Perl

I signed up to the CPAN Pull Request Challenge - apparently I'm entrant 170 of a few hundred. My assigned dist for January was IO-Digest - this seems a fairly stable module. To get the ball rolling, I fixed the README, but this was somehow unsatisfying. :) To follow-up, I added Travis-CI support, with a view to validating the other open pull request - but that one looks likely to be a platform-specific problem. Then I extended the Travis file to generate coverage reports, and separately realised the docs weren't quite fully complete, so fixed this and added a test. ...

Last night, I went to the London.pm tech meeting, along with a couple of colleagues from CV-Library. The talks, combined with the unusually hot weather we're having in the UK at the moment, combined with my holiday all last week, make it feel like I'm at a software conference. :) The highlight for me was Thomas Klausner's talk about OX (and AngularJS). We bought him a drink at the pub later to pump him for information about using Bread::Board, with some success. It was worth the long, late commute back to Southampton. ...

While I remember, I have uploaded the slides from my talk about Solr and Perl at the London Perl Workshop. This talk was inspired by having seen and contributed to at least five different sets of Solr search code at my current job, all of which (I now believe) were doing it wrong. I distilled this hard-won knowledge into a 20 minute talk, which - funny story - I actually delivered twice to work around a cock-up in the printed schedule. I don't believe any video was successfully taken, but I may be proved wrong later. ...

At the London Perl Workshop last Saturday, one of the lightning talks was about Questhub.io, formerly known as "play-perl.org". It's social gamification for your task list, or something like that. Buzzword-tastic! But most importantly, there seems to be a nice community of programming types to procrastinate with you on your quests. This means I can finally get to work refuting lamby's prediction about gamification of Debian development! Tasks are referred to as "Quests", and are pursued in themed "Realms", for that World of Warcraft feeling. For example, there's a "Perl" realm, and a "Lisp" realm, and a "Haskell" realm, but also non-programming realms like "Fitness" and "Japanese". ...

I have been dealing with an interesting forking issue at work. It happens to involve Perl, but don't let that put you off. So, suppose you need to perform an I/O-bound task that is eminently parallelizable (in our case, generating and sending lots of emails). You have learnt from previous such attempts, and broken out Parallel::Iterator from CPAN to give you easy fork()ing goodness. Forking can be very memory-efficient, at least under the Linux kernel, because pages are shared between the parent and the children via a copy-on-write system. ...

So since my last post about perl tutorials, the Perl Tutorial Hub has leaped from page 2 to be the top result for the relevant Google search. The Leeds tutorial has dropped off the first page. I couldn't figure out how such a dramatic reversal could have happened, until I asked Mithaldu on IRC; the admins of the old Leeds tutorial have added a (delayed) redirect. So, Google has interpreted that as a 302 status, and given perl-tutorial.org all the old inbound links, presumably. ...

Hello, World! Last year, a bit of a fuss was kicked up in the Perl community about the low quality of search results for the phrase "Perl tutorial". Various ideas for fixing this were proposed, including the handy Perl tutorial hub, but kicking Leeds University off the coveted top spot is going to be a real challenge. The problem is, most Perl tutorials on the internet were written for Perl 4; modern Perl doesn't get a look-in. It's a miracle anyone manages to learn Perl at all... ...

Today I went to HantsLUG at IBM Hursley. I delivered a talk on the Debian Perl team aimed at end users, which was well received - I got a head start by getting people in #debian-perl to review the slides beforehand, which was very helpful. I'm told there will be a video uploaded in a month or so. I also plugged SmoothWall Express on Debian to some new people, and there was interest. My most recent discovery is that I probably need to extend netcfg in the debian installer to allow configuring more than one network interface.

On Tuesday, I released version 0.02 of Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards to CPAN. So far, no one has complained. This module is probably of interest only to people in the UK; it looks up which trains are next to arrive/depart from a particular station. This release was prompted by a patch sent to me by Ian Dash, implementing a filtering feature I was too lazy to write myself. If someone wants to put a fancy GNOME applet around it, I'd be grateful. ;) I think the next step is to add a nicer OO interface. ...

I wrote a plugin for Hudson today, which integrates Devel::Cover (Perl's test coverage tool) into the build reports. Actually, that's currently an exaggeration. All it does is add a checkbox in the configure page, and a link to Devel::Cover's reports on the build page when it's enabled. I spent the day remembering how to program in Java. Tomorrow I might be in a position to extend it into something more attractive - I'll publish it very soon, but I need to run it past my employer. Watch this space. ...