use Perl

I'm watching the latest episode of The Office and I see the name of Michael Schur as a "co-executive producer." I enjoy Schur's writing at Fire Joe Morgan (as "Ken Tremendous") so it caught my eye.

Then I saw several other producers named after him. So I rewound.

I counted six "executive producers," eight "co-executive producers," two "consulting producers," one "producer," and one more person that the show was "produced by."

I have some experience adding by more than ones, so I say with confidence that the show had at least 18 producers in the credits.

I'm no Ben Silverman, or Greg Daniels, or Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant, or Howard Klein, or Paul Lieberstein, but that seems like a lot to me.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

I've banged on before about how Perl is seen as less popular than it really is because the Perl community can be a bit insular. I believe that we need to get out there and tell people that a) we're still here and b) we're still wonderful.

As an example of that, we've started to ensure that all of London.pm's events are listed on Upcoming and we encourage people to register their attendance so that we can demonstrate how popular our meetings are. Recently, I also created a London.pm group to make it easier to track down our events. When adding events to our group, I also add them to a couple of other local geeky groups - which gives us a bit of free publicity. Maybe other local groups could consider doing the same (I see that some already do).

Today I also created a global Perl group with the intention of collecting all worldwide Perl events. If you create any kind of Perl-related event on Upcoming then please add it to the group.

One of the modules that we rely on at work is PDF::API2, and I'm deeply grateful for the fact it exists. But we're also highly sensitive to it, so if it ever goes rotten we have some hard thinking to do. But lets ignore that part for now.

If you were considering writing a PDF application, and happened to be searching around for something to use, and you stumbled across the PDF::API2 module on CPAN you would see this.

Now, looking at that page, I can see that it's failed a third of all CPAN Testers reports, and it hasn't had a release of note in a while. To me, that looks like a fairly rotten not very well maintained module that I should avoid.

So lets look at it's CPAN Testers report page.

And if you want to see what it looks like with my settings, which only shows production releases of the module that have occurred on production versions of Perl (that is, in the real world) then you see something like this.

And what you'd see, if you only care about the real world, is that in the real world PDF::API2 has no less than 100% PASS rate (ignoring the 2 UNKNOWNs).

Not a single damned FAIL.

And yet looking at the graph on the CPAN testers page, you could be forgiven for thinking that the module is decending into rot.

The real situation is that the module works perfectly, unless you try to build it one of two dozen patched versions of Perl that nobody other than the P5P team will ever see, and which are probably already fixed.

It's all well and good that we run tests of patched versions and developer versions, and that we collect results from patched versions and developer versions.

But the poison is spreading and as a result we're staining the reputation of reputable modules in public forums.

EVERY feed of information coming out of the CPAN Testers database needs to be limited to production releases of modules on production versions of Perl BY DEFAULT, unless someone has a specific need to request otherwise.

This bullshit needs to end.

If you have not yet registered to vote in Washington, register today! Many other states also have a deadline of Friday or Saturday.

Also, if you're in Washington, sorry the Mariners are so terrible, but how about Tacoma native Jon Lester, huh? In the last year he's battled back from cancer, won the clinching game of the World Series, thrown a no-hitter, and even tossed a one-hit complete game shutout in Yankee Stadium. And last night, he became only the third Red Sox pitcher ever to win a playoff game with no earned runs or extra-base hits allowed (Burce Hurst and Babe Ruth are the others).

Go Sox!

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Sarah and I watched this last night from Netflix. I'm so disappointed. I'm more than ready to believe the premise of high-school guerrilla warfare. But this was clearly written by a soldier, not by someone with knowledge of emotion and plot. The emotions are completely wooden. The only love in the story is a girl going gaga for a married soldier, and even that was barely detectable. I couldn't feel anything for all but one of the deaths in the movie (and the only thing I felt for that one was shock).

The soldier who must have wrote this hammered in the following lesson over and over again: when you're dying, try to take out one last guy from the other side, and say something dramatic and glorious so your death will be meaningful. Yuck. He hammered it in for both sides, too. Be a good soldier, and fight for your state.

Speaking of which, that's the moral read to us explicitly at the end of the film: these people fought and died for their government. Not for their families. For their government.

My imagination was alive with ideas of young guys going off in the woods and keeping a shadow civilization going, starting families with the girls and defending themselves. A shame that didn't happen. In the mind of this script writer, girls fall only for old military guys (probably just like the script writer, I'll bet).

There were lots of action scenes, but they were boring as all get out. Obviously written by somebody who thinks the interesting part about wars is the battles and not the history and ideas and people involved. There was lots of senseless deaths, etc., so I guess he was trying to tell us how awful wars are from a first hand view.

The characterization was practically dead, as were most of the characters. Lots of people were defined at the beginning, and then we never heard from them again. Sometimes they were off to the side in the background, never being a personality. Sometimes we just learned they'd died somewhere along the way. The relationships between the characters weren't even good enough to be melodramatic. It was like seeing the very Soviet propaganda the film had, telling us how good families were and how they made us better citizens. Nothing genuinely worth fighting for, in my opinion.

The film also suffered from the long, long foreign language sequences. You have to be trilingual to understand it. (Seriously: Russian and Spanish, in addition to English, because of the film's laughable plot of Cuba launching part of the invasion.) Some short foreign language spots would have been great. Maybe one long one. But whole strategic planning sessions in Russian? Come on; at least The Passion of the Christ had captions!

I believe readily in the premise of guerrilla warfare in the unlikely event of invasion. I believe readily in the premise of fighting high schoolers. (Teenagehood is really a modern invention for delaying adulthood.) I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the idea of Cuba invading alongside the USSR. But I really didn't want to hear a lesson in dying for the state with no feeling at all.

I'm finding ways to turn TAP output into something compatible with JUnit. Is there anything to go the opposite direction? I'm writing some JUnit tests and would like to make them output in a way that makes sense to me, possibly going right into some Perl harness code.

For FLOSS Weekly 39, Leo Laporte and Randal interviewed Simon Phipps, the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun. It's not the normal open source religion, and a much better view than I've heard for the "Open Source" people.

The entire hour long interview is excellent, but this was my favorite part:

Simon Phipps (@0:14:08): What characterizes open source is, open source is the syncronization of the self interest of many parties. And to create an environment where people are willing to synchronize their self interest and collaborate over code, there has to be transparency. On the other hand, in open source, you know, Randal, I don't care what your motivations are for being involved in Perl. They're of no relevance to my life because our relationship around Perl depends on code and the code and the community are transparent, but your motivations for participating in it are opaque. It's up to me. They're private to me.

Leo Laporte: They're also irrelevant because of transparency, the codes speaks for itself.

Simon: Absolutely. So I'm able to maintain my privacy around my motivations and degree of my involvement and how I'm funding it. I maintain responsibility for that part that is private as well. On the other hand, I'm able to work in an environment of transparency where all the code is known, all its origins are known, all its defects are potentially known, and that combination of transparency with privacy is, in my opinion, what characterizes open source. Trying to define open source in terms of licenses in kinda outmoded in my view. Open source is about transparency at the community level but also about privacy in terms of my motivations.

Simon also said quoted:

Whenever you create a system, you create the game that plays it.

Does anyone know the source of that quote?

When portions of the build framework for Perl 5 are written in rakudo/Perl 6/Parrot, then it'll be time to switch.

Strawberry Perl is released quarterly and aimed to be available for download on the second Monday of the month (which also means Sunday afternoon in the Hawaii and the Americas)

This quarter, the target release date is October the 13th.

If anyone has any requests for new features to be integrated, please say so now.

Anyone responsible for a module that Strawberry bundles who wants to get new additions into the new release, now is the time to get your new production releases out so I can pick them up.

In the last two days, we've already seen major new releases of Module::Build and ExtUtils::MakeMaker, inching the toolchain closer to complete configure_requires support.

So far this release cycle, I've already flagged the addition of a zero-conf setup for CPANPLUS, so that it works out the box, and rejected any suggestions that I start adding patches to the official Perl release (even to support something as neat as Data::Alias or Module::Signature).

(Having spent a year battling RedHat Perl and it's patched craptasticness, there's no way that I'm patching Perl).

This release will also (hopefully) see the first full beta release of Portable Perl.