use Perl

I am abandoning use.perl.org for blogs.perl.org

Thanks very much for the site - it was great while it lasted

Sorry to hijack your thread but I have just tried to register unsuccessfully for the last 10 minutes. It keeps telling me the captcha text I am entering is wrong despite being 100% confident that I have it correct.

I am ready to abandon my journal here but can't seem to get registered there. About the only thing I can see that might be an issue is that I am forced to use IE and the register page says "finished but with errors".

I agree that it is BS to not offer up an idea for improvement because you are concerned about not being able to help do it.

That's not where I was coming from here. Reserving my opinions means not complaining. I don't have any ideas about how to make it better, I just know what I don't like.

The argument then could be made that there is still value in even that - pointing out the things that could use improvement. Again, I have to counter with I would only be echo'ing what I have heard others already say much more effectively than I could.

So, rest assured that I am not holding back ideas (good or otherwise). I am just not complaining either.

I specifically limited my ideas to searching because, while I too think that the entirety of CPAN could use some rethinking, it isn't something any one person can do. Providing a different front end search engine is something anyone should be able to do without ruffling any feathers.

I am not sold on the idea perl 6 is taking regarding modules will make choosing a module any easier. Providing a more flexible search engine now isn't going to be wasted in that regard.

I will reserve my opinions on the rest of CPAN because it isn't fair of me to throw stones without volunteering to do something about it - and at this point, I don't even have any square tuits let alone round ones.

Here are some random features I think would make an "advanced search" for search.cpan.org nice

It is with great disappointment that I have decided not to go to YAPC::NA this year. I was looking forward to it but personal events lately have made it clear that to go would not be in the best interest of my family and myself.

Maybe next year

Awhile back, I wrote the following tutorial

# Using WWW::Selenium To Test Or Automate An Ajax Website

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=720018

It is more about getting the most out of Selenium and working around some issues than it is about integrating it into your testing framework. In any event, any tips, tricks or pointers you might be able to share would be very much appreciated.

Perl Saves The Day
I am a lazy bastard. This is one of three known virtues for a programmer. Oddly enough, I am not a programmer - at least not professionally. Anyway, this post is about perl so I have posted it here but it is also about my other blog.

Yes, this is my perl blog but I have a personal blog over at http://www.gatcomb.org/joshua/

See http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=558342

Perhaps I am misremembering but I believe at least one of the solutions in that thread (or the one it references) gives all possible "best" solutions.

Of course that thread was about optimizing for runtime speed and not fun ladders/bridges but it was fun anyway.

In case you weren't aware, the US and Europe have extremely different perspectives on giving employees time off. I am very fortunate that I get 42.5 paid days off a year (19.5 vacation, 13 sick and 10 federal holidays). It would be great if I could re-arrange that time off.

How many hours of work do I actually work to get my salary?

52 weeks a year x 40 hours a week = 2080 hours
42.5 days paid off x 8 hours = 340 hours
2080 - 340 = 1740 actual work hours

http://use.perl.org/~nicholas/journal/36270

In one case I used Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::SaveParser to do the following things:

• Generate Excel file on Unix
• Create a chart using a hidden data tab
• Fancy formatting on a multi-tab workbook

I remember having to work around a lot of limitations - not sure if they were in the ParseExcel or WriteExcel side. One of them was the hidden tab which you helped me with - at the time it wasn't included in the standard distribution. Another was many cells losing formatting. I ended up having to break encapsulation in quite a few places. I got it all to work but I would never want to have to maintain that code as it was one kludge after another.

The other project I used it for was also on Unix but it was a lot simpler. I needed to parse a bunch of academic papers (scanned PDFs) and extract information from the bibliography. The output was already being put into excel by hand - I just provided the value added of automatically doing so.

I would buy the book because I support the community but it would end up sitting on my shelf collecting dust and be eventually given away.

I have done the same with 15-20 other such perl books. I have probably only ever opened 4 or 5 of them and haven't read more than half of any one of them.

That's just me and has nothing to do with the quality of the book or author.

I would would participate in a weblog.

I would prefer to collaborate with you (or anyone else with time) on the book I have been meaning to write for 3 years now. I will email you about that.

Why not use a low watermark algorithm to get the "best" match? Even if you need to keep track of all methods with the current "best" distance to break ties in the end, it seems sorting is unnecessary.

Having never implemented a MMD myself, I am kind of curious how a string edit distance (Levenshtein or Hamming) could be used as a replacement to Manhattan distance. Could you provide a simple example?

This is really nice news for obvious reasons.

Now it is probably no sekrit that I don't follow p5p, haven't ever read the perl C source to find the cause of my bug, and have referred folks to perldoc perlport without doing so much as skim reading it myself.

So with those facts of ignorance entered into evidence, what would have really been mind blowing if M$ engineers had decided to start hacking on the perl core to improve the port.