blogs.perl.org

Read this article on Rakudo.Party

Last week I gave a "Faster Perl 6 Programs" talk at the Toronto Perl Mongers, whom I thank for letting me speak.

For google hangout that is usually set up, we got to use the fancy equipment provided by the company that was letting us use their space. Unfortunately, it's currently unclear if the hangout was recorded and if there would be a video of the talk.

So, I figured I'd make a screencast of the talk. You won't get some of the discussions that occurred during the meeting, but the content of the talk itself is pretty much identical.

You can view the slides at https://tpm-perf.perl6.party/ and the screencast of the talk is on YouTube:

Back to the API day here in the Moose-Pen

Can't call method "view_count" on an undefined value at D:\GitHub\database-
accessor\lib/Database/Accessor.pm line 762.
# Looks like your test exited with 255 before it could output anything.

 @elements = @{$self->gather->view_elements()}
          if ($self->gather->view_count());

Late last year, I blogged about my plans for handling the Iridium flare functionality in the Astro-satpass distribution given that these satellites are being taken out of service in favor of a new design that does not flare.

For some time now, most of the updates to Astro-satpass have been to maintain the canned Iridium status table. This seemed wrong to me, so I have pulled Astro::Coord::ECI::TLE::Iridium out into its own distribution. This is currently available on CPAN. The first distribution of Astro-satpass without this module will be version 0.100, which should be out in a few days.

For people who use one of the CPAN clients, this should be a non-event. I know of no downstream packagers except for ActiveState and MacPorts. Last I looked, ActiveState was just automatically picking up all of CPAN (or not, as the case may be), though if there was no PPM package a CPAN client would work. I have filed a bug with MacPorts describing what is going on. We will see what happens.

"I always insisted on commenting my Perl. I never got to the very end of the Camel Book. Not in one reading, anyway. I never experimented with the darker side-effects; three or four separate operations per line was always enough for me. Over time, as my responsibilities moved more to programming, I cut back on the sysadmin tasks. Of course, that didn't stop the Perl use completely--it's amazing how often you can find an excuse to automate a task and how often Perl is the answer. But it reduced my Perl to manageable levels, levels that didn't affect my day-to-day functioning."

Read on: https://opensource.com/article/18/7/confessions-recovering-perl-hacker

Release SPVM 0.0359

SPVM - Fast array and numeric operation, and provide easy way to C/C++ Binding

0.0359 2018-07-16
  - SPVM::CORE become done native compile
  - add join function
  - fix const assignment bug
  - support list syntax
      my $nums = [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6)];
  - object have body field at offset 0. This will fix alignment bugs.

Its even more moose day here in the Moose-Pen

For those of you who might have been a little disappointed that there has not been much Moose in my posts of late today you are in for a treat.

$address_da->only_elements({region=>1});
$da->add_gather({elements => [{name => 'description',
                                                       view => 'region'}]});

It has been six years since I last mentioned anything about githook-perltidy, a tool for the automatic tidying of Perl and POD files during a Git commit. I rely on it every day, and I still make minor improvements to it, so I thought it worth a quick shout out to others who haven't heard about it or upgraded for a while.

Some CPAN distribution authoring tools come with automatic README generation support. At least in the case of Module::Install::ReadmeFromPod and the various Dist::Zilla plugins I've seen, that generation occurs when Makefile.PL is run. For reasons related to my workflow, Git and GitHub, that timing is too late for me. So I've added a README generation feature to githook-perltidy. See the documentation for details.

One final thing to note. This latest round of work on githook-perltidy was triggered by an unrelated minor issue that a user raised. So don't hesitate to let the author of a tool know when you use something, and that you find it sub-optimal. It might just motivate them to do a bunch of work.

I am giving a short talk on "How to become a CPAN contibutor?" at the The Perl Conference in Glasgow 2018. This is going to be my first ever talk at the European Perl Conference. I have already prepared the first draft of the slides for my talk. I will be doing final cleanup in the next few days. I have also got the hotel and train tickets booked.

For a change, this time I am taking my family with me. The plan is to have Glasgow City tour one day and one day Edinburgh City tour with the family.

Before I was mostly associated with London Perl Workshop for obvious reason as I live in London. Few months ago, I got the opportunity to attend German Perl Workshop 2018 in Gummersbach. I must say, I was very impressed with the way the event was handled by capable team of organisors, specially Jens and Roland.

Hello all, this is a fourth blog post in the Machine learning in Perl series, focusing on the AI::MXNet, a Perl interface to Apache MXNet, a modern and powerful machine learning library.

If you're interested in refreshing your memory or just new to the series, please check previous entries over here: 1 2 3

If you're following ML research then you're probably well aware of two most popular libraries out there, Google's TensorFlow and a relative newcomer to the field but rapidly gaining widespread acceptance, Facebook's PyTorch.

The reason why PyTorch has gained so much ground on TensorFlow is in dynamic nature of that library. TensorFlow started as a static graph library (which is easier to optimize) and PyTorch went with dynamically allocated graphs and NumPy (read PDL) style of programming (with a robust GPU support and auto-differentiation of the gradients) that is as easy to debug as an ordinary Python's code.

Back to basics here in the Moose-Pen

$da->add_condition( 
{
                left => {
                    name => 'user_id',
                    view => 'people'
                },
                operator => 'Like',
                right =>{value=>'atkinst%'}
            },
);

Our new Perl internship started on the 9th of July, 7 daring new interns took on the challenge of becoming Perl developers. The internship will last for 4 weeks, during which they will get familiar with Perl and all that goes with it.

Perl is one of the pillars of Evozon, the company was founded in 2005 as a Perl and Java shop, expanding to other technologies over the years. After 13 years of Perl development we have plenty of experience and excitement for this language, something we want to share with this new group of interns.

We have one of the largest Perl teams in Europe and we’re proud to say that quite a few of our developers started their career with us, learning about Perl through internships just like this one. Now, they’re passing on the knowledge they’ve accumulated over the years to another round of Perl developers to be.

The internship will have two parts, a theoretical part where the interns will be introduced to the world of Perl by our trainers and a practical part where they will be working on an application built in Mojolicious with DBIx and MySQL, using the microcontroller Raspberry Pi. The microcontroller will have several types of sensors attached and will be able to monitor the temperature and humidity in our office.

A long time coming, this looks along /usr/lib64 and /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu for existing libreadline.so.* libraries, otherwise assumes v7. I'll add more directories as I find them, and make sure that it looks recursively in /lib if all else fails as part of the next release. I'll be adding comments to the GitHub issues shortly, as it should address most of the existing problems.

I've requested The Perl Foundation to cancel my currently running grant "Perl 6 Bugfixing and Performance of Rationals / Fixing Constraints on Constants" on the grounds that a more detailed investigation into proposed features that occurred during the course of the grant showed many of them to be unwanted or unimplementable.

Since any further grant's work now differs significantly from what the TPF and community voted on, I prefer to cancel the grant and perform any of the remaining work on a volunteer basis, whenever I get a chance.

No payments will be made for any of the completed work to date and it is to be deemed to have been performed on a volunteer basis.

Summary of Changes from Original Proposal and Reasons for Cancellation

Go back again day here in the Moose-Pen

Yesterday I was stymied by not being able to select out just one 'element/field' from a Database::Accessor before I sent it in as part of a condition. I did have something in place an option on my retrieve called 'only_elements'. Time to open up the API once more and make this an attribute that I can set on the Database::Accessor but I do not need to pass down to the DAD as I plan to do the filtering in the same sub 'get_dad_elements'

The newest blog post on the Ocean of Awareness blog is "Undershoot: parsing theory in 1965". It revisits the question "Why, despite all evidence, is parsing considered solved?", this time supplying some more background.

If the state of the art of computer parsing is taken as anything close to its ultimate solution, then it is a case of "human exceptionalism" -- the human brain has some power that makes it much better at parsing than computers can be. It is very unlikely resorting to human exceptionalism as an explanation would be accepted for any other problem in computer science. Why is it accepted for parsing theory?

This is the final report on my TPF Grant Complete YAML::PP

It's a final report, but it's also a TODO report.

I did way more work on YAML::XS and YAML.pm than I would have thought. Both modules will stay around. YAML::XS because of its speed and its usage of the widely used (or ported) libyaml; YAML.pm because for simple data it mostly just works, so there is at least no urgent need for changing to a YAML 1.2 processor.

I think fixing some annoying bugs and incompatibilities improved the state of YAML in Perl a lot.

This is something that was not part of my initial grant proposal.

On the other hand, during implementing the YAML::PP, I learnt more about YAML and saw the need to implement things in a more generic way. If done right, you can do cool things with it. If you are the kind of person who likes to write their programs in latin, you might appreciate that you can now tell the YAML loader to read roman numbers into integers! (And the other way around).

This takes more time to implement and is one of the reasons why loading and dumping generic perl objects is not implemented yet.

The following code is using a widespread Perl idiom, taking advantage of features designed for one-liners:

my $content = do { local ( @ARGV, $/ ) = ("$file"); <> };

Another trick here is the array assignment, which slurps all elements of the list into @ARGV, leaving $/ to undef; that way, the diamond operator will read the entire file at once.

I've been using and publicizing this local @ARGV idiom for years. And I've spent several days last week chasing a bug caused by this line of code.

Is why tinker with a good thing day here in the Moose-pen

Hello Perl community,

I realized that it's more than one year since I last announced an Amusewiki release on blogs.perl.org, so here we are again. Yesterday I released Amusewiki 2.222.

Unofficial Debian packages can be found, as usual, at packages.amusewiki.org (together with installation instructions).

The codebase is pretty stable by now, but over the past year it saw a couple of interesting improvements.

The Xapian-powered search now is a full-fledged and fast faceted search. See for example https://amusewiki.org/search

As a side-product of this improvement, I contributed to the Xapian documentation, which can now produce Perl examples as well: (to the extent permitted by the Search::Xapian module).

git clone https://github.com/xapian/xapian-docsprint

cd xapian-docsprint

make html LANGUAGE=perl

Read this article on Rakudo.Party

Today, I came across a reddit post from a couple months back, from a rather irate person claiming themselves to be possibly the only person to never receive any credit for their work on Perl 6.

I was aware that person committed at least one commit and knowing the contributors list is generated automagically with a script, I thought to myself "Well, that's clear and provable bullshit." And I went to prove it.

Moar No More

I looked up the commit I knew about, looked at the release announcement for the release it went into and… that person was indeed missing! It was the 2017.02 release, which I released. So what was going on? Did I have an alter-ego that shamelessly erased random people from the contrib list without my having any memory of it?!