use Perl

I am glad to announce that Padre 0.05 (could have been codenamed Copenhagen) has been released and uploaded to CPAN

To see changes look at the Changes file in the repository.

Bug repoorts and requests should go to the home of Padre

I'm in the middle of a "Quality Management" project at work for the factory. I've done some Perl code already and it's clean and good. I've done some SAP ABAP code and it's as clean as ABAP gets and it's as good as it gets. I'm actually happy with the evil shell script I had to hack to make the Perl and SAP bits talk.

The final big problem is getting our pumps to download their test data directly into the SAP QM system. The pumps speak a proprietary line orientated language over RS232 (print and read). Alas I have to make this all work on Windows client systems which I try to avoid these days and I'm short on time...

Life would be so much easier on Linux or Unix...

Using XML::LibXML, I'm trying to determine if two nodes are different. I have the following humiliating code, but it works.

sub _node_differs {
    my ($self,$left,$right) = @_;

    # toStringC14N ensures "canonization" and allows '<title/>' to match
    # '<title></title>'
    my ($left_string, $right_string) = map {
        defined($_) ? ( eval { $_->toStringC14N } || $_->toString ) : ''
    } ( $left, $right );

    if ($left_string ne $right_string) {
        return [ $left, $right ];
    }
    return;
}

What's a "proper" way of doing that? I know I'm missing something obvious.

It is about 1300m and I did it in about 45 minutes. It was the first time I'd swam it and I'd hoped to do it under 40 miunutes but I went a bit off course. Swimming in the open(ish) sea isn't quite like doing the same distance in a pool. :-)

The overall winner gets the The Richard Harris Memorial Trophy in memory of the actor who initiated the competition in his youth.

John.
--

At the end of my "Perl in RPM-Land" talk at YAPC::Europe, I sketched out an idea about automatically generating RPMs from CPAN modules. I fully expected people so tell me that I was talking nonsense, but it seems that a number of other people had been thinking along similar lines.

In order to carry on the discussion, I've set up a mailing list. Please subscribe if you're interested in this subject.

I've also submitted a talk to the London Perl Workshop to report on the project's progress. This is known as Conference Driven Development - I now need to ensure that we've made some kind of progress to prevent this presentation from being very embarrassing.

Dear lazyweb...

There is some code we have. It implements part of its security by calculating a digest that is not entirely unlike MD5. Well, to be exact, it's specified as taking the Digest::MD5 source code

static void
MD5Init(MD5_CTX *ctx)
{
  /* Start state */
  ctx->A = 0x67452301;
  ctx->B = 0xefcdab89;
  ctx->C = 0x98badcfe;
  ctx->D = 0x10325476;

  /* message length */
  ctx->bytes_low = ctx->bytes_high = 0;
}

and replacing those 4 values with 4 others.

Now, I don't like repeating myself (in code at least. Real life is another matter) and I was trying to find a way to avoid having a complete patched fork of the Digest::MD5 source. That's a static C function, so I can't replace it in a subclass. I've skimmed the source, and I can't see any way to directly knobble A, B, C and D. Am I right in thinking that changing the start state in this fashion before digesting a string $glurpp is exactly equivalent to computing the (true) MD5 of a string "$prefix$glurpp", where $prefix is some fixed prefix string that I don't know yet? If yes, is there any efficient way of computing that prefix, short of brute force?

I've received some nice feedback about Test::Kit. A number of people at YAPC::EU also told me it sounded interesting, so I made the mistake of promising I'd have an alpha out by conference end. I made that deadline, but now there's a lot of work to do. I have three main things resolve:

1. Add some missing test features
2. Clean up internals (don't look. Sausage manufacturing looks wonderful in comparison)
3. Write a Cookbook

In particular, while it's possible to create something just like Test::Most, it's not particularly easy, so the first thing I need to do is eat my own dog food.

Regarding YAPC::EU, I was astonished when the Lisbon, Portugal delegation opened their talk with my promotional video for a Lisbon YAPC. Sitting in a lecture hall with a few hundred people and watching your video on a large screen can be a wee bit intimidating. Fortunately, it went over well and people laughed in the right places (whew). I'll have to do more. That would be fun. Anybody want a video for a conference? :)

In other news, the Copenhagen conference was fantastic and, once again, I'm terribly impressed with what the organizers put together. They're a tough act to follow.

Yesterday I sent out the invite mails for the YAPC::Europe 2008 Survey. In roughly 24 hours we already have 85 out of 284. Outstanding! Seeing as people are still in the process of returning home and unwinding, I expect there will be plenty more submissions this coming week.

Following a comment from one speaker, I wanted to follow up a point about the survey. Towards the end of the survey is some feedback regarding each talk. Although I was planning to share this feedack with the organisers (2008 & 2009), and the speakers of the respective talks, I wasn't intending that part of the survey to be public. Also keynotes were purposefully missed out.

I have also had some suggestions to improve the survey for next year, which I'm planning on doing, if next year's organisers would like me to.

This year's survey will close at midnight 30th October 2008, and I'll try and get the data to the appropriate people as soon as possible after that. Hopefully the followup reports will be published soon after.

I have just uploaded Workflow release 0.32_3, I had hoped to release 0.32 over the summer, but we received some bug reports, which need addressing prior to this.

I also got some more tests added to the distribution, which I apparently not had gotten packaged with last release, so having these tested in a more wide audience (CPAN-testers) would also be nice.

Anyway a new release will soon be in it's way.

My friend Gabe Cheifetz made a mini-documentary at Frozen Perl 2008 for Current TV. You can check it out at current.com.

Unfortunately, current made some additional changes to Gabe's final product, apparently mostly to introduce factual errors. Doh! You'll notice them as soon as you watch it, but I left a comment on their site with corrections for non-geeks.

Nonetheless, I think it's neat.