kasei's Friends' Journals

use Perl; Shutting Down Indefinitely

pudge — 2010-09-08T22:07:47+00:00

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?

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/*>.

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/*>.

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/*>.

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.

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/*>.

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).

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

OOPSLA 2009

acme — 2009-11-05T08:41:53+00:00

OOPSLA 2009 happened a few weeks ago. OOPSLA stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications and I've always been quite interested in the conference. The proceedings of the conference aren't put online, but I've managed to find two interesting papers:

A Market-Based Approach to Software Evolution (PDF) tries to imagine an open market which is targetted around fixing bugs and improving software. It's quite interesting as it's quite similar to a proposal from Nicholas on spending other people's money. The authors point out many potential flaws.

The Commenting Practice of Open Source (PDF) analyses projects on Ohloh and tries to spot commenting trends. "We find that comment density is independent of team and project size", but they find that it varies from language to language. "Java has the highest mean of comment lines per source lines at.. one comment line for three source code lines" and "Perl has the lowest mean with.. one comment line for nine source code lines". They list as future work to find out why this might be the case.

Games

acme — 2009-10-19T07:34:03+00:00

A few weeks ago I was up in the hills about Geneva reminiscing with my sister about all the things we used to enjoy when we were smaller. When I was younger I used to really enjoy programming computer games, first on my 48K Spectrum and then later on in STOS BASIC and then 68000 assembly language on my Atari ST.

I haven't programmed a game in a very long time. However, I'm an avid gamer, playing games while travelling on my DS and at home on my Xbox 360. I almost enjoy reading Edge magazine more than I like playing games.

At YAPC::Europe in Lisbon, Domm pointed out that the Perl SDL project (which wraps the Simple DirectMedia Layer) was languishing and that we should all programs games in Perl.

A few months later I got around to playing with SDL and made a simple breakout clone which I styled after Batty on the Spectrum, but with gravity. It was fairly easy to program, but there was a lot to grasp. The Perl libraries are a mix between a Perl interface to SDL and a Perlish interface to SDL, with limited documentation, tests and examples.

Of course this is where I join the #sdl IRC channel on irc.perl.org and start discussing with the other hackers (kthakore, garu, nothingmuch). We decide on a major redesign to split the project into two sections: the main code will just wrap SDL and then there will be another layer which makes it easier to use. I've started writing a bunch of XS on the redesign branch of the repository while trying to keep Bouncy (my game) still working. There is a bunch of work still to do but we've made a good start. This is what Bouncy looks like at the moment:

[YouTube video]

The physics are pretty fun and it runs pretty fast (1800 frames/second). I'm taking a little break as I'm off to Taipei...

Apaches Hanging

pudge — 2009-10-16T22:30:03+00:00

When I try to print high-bit data to STDERR from mod_perl 1.x and perl 5.10.0 -- sometimes, not always -- the process hangs and sucks up 100% CPU. I wonder if updating perl to 5.10.1 might help.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

DirecTV, Versus, Center Ice Update

pudge — 2009-10-06T22:54:09+00:00

We called up DirecTV to complain about a lack of Versus (which means I don't get all the Bruins games, even though I purchased Center Ice) and they refunded $50 to my account, and gave me the sports pack (including NESN) for six months for free.

I still want Versus though.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Mac-Carbon-0.82 Released

pudge — 2009-10-06T04:50:41+00:00

Mac-Carbon-0.82 has been released. Download it from the CPAN or SF.net.

(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)
Changes:

* v0.82, 4 October 2009 More Makefile.PL fixes. Try to catch 64-bit-only perls. Fix bug introduced in 0.81 for older gcc 4's.

Posted using release by brian d foy.

Mac-Carbon 0.81 Released

pudge — 2009-09-27T05:25:09+00:00

Mac-Carbon-0.81 has been released. Download it from the CPAN.

(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)

Changes:

* v0.81, 26 September 2009 Fixes for building on 64-bit perls and Mac OS X 10.6. Build should now work on any perl, whether self-built or system perl (unless your perl is 64-bit only), and tests should run under 32-bit mode. Other miscellaneous test fixes.

Mac-Carbon Makefile.PL 64-bit Check

pudge — 2009-09-17T18:01:27+00:00

I should add a check for 64-bit mode to the Mac-Carbon Makefile.PL. This will save a lot of hassle if I can give a nice error message, with a link to more information, up front.

I can't test this easily, though, since I don't yet have a 10.6 64-bit box (it's only on an original MacBook Pro, which is 32 bits). I will upgrade to Snow Leopard soon. I could try to make my own perl before then, but I don't know it would work the same way. So. If you want to help, now's your chance!

First thought is Config, but we all know Config can be flaky. For example, on my 32-bit box:

$ perl -V:use64bitall use64bitall='define';

Doesn't really help. I don't know if $Config{intsize} would be 8 on a 64-bit perl. It's 4 on this 10.6 32-bit perl. I do know you should be able to call perl with VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=yes to give you 32-bit perl, instead of the default 64-bit perl.

So anyway ... if you can figure out a way to know, under 10.6 stock perl, if I am running under 32-bit perl or 64-bit perl, let me know.

Mac-Carbon, and Related Things

pudge — 2009-09-17T15:14:56+00:00

Please do test the aforementioned Mac-Carbon-0.80, and report it on RT if there's a problem. Please note that you MUST build under 32-bit mode, which is especially important if you are using the standard perl that comes with Mac OS X 10.6.

I've also got new versions of Mac::AppleEvents::Simple, Mac::OSA::Simple, and Mac::Glue coming out soon. I want to get Mac-Carbon well-tested out there first, though.

Mac-Carbon 0.80 Released

pudge — 2009-09-17T07:19:21+00:00

Mac-Carbon-0.80 has been released. Download it from the CPAN.

(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)

Changes:

* v0.80, 16 September 2009 Add notes for 64-bit perl Bump all the version numbers Fix a bunch of tests (nothing major, just make them work better) Fix sound-env-var checking code for tests (no more sound tests unless you ask for them with MAC_CARBON_SOUND, which was in the last version, but the logic was broken) Make CFStringRef typemap better Remove high-bit characters from source files Add new system version gestalt constants Fix leak in Mac::Processes and Mac::Speech

Perl/iX for HP e3000 MPE

acme — 2009-09-15T13:54:28+00:00

I'm trying to update various URLs in the Perl source code. Regarding the Perl/iX for HP e3000 MPE README.

It's very out of date now and most of the URLs are broken. I've contacted Mark Bixby, but he no longer has any involvement with the MPE/iX OS or that particular Perl port.

Does anyone run Perl on this platform? Does anyone build Perl on this platform? If so, please contact me and we'll try and update the details. Cheers!

Mac-Carbon Modules and Mac OS X 10.6

pudge — 2009-09-08T05:54:34+00:00

The default perl for Mac OS X 10.6 runs in 64-bit mode by default. The problem for Mac-Carbon is that significant portions of the Carbon API are unavailable to 64-bit programs on Mac OS X.

Perhaps a subset of the API could be made available to a 64-bit perl (for more information see Apple's "64-Bit Guide for Carbon Developers"), and might in the future, but it's simpler at this point to just run perl in 32-bit mode.

There's a few ways to do this. Most obviously, you could simply build a 32-bit perl. I always build my own perl, and I just compile it for 32 bits.

There's also two methods mentioned in L under Mac OS X 10.6: you can set an environment variable, or set a system preference. For the environment use:

VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

And for the system preference, execute this line in your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Happy Labor Day

pudge — 2009-09-07T15:01:43+00:00

I plowed through a bunch of bugs for Mac-Carbon today. And I found an unfixed endian bug in Mac::Glue.

And I did it without the help of a union!

I hope to get this work done before September 9th, after which my time will belong to The Beatles Rock Band for awhile. I might not release by then, but the bulk of the work should be there.

Thanks to everyone who filed reports, and their subsequent patience. I've gone through the process many open source developers before me have ... as we get older and have more obligations, some of our public release work slows down. A lot. Thankfully most of the bugs are pretty superficial; unfortunately, being related to tests, they will prevented some people from getting the code installed.

I've promised myself I won't waste my time feeling guilty about it, but I apologize for the inconvenience.

(And no, Mac-Carbon won't work on 64-bit perl, but I will document the reasons why, and various workarounds.)

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Pudge's Picks 2009

pudge — 2009-08-23T01:42:32+00:00

Please, if you wish, go to join Pudge's Picks for 2009, hosted on ESPN.com.

After logging in (create a new login if you don't have one), create an entry (each user can have one to three entries).

Then for each entry, click Join a Group. Type in "Pudge's Picks" in the search field, then click on Pudge's Picks when it shows up in the list. You can also go directly to the group page, instead.

The password to join is "longhorn."

Invite others, if you wish.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

iPhone Hacking

pudge — 2009-08-19T22:08:27+00:00

I got me a used iPhone. In playing with it, I installed PCalc Lite, as I am a longtime fan of PCalc (and DragThing, by the same author, James Thomson). I liked it and so I got the full PCalc, which has a lot more features, including a bunch of different themes.

Getting into hacking the iPhone, I thought I'd try to make a theme. You can't do this, I suppose, for now, unless you jailbreak the iPhone, as the themes are stored in the app and that breaks Apple's code signature stuff. But the same themes work on PCalc for the Mac, too. So I gave it a shot. Without further ado, my Slashdot theme for PCalc. You can also download the theme archive itself. Not sure why you'd want to, unless you're me, though.

I also have been playing a lot of Quordy and Muddled, two word games from Lonely Star Software. A friend of mine from college wrote Muddled. And I wrote a Perl program that solves both games. Both use a dictionary (I grabbed 'words.sql', a DBLite file, from the Quordy bundle, after uncompressing the ZIP file with the .ipa extension). You just enter the letters you have available to you (in order from left to right, top to bottom for Quordy), pick the dictionary options and the game you're playing, and run it.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

YAPC::Europe 2009

acme — 2009-08-16T13:46:30+00:00

Two weeks ago I attended YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon, Portgual. This wasn't the first YAPC in Portugal - in 2005 we went to Braga, a university town inland and it was a very well organised conference. It's no surprise the YAPC in Lisbon was also amazingly well organised, as it was the same organisers - José Castro (cog), Alberto Simões (ambs) and Magda Joana Silva. Thank you so much José, Alberto, Magda and all the others involved - it was amazing.

The theme of the conference was "Corporate Perl" and this made a useful track in the vast schedule. It's amazing all the places Perl is used. Every talk I attended was great - the speakers knew their material and explained their content well. Some of the presentations are already online, see "Talk" in the schedule.

I liked the venue, three metro stops away from our hotel (also very walkable). The main room was huge and the three other tracks were just nearby, leaving a large space behind these for socialising with the just-over 300 attendees (and easy access to the sun). This was also where the terribly-important refreshments were, including oh-so-tasty pastéis de Nata.

The attendees' dinner was great. It was in a huge churrascaria (meat on swords!) by the river. It was also a good location for the Quizz Show, with 16 two-person teams fighting to be the geekiest. This was quite hard, as the questions varied from Portuguese history, Star Trek, Buffy and Perl internals ("How many levels of precedence does Perl 5.10.0 have?") to Unix history.

Community was very important at the conference - there are lots of seperate groups of Perl people clustered around the core, Perl modules, Perl projects or even cities and conferences are where you can mix, meet people in real life and start making crazy plans for the future. There are so many exciting things going on in Perl and I'm really looking forward to YAPC::Europe in Pisa in 2010!

SIGGRAPH 2009

acme — 2009-08-15T12:18:16+00:00

I always enjoy reading the papers of the SIGGRAPH conference. It's nice to see what new graphical techniques are coming. Here are my favourite picks from 2009:

The last one contains great quotes like "A stretched cow that is torn when two bars scissor together" and "These images from an animation show viscoelastic horses being dropped onto one another".

Moose book

acme — 2009-08-06T15:45:38+00:00

I love Moose. It's a postmodern object system for Perl 5. It's very powerful, saves me writing a lot of code and is very extensible. Dave Rolsky received a grant to write the Moose::Manual and it's a great introduction to Moose, how to use Moose and covers every part of it in detail. I don't really enjoying reading documentation on a screen, so I converted the manual from Pod to LaTeX so that the typography would be beautiful, fixed a few typos in the manual, designed a nice cover and you can now buy a copy for yourself. At the YAPC::Europe 2009 auction a copy of the book signed by Yuval Kogman and Larry Wall went for €120!