larsen's Friends' Journals

use Perl; Shutting Down Indefinitely

pudge — 2010-09-08T22:07:47+00:00

Flore Louise Apolline Bruhat-Souche

BooK — 2010-08-20T22:17:07+00:00

On Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9:30, Flore Louise Apolline Bruhat-Souche was born. She weighs 3.02 kg and measures 48 cm.

Word already spread through IRC (#perlfr and #yapc mostly) and via email and telephone.

The mother is fine, the father is slightly tired and the big sister is happy.

There is one photo online.

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/*>.

Fixing Mailman with Perl

BooK — 2010-03-25T01:07:02+00:00

Mailman is useful. Mailman works. Mailman is ubiquitous. I am subscribed to over 50 mailing-lists managed by Mailman.

But Mailmand is software, and therefore hateful.

My particular Mailman hate is the nodupes parameter.

Avoid duplicate copies of messages?
When you are listed explicitly in the To: or Cc: headers of a list message, you can opt to not receive another copy from the mailing list. Select Yes to avoid receiving copies from the mailing list; select No to receive copies.
If the list has member personalized messages enabled, and you elect to receive copies, every copy will have a X-Mailman-Copy: yes header added to it.

I like duplicate email. Moreover, I like the List-Id header that makes emails sent through a list special (at least in the sense that they can be filtered automatically by more tools, and I can just delete the stuff that piles up in my Inbox). And by the way, how could Mailman be really sure that I got that other copy? Just because the headers say so? Bah.

Oh, and I also hate the fact that Set globally never worked for me with this option.

So, because I'm lazy, and I don't want to go clikety-click to first, get a reminder of the random password that was assigned to me years ago, and two, login and change that annoying option, and because I don't want to do that fifty times, over and over again...

I wrote and put on CPAN WWW::Mailman, designed to automate that kind of tedious task out of my life (and hopefully yours). Examples included, I know you're lazy too.

PS: I've been told there is a command-line interface to Mailman, but it is reserved to people managing Mailman on the server.

Gone

Ovid — 2010-03-14T08:02:43+00:00

Like many others, I'm no longer posting here very much. You'll find my new technical journal at blogs.perl.org. It's much shinier.

As you can see, use.perl visits have been dropping for a while (blogs.perl.org is too new to show up on that search) and the front page of use.perl has been sadly neglected. As for blogs.perl.org, after an initial rough start, plenty of people are switching over and are very happy with the shiny.

I have fond memories of use.perl.org, but it's just too old and out-of-date. Come on over to our new platform and look around. Plus, tell us what you want changed about it. (To be fair, while I was involved in the project to get it launched (mostly kibitzing and asking why things were stalled -- I'm such a marketroid :), the hands-on work was Dave Cross, Aaron Crane and the wonderful folks at SixApart.)

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/*>.

Test::Class::Most

Ovid — 2010-01-31T19:25:10+00:00

Test::Class::Most.

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.

Testing with PostgreSQL

Ovid — 2010-01-30T16:22:57+00:00

My new personal project has a PostgreSQL database. Here's how I'm handling testing.

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.

Roles without Moose?

Ovid — 2010-01-25T14:04:31+00:00

Milliseconds are important.

Unless what?

Ovid — 2010-01-15T11:47:53+00:00

Unless what?

Dear Recruiters

Ovid — 2010-01-13T13:06:11+00:00

Dear Recruiters

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/*>.

Next QA Hackathon -- What Do You Need?

Ovid — 2010-01-12T11:37:14+00:00

Read about the next QA Hackathon.

Most Popular Testing Modules - January 2010

Ovid — 2010-01-07T21:46:46+00:00

Pink stinks

BooK — 2010-01-05T00:35:05+00:00

I still like wearing pink T-shirts, though. And not just at Perl conferences. (My love of pink basically comes from pushing a "joke" from the YAPC Europe 2002 auction way beyond its scope.)

Some very interesting reads:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/dec/12/pinkstinks-the-power-of-pink
http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/ (I bought the T-shirt and buttons)
http://pinkstinks.wordpress.com/ (the blog)

A little more than a week ago, it was the second Christmas of my daughter... I guess it shows. Raising children brings all kinds of new interesting issues and questions to one's attention.

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).

Cool Things in Perl 6: Subsets

Ovid — 2010-01-04T13:11:31+00:00

They're going to be a lot of fun.

Perl 6 Config::INI parser on github

Ovid — 2009-12-30T17:48:47+00:00

Details here.

Improve My Perl 6!

Ovid — 2009-12-24T11:29:45+00:00

Collaborative filtering (user recommendations) in Perl 6.

Gitpan languages

Ovid — 2009-12-18T14:15:32+00:00

What? You didn't know that SOAP::Lite was written in Visual Basic?

Atom Feed Help

Ovid — 2009-12-17T10:40:35+00:00

Atom feed help requested

git-move-dates

BooK — 2009-12-15T22:22:40+00:00

As a Perl programmer and Open Source enthousiast, you probably sometimes contribute to Open Source projects. Maybe even (gasp!) during work hours. If your employer is jealous of your time, you probably do not want your commits to look like they were done during work hours (especially in tools like the GitHub Punch Card).

On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to not commit your changes, and lose the benefits of using Git, just so that the reality of when you worked on these tiny changes is not made public. (At that point, it would probably also make more sense to have an open discussion with your boss...)

The way Git handles history makes it really easy to change the date of commits on a local branch. When I first thought about it, my idea was to write some date manipulation code (move a bunch of commits from a time range to another with all kinds of fancy nooks and crannies) and manipulate the Git trees and commits myself.

Then I discovered git filter-branch, which is all about rewriting commits. And I realized that in the situation above, moving commits a few hours in the future (like ten minutes before actually using git push or git send-email) is largely sufficient.

The problem is that the code to move a bunch of commits one hour in the future looks like this:

git filter-branch --commit-filter '\ GIT_AUTHOR_DATE=`echo "$GIT_AUTHOR_DATE"|perl -pe'\''s/\d+/$&+3600/e'\''`;\ GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=`echo "$GIT_COMMITTER_DATE"|perl -pe'\''s/\d+/$&+3600/e'\''`;\ git commit-tree "$@"' -- <rev-list>

Which is impossible to remember, and painful to write.

So, lazy as a Perl programmer should be, I just wrote git-move-dates, that writes and runs the above type of command-lines for me. Useful options include --committer and --author (to change only one of the two existing dates), and options ranging from --seconds to --weeks to define the exact timespan of your commits' time-travels.

As with my other Git gadgets, the source is available from http://github.com/book/git-gadgets.

And remember: there's nothing wrong with rewriting history, as long as it's unpublished, local history. ;-)

MySQL and Oracle

Ovid — 2009-12-14T12:56:02+00:00

MySQL and Oracle. (Despite teething pains, blogs.perl.org is holding up quite well on the new server)