signatures incurred a substantial runtime performance hit. I wanted to test if that was true so I tried converting Hailo to use it. The result: Yes, it's slow:

Here's how long it takes (real time) to train Hailo with a new brain, the command is:

time hailo --brain megahal.brn --train /tmp/fortune.trn --no-progress

The results:

• Without MX::MS: 11.37s
• With MX::MS: 52.09s
• With MX::MS + no type checking: 52.84s

Interestingly If I don't do any type checking, I.e. just:

method foo ($one, $two) { ... }

Instead of just:

method foo (Str $one, Str $two) { ... }

MX::MS doesn't become any faster, even though it looks like it also has to check that the argument list is of a certain length and that none of the arguments are undef.

These tests can be reproduced by going to hailo's repository on github and checking out either the master, mx-ms and mx-ms-no-validate branches. Check out version f9786122a08 of master for the most accurate comparison.

I'm really tired of boilerplate. In fact, I hate it so much that I can't stand when I write this:

package Some::Test::Class;
use strict;
use warnings;
use base 'My::Test::Class';
use Test::More;
use Test::Exception;

Of course, you already know about Test::Most and Modern::Perl, so you could reduce it to this:

package Some::Test::Class;
use base 'My::Test::Class';
use Modern::Perl;
use Test::Most;

But that's still boilerplate. So here's what I've just uploaded:

It came to my attention via brian d foy's blog post that the next Nordic Perl Workshop will take place in Iceland - which sounds very interesting. At the same time I decided that I need to take a longish break after working very hard for the last two years. So I will combine my holiday with NPW!

My current plan is bike from Vienna via Prague to Berlin, spend a few days there to visit some friends, take a plane to Rekjavik, attend NPW, and then either cycle a bit more through Iceland or treck a bit (probably combined with public transport). Then take the plane back to Berlin and a train back to Vienna.

The plan still has some issues:

• Is it totally insane to cycle through Iceland in May (if any Icelandic person could comment on this, I'd appreciate that..).
• Maybe cycling from Vienna to Berlin takes to long or is boring. Then I could take the train to Berlin, and cycle from there to Copenhagen, fly to Iceland, and go back to Berlin.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to this!

Hinrik and I have been creating a replacement for the well-known MegaHAL conversation simulator in Perl. The result is already on the CPAN as Hailo and the source code is available on Github.

MegaHAL has numerous problems that we sought to solve:

I've been working on a personal project lately and I decided that, amongst other things, I was going to use PostgreSQL. Some of you may recall that I had an interesting testing strategy for MySQL. The basic idea is that I don't want to teardown and rebuild the database for every test. Truncating a table is generally much faster than dropping and recreating it. However, if I leave the database up, how do I guarantee it's always in a pristine state? One way is to use transactions and always roll them back at the end of a test. That means, amongst other things, that I can't easily test "commit". You can make it work with nested transactions (if your database supports them), but "rollback" can cause issues.

There's also the problem that by breaking "commit", you're altering the behavior of your code somewhat. Plus, if you have more than one process, unless you can share the database handle, separate processes can't see what's happening in another's transaction.

San_Francisco.pm (SF.pm) started off 2009 with a bang! Fred Moyer took on the daunting role of President, and Joe Brenner stepped up to the unforgiving role of Speakers Co-Chair. Both leaders relieved X-President Quinn Weaver, who sheperded SF.pm for 6 years leading up to 2009.

A Meetup web portal was created at http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Perl-Mongers/ which served to facilitate organizing meetings. Six Apart generously donated a conference space for monthly meetings on the 4th Tuesday of the month (as has been a tradition for the last 10 years). Matt Lanier, the founder of SF.pm, liasoned with Six Apart to obtain this arrangement. We started off the year with a 35 person meeting on how not to use memcached - http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Perl-Mongers/calendar/9432356/

The Perl QA Hackathon 2010 will take place in the lovely MetaLab, a grass-root non-profit hack-space in the middle of Vienna (more on Wikipedia). There will be lots of space, workplaces, sofas, wireless and wired network and a big fridge full of drinks.

Vienna.pm has also proud to announce that we will sponsor the hackathon with 10.500 Euro. We will reserve a small part for catering during the event, but most of the money will go into paying for transport and hotel of invited guests.

If you want to hack on a QA / Toolchain project, please add yourself to the Attendees page of the wiki.

Thomas Klausner,
on behalf of Vienna.pm and the Perl QA Hackathon 2010 team

I'm currently working at Blekko, Inc.; we're still in stealth mode, so I can't really say anything about what we're doing, except that it's really cool, and it's all in Perl.

Working for a startup is wildly different from anything that I've done before; there's an incredible amount of freedom, coupled with an equal amount of responsibility. I love working here.

I'm currently doing a lot of work on our build process, streamlining it and automating it. I'm running things under Hudson with a lot of support stuff to get Perl integrated into Hudson's very Java-y workflow. I'm holding back on details for the moment until I've submitted my proposal to OSCON, but once I've done that I'll talk more about what I've been doing.

I'm on a new team at the BBC. On the previous team, PIPs, we gathered BBC programme data for television and radio. The rest of the BBC could use PIPs to pull schedules, get information about Doctor Who (note, that's "Doctor", not "Dr."!) or understand how a radio programme is broken down into segments which might be rebroadcast on a different programme. The work was complex, but fun. If our system went down, large parts of the BBC wouldn't be able to update their programme data.

Why is blogs.perl.org so slow?

I will use this space to blog about Perl, which might not sound peculiar, but wait!

Unlike most here, I don't make my living by programming in Perl, but rather by working on several unconnected Microsoft frameworks that have a .NET in their brand name. I do use Perl for my pet projects and tools I work on my space time. In this sense I'm a hobbyist Perl programmer.

I think this gives me a unique look on the world of Perl, one of an outsider looking inside. Now, this is quite an oversimplification of the matter, as I should make clear. I frequent the different Perl online presences, such as PerlMonks, use.Perl, blogs.perl.org and planetperl. But I do all that as an enthusiast rather than as a professional.

In the first B::C debugging article we stepped into the B::C compiler with Od.
In the second B::C debugging article we stepped the c code with gdb.
We saw that the compiler is missing a method_named sub (aka a package->method call), the most typical problem with the compiler.
In the third B::C debugging article we saw the easy workaround, using -u to force using the package subs from the package given in the -u option.

Now let's finally fix this bug which was introduced with the addition of the opcode method_named forever.
Looking at the source of pp_method_named() we see that the package name is a PV at
[PL_stack_base+TOPMARK+1], and the method name is at the stack.
Looking at the illguts stack page, inspecting the optree generator in op.c and debugging into pp_method_named we confirm that the missing package PV is the SVOP->sv of the previous op. The name of the CONST.

(Pardonnez mon mauvais français). Ma belle-mère (presque) visite Londres cette semaine. Elle aimerait que Leïla (ma fiancée) habiter en France et me demanda s'il serait difficile pour moi de trouver un emploi en France. J'avais l'impression que Perl n'est pas très populaire en France et je lui ai expliqué que, sans parler couramment le français, il serait difficile pour moi d'obtenir un emploi en France dans un autre langage que Perl. Pour Perl, il semble qu'il ya très peu d'emplois à Perl en France. Est-ce vrai?

Nous n'avons aucune intention de quitter le Royaume-Uni, mais je suis curieux de connaître l'état de Perl en France.

My future mother-in-law is visiting this week. She wants Leila to move back to France and asked me if it would be difficult for me to find a job in France. I was under the impression that Perl is not very popular in France and found myself trying to explain that without speaking French fluently, it would be difficult for me to get a job in France in a programming language other than Perl. As for Perl, it's seems that there are very few Perl jobs in France. Is this true?

We are not planning on leaving the UK, but I am curious about the state of Perl in France.

I am the current maintainer of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and I am looking for help from some people with an interest in cryptography in Perl.

I would like to extend Spreadsheet::ParseExcel to parse encrypted Excel files with user supplied or default passwords. This is a frequently requested feature from end users.

The problem is as follows. At its most basic level an Excel file is comprised of sequential binary records like this:

Name     Length   Data 
2 bytes  2 bytes  variable length

When the file is encrypted some additional unencrypted records are added to the start of the file to define the encryption type (usually RC4) along with some information such as salt and verifier hash. The Data segment of the subsequent records, but not the Name or Length bytes, are then encrypted.

In the first B::C debugging article we stepped into the B::C compiler with Od.
In the second B::C debugging article we stepped the c code with gdb.
We saw that the compiler is missing a sub in a seperate package, the most typical
problem with the current compiler. (since 1995)

We have a cool workaround for this, the -u option for "use".
-udummy forces all symbols in the package dummy to be dumped.

Remember, our testcase was:
'package dummy;sub meth{print "ok"};package main;dummy->meth' as ccode35.pl

Assuming I have an undirected graph of 3D points, what (free) Javascript or Flash software would you recommend for plotting them (along with their connections) in a browser? I vaguely need an end result like this 3d scatter plot, but with fewer (87) points and a similar number of connections.

It would be nice if it was cross-browser compatible and didn't require a Flash authoring tool :)

Having monitored the logs on the server over the last few days, I've noticed some improvements that can be made to some of the processing. Some of the improvements are in the server code itself and will be introduced alongside some of the changes towards CPAN Testers 2.0.

However, some of the proposed changes are to the files available on the Development site. Specifically the database downloads. As there hasn't been anyone accessing any of the CSV files for the Uploads DB, these will be removed next week. Of the other files, although the GZip and BZip files are accessed, they aren't accessed very often, except for the cpanstats DB. As such the archives for both the Uploads DB and Release DB will only be updated once a day from next week.

These changes are to help reduce the processing load on the server, which in turn will help to improve response times for web pages and allow more processing capacity for parsing reports once we move to the Metabase.