use Perl

Yes, we have a nice service that we host at http://my.opera.com.

This is my "random" blog, for example: http://my.opera.com/cstrep/blog/.

There are many blogs better than mine, with lots of builtin custom designs. There's photo albums as well, and 1 Gb of file storage. See here, here, or here.

I hope you will like it. If it sucks for you, just drop me a note. We're continuously improving it.

There's a long way to go, the code is crappy, there's support for nothing but INET sockets, whatever you want, but...

the minimal skeleton versions of IO::Socket and LWP::Simple are working in Perl 6. This happened thanks to Jonathan Worthington, as usual, Carl Masak, Martin Berends and me, who wrote the crappy code.

So here's the final lwp-get.p6:

#!/usr/bin/perl6
use LWP::Simple;
say LWP::Simple.get('http://www.rakudo.org');

This was one of our goals for the 2009 Oslo Perl6 Hackaton. We did it! There's a huge lot of work still to do, but one significant step is done! Work is underway for server socket support (accept, bind, etc...) and fully speccing the sockets classes.

I've been the current maintainer of Win32::API for some years now.

I am proud to be working on such a useful module, at least for Windows people. I even managed once to build it under Linux/winegcc.

Lately, I've been receiving user requests about porting it to 64-bit architectures. While this is something I want to do, I might have some problems. Mainly, my lack of knowledge about porting 32-bit stuff to 64-bits under Windows.

Luckily, there seems to be available information and enough interested users that can provide help, code, hardware and/or licenses.

So, if you are in any way interested in helping out or staying tuned on the 64-bit port of Win32::API, please join the libwin32 mailing list. I'm going to post some more details there.

Today I uploaded a proof-of-concept CPAN distribution I'm going to work on in the next weeks. It's called Imager-SkinDetector.

The PAUSE upload finished, and to my surprise, I received an indexer FAIL status. What? Why? The reason is that the distribution contains "world writable files".

Great. I'm probably the only one on Earth to not know, but... if you know some way to make them not writable on Windows, please tell me. Thanks!

If you're interested, and you missed the great Italian Perl Workshop last week in Pisa, you can take a look at the talk I presented there, about scalability of our main community site here at Opera Software, my.opera.com.

The level is probably basic for most of the readers here, and the presentation is not so "bullety" (someone is supposed to be speaking... :-), anyway, it's up on Slideshare, and I will put it up as a simple PDF file sometime in the near future.

Any feedback is welcome. Please consider it's my first talk ever. Ok, fire now... :-)

My first YAPC actually. Well, it was awesome.

First of all, I saw Larry "live" for the first time. His talk was interesting to follow the status of Perl 6, but heavy for me, honestly. I didn't expect Larry to have that baritonal voice. :)

It was great to meet again in person some cool guys I met at the Oslo Hackaton the first time.

About the talks, I attended the first two about Parrot/Perl6, but I knew already most of the material. Then I attended 3 other awesome talks:

• Everything but the secret sauce by Jesse Vincent
• Cosair.org by Darko Obradovic
• Nothing can possibly go wrong (again) by Adam Kennedy. This one was particularly inspiring to me, since I happen to be preparing my first talk for the Italian Perl Workshop 2008.

Looking forward to the 2nd day!

It was a pain to debug and fix.
Hope it will be useful to others as well.

Yesterday I started investigating an "interesting" problem in our shiny new "Storage abstraction layer".

It's a new set of classes designed to solve the problem of how to handle static resources like images, thumbnails, favicons, ... providing fault-tolerance and distributing them automatically onto pools of static servers. Kind of our little own 'CDN' :)

Anyway, that is using WebDAV as one of the server "backends", and in fact, we're now using mod_dav enabled servers to distribute our content.

Now I'm in the process of exporting hundreds of thousands of pictures, in 5 different formats, with a single script to many DAV servers, I'm noticing a steady increase of memory usage.

I tried to track down the problem, and it seems to live within HTTP::DAV, where there's at least one circular reference between HTTP::DAV::Resource back to HTTP::DAV parent object.

I tried also to get some information out of Perlmonks, or web searching in general about this issue, but found nothing.

Any pointers or similar experiences?

It required some trial and error on my part due to lack of experience using svn_load_dirs, but at last, we have it.

The full Win32::API source code history throughout all CPAN releases. Check it out, it's hosted on google code, together with all others Win32 specific modules.

Thanks to Jan for helping me out with this. And if you're wondering, I think it's time to "open up" the source code repository for Win32::API.
Lately I've been receiving lots of emails, requests for support, new implementations and bug reports for it.

Since I have less and less spare time, I think it's important that people that want or know how to contribute, do it. And do it on the "latest and greatest" version, with all recent bug fixes and/or new features.

Of course, a new version is currently in development. It should fix problems using DLL APIs with double or float arguments, together with other minor issues. I will need some more time to finalize these changes, and then hopefully I will release the new version on CPAN in a reasonable time.

So, here it is... Enjoy!