TorgoX's Friends' Journals

use Perl; Shutting Down Indefinitely

pudge — 2010-09-08T22:07:47+00:00

Cute caps

jdavidb — 2010-08-19T21:55:41+00:00

I'm doing some quick code generation (the output is Java), and I found myself writing the below routine. I like it because of the names I picked for the variables. Not exactly self-documenting (although it is when you think about it), but this is throwaway. You can probably tell what the code is doing and why I named the variables as I did, and you might be entertained.

sub uc_prop { my($prop) = @_; my $p = substr($prop, 0, 1); my $P = uc($p); my $rop = substr($prop, 1); return "$P$rop"; }

use Perl;

pudge — 2010-08-11T23:34:11+00:00

I am no longer working for Slashdot/Geeknet as of September 30. I am actively seeking new employment. Unless you want to hire me, you don't need to care, unless you also care about use Perl;, because it has been generously hosted by Geeknet since I started the site over 10 years ago, shortly after I was hired by Andover.Net to work on Slashdot.

Long story short, I have not done much with the site in recent years, so my options at this point are to do nothing; migrate the site to a new server and keep it running as-is; or take the data and do something with it on a new site. Or something I haven't thought of.

I am hereby accepting proposals for what to do with use Perl;. In short, I would like to donate it to someone who will give it a good home. If you're interested, give me your best pitch.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Matt Trout, aka mst, is insane

pudge — 2010-08-11T16:41:54+00:00

Wow. I occasionally, but not too often, go into #perl. Very busy with family and life. So I go in today, and for no reason, mst bans me and tells me to not come back.

What's up with him being such an irrational dick?

Strawberry Perl install rolled back

jdavidb — 2010-07-26T20:34:33+00:00

Strawberry Perl 5.12.0 was almost completely installed when suddenly it flashed some message I didn't see into the install wizard and the progress bars started moving backward! I have never seen anything like it. I realized the progress bar caption had been changed to simply "Rolling Back Action" and watched as at least three anonymous "actions" were rolled back, progress bar by progress bar. Then the install wizard simply told me "Strawberry Perl Setup Wizard ended prematurely Strawberry Perl Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install this program at a later time, run Setup Wizard again. Click the Finish button to exit the Setup Wizard."

I wish it would tell me what the error was so I might have some hope of correcting it.

Hiveminder: personal RT, for free

jdavidb — 2010-07-19T16:58:36+00:00

You mean someone will provide RT for me to use for free on the web? And they've built an awesome AJAX-y frontend for it? And they allow me to tag tasks and they encourage me to keep my work todo list and as many personal todo lists as I want in here? And they give me awesome search utilities for figuring this out and keeping it organized?

It's almost like a dream come true.

Strawberry Win32 GUI programming

jdavidb — 2010-06-09T15:10:53+00:00

If I wanted to write a Strawberry program to run as a daemon and periodically pop up alerts on my machine, and I had no Windows Perl GUI programming experience other than an abortive look at WxPerl years before anybody ever thought of Strawberry, what module would I be looking for?

Summary of Celtics vs. Lakers NBA Finals History

pudge — 2010-05-30T05:25:50+00:00

There have been 60 NBA Finals. The Boston Celtics have won 17, and the Minneapolis/Los Angeles Lakers have won 15, which amounts to those teams winning more than half of all NBA Finals. This year, they play each other in the Finals again, making it 33 champions out of 61 being either the Lakers or the Celtics.

Additionally, 39 of the 61 Finals have included either the Lakers or the Celtics. Including this year, the Celtics and Lakers have played each other in the Finals a whopping 12 times (just under one-fifth of all Finals have been these two teams).

The Celtics have made 21 total Finals appearances, so have faced the Lakers more than half of the times they've been in the Finals. The Lakers have made 30 Finals appearances, facing the Celtics in two-fifths of those.

The Celtics won nine of those against the Lakers, which accounts for more than half of all their 17 championships. The Lakers' two victories over the Celtics came after the Celtics won their first eight encounters.

The longest streak without either team in the Finals was eight years from '92-'99. The longest streak with either the Lakers or Celtics in the Finals was 10 years, done twice (from '57-'66, in which the Celtics appears all 10 years, and the Lakers five of those; and '80-'89, in which the Lakers appeared eight times, the Celtics five).

The longest streak for one team appearing in the Finals was, as noted, Boston, in the 10 years from '57-'66. Boston won nine of those 10 years, including eight in a row (the longest winning streak from any one team) from '59-'66, and also won 10 in 12 years, from '57-'69.

The Lakers' longest appearance streak is "only" four, from '82-'85, winning twice; but they have also appeared three times in a row five additional times (including the current three-year streak). In two of those, they won all three years; in one, they lost all three.

The only other team to "threepeat" was the Bulls, winning three years in a row twice in eight years ('91-'98). No other team but the Celtics and Lakers have had four consecutive appearances. The only other team to have three consecutive appearances was the Knicks, losing all three from '51-'53.

The 2010 NBA Finals begin in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Another StackOverflow question moved: what's the deal?

jdavidb — 2010-05-20T14:18:10+00:00

Stack Overflow is made significantly less useful when ignorant people move Perl programming questions to serverfault.com because the questions are about "servers, networks or the administration of many machines.".

This kind of ridiculous micromanaging by people who are awarded points for being anti-helpful is what destroyed Wikipedia as a place I wanted to participate.

Testing gurus, would you please chime in?

jdavidb — 2010-05-07T17:16:23+00:00

The question is how to test a class that installs system services: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2790072/unit-testing-installation-of-services

Unique

pudge — 2010-04-26T17:45:28+00:00

I wonder how long it will be before people start just putting together random letters for names of companies, bands, and so on, so they can be unique in Google searches.

Your search - fobhwueufg8 - did not match any documents.

^^ my new band name

(Hm, "Did Not Match Any Documents" would be a fun band name. Or the name of the debut album of the band fobhwueufg8.)

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Top-level namespace pollution is evil

belg4mit — 2010-04-22T22:57:26+00:00

Why's it evil? Because not everyone hunts for modules by using a search engine. Because you're less likely to see that you're needlessly reinventing the wheel. et cetera et cetera

People need to read perlmodstyle and think before they upload. Indeed, PAUSE should exact a pound of flesh or some other substitute before accepting top-level modules.

While we're at it, maybe we can thunk people with a clue-by-four who don't include a module description, etc.

Ball of mud song

jdavidb — 2010-04-20T15:01:23+00:00

Anyone got any good songs about working on a ball of mud?

My Slashroulette Videos

pudge — 2010-04-02T05:15:16+00:00

Today Slashdot did a spoof of Chatroulette, that we called Slashroulette. We prerecorded videos of ourselves and others. Here's five of the six I did (the sixth was me tuning the guitar, I didn't post that one on YouTube): video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

From UTC to US/Central

jdavidb — 2010-04-01T17:57:23+00:00

I've been living on UTC time since just before the end of Daylight Saving Time, 2005. Today I have reset my workstation to Central time. It's like looking at the world with fresh eyes.

My settings on websites will follow at some point.

RIP Jaime Escalante

jdavidb — 2010-03-31T12:43:26+00:00

Jaime Escalante, America's best math teacher, passed away last night. Escalante built a spectacular mathematics program in a struggling inner-city school district, teaching disadvantaged children all the way through Advanced Placement Calculus. His story was depicted in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. I've got to say this man was really one of my personal heroes. When Sarah and I started talking about homeschooling our children it was thoughts of Mr. Escalante that made me get really serious about the kind of education our children could have with us directing.

Things I didn't know about the Walls

jdavidb — 2010-03-19T17:00:01+00:00

Larry's son, Lewis, is writing a 2D game engine in Perl 6 using Rakudo (http://www.wall.org/~lewis/).

Larry's wife, Gloria, took the Revised Common Lectionary and expanded it to make a complete Bible reading program which covers the entire Bible in three years (http://www.wall.org/~gloria/lect/). And I wonder if maybe I'm not the only person in history who's ever written a program in Perl to divide up the Bible for reading, after all...

My Netgear Router is Dumber Than It Thinks It Is

pudge — 2010-02-07T02:09:27+00:00

I upgraded the firmware on my Netgear router today and it wouldn't let me use the LAN IP I usually use for it, 10.0.1.1, because it thinks my ISP uses that subnet, because I set the router to read from my own internal DNS. Took me awhile to figure out why it thought what it did, because it didn't occur to me that it would care what DNS addresses I gave it.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Franchise Tag Whiners

pudge — 2010-01-30T18:52:27+00:00

There's a long line of players in the NFL who claim that it is a personal offense when their teams place the franchise tag on them.

These players are big fat babies.

The players agreed to the franchise tag for the owners, as a compromise. The players take advantage of everything available to them under the contract; why shouldn't the owners do the same?

Stop crying. Stop whining. Sure, you don't like it, but so what? Grow up. Those are the rules that you agreed to.

ah, dreams...

Matts — 2010-01-26T10:31:17+00:00

I just woke from a dream where it was rjbs' birthday and we got him an onion cake. Only the person who made the cake misunderstood, and instead of a cake shaped like an onion he cooked it WITH onions in it.

Bizarro.

Time::Piece test failures on Win32

Matts — 2010-01-25T23:23:53+00:00

Can someone with Time::Piece test failures on Win32 please contact me offlist? I have a proposed patch I'd like to test, but no Win32 perl to test it on.

Perl 10.1.0 doesn't build on Cygwin

jdavidb — 2010-01-14T17:16:42+00:00

Is building on Cygwin not supported any more, I take it? Did we forget about it?

CCCMD = gcc -DPERL_CORE -c -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV -U__STRICT_ANSI__ - fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -O3 -Wall -W -Wextra -Wdeclarati on-after-statement -Wendif-labels PATH=/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1:.:/home/dblackstone/bin:/home /dblackstone/bin :/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/cygdrive/c/Progr am\ Files\ (x86)/J ava/jdk1.6.0_16/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/c ygdrive/c /WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/ZipGenius\ 6/:/cygdrive /c/Program\ Files/MySQL/MySQL\ Server\ 5.1/bin:/cygdrive/c/apache-ant-1.7.1/bin: /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/cvsn t:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/PuTTY:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/GnuW in32/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/c/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/perl/bi n:/cygdrive/ c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem/:/usr/lib/lapack:/usr/local:/etc:/usr /lib:/lib:/sbin: /usr/sbin:/usr/libexec gcc -Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--export -all-symbols -Wl,--stack,8388608 -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base -L/usr/local/lib - o miniperl.exe \ malloc.o gv.o toke.o perly.o pad.o regcomp.o dump.o util.o mg.o ree ntr.o mro.o hv.o av.o run.o pp_hot.o sv.o pp.o scope.o pp_ctl.o pp_sys.o doop.o doio.o regexec.o utf8.o taint.o deb.o universal.o xsutils.o globals.o perlio.o p erlapi.o numeric.o mathoms.o locale.o pp_pack.o pp_sort.o cygwin.o \ miniperlmain.o opmini.o perlmini.o -ldl -lcrypt /bin/sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `(' /bin/sh: -c: line 0: `PATH=/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1:.:/home/dblackstone/bin :/home/dblackstone/ bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/cygdrive/c/P rogram\ Files\ (x86)/Java/jdk1.6.0_16/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive /c/WINDOWS:/c ygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Z ipGenius\ 6/:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/MySQL/MySQL\ Server\ 5.1/bin:/cygdrive/c /apache-ant-1.7.1/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/c/Prog ram\ Files\ (x86)/cvsnt:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/PuTTY:/cygdrive/c/Prog ram\ Files\ (x86)/GnuWin32/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/c/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawber ry/perl/bi n:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem/:/usr/lib/lapac k:/usr/local:/etc:/usr/lib:/lib:/sbin: /usr/sbin:/usr/libexec gcc -Wl,--enable-au to-import -Wl,--export-all-symbols -Wl,--stack,8388608 -Wl,--enable-auto-image-b ase -L/usr/local/lib -o miniperl.exe \' make[1]: *** [miniperl.exe] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1' make: *** [install] Error 2

Moving 32-bit Intel Perl to Mac OS X 10.6

pudge — 2010-01-12T17:39:58+00:00

Dear Google,

When you move a 32-bit x86 perl installation to a 64-bit Mac OS X 10.6 environment, you should edit $ARCH/Config_heavy.pl and add "-arch i386" to lddlflags, ldflags, and ccflags. The compiler and tools in Mac OS X 10.6 assume 64 bits unless you explicitly tell it otherwise, but some 32-bit installs don't bother putting in an -arch flag, because at the time it wasn't necessary.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Stack Overflow career spam

jdavidb — 2010-01-07T15:26:00+00:00

I got a fairly innocuous spam from Stack Overflow advertising their new job hunting site, where they would like me to upload my resume.

Sorry, Stack Overflow; I'm smart for that (thanks to Andy Lester). I also don't particularly appreciate the spam, although it's the first I've ever gotten and wasn't too obtrusive.

CPAN bug tracker update

belg4mit — 2010-01-06T14:24:06+00:00

Hooray! CPAN's RT has been upgraded to the modern 3.8 series.

Warning compiling perl stuff on Snow Leopard

Matts — 2010-01-04T22:13:57+00:00

I've searched but can't find any reference to this...

Compiling IO::KQueue on Snow Leopard I get the following warning:

KQueue.xs: In function 'XS_IO__KQueue_kevent': KQueue.xs:71: warning: format not a string literal and no format arguments

Yet that line is just:

Newxz(ke, max_events, struct kevent);

Which seems to me pretty standard perl, and no format strings involved (though Newxz expands quite a few macros).

SVK retired

jdavidb — 2009-12-21T22:00:29+00:00

I didn't notice, but SVK retired in May. Thanks to its authors and Best Practical for providing it. I agree with the sentiment that people moved on from Subversion quicker than expected; I am glad that I went on to git instead of spending too much time with SVK, although I would've liked to have learned it earlier and gotten to know it better.

19100 all over again

jdavidb — 2009-12-17T19:42:14+00:00

I just saw a website say "Today is: December 17, 109" :)

Perl 5.11.2

acme — 2009-11-21T08:56:15+00:00

The streets were pretty quiet, which was nice. They're always quiet here
at that time: you have to be wearing a black jacket to be out on the
streets between seven and nine in the evening, and not many people in the
area have black jackets. It's just one of those things. I currently live
in Colour Neighbourhood, which is for people who are heavily into colour.
All the streets and buildings are set for instant colourmatch: as you
walk down the road they change hue to offset whatever you're wearing.
When the streets are busy it's kind of intense, and anyone prone to
epileptic seizures isn't allowed to live in the Neighbourhood, however
much they're into colour.
- Michael Marshall Smith, "Only Forward"

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.2.

This is the third DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5112delta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can download the 5.11.2 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/perl-5.11.2/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

2988906609ab7eb00453615e420e47ec410e0077 perl-5.11.2.tar.gz

0014442fdd0492444e1102e1a80089b6a4649682 perl-5.11.2.tar.bz2

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.2, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.2 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.

If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.

Notable changes in this release:

It is now possible to overload the C operator
Extension modules can now cleanly hook into the Perl parser to define new kinds of keyword-headed expression and compound statement
The lowest layers of the lexer and parts of the pad system now have C APIs available to XS extensions
Use of C<:=> to mean an empty attribute list is now deprecated

Perl 5.11.2 represents approximately 3 weeks development since Perl 5.11.1 and contains 29,992 lines of changes across 458 files from 38 authors and committers:

Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Ben Morrow, Bo Borgerson, Brad Gilbert, Bram, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Frederick Crisman, Dave Rolsky, David E. Wheeler, David Golden, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Frank Wiegand, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Graham Barr, Harmen, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, Leon Brocard, Nicholas Clark, Paul Marquess, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Sisyphus, Steffen Mueller, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Vincent Pit, Yuval Kogman, Yves Orton, and Zefram.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

Jesse Vincent or a delegate will release Perl 5.11.3 on December 20, 2009. Ricardo Signes will release Perl 5.11.4 on January 20, 2010. Steve Hay will release Perl 5.11.5 on February 20, 2010.

Regards, Léon

www.perl.org - redesign

Ranguard — 2009-11-12T22:33:25+00:00

Well, it's taken me 6 weeks of evenings and the odd weekend, but I'm proud to say the new http://www.perl.org/ site has just gone live.

This is a complete redesign and content review. Hopefully it's cleaner and easier for people to actually get the information they are after.

Whilst I was at it I also implemented this skin for http://dbi.perl.org/ and http://learn.perl.org/ (which needs a lot more loving now you can actually see what's there... not much).

My work (http://www.foxtons.co.uk/) have donated some of my time, and also some of the designers on my team's time, without which it would have taken even longer.

So enjoy!