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These are some answers to the Week 172 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few of days from now (on July 10, 2022 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Prime Partition

You are given two positive integers, $m and $n.

Write a script to find out the Prime Partition of the given number. No duplicates allowed.

For example,

Input: $m = 18, $n = 2
Output: 5, 13 or 7, 11

Input: $m = 19, $n = 3
Output: 3, 5, 11

In this weeks TPF Marketing Committee meeting I made an elevator pitch for a "Perl Community Dashboard". It was well received so I have taken the action item to expound upon the idea here to gather more input. Understand this then as the minimum viable product to go from 0 to 1, something achievable that we can build upon.

The Goal:

Create a central web based "Dashboard" (think Grafana-ish) the brings together metrics from key Perl related websites (hereafter, mastheads) and potentially other channels such as social media or irc.

What is the "Business Outcome"?

The marketing committee can use those metrics to set goals and measure the effectiveness of marketing activities. By including many mastheads we can get a picture of activity levels over time, how people move between the content, and which content is the most important.

Dear TPF Board members,

We want to express our disappointment with the recent transparency reports and associated actions from the Community Affairs Team (CAT).

On Monday 19th March, a first Transparency Report was issued, which said that an individual had been investigated for (1) behaviour on IRC and Twitter, and (2) behaviour at a Perl event in 2019. The report also reported that they had "found many instances of communication which alone may not have constituted unacceptable behavior, but when taken together did constitute unacceptable behavior", but no further details were given on those. The report issued a ban from all TPF events "in perpetuity", and furthermore issued a ban on the individual’s participation on irc.perl.org and any perl.org mailing lists. A second individual was issued a warning.

Thanks for your support and encouragement ...

I had many ups and downs in the month of April. In all these, I have recieved plenty of supporting voices.

First, we had the start of Ramadan. I feel fortunate to be able to fast in this holy month. However I had to break my fast for two days because I suffered by Vertigo. Luckily I recovered very fast, thanks to ALLAH s.w.t.

These are some answers to the Week 171 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few of days from now (on July 3, 2022 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Abundant Numbers

Write a script to generate first 20 Abundant Odd Numbers.

According to wikipedia,

A number n for which the sum of divisors σ(n) > 2n, or, equivalently, the sum of proper divisors (or aliquot sum) s(n) > n.

For example, 945 is the first Abundant Odd Number.

Sum of divisors:
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 + 15 + 21 + 27 + 35 + 45 + 63 + 105 + 135 + 189 + 315 = 975

Gee almost a year since my lat post. I better start posting again or Mohammad will catch up with me ;).

Been quite a year for every one on this big blue marble. I hope you are all good.

Ok here is the very short post for today.

I just did my first build and upload of PAWS to CPAN

Expect Version 0.43 to be up there later today some time.

It was a bit of an epic on my part as this whole releasing thingy, made some real bad goofs (deleting then checking in a folder), thank goodness for 'git revert' and getting the version number wrong.

Hopefully is comes out ok.

Look for more releases in the future.

Edit2: After further talk with CAT, i will acknowledge that it was not the intent of the CAT to make me wait, and they in fact did not even realize this was the effect.

I am the "second individual", i am intimately familiar with the events of both their investigations.

Shortly before the TPF informed me that their start-of-may update was nearly ready to be posted, i informed them that these were my expectations:

2021-04-29 19:00
> all i care about are correct, accurate, truthful and useful consequences

I was wholly disappointed.

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Context: https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/cat-transparency-report-updates0

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Edit:

And interestingly the perl.reddit.com moderation team saw fit to censor the submission of this post. It can still be seen directly, but is not in the feed anymore. This is notable as a wide variety of posts and comments that violate the "no personal attacks" rule, but also were in nature against the accused by the TPF, were allowed to remain up and are up to this day and hour, often with completely false claims about people. chromatic and briandfoy are currently the most (and probably only) active moderators there.

If you want to challenge yourself on programming, especially on Perl and/or Raku, go to https://perlweeklychallenge.org, code the latest challenges, submit codes on-time (by GitHub or email).

Do tell me, if I am wrong or you strongly oppose my statements!

Well, I wake up early and get some time to blog about The Weekly Challenge again (in addition, correct some parts of my submitted code ‐ a brain with good rest well spots bugs!).

Both Perl and (guest language) Java codes for the two tasks have been done this week.

Task 1: Valid Phone Number

These are some answers to the Week 170 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few of days from now (on June 26, 2022 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Primorial Numbers

Write a script to generate first 10 Primorial Numbers.

Primorial numbers are those formed by multiplying successive prime numbers.

For example,

P(0) = 1    (1)
P(1) = 2    (1x2)
P(2) = 6    (1x2×3)
P(3) = 30   (1x2×3×5)
P(4) = 210  (1x2×3×5×7)

I've been wanting to explore the Wx GUI toolkit bindings for Perl, but I couldn't get it to install correctly on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine.

When I ran cpan Wx, it failed to install the dependency Alien::wxWidgets. There were some cryptic errors about CreateProcess, which is (basically) Windows' equivalent of fork(2). Presumably, some process started by the build script was having some problems, but there wasn't much in the error message to go on.

From Google, I found an old reply posted on PerlMonks by Mark Dootson, the maintainer of Wx and Alien::wxWidgets, where he recommended to make sure to correctly set the PATH before building it.

Technically, my PATH seemed fine – it had all the necessary Perl directories in it. Still, suspecting that the problems may be caused by some other directory in the PATH, I reduced it to its bare elements and then ran cpan again:

Continuing from my previous post ( https://blogs.perl.org/users/itcharlie/2021/04/calculating-ev-battery-charge-with-perl.html ) I learned that residential electricity charges are calculated using an electricity supply rate per kWh and a electric delivery rate per kWh which actually increases the total EV charge prices that I have calculated in my previous post. My current bill states that my electric supply rate is at 6.9057 cents per kWh and my delivery rate is 11.1785 cents per kWh making it a total of 18.0842 cents per kWh which is 5 cents more than my original post at $ 0.13 cents per kWh.

If you want to challenge yourself on programming, especially on Perl and/or Raku, go to https://perlweeklychallenge.org, code the latest challenges, submit codes on-time (by GitHub or email).

Task 1: Chowla Numbers

Task 2: Four Squares Puzzle

JavaFX

These are some answers to the Week 169 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on June 19, 2022 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Brilliant Numbers

Write a script to generate first 20 Brilliant Numbers.

Brilliant numbers are numbers with two prime factors of the same length.

The number should have exactly two prime factors, i.e. it’s the product of two primes of the same length.

For example:

24287 = 149 x 163
24289 = 107 x 227

Therefore 24287 and 24289 are 2-brilliant numbers.

I recently got an Apple M1 Mac Mini, half out of curiosity, half because it was exactly what I would need: I have a low end Mac just to try out things like new Xcode betas etc, like a "canary" machine. My old 2012 Mac Mini stopped getting official Apple updates, so it could no longer do what I needed and the 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD M1 mini at $699 is easily the cheapest Mac you can buy.
Overall, unlike the typical Mac Minis of old which seemed to be on the slow side, it did feel quite fast from the start, so I thought I'd run some benchmarks on it for fun to see how Apple's ARM M1 fares against some x86 competition. And, as in my day job I use mostly Perl, I thought some perl-related benchmarks would be of interest to me.

On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I'd like to announce the availability of Dancer2 0.301002. This release includes a number of enhancements and documentation changes along with several bugfixes. The most notable enhancement is a brand new command line interface, and I highly encourage you to check it out.

The current Yet Another Society (The Perl Foundation) bylaws exclude the possibility of membership (see Article II https://www.perlfoundation.org/bylaws.html). As reference, the Python Foundation has 5 membership classes with various rights and privileges associated (https://www.python.org/psf/bylaws/).

I believe this to be a wasted opportunity to increase engagement with stake holders in the Perl community, be they individuals, business or other organizations. And also to secure funding for vital Perl related activities arranged by the Perl Foundation.

Rather than a complicated class system,a good starting point would be a single membership option with an annual renewal and no specific benefits than a warm feeling. (Although, throwing in some exclusive swag and a membership card might not be a bad little bonus)

This could then evolve based on feedback via a membership committee.

I have sent a brief proposal to the YAS (TPF) board to this effect. I invite your support in comments below and/or by contacting board members voicing your support (see https://www.perlfoundation.org/committees.html)

These are some answers to the Week 168 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on June 12, 2022 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

The Perrin sequence is defined to start with [3, 0, 2]; after that, term N is the sum of terms N-2 and N-3. (So it continues 3, 2, 5, 5, 7, ….)

A Perrin prime is a number in the Perrin sequence which is also a prime number.

Calculate the first 13 Perrin Primes.

f(13) = [2, 3, 5, 7, 17, 29, 277, 367, 853, 14197, 43721, 1442968193, 792606555396977]

On my first implementation, I originally obtained the following sequence:

2 3 2 5 5 7 17 29 277 367 853 14197 43721...

Presently I have great interest in “EVs” Electric Vehicles but I haven’t seen any data on how much it would cost to charge an electric vehicle from 0 % to 100 % battery charge at home in NYC ( So I wrote a Perl script to do just that ) but before we dig in into it I explain a few things about Electric Vehicles.

Electric Vehicles will have a battery capacity that is represented by kilowatt-hour units or kWh for short.

An EV’s driving range is represented in miles units ( In the US ) and the average mileage is determined by the EPA battery range rating ( the bigger the battery capacity usually means the more driving range you will have in a car ) after conducting a few tests ( so in reality your mileage will vary ).

Celebration time ...

The month of March is very special to me. It was in this month 2 years ago, I started my dream project The Weekly Challenge (a.k.a. Perl Weekly Challenge).

Let's examine if in 2021 an email redistribution list, i.e. perl5-porters@ (p5p) is still the best model for collaborating on the perl language. This is a discussion so comment below!

Advantages of an email list:

• Familiar interface, people can use their client of choice
• Low resources to run and maintain
• Easy to derive automation from as email is all well known protocols
• Everything is email

Disadvantages of an email list:

• Email addresses disclosed to all participants (can be changed)
• UI experience for participants inconsistent, may require client side configuration to "get right"
• Email "reply" text can lower the signal to noise ratio
• No topic categorization of posts, its all dumped in to your inbox
• Tricky to respond to missed emails
• Moderation is crude, every email is reviewed and approved, or everything is approved
• Once an email is relayed it can't be moderated further
• Encourages side channel correspondence
• Everything is email

Given the long list of disadvantages we can guess why email lists (and newsgroups) have largely fallen by the wayside.