After inspiration by a comment on Perlmonks.org and some slight hacking, I'm very proud to announce HTTP::Request::FromCurl, together with its companion online site at https://corion.net/curl2lwp.psgi. The module and included curl2lwp program allow you to easily convert curl command lines to Perl code that uses LWP::UserAgent resp. WWW::Mechanize.

The ambush of WWW::Mechanize::Chrome shows more fallout before the module itself has been released. The module is one in a long line of browser automation modules I wrote, starting with WWW::Mechanize::Shell, reaching is breakthrough with WWW::Mechanize::Firefox and continuing from WWW::Mechanize::PhantomJS to WWW::Mechanize::Chrome.

In April, Google announced that Google Chrome was finally supporting headless mode, at least on Linux and Mac OS. Back then, I noted to myself that this might be a good time to revisit my rough prototype of WWW::Mechanize::Chrome. According to Git, I had written a first prototype of it in 2010 which used the old, raw socket protocol. But time has progressed and the protocol now uses Websockets. My original approach used AnyEvent, so I quickly replaced my own approach using AnyEvent::WebSocket::Client, and the HTTP parts with Future::HTTP.

Do not ask what Perl can do for you, ask what you can do for Perl!

In my effort to bring the new signature back to older versions of Perl, I'm maintaining Filter::signatures, a source filter that simply converts the signatures to the equivalent old-style Perl code. That filter works surprisingly well for its simplicity and has caused very little in problems.

I don't mind working with Spreadsheets. Much of my work consists of creating Spreadsheets from SQL queries. Sometimes, the resulting spreadsheet should be a pivot table, listing some values across the spreadsheet. For most of my Spreadsheet-generation needs, Querylet is sufficient, but it cannot create pivot tables.

In my long-term quest to host all of my data on my systems, one of the major points is to replace the note-taking app Google Keep with something that allows me to take my notes back to me. I've looked at various open-source apps for taking and synchronizing notes, but they either feel like overdesigned monsters that don't fit my workflow (Laverna) or don't have good synchronization from mobile phone to the server.

While trying to get some more of my modules ready for release, I've been doing drive-by patches to CPAN modules that I used for various reasons. While I'm not exactly enthused about throwing a patch with a testcase over the fence, I think it's still far better to have the problem and solution in some bug tracker somewhere than having it only on my hard drive.

While putting off working on my Perl Advent Calendar submission, I was instead active in resolving bugs in App::ShaderToy and adding some interesting features. The three major features I added this week are, in order of implementation, loading of bitmap images, hot reloading of code and the feature to make the window stay always on top.

It is incredible how much joy quicker iterations bring me while toying around with shaders, tweaking the parameters to see if I can find new visuals.

The shader is a modification of a shader by Inigo Quilez, hacked up by Weyland.

After the initial rush of success, I spent this week working more on the UI side of the app, putting off adding support for geometry generation for later. Prima proves to be a solid UI toolkit and to me it feels closer to using Delphi or Visual Basic, API wise.

For a long time, I've wanted to actually make use of the modern hardware I have at home. The graphics card is capable of OpenGL and OpenGL now has a fancy little language to actually bring images to life. For example [https://www.shadertoy.com] has great so-called "shaders" that show off what can be done with them.

Because I also want to toy around with programming some shaders, I want to get a live environment running. So during the weekend, I took the Glew library, wrote a small Perl script to convert the header files to XS, and then fought with OpenGL until I had a driver that could run shaders from Shadertoy.com: