Re: Dear Dr Who experts...
From: Joel Bernstein wrote: I think I meant this film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Who_and_the_Daleks Bernard Cribbins was the heroic lead in the sequel - which, AFAIK, makes him the only major character actor to appear in both the parallel universe of the Cushing movies and the main TV reality. More obscure actors did as well apparently: Philip Madoc/Eileen Way/Kenneth Watson/Robert Jewell anyone? And slightly more on topic: Peter Hawkins and David Graham who voiced various daleks.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Workshop
Dave Cross wrote Quoting Mark Keating : London Perl Workshop: Saturday 7th November 09:00-18:30 - University of Westminster, Cavendish Campus. I suspect that should be Sat 8th November. I would mention in passing that you can subscribe to the official London Perl Mongers calendar using the widely supported ical format via - https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/tge27p54mq26g6r1op26bpj5n4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics That way you get the official source of bang up to date misinformation - but at least it can't confuse Fridays and Saturdays. Chris
Updating london.pm.org website
I'm trying to get the london.pm.org website updated and have hit a problem for which I was hoping someone might like to offer some advice. As I understand it, the html (or equivalent?) repository for the website is stored in github but, because of the age of the website server, releases cannot be done from git to the website. There are also IRC bots and mailing lists on the server. Is this true? Does anyone know a way to do releases? Or do we need a new server? At the moment, the website is missing key information such as links to the meetup and facebook pages for london.pm aka:- https://www.facebook.com/groups/2560427276- http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers There is also out of date information (such as who is in charge) and scope for adding more general information about where to go to get started plus more on the aims/limitations of what the london.pm.org website is for. Any assistance or comments would be much appreciated, CheersChris
Re: Next Technical Meeting: 24th July @ Conway Hall
Tom Hukins t...@eborcom.com wrote On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 02:35:42PM +0100, Chris Jack wrote: Is there a website for signing up to this? If I search on google for London Perl Mongers, the likely suspects seem to be things like: http://london.pm.org http://londonpmtech.appspot.com http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers Hi, Chris. I've mentioned to you before that London.pm is run by a small number of volunteers if and when we have time. We're always looking for more people to help out with making things happen. If we're not meeting your expectations, please join in and help out. Please don't interpret my question as some sort of back handed slight or a sign of a lack of appreciation. I was really asking because I don't want to miss out on the coming meeting and was unclear on what the signup requirements were. And please don't interpret any of the rest of this email as a slight either: rather take it as an offer to assist. If you want to organise access rights for me on the websites, I would be more than happy to - take responsibility for coordinating the release of meeting announcements going forward - amend the appspot site to make it clear it is now defunct and add links to the other websites - put a link from london.pm.org to the meetup group Cheers Chris
RE: Next Technical Meeting: 24th July @ Conway Hall
Sue Spence virtually...@gmail.com wrote London Perl Mongers will hold its next technical meeting in the Brockway room at Conway Hall on Thursday 24th July, doors opening at 18:30 for a 19:00 start. Is there a website for signing up to this? If I search on google for London Perl Mongers, the likely suspects seem to be things like: http://london.pm.org http://londonpmtech.appspot.com http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers but none of them have it listed. I can find it on the Conway Hall website: http://lanyrd.com/2014/london-perl-mongers-technical-meeting but I'm guessing that's not the official location for sign up. Cheers Chris
Re: Evaluating user-defined conditions
Roger Bell_West ro...@firedrake.org wrote: On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:59:57AM +0100, Chris Jack wrote: Can I suggest you consider including some rudimentary idea of cost when you're deciding whether to allow the query to run or not. Cost could be in terms of anticipated rows returned and/or total anticipated CPU time. Yeah, it shouldn't be that hard to write code to evaluate an expression and work out how long it'll take to run. A very rudimentary approach would be to disallow expressions without an equality on a column (or better at least one column from a list of columns with known good selectivity). A better approach (closer to what cost based databases do) would be to create a size n histogram of values of all columns that can be in the restriction: n = 20 is typical. Based on this, you can approximate how many rows both equalities and inequalities would probably return. A better solution might consider column value correlation. Some databases have features that allow you to grab the estimated run time from the cost based optimiser without having to run the query for real. It would be very quick to implement something that grabbed that but obviously it requires a database with the feature. Clearly whether it's worthwhile at all depends on the maximum number of rows that can be returned, how much of a problem it is if long queries run and the amount of development time available. From memory, commercial reporting tools like Business Objects allow specification of a maximum run time/row count restriction so looking into Dave's proposal if you want to implement an equivalent might be the go. For a robust solution, this is probably essential: but it has the obvious downside that the query still had to run for the maximum time. So it's better to also identify badly performing queries ahead of time. Users cannot be trusted. Even if it's work, unless a long running query is not possible for other reasons, users will create queries that run a long time. Chris
Re: Evaluating user-defined conditions
Can I suggest you consider including some rudimentary idea of cost when you're deciding whether to allow the query to run or not. Cost could be in terms of anticipated rows returned and/or total anticipated CPU time. This could be a slippery slope as to do it well you'd have to start creating histograms of your data. If someone has any time (ha!): a nice addition to some of the modules mentioned would be to include some sort of self-monitoring: so if memory goes up more than a certain amount of CPU time goes over some threshold: the module decides to abort itself. CheersChris
RE: Dim Sum tomorrow Joy King Lau
Sue Spence wrote It's been a month or so since the last Thursday dim sum, so I would like to propose meeting up for some dumplings, steamed buns and other tasty treats. FYI: I'm on the digest form of the list and it turned up in my email at Thursday 12:10pm which is a bit late to decide to go. I'm not precisely sure the algorithm the list digest uses to decide when to send things out but I would guess it's something along the lines of which ever is the sooner of - 24 hours after a post is received - more than a certain number of posts are received Aka - maybe send these things out on Tuesday... Chris
Bouncing accidental sends
Jon Antonovics jon.antonov...@gmail.com wrote Absolutely nothing while quoting a previous digest As someone who has managed to do something similar in the past, I was wondering if it was possible to put a filter into the list software that identified and bounced posts that failed one of the following tests: - if the title were of the format of something like: (Re: )?london.pm Digest Vol... - more than a certain number of leading s were included: maybe 50 - a minimum number of non rows were not included: the number 3 springs to mind, - a minimal ratio of non rows to were not exceeded maybe 10% - more than a certain line length without a carriage return were spotted (this is for those of use who use hotmail and have discovered sending in html doesn't always meet kindly with the list software) Thoughts? Chris
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Damian Conway Speaking at London.pm: Monday, 10th March
Damian Conway said: Yep. We didn't really have enough lead-time on that one. My fault. I was only able to commit to it and propose it to FlossUK about a month ago. That turns out not to be enough time to attract the numbers we needed to make it viable. I would love to do more perl mongers courses and I would have booked the FlossUK one if it hadn't been in office hours. i.e. I would love to see more weekend and evening perl courses. Industry standard door charges would not be an issue for me. Taking a day off work is. Chris
London Perl Conference 2013 photos
If anyone's interested, I have put a few photos up from this year's London Perl Conference. You can find them here: https://plus.google.com/photos/104598318166622233830/albums/5952849024849301 153?authkey=CJDc4M-snaLrIA Email me off list if you appear in a photo and you'd rather it was removed. You can also email if you like a photo so much you want a full sized version. Chris
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
Abigail abig...@abigail.be wrote: I'd call them niche books. If generic books don't sell, why would niche books? A thought. One way of mitigating the risk of writing a book that might not sell could be to use cloud funding (e.g. kickstarter.com). This would have a number of advantages: - it would make it much clearer if a subject/author combination were worth the effort - people could contribute to the writing of a book they think deserves to be written even if they don't want it (possibly at a contribution level less than that of people actually getting the book) - people could contribute more than the cost of the book in return for additional perks - it would be more apparent how little money is sometimes available for the effort of writing a book Chris
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Joel Bernstein j...@fysh.org wrote And if you turned up without your Trema Finance Kit did you have to do it in your underwear? I wear underwear on all my assignments however... I am cycling off road from London to Paris on behalf of the British Heart Foundation at the end of June. I will guarantee to do it commando if I get £100 in sponsorship from this list. All donations will be doubled through matching funds. You can sponsor me here: http://www.justgiving.com/Chris-Jack4 Chris
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 16:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) I commuted from England to Finland (around 1200 miles each way) on a weekly basis for about a year back in my Trema Finance Kit consultancy days. And yes, it involved Perl programming. I win. Chris
Re: A stranger arrives in town ...
On 09/04/2013 09:08, Smylers wrote: David H. Adler writes: Cellphone Warehouse? Carphone Warehouse -- they aren't a warehouse, and they don't sell car-phones. Which raised the question in my mind about whether anyone sold carphones at all. And surprisingly (to me at any rate), they still exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_phone However carphone warehouse doesn't appear to sell even the ones that don't really require installation like the Nokia 810. Go figure. Chris
Re: More advice about becoming a freelance Perl programer
Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote How long is a piece of string? A piece of string is 3 inches long. Now you might be thinking you've seen a piece of string that was 4 inches long. But that was another piece of string. *Sorry: and it's not even Friday. Chris
Re: Billing a client
A few other points on this: you might like to agree some standard for agreeing when a piece of work has actually been done.Without this, it could get messy if the other company decides not to pay. The most common method is probably getting time sheets completed and signed off. Alternatively (and I have never done this personally) - if you have entered into a fixed price contract to deliver something, agreeing ahead of time what the acceptance criteria for the deliverable is. This might imply having a well defined requirements/design document. Aside: It used to be said of a well-known software consultancy (which I won't name) that they bid low to get the work - knowing the requirements document would always turn out to be inadequate. They would then make their money on the change requests. I have only once had to sue someone for non-payment. It was a short 4 week piece of work and there was a plethora of evidence that the work had been done, but the company was short on cash (not my problem). So I lawyered up. There's a procedure that then has to be followed. Don't take this as legal advice but some of the steps I recall were: I send a letter to the company requesting payment, time passes, my lawyer sends a letter to the company requesting payment, time passes, my lawyer sends a letter threatening to wind up the company, time passes, we issue winding up orders on the company. The first step of this is it has to be advertised in one of a few specific journals. It was when we advertised the winding up petition that the company's bank (and I believe this is obligatory but don't quote me) froze their bank account. At this moment, the company suddenly paid attention to my request for payment, paid in full, and paid my solicitor's fee. Chris
RE: Billing a client
One other thing. I'm not suggesting lawyering up should necessarily be your first port of call. The longest arrears I have ever had was something like 5 months, but there was a lot of goodwill and trust on my part in that case. I was working for a software house that was running low on cash. They were attempting to refinance themselves but the problem was the company founder didn't want to dilute his holding too much so was trying to (effectively) get money from his mates to maintain his shareholding when the new cash came in. I, and the other contractors, kept getting reassurances that there was no issue about being paid: it was just a question of when. I had had a fair amount of money in my corporate account so I was able to live off that for a while - but about the 5 month mark, I did have to say to the company that it was getting past a point of goodwill - and was getting to the point where I was physically not going to be able to continue for financial reasons. At which point, they found some money to pay me some (not all) of the arrears. And eventually they completely caught up. Obviously the high level risk in these circumstances is that contractors are very low down the pecking order if the company were to go into receivership. Chris
Re: Updating lots of database fields in a single row
On 3//1//013 0::1,, J?r?me ?t?v? wrote:
Something critical is missing in your code though: quoting:
Replace $field = '$hash-{$field}' with $field
=.$dbh-quote($hash-{$field})
This would assume all fields were strings. To do it properly, you would need to
have the metadata available and do:
$dbh-quote($hash-{$field}, $data_type)
You may also have to worry about $hash-{$field} containing SQL injection
stuff. So bind parameters are potentially safer.
For Oracle, bind variable sometimes also offer performance benefits as the
query plan is more cacheable. But be aware, this is at the price of losing
specific statistical information about values in the where clause which will
mean the optimiser has less information to look at it's histograms with. For
specific queries, it may be faster to use actual values. e.g.:
select * from sometable where column_A = ?
If column_A is indexed and has 90% of rows with value 1 and has 1000 other well
distributed values for the other 10% of rows: the best query plan will be
different for value 1 versus other values.
The other reason I tend not to use bind parameters is it makes abstracting code
harder to do. If you want to write a function that does something like:
populate_excel_tab_with_sql($excel_handle, $sql)
It's easier if you don't have to worry about bind variables. Obviously there
are ways around this but the way I generate some SQL makes it easier to go with
using values.
Chris
Re: London Perl Conference 2012 photos
From: James Laver james.la...@gmail.com https://picasaweb.google.com/104598318166622233830/LondonPerlConference24112012?authuser=0feat=directlink#5814779230205261074 Not entirely flattering. You must have picked a hell of a moment. From: Pedro Figueiredo m...@pedrofigueiredo.org No, this is a hell of a moment: https://picasaweb.google.com/104598318166622233830/LondonPerlConference24112012#5814779296635010610 We honour all requests from people photographed who want their photographs taken down. I would suggest private emails rather than to the list... Photographing conferences has distinct challenges, particularly when people are either not presenting or only presenting for a minute or two. From: William Blunn bill+london...@blunn.org And again; this time without the Redmond-crapware-induced spurious linebreak: https://picasaweb.google.com/104598318166622233830/LondonPerlConference24112012?authuser=0feat=directlink I sent the email from outlook (I usually just use the hotmail web interface with Plain text turned on). I will have to bare this in mind too for future posting... Chris
London Perl Conference 2012 photos
If anyones's interested, I put a few photos up from the conference at: https://picasaweb.google.com/104598318166622233830/LondonPerlConference24112 012?authuser=0feat=directlink If anyone wants full size versions, drop me an email, Regards Chris
FLOSS UK O'Reilly announces - Intermediate Advanced Perl courses by Dave Cross
From: Ian Norton i.d.nor...@gmail.com Advanced Perl - 14th 15th February 2013 I would be more interested if this were to run at the weekend or, better still, on a series of weekday evenings. Chris
Re: Proprietary Sybase DBI/DBD module
From: Joel Bernstein j...@fysh.org Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: Sybase will be releasing to CPAN but they're still finishing off work/testing etc. What's the question then? The original question was how to get it into standard distributions. Dave Cross answered this. When I asked at the SAP/Sybase conference, the presenter, when I asked, said it would get released to CPAN sometime (but it's possible the presenter didn't know). Finding out how to get it into standard distributions doesn't require the code to be immediately available on CPAN. The driver is currently available at http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01694.1570/doc/html/car1311374855236.html Niche is a point in time concept. SAP buying Sybase was a significant coupe for both companies. SAP competes head to head with Oracle in applications yet had been beholden to Oracle for its database. This had lead to all the complications you would expect. SAP is now pouring bucket loads of money into development of Sybase. years ago, I was pessimistic that Sybase was going to become another hard to sell legacy skill on my CV (anyone remember SQLPlus: now there's a legacy database skill...). Now, I'm not so sure. SAP is targeting Sybase as being the number commercial database in the world. They were able to add some credibility to that aim with statistics about the number of sites now migrating from Oracle to Sybase. But who knows. That sounds pretty niche to me - a database I used to use a bit in the past which is now basically used to support a certain big app. Not seeing anybody migrating TO Sybase, are you? SAP quoted 800 sites in the last year migrating from Oracle to Sybase. Sybase is currently the 4th biggest commercial database (http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/eye-on-oracle/oracle-the-clear-leader-in-24-billion-rdbms-market/), but it's the 47.9% growth in 2011 (compared to under 20% for everyone else) that makes me think that there's life (and opportunity) in remaining in the Sybase camp. Sybase scrwed itself (IMHO) 10 years back by being very slow to come to the row level locking party. So software like SAP (at the time) that required row level locking had no alternative than to look to vendors like Oracle. Oracle then stole a march on Sybase again by coming out with a grid computing solution: not enought CPU - just add another box. Sybase is now playing catch up and with the resource of SAP behind it. It is also very prepared to compete on price. DB2, SQLServer and Teradata are in slightly different markets (IMHO): so really Sybase is primarily competing against Oracle. Ooops: I meant SQLBase (although SQLPlus is kind of ironically funny: if there's a database tool that should qualify as legacy, SQLPlus would be it). Finally, please, please, please fix your mailer, the quoting/attribution in that was impressively broken and it took me minutes just to -read- your reply. Apologies: I use hotmail and it looks fine when I send it. I usually switch to Plain Text - but on this occasion I had left it on Rich Text. The problem is in the list's conversion software. I doubt either Hotmail or List software is going to change anytime soon - so I will try to be careful. From: PostgreSQL and SQLite are both excellent open source databases that are still actively developed. True, but they don't even appear on the radar for market share. From: DAVID HODGKINSON daveh...@gmail.com Can you define proprietary please? All I meant was Sybase was writing it itself. They've put a lot of effort into improving performance/functionality. It will be shipped with .so files? See link above. Regards Chris
Re: Proprietary Sybase DBI/DBD module
From: Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk Well, there's only one standard Perl distribution[1]. And that doesn't include any DBD modules. It doesn't even include DBI. There are a number of distributions that include modules beyond the standard set. Offhand I can think of ActivePerl[2], Strawberry Perl[3] and DWIM Perl[4]. Some of these include DBI and DBD modules but (as far as I know) they only include DBD::mysql - as it's still by far the most popular database. None of them include DBD::Sybase, so the chance of getting them to include an alternative Sybase DBD would seem to be tiny. Thanks this is helpful. Popular is a slightly arbitrary concept: see http://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/1 for instance. Not that I'm saying that's correct simply that you choose your own definition of popular. I will grant you that mysql has the most downloads of any open source database. Obviously mysql is a database - but it's really not in the same market as Oracle, DB2, Sybase etc. IMHO mysql got itself scrwed for all time when it was acquired by Oracle. How better to control what features get added to a low end competitor. At the same time, you're dissuading development on other open source databases by having something with already good functionality. There are, however, a couple of alternatives that you can consider. Firstly, for a module to be considered real to most Perl programmers, it needs to be on CPAN. The PAUSE FAQ[5] is still (as far as I know) the best guide for getting a module onto CPAN. Sybase will be releasing to CPAN but they're still finishing off work/testing etc. Secondly, you could consider making pre-packaged versions of the module available for various platforms. For example, an RPM for Red Hat systems or a .deb for Debian/Ubuntu. You could try to get it into the standard package repositories for these systems but the niche nature of Sybase use is likely to count against you here. Niche is a point in time concept. SAP buying Sybase was a significant coupe for both companies. SAP competes head to head with Oracle in applications yet had been beholden to Oracle for its database. This had lead to all the complications you would expect. SAP is now pouring bucket loads of money into development of Sybase. 3 years ago, I was pessimistic that Sybase was going to become another hard to sell legacy skill on my CV (anyone remember SQLPlus: now there's a legacy database skill...). Now, I'm not so sure. SAP is targeting Sybase as being the number 2 commercial database in the world. They were able to add some credibility to that aim with statistics about the number of sites now migrating from Oracle to Sybase. But who knows. From: Jason Clifford ja...@ukfsn.org So long as it being proprietary does not prevent this model of distribution that's all you need to do. Thanks for your response too. It's only proprietary in the sense that it is written/maintained by SAP/Sybase. They're also releasing similar module for Python, PDP, and so on. They'll all be free and available in the standard locations like CPAN. RegardsChris
Proprietary Sybase DBI/DBD module
I'm just back from speaking at the Las Vegas SAP/Sybase conference (on a somewhat Perl related topic too!). One of the (other) interesting talks was about a new proprietary Sybase ASE DBI/DBD module for Perl (to be called DBD::SybaseASE from memory). They were a little short on specifics, but it sounds like it will answer a number of concerns with the current non-proprietary DBD::Sybase - for instance with performance of bulk loading. I asked what was being done about getting it into standard perl distributions, and the presenter didn't know. Hence my question: can anyone send me/post information or a link about how to get a new module into standard Perl distributions (and maybe also a list of the major perl distributions). RegardsChris
Re: Brainbench perl test
One other point I wanted to make on this debate was: No matter how strongly each of us feels about what is or is not a legitimate or worthwhile interview question: part of the benefit of having this discussion is finding out what other people think is important in an interview. Even if we sway the opinions of people in this forum about what interview questions to ask, at the end of the day interviewing is a game and being able to give more complete answers to less worthwhile questions is part of the process. Hence these are the sorts of things we need to swot up on. My general aim in an interview is to present the interviewer with a number of things they didn't know. Hopefully of which a few are of broad practical use. I might argue that memo-ization is a minor, occasionally useful feature of perl, but knowing about memo-ization shows I have studied perl in more depth than the people who don't know about it. I also think it is good to be upfront in interviews about things you haven't done and somewhat humble in assessing your skill level. For the latter, the interviewer is unlikely to take your assessment at face value and over delivery in the interview is not a bad habit to get into. Perl is a huge subject and things like Moose start to challenge what the language is. Many modules are more like language extensions than perl per se. I start to doubt that anyone is a master of all areas of perl any more. At which point I could go off and have a little rant about a number of people who have written about DBI who are obviously somewhat clueless about a few things about databases (but I won't). Chris
Re: Brainbench perl test?
Piers Cawley pdcawley-london.0dd...@bofh.org.uk wrote On 4 September 2012 14:41, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 14:31 +0100, Matt Freake wrote: For that reason, I would have thought there were other, better, recursion problems out there I could use. Tower of Hanoi? :) Tower of Hanoi (with a proper description of what the problem _is_) is always a better example for solving with recursion than the fibobloodynacci sequence. Tower of Hanoi is one of those aha solutions that I would argue has little to do with day to day programming. If you've worked it out sometime in past or had it explained in a lecture then you're unlikely to forget - otherwise I don't think I've ever come across a problem with a comparable solution. Although I do have fond memories from my uni robotics course of having to program the robot arm to do it. In regards to Fibonacci: knowing about memo'izing (or even the performance issues around calculating Fibonacci) could arguably be effectively asking if you've read Higher Order Perl. It's an interesting book but I wouldn't suggest high up the list of books I would recommend people read about Perl unless they're doing something very specialised. I haven't yet had a problem which I felt was worthwhile of a memo-ized solution - but that might just be indicative of the sort of perl work I do. Similarly, discriminating against people on the basis of web programming versus perl experience - is a massive presupposition about what people use perl for. Probably 90% of the perl work I do has nothing to do with the web. If you haven't read up on web security issues, SQL injection is not immediately obvious and there are various legitimate reasons for avoiding bind variables. I think we can often treat interviews through the filter of our own experience - I went to one interview where my interviewer seemed to think it was incredibly important to know about closures. I think it is more important to broadly assess the competency of the candidate . Which is what a lot of posts in this thread seem to have been alluding to. Chris
RE: CRUDdy DBIC question
Bob MacCallum uncool...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry about the Perl question. We have a database model where the master copy of the data is file based. Is there some DBIx::Class magic which does some kind of nested update_or_create_or_delete? For example, an object might initially be written to the db along with its three children, but then someone edits the file and removes one child, adds another, and edits an existing child. I've seen http://search.cpan.org/~scain/DBIx-DBStag-0.12/DBIx/DBStag.pm and stag-storenode.pl - if we convert our files into Stag format temporarily, maybe this could work. Are there any other options I've missed? many thanks, Bob. You could use something like DBM and there's a section in the Perl Cookbook on using tie with objects but... I really question the desirability of doing something like this with anything that doesn't pass the ACID test. There are so many advantages to using a relational database (mySQL is free), I'm wondering why you're not going down that route. How much data are we talking about? Do you care about maintaining your data if your program terminates abnormally? Do you need more than one program to access it at a time? Regards Chris
Perl xls to xlsx converter
Apologies in advance for asking a perl question. Laziness/Impatience: Does anyone have a perl Excel converter they would be prepared to send me? I would like to convert Excel 2002/2003 .xls files to Excel 2007/2010 .xlsx files maintaining all formatting. I know there are non-perl free products to do this, but I would like something I can easily alter. I had a look around on CPAN/google. It looked like work to combine things like ParseExcel with Excel::Writer::XLSX so I was hoping someone might have done this for me already. Spreadsheet::Read looks like a good idea, but it would be an even better idea if Spreadsheet::Write handled more output formats and took Spreadsheet::Read data structures as input. Hubris: You have my permission to feel smug. :-) Regards Chris
Re: Should I get my mum a Kindle?
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 09:04:29AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Yeah. Especially radio programmes that you missed, so (a) you weren't there to hear them live and (b) you didn't think to program your stereo deck to record the show to cassette in advance. (Are there stereos these days that can record to CDs or internal storage of some kind? For that matter, are there stereos that you can make them record something on a timer?) You can get a very large number of radio stations live on the internet and the bbc.co.uk website makes a lot of recent content available for download. Chris
RE: Getting cpan's Oracle DBD to work properly on i386 is proving
Paul Branon paulbra...@googlemail.com wrote: Does anyone know where I can get help getting oracle DBD to work? I'm on Intel Solaris 10 and Oracle comes with an AMD64 binary. It runs fine on my system. I can connect to oracle with no problems at all. Then I install oracle DBD which installs just fine But when I try to connect to the database I get wrong ELF class. Because libclntsh.so.10.1 is a 32 bit binary. I've tried all kinds of things. But I think in the end I'm really going to have to talk to someone who's recently installed oracle (preferably 10g) on intel solaris 10 and then got cpan oracle DBD to talk to it. I've had lots of great suggestions from people but I can't get any of them to work. I guess what I need is literally the answer. Are you compiling from scratch? DBD::Oracle is annoying because it has to be compiled against the same Oracle Client that you are using to connect. Here's a quote from http://search.cpan.org/~pythian/DBD-Oracle-1.28/Oracle.pm First off you will have to tell DBD::Oracle where the binaries reside for the Oracle client it was compiled against This is really quite annoying and DBD::Sybase, for instance, does not have this limitation. For my sins (which are varied and multitudinous), I am doing an upgrade from Oracle 10.2 to Oracle 11.2 at the moment. The perl (32 bit 5.6 and 5.8) libraries were compiled against Oracle 8.1.7 - and the 11.2 server only (officially) supports Oracle 9 clients and above. We only have the 64 bit 11.2 Oracle client libraries available so, as switching to 64 bit would cause all sorts of other problems, I am using 10.2.0.4 32 bit libraries and taking the opportunity to move to 5.12 of perl. 10.2.0.4 is the first version of the Oracle client that, despite the version, was compiled with the Oracle 11 code base (10.2.0.3 was the last using the Oracle 10 code base). If you have the choice, I would suggest you use at least 10.2.0.4 to postpone any future perl upgrade issues. Regards Chris
Re: LPW 2011 carpooling
James Laver london...@jameslaver.com wrote: For those not actually familiar with the airport situation in London, Southend and Oxford have prepended 'London' to their names but they're bloody ages away. And yes, he probably can actually get to Birmingham faster than anything except city airport because he's just down the road from Euston. If you're being sensible and you have the money, fly from city, else heathrow, else gatwick, else luton, else stansted. In that order, preferably avoiding scumming it from stansted. If you're using another airport and you don't happen to live near euston, don't even think about any of the others. Not quite sure what you're criteria is and I would say ranking airports really depends where you're trying to get to in London and where you're flying in from. In terms of getting to London from the airport (and I suggest you also look on a map) but to give you a rough idea: Travelling to Kings Cross/St Pancras by train Gatwick: 45 minutes Luton: 25-35 minutes (plus 5 minutes bus transfer to Luton Airport Parkway) Heathrow: 60 minutes (plus it can be quite a long walk depending on what terminal you fly into) - you can also go to Paddington in 15 minutes by Heathrow Express City and Stansted have direct routes to other stations: City: 22 minutes to Bank Stansted: 45 minutes to Liverpool St Station I have flown a lot from all of these (apart from City where its only been twice). I wouldn't personally rank any of them as markedly better or worse than any other aside from criteria of convenience from where in London I'm starting and whether they fly to where I want to get to. Chris
Re: IMPORTANT(ish): Re: website maintenance gig available
On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 18:33, Andrew Beattie and...@tug.com wrote: Ok. Who stole all my whitespace? I use hotmail and spend my life changing to Plain text (and back to html when I've finished) to avoid this problem (there was a discussion many moons ago on this list). Basically the html to text converter that the board software uses don't (sic) work too well. Chris (whose going on holiday to Oz for a week tomorrow :-)
Re: Where do we go to get good Perl/Catalyst/DBIC/Moose people in India?
Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 10:55:11AM +, ian.doche...@nomura.com wrote: [...] We don't expect people to have all these skills, but mostly what we have seen are people with some of, basic Perl OO, CGI or DBI at best. I suspect this is very much a case of getting what you pay for. I work with quite a few Indian Perl programmers (mostly from Tata). Whilst rates for programmers in India are usually lower than in London, my impression is you get roughly the same distribution of good and bad programmers as you do in London. A lot of the Indian middle class get a good education in an english speaking school. Part of India's problem seems to be to be it's become a victim of it's own outsourcing success - and there is an IT skill's shortage there (as well). From my point of view, this is good news as it means London rates are less likely to be watered down by excess capacity. Something to be careful of is: we have lost a number of Indian juniors who have got themselves trained up and then moved on to better paid things. Chris
Re: Slightly offtopic - coordinate conversions
Michael Lush mjl...@ebi.ac.uk wrote: On Wed, 13 Jul 2011, Peter Sergeant wrote: I've been playing around with Google Maps recently, and noticed that they've started using hashes of some coordinates: latlng: 52.54296 -0.308166 hnear : 0x4877f21032e242f5:0x805cb103d71d5051 latlng: 51.411586,-0.300893 hnear : 0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99 A few attempts at working out how this was done with Perl have failed me - anyone got a better idea? Where/why are they doing this? I suppose it could be some kind of attempt to obfuscate the numbers in order to prevent 'coordinate harvesting'? There may be several reasons: and a check sum would certainly help prevent systematic attempts to get 'coordinate harvesting' data (and might suggest an algorithm that was both hard to crack and google might be unwilling to divulge). From what others have said, it seems to distribute widely and non-linearly - which would be useful for separating data that would otherwise tend to clump around interesting places. So it could also be for efficiency of lookup (the hash is precalculated), you don't get tied in to a set level of coordinate precision, and it maybe even be to help distribute over multiple machines. Chris
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
From: london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org Subject: london.pm Digest, Vol 68, Issue 13 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2011 14:00:37 +0100 Send london.pm mailing list submissions to london.pm@london.pm.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org You can reach the person managing the list at london.pm-ow...@london.pm.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of london.pm digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside... (Paul Makepeace) 2. Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside... (Denny) 3. Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside... (Peter Edwards) 4. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (Abigail) 5. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (Bill Crawford) 6. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (Tom Hukins) 7. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (Paul Makepeace) 8. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (Peter Corlett) 9. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (Roger Burton West) 10. Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl? (David Matthewman) -- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2011 12:07:01 +0100 From: Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com Subject: Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside... To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm@london.pm.org Message-ID: BANLkTinumqtmy=tmbpx7yh0xlttok90...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:21, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: Of course, it's possible that the Comprehensive Python Archive Network or similar for ruby/javascript/java/C/whatever does exist but I just can't find it. ?But then, if I can't find it, it's not much use. (If you were a python programmer and yet had still somehow managed to assiduously avoid all mentions of it, you could search for 'python packages' (because that's what they're called in python) and would find the top result is http://pypi.python.org/pypi) Paul -- Message: 2 Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:15:51 +0100 From: Denny 2...@denny.me Subject: Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside... To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm@london.pm.org Message-ID: 1307531751.13033.12.ca...@serenity.denny.me Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 On Wed, 2011-06-08 at 12:07 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:21, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: Of course, it's possible that the Comprehensive Python Archive Network or similar for ruby/javascript/java/C/whatever does exist but I just can't find it. But then, if I can't find it, it's not much use. (If you were a python programmer and yet had still somehow managed to assiduously avoid all mentions of it, you could search for 'python packages' (because that's what they're called in python) and would find the top result is http://pypi.python.org/pypi) As helpfully documented here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/MovingToPythonFromOtherLanguages -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 490 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/attachments/20110608/5c15a72b/attachment-0001.pgp -- Message: 3 Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2011 12:19:15 +0100 From: Peter Edwards pe...@dragonstaff.co.uk Subject: Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside... To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm@london.pm.org Message-ID: banlktimeahq-+dc4sk3fbbhm7lklu9h...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, 8 Jun 2011, David Cantrell wrote: It's the lack of a CPAN-a-like for any other language that keeps me coming back to perl. Of course, it's possible that the Comprehensive Python Archive Network or similar for ruby/javascript/java/C/whatever does exist but I just can't find it. But then, if I can't find it, it's not much use. Python repo http://pypi.python.org/pypi It was fairly chastening a couple of years back looking for a library implementing Role Based Access Control and finding that there was a Python one but no Perl one http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=searchterm=role+based+access+controlsubmit=search http://search.cpan.org/search?query=role+based+access+controlmode=all Then when I was doing WxWidgets programming from ActivePerl having to use the wxPython library docs http://www.wxpython.org/ because they were more up to date and complete than the Perl ones http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/documentation.html in terms of calling from a wrapper (more useful than the C++ docs). Node.js repo http://npm.mape.me/ V8 seems to work well on Unix and takes little code to
RE: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
Apologies for including the top half of the digest. Chris
Re: Junior-mid level Perl (Victoria Conlan)
On 27 April 2011 11:15, Victoria Conlan vi...@comps.org wrote: I still favour getting the hell out of IT and setting up a tea shop, though. (tea and cakes at my place when I do so!) Victoria(n) sponge cakes?
RE: Christmas quiz 2010
Well the quiz obviously went down as well as the proverbial lead balloon, but I
thought I should publish some answers anyway. Apologies for the loss of
formatting in the perl code - it's formatted when I sent it. Oh and merry xmas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QGCrIY1HME
questions based on http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/modern_perl_a4.pdf
1) What does Tim Toady refer to?
It's the pronounciation of the acronym: there's more than one way to do it
2) What does this output?
for (qw( Huex Dewex Louid )) {
$_++;
print;
}
---
Doesn't compile as attempting to alter a constant
3) What year was Perl first released in?
1988
4) If the following was a complete perl program, would it initialise %hohoho.
What statements could you add to verify this?
my %hohoho;
if ($hohoho{Robot}{Santa}{Claus} eq sleigh) {
print Coming to town\n;
}
---
%hohoho gets initialised.
my %hohoho;
print scalar(%hohoho) .\n;
if ($hohoho{Robot}{Santa}{Claus} eq sleigh) {
print Coming to town\n;
}
print scalar(%hohoho) .\n;
5) What version of Perl 5 introduced the given/when constructs?
5.10
6) What does the following output?
print scalar((a,b)) . \n;
---
b
7) What is Perlscript?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerlScript
8) What does the following output?
sub parent {
print Perl 4\n;
child;
print Perl 5\n;
child;
}
sub child {
my(@a) = (@_);
for my $i (@a) {
print $i\n;
}
}
parent(1,2);
---
Perl 4
1
2
Perl 5
9) In December, what will the localtime function report the month as?
11
10) Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and
answer it.
Spam filters
Mr.G mrg9...@gmail.com wrote: whole lot of spam which I've deleted Just out of curiousity - this list has been very good at not propagating spam. I was therefore wondering why certain things manage to sneak past and, if we have a spam filter: why it didn't pick this up. Chris
RE: wireless routers
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: My netgear WPN802 seems to have died. Any recommendations for a non-ADSL wireless router that is reliable and might last a bit longer? Don't need anything fancy, but I would like something that I don't have to reboot regularly. I've always wondered a bit about this rebooting thing - whether the real problem is at my end or that of my service provider. I just have seen so many people buy new routers with the expectation they won't have to reboot - only to find themselves having to reboot the replacement. I also wonder if the service provider is doing something to intentionally cripple people who have been generating a lot of traffic for a period of time and whether rebooting is really just effectively resetting the counter at the service provider's end. I use Sky - and on a semi-regular basis it stops working Friday night or the weekend (regardless of what I reboot) - and then miraculously springs back into life on Monday morning. My take on this has been that Sky doesn't employ engineers to do weekend call outs to fix things that break their end. Not so long ago, my Sky box stopped working even mid-week - lights seemed to sort of come on but no connection and no LAN (which definitely wouldn't be Sky's end). Interestingly Sky's first suggestion was to send us a new power cable which I thought would have little chance of success (as lights were coming on on the router al beit not as enthusiastically as they had when it worked) - but surprisingly it fixed the problem. Chris
Re: XS Constants peculiarity
Dirk Koopman wrote: Why would RK + LOCK give a different result to RK | LOCK? Don't know. I don't have your module but if I create FF.pm as: use constant LOCK = 0x10; use constant RK = 0x4; 1; perl -e 'use FF; printf 0x%x\n, $_ for (LOCK, RK, RK | LOCK, RK + LOCK)' And use perl 5.8.6, it gives 0x10 0x4 0x14 0x14 Would suggest your try: perl -e 'use FF; printf 0x%x\n, $_ for (RK + LOCK, LOCK + RK, (RK) + (LOCK))' and see what happens - or use intermediate variables: e.g. $RK_var = RK; $LOCK_var = LOCK; $RK_var + $LOCK_var; Regards Chris
Re: XS Constants peculiarity
Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: This is not my stuff, this is generated from the original header file(s). Prototypes? Functions?? What kind of a solution are you looking for here and what is your real problem? Have you tried the suggestion about surrounding your constants in round brackets? Or is this so widespread in your code that it would take too long. You could also try redefining the constants at the end of the header file (or in a header file of your own) via either of: use constant RK = 0x4; use constant RK = (RK); and filter out any redefinition errors if you've got perl warnings on. Chris
Re: overlapping find and replace
On 18 Oct 2010, at 16:11, Michael Lush wrote:
I have a string ABCDEFGH and want to highlight two overlapping hits
BCDE and DEFG in HTML to make AbBCiDE/bFG/iH
The obvious $string =~ s{(BCDE|DEFG)}{b$1/b}g; does not work as the
modified string doesn't match the second query and I don't get differnet
fonts for each overlapping match.
Is there a conventional way of doing this?
It really depends on what your general case is. For your specific case, you
could consider the fairly simple:
$string =~ s{(BC)(DE)(FG)}{$1b$2/b$3}g;
For a more general case: I would suggest you pre-parse the LHS of the RE to
achieve something similar.
Regards
Chris
RE: london.pm Digest, Vol 57, Issue 4
Dan Rowles daniel.row...@wcn.co.uk wrote: A quick google for one time credit card number seems to suggest that PayPal offer one-use-only credit card numbers. No idea if that's actually true, but might be worth a look Here's a link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/account/VDCFrequentlyAskedQuestions-outside It sounds like it's in beta and only for websites at the moment. I'm also curious about how (if) they nabbed enough numbers to avoid reuse. Chris _ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/19780/direct/01/ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now
RE: YAPC Pisa
Gordon Banner t...@gordonbanner.me.uk wrote On the subject of YAPC, has anyone else tried to book at the conference hotel and been worried at being asked to send credit card details by email? It's a long time since I sent credit card details by email and whilst I think it is obviously a very bad thing... If you have to do it, can I suggest you try to avoid putting the whole 16 digits in 1234 5678 1234 5678 style format as this would be a very easy thing to parse for. Rather think up something like: First 4 digits: 1234 Second 4 digits: 5678 Third4 digits: 1234 Fourth 4 digits: 5678 but think up your own to avoid establishing a standard which might be parsed. I find it doubtful there are a lot of people reading my emails (not on the distribution list ;-), I find it more likely someone is auto-scanning my emails with a noddy credit card number searching algorithm which can easily be defeated. Regards Chris _ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/19780/direct/01/ Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now
Re: Damian Conway: Understanding Regular Expressions
Can I put a quick plug in for the joys of running evening courses. As I contract, every time I consider taking a course, I think of the lost earnings (usually more than the cost of the course). If you have booked a venue during the day, why not book it for the evening as well and attract a whole new audience... Chris _ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/19780/direct/01/ Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now
Re: Stand up comedy
10 downing street Personally I felt Gordon Brown's timing could have been improved.
Solid state drives
Because it's been discussed previously on this list, I thought I might draw your attention to the newish generation of SSDs: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/index.htm You can probably find the performance data you want quite easily, but the key reliability data I was interested is slightly buried in section 3.5.4 of the technical document's datasheet: aka it's rated for 20Gb of writes for a minimum of 5 years. I'm not qualified to say if they are reliable enough for production databases - but I would be interested in opinions. Seems to me we my be seeing the early stages of the death of mechanical computing (aka the rotating disk drive). There are actually reasonably affordable (http://www.microdirect.co.uk/home/product/44075/Intel-X25-M-Mainstream-80GB-SATA-2-5-inch?source=googleps) has 80GB drives for £155 ex VAT. Chris _ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder: London Perl Mongers social on Thursday 1st
Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com said: On 31/03/2010, at 1:27 PM, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 19:15, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: On 31/03/2010, at 1:02 PM, David Cantrell wrote: And bowels? There will be almost as many bowels as people. If anyone has a colostomy bad, this will not be true. I think with the almost it's arguably even more accurate for anyone having an out-of-body experience. Yes, indeed, I think I scanned over the almost. Excuse my failure at pedantry. Actually... the pedant would point out that most people have more than one bowel so in the absence of widespread perl monger disembowelment, one would usually expect more bowels than people. But, not being a pedant, I might keep my mouth shut. Chris _ Send us your Hotmail stories and be featured in our newsletter http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
Geek gang signs
Oh no: http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/05/29/geek-gang-signs/ Chris _ Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
MIME::Lite
A perl question!
This is really just out of curiousity as I know the solution. We have a section
of code that has been working fine using MIME::Lite that reads as follows:
$msg = MIME::Lite-new(
From=SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS,
To =$email_list,
Subject =$subject,
Type='TEXT',
Data=$message_lines
);
if($file_name)
{
my($name,$path,$suffix) = fileparse($file_name);
### Attach a part:
$msg-attach(Type ='spreadsheet/xls',
Path =$file_name,
Filename =$name
);
}
## Configure Mime to send via SMTP
MIME::Lite-send('smtp', SMTP_HOST, Timeout=60);
if (! $msg-send())
{
print STDERR Unable to send email:$!\n;
}
Someone on the $email_list left the company, their email address became defunct
and the above section of code failed. Taking them out of the distribution list
made the code work again.
My question is: how/why did MIME::Lite know to fail?
My preconception is the email would be sent to an email queue that, at some
point in the future, would attempt to get the email to the target address - at
which point an email would be sent back reporting the failure. Immediate
failure suggests the target address was either checked interactively or was
cached somewhere as being defunct.
I am also wondering if it is even desirable for the above code to fail.
Thoughts/explanations?
Chris
_
Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now
http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
Re: No more IP for you
On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:26:32 +0100, Abigail wrote: On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 01:54:32PM +, Mike Woods wrote: Richard Foley wrote: That's 2012, right? Well that's the olympics fecked then :p Roll over won't occur before December 2012 (before Christmas). The London Olympic will be from July 27 till August 12. But if you'd seen the movie, you'd realise the Olympics must have massively overrun because they were impacted by all the disastery things going on. Who's going to break it to the Olympic organising committee? Dec 21 is my birthday by the way - so I have told my family I have to open my presents in the morning - and I can only be given things I can use in less than 6-8 hours. If the presents help with tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions: it would be even better. Chris _ Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
Re: Pig and pub! (Emergency social called for)
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:17:30 +, LesleyB wrote: On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 01:33:50PM +0100, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote: On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 05:48:22PM +, Edmund von der Burg wrote: PS - note that there are four heads going. If you ever wanted to do a very British variant of the horse's head in The Godfather this would be an opportune moment. Didn't get that Christmas bonus? Let the boss know how you feel! Don't you guys eat those? ? Dans le cochon, tout est bon. ? The average house may well not have an oven/hob large enough and I don't have any recipes. Does anyone else? Remind me: I thought the horse head in the Godfather was uncooked. I did manage to fit a whole small suckling pig from Pugh's in a regular size oven once. It was very small but still only just fit in diagonally with the snout in one corner. No room for anything else - so potatoes had to be done in the grill oven. I couldn't get a whole apple in the mouth but I did put a token slice in at the end (unless you want apple sauce, you probably don't want to cook the apple). It was fun and tasty - but I don't feel an urge to repeat the experience in a hurry. Chris _ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
RE: london.pm Digest, Vol 51, Issue 14
James Laver wrote: On topic: Buffy eating a dim sum pie and washing it down with beer. You left out ponies. A pie eating pony was washing Buffy down with some beer. _ Tell us your greatest, weirdest and funniest Hotmail stories http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
RE: Brazilian PM looking for a job in London area
Solli wrote: My name is Solli (a Brazilian Perl Monger) that is going to London to get my My name is Solli and I'm a Brazilian Perl Monger. I am coming to London to English improved. As a part of tactics to get fluent English, and has a improve my English. My plan is to become fluent in English and gain entire British life experience, I'm looking for a part-time job experience of British life. I'm looking for a part-time job in the London area (limited by student visa) in the London area. but am limited by my student visa. Chris _ Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
RE: Brazilian PM looking for a job in London area
I thought it was explicit in Solli's post that he was looking to improve his English and he seems to have taken my reply in that spirit. I don't believe it is either patronising or rude to give correction when it has been asked for but I apologise if anyone has taken offence. Chris _ Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
Re: Perl Christmas Quiz 2009 Answers
Leon wrote: Amelia points out that you got her name wrong. She was named by Larry Don't think this gets you off the 1.5 pints you owe me. Chris _ View your other email accounts from your Hotmail inbox. Add them now. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394592/direct/01/
Perl Christmas Quiz 2009 Answers
I thought I should (again) post some sample answers. The challenge of writing a
Xmas quiz is always coming up with short, interesting questions that touch on
interesting and potentially controversial answers. I spent the better part of a
year coming up with the questions I did, and, to be honest, I will only know
next year at the same time whether I am able to come up with any more.
As with last year, I have found that the original answers I had invisaged have
had to be modified in view of people who had better knowledge than I did. I
didn't realise the answer to question 1 was dependent on the version of perl
used. I still don't know how to better word question 7 and am curious to know
if there is a better way of doing it - but I believe my proposed answer is in
keeping with the spirit of doing the calculation in the regular expression
engine.
I find it interesting when people propose psychic insights into my inability to
know the correct answer to questions (I'm thinking question 6 here) - but I
will hold my hand up and plead gotten. I think my answer to question 10 may
cause controversy, but it is based on a careful reading of the sited webpage.
Anyway: enough chit chat:
1) Without running it to check, what does the following program output?
my %a = (3,2,1,0);
for my $b (sort values %a) {
$b += 4;
}
print $a{1} . \n;
Answer: 4
2) If you received a perl mongers award for contributions to the Perl
community, what colour/type of camel would the award be?
Answer: A white (albino) camel.
3) What is Perl XS? What does XS stand for?
Answer: It's an interface through which a Perl program can call a C or C++
subroutine. XS stands for eXternal Subroutine.
4) Based on your answer to the previous question, what do you conclude about
Perl programmers spelling ability?
Answer: It's so 1990's
5) Write a short perl program that has a memory leak. Bonus mark for one line
solutions. Second bonus mark for the shortest program.
Answer:
{my $a;$a=\$a}
I thought the proposed:
valgrind perl -e''
was interesting, but surely this is a bug not a language feature.
6) What is the name of the official Soft Toy Camel of the London Perl Mongers?
Bonus mark if you own one.
Answer: Amelie/Niles - the latter possibly because having him on your desk has
a Seinfeld-esque therapeutic effect. It just keeps staring at me with those
piercing black eyes: does it think I'm going to crack and open up?
7) Write a one line program that takes a non-negative integer as an argument
and prints the square root when the answer's an integer.
Restrictions: the perl line should be a regular expression.
You are allowed to use the following functions/operators x, -, length,
print plus any of the usual regular expression bestiary.
Hint: Consider converting the number to unary.
Answer:
(1 x $ARGV[0]) =~
/
^(1*?)(??{$1 x (length($1) - 1)})$
(?{ print x= . length($1) . \n })
/x;
% time root.pl 1
x=100
real0m0.685s
user0m0.045s
sys 0m0.030s
% time root.pl 10001
real670m14.985s
user659m58.285s
sys 1m34.659s
The first question mark is critical to an efficient solution as it is
effectively looking for a solution by counting up from 0 rather than down from
the given number.
8) According to amazon.co.uk, what is the best selling Perl book so far in 2009?
Answer:
Learning Perl by Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, brian foy. See:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/269855/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_b_2_5_last
This is actually a bad question as Amazon's best seller list algorithm is not
year to date sales. Here are some discussions:
http://comiksdebris.blogspot.com/2009/08/amazon-best-seller-list-black-box-with.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/23/algorithms-internet-google-amazon-itunes
9) What is the youtube.com link for the perl v other languages videos
discussed on this list, and also the bubble sort video?
Answer: Urgle: we should make this happen.
10) What is the highest value of X that is a currently available, stable
production release of perl 5.X?
Answer: 8 see http://www.perl.com/download.csp
11) Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and
answer it.
Answer:
while (1) {
print Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and
answer it.\n;
}
print It didn't say it hard to be original\n;
Randal now owes me 2 pints of beer as he has featured in both my Xmas quizzes.
Leon owes me 1.5 pints for similar reasons.
Apologies for any inappropriate thread reply management. Hotmail is now so
advanced, it doesn't even allow me to look at the full email header.
Chris
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Perl Christmas Quiz 2009
Seeing as last year's quiz was mildly popular, I thought I'd do another one.
I've changed the mix of questions based on what people submitted answers to
last year - it also arguably a little more educational this time around.
Any feedback about the quiz, either private or public is welcome. Apologies if
any of it doesn't come out well formatted - it all looked fine before I hit
send.
1) Without running it to check, what does the following program output?
my %a = (3,2,1,0);
for my $b (sort values %a) {
$b += 4;
}
print $a{1} . \n;
2) If you received a perl mongers award for contributions to the Perl
community, what colour/type of camel would the award be?
3) What is Perl XS? What does XS stand for?
4) Based on your answer to the previous question, what do you conclude about
Perl programmers spelling ability?
5) Write a short perl program that has a memory leak. Bonus mark for one line
solutions. Second bonus mark for the shortest program.
6) What is the name of the official Soft Toy Camel of the London Perl Mongers?
Bonus mark if you own one.
7) Write a one line program that takes a non-negative integer as an argument
and prints the square root when the answer's an integer.
Restrictions: the perl line should be a regular expression.
You are allowed to use the following functions/operators x, -, length,
print plus any of the usual regular expression bestiary.
Hint: Consider converting the number to unary.
8) According to amazon.co.uk, what is the best selling Perl book so far in 2009?
9) What is the youtube.com link for the perl v other languages videos
discussed on this list, and also the bubble sort video?
10) What is the highest value of X that is a currently available, stable
production release of perl 5.X?
11) Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and
answer it.
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Re: Perl Christmas Quiz 2009
Abigail abig...@abigail.be wrote On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 06:24:12PM +, Chris Jack wrote: 7) Write a one line program that takes a non-negative integer as an argument and prints the square root when the answer's an integer. Restrictions: the perl line should be a regular expression. Just a regular expression? Regular expressions don't print, so that would be impossible. Pedant. Perl regular expressions allow execution of arbitrary code blocks - which is why I put restrictions on which ordinary functions you were allowed to use. The actual square root algorithm, however, should only use the normal regular expression bestiary. I was going to point you towards my talk on Perl one-liners - which shows the basic idea behind prime number checking and solving linear equations - but I can't find any of the talks on the London Perl Mongers website... The principal behind doing square root is similar but different. As far as I'm aware, no-one has published this previously - so you can claim bragging rights if you do it before I give my solution. _ Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394592/direct/01/
RE: Help me become a Londoner!
Gianni Ceccarelli dak...@thenautilus.net wrote: - can anyone recommend some agencies (or other methods) to search for the apartment? - which areas should I be looking around, for a largish (60m?) apartment for under ?800/month, within a half-hour commute (by train?) to the centre? This is really dependent on where your job is precisely. If you're working in Docklands the answer is probably different to the square mile. The first step should be identifying your nearest train station and finding somewhere that has as few train changes as possible to get there that meet your criteria. - is there a no-interest, no-fees, everything-on-the-web bank that can be trusted (at least a bit :) ) with my money? There is no such thing as a no-fees bank as far as I'm aware and again, it depends what you're after. Do you need cheques, hole in the wall, real branches for those odd occasions. Personally I use cahoot.com for my main banking - but I like to complicate my life and use Barclays for cheques and Halifax because they give me £5 a month for shuffling £1000 in one day and out 5 days later. - anything else a foreigner really ought to know? Madame JoJos is a gay cabaret/nightclub in Soho ;-) Chris _ Got more than one Hotmail account? Save time by linking them together http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394591/direct/01/
Re: Help me become a Londoner!
From: Gianni Ceccarelli dak...@thenautilus.net wrote: Also, my 30 minutes commute seems a bit optimistic: I'll probably have to raise my expected commute time? When you're doing your maths on all this: remember to factor in the price of the train fare (plus how much you value your time/mind being in a crowded train). Train fares can be non-trivial around London. I commute from St Albans to London (about 30 minutes on the train) and it costs me around 3200 GBP per annum which works out about 270 GBP a month. Do your own train fare research - I'm just saying don't get stuck on specific expenses without considering the overall expenses picture. Chris _ Have more than one Hotmail account? Link them together to easily access both http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394591/direct/01/
Re: Live Rabid!
On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 10:46 +, Jonathan Stowe wrote: On Thursday 19th November I will be playing (as Rabid Gravy) the usual noise with beats in it at: ... Didn't realise we could post gig info here. I'm performing Beethoven's Pathetique Piano Sonata on Dec 3 at 7pm near monument in London. It's free - but you have to email me ASAP (yesterday really) to get you on the invite list. Drinks will be available but need to be paid for :-( and there will be other people performing. Chris (chris_j...@msn.com) _ Got more than one Hotmail account? Save time by linking them together http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394591/direct/01/
Re: Books to get rid of
Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Don't worry, I have enough books and CDs to keep charity shops in business for years! Perl Cookbook Version 1. I can almost hear the russle of large notes ;-) Chris _ Got more than one Hotmail account? Save time by linking them together http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394591/direct/01/
RE: Production databases on SSDs?
Ovid publiustemp-londo...@yahoo.com wrote: Does anyone here have any experience putting a production database on a solid-state drive? Our database is heavily used and it sounds to me like we could get a massive performance boost for minimal cost and no architectural changes. Are there any downsides I should be aware of? Be aware that there is a major difference between the reliability and cost of the pen drives you get on the high street and production quality solid state drives. Your minimal cost comment worries me. Chris _ Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394592/direct/01/
Re: Anyone know of a ...
Don't take this as legal advise, so without prejudice, and all that... The one time I have had to sue someone for non-payment, what I recall happening is: 1) I sent the person a few letters/invoices requesting payment, getting no response. 2) I got a solicitor to send a letter requesting payment, getting no response. 3) Solicitor sent a letter threatening to wind the other person's company up if payment wasn't received, getting no response. 4) Solicitor put an advertisement in one of a set of standard newspapers/publications stating they were about to start winding up procedures. 5) The day the advertisement went in, the other person's company's bank accounts were frozen. 6) Later that afternoon, the other person paid me all the money owing plus my solicitor's fee I still feel this urge to laugh when I read point 6 - but read points 1-3 again before concluding I'm a completely heartless b**d. I know you're looking for a cheap option, but getting a solicitor to send a few form letters is unlikely to cost you a bomb. Chris _ Download Messenger onto your mobile for free http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/174426567/direct/01/
Re: keyboards/RSI/switching costs (was Looking for a secondhand Datahand Pro II)
Jacqui wrote: James Laver wrote: On 21 Oct 2009, at 01:24, Paul Makepeace wrote: PS for the real layout nerds, http://colemak.com/ is a better choice than Dvorak if you're going to start from scratch http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/ is worth a mention too. I got myself up to about one-quarter-speed on that last time I tried. OK I'll bite which is best for perl? :-) Or perhaps what would be the ideal tag layout for perl on a standard UK/US keyboard layout? Before you switch keyboards, I think there is an important question about how often you are obliged to use a standard qwerty keyboard. I worked all over Europe for a bit using a large number of the European variations on qwerty (y and z switched for instance and punctuation in unusual places). I found the constant switching meant I was slower on all keyboards - but maybe it was worse because the keyboards were kind of the same. Maybe it's not such a problem if you switch between, say, qwerty and colemak. However... My understanding is that, despite a lot of the top results on google for comparisons between dvorak and qwerty significantly favouring the latter, there is actually very little to choose between the two of them in terms of speed. This is a quote from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DvorakKeyboard Liebowitz and Margolis have expanded their earlier discussion on the supposed 'network effect' of the two types of keyboard in their 1999 book, Winners, Losers Microsoft (ISBN 0-945-99980-1 ). Chapter 2 is titled The Fable of the Keys. In it, they refer to some ergonomic studies (pages 31 to 33) in which the theoretical performance benefit of Dvorak over QWERTY has been calculated. A study by A. Miller and J. C. Thomas concludes that no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing. R.F. Nickells, Jr, found that Dvorak was possibly 6.2 percent faster than QWERTY, while R. Kinkhead found a 2.3% advantage in favour of Dvorak. Ok - even taking the top number without question: 6.2% is obviously better, but, for me, it's not enough to overcome the switching/convenience problem - and also the problem of being able to find a top quality ergonomic keyboard. Can anyone point me towards a Goldtouch style keyboard for dvorak or colemak? It's basically got a ball and socket joint joining two halves of a split keyboard allowing you to control both yaw and roll. It also has the advantage of no numeric keypad - so there's significantly less travel between keyboard and mouse. I haven't had significant RSI since I started using it, and I was in significant pain pre-adoption. I had been seeing an osteopath who pointed out that the natural position for the hand is in shaking hands position - so constantly rotating it flat (as for normal cheap flat keyboards) - and worse, then yawing it to point forward, places a lot of strain on your hands. He also got me to use a shaking hands position mouse. We're kind of switching into public service/health announcement territory here: but if anyone is interested, a good link to buy this sort of stuff is www.ergonomics.co.uk under Products-Accessories. I also use a specialist mouse wrist rest from Fellowes that moves with my wrist. I would be very interested to know if there are any truly independent studies on colemak versus qwerty keyboards - but I would be surprised if the difference came out at more than 10%. Chris _ Stay in touch with your friends through Messenger on your mobile http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/174426567/direct/01/
Re: keyboards/RSI/switching costs
James Laver wrote: On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: It also has the advantage of no numeric keypad - so there's significantly less travel between keyboard and mouse. That's distinctly not an advantage for those of us who type numeric IDs into database driven applications. I have a separate numeric keypad which I could put on the other side of the mouse - but personally I never use it so it sits on the other side of my desk where I sometimes use it to plug USB devices into (cos it's got a couple of USB ports). If you've never had significant pain from RSI, you may not realise how much extra pain travelling over the numeric keypad is. It is a classic bad design. When you travel from the keyboard to the mouse - your hand is in the air and holds extra tension. Numeric keypad = extra travel = extra tension. Extra tension+inflamed tendon = extra pain. Anyway, if you're not suffering from RSI, you may not want to shell out the rather exorbitant sums for such a keyboard - but I suspect it helps ward off getting RSI in the first place - so a mythical future version of yourself with RSI may berate your current self for sticking with a numeric keypad between keyboard and mouse. Chris _ Download Messenger onto your mobile for free http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/174426567/direct/01/
Re: Looking for a secondhand Datahand Pro II
David Dorward da...@dorward.me.uk wrote: ...and then we shall tell Buffy and Willow that they are forbidden from taking their ponies to deliver beer ... I don't remember seeing an email about this. Can I please get myself added to the distribution list. Thanks Chris _ Chat to your friends for free on selected mobiles http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/174426567/direct/01/
Re: Bubble sort dance
Dave Hodgkinson wrote: So there will be a re-enactment? With costumes? And bubbles? Chris _ Access your other email accounts and manage all your email from one place. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/167688463/direct/01/
Re: More camels
James Laver wrote: What about making camel pies? I've eaten camel in Holland. It was quite leathery. I wouldn't recommend it. Chris _ Celebrate a decade of Messenger with free winks, emoticons, display pics, and more. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/157562755/direct/01/
Re: Straight Jackets and Video Cameras
Ovid publiustemp-londo...@yahoo.com wrote: On the off chance that anyone here is interested, I thought it would be fun to produce a small parody of the I'm a PC/I'm a Mac ads. Basically, it would be a series of video shorts along the lines of I'm Java/I'm Perl, I'm Ruby/I'm Perl, etc. All in good fun, of course :) I don't think my Web cam provides *quite* the video quality I'm looking for :) I can do the the script writing (example: http://vimeo.com/1424008) and the video editing (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3-ZUagzrjw), but if others want to chip in, that would be awesome. Would anyone be interested in working with me on this project, or perhaps make it a Sponsored by London.pm thing? I already have ideas for small sample scripts for a number of languages (one has a Java programmer in a straight jacket bragging about how he's never poked himself in the eye). Volunteer actors would be welcome, too. Interestingly, I am planning to go to the Metropolitan Film Schools Weekend intensive/intro weekend in September (www.metfilmschool.co.uk) as part of preparation for a longer term project I am working on so would be quite interested in getting some practice in. Apparently Red Cameras are all the buzz in the film schools at the moment, however I'm not about to cough out any money at this stage... Chris PS I'm doing a one mile swim at Weymouth on August 9 on behalf of the British Heart Foundation. If anyone fancies sponsoring me, please go to http://original.justgiving.com/chrisjack _ Windows Live Messenger: Happy 10-Year Anniversary—get free winks and emoticons. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/157562755/direct/01/
Re: London.pm Beer Festival, Edgar Wallace, TOMORROW,Thursday 2009-07-16
Just so you know: I just got 4 emails about this (the earliest dated Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:07:38 +0100) in a London PM digest. Obviously not much use as it's now Friday - not that I was going to go anyway. And, yes, I know I could switch to receiving non-digested London PM postings. Just wondering if there was a magic configuration that could be applied to the list's software to do something about this. Chris _ Get the best of MSN on your mobile http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/147991039/direct/01/
Re: Techmeet slides - legacy slides/Ivor Williams
James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 Apr 2009, at 15:04, Chris Jack wrote: I too noticed some of the links were broken to London Perl Monger talks - in particular some of the talks Ivor Williams gave. Some of these seem to have moved to http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ivorw/slides and also http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ivorw/slides/geogmod.ppt which is missing a link from the top page. The top page is itself missing. My bad: try http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ivorw/ Chris _ View your Twitter and Flickr updates from one place – Learn more! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/137984870/direct/01/
RE: Techmeet slides - legacy slides/Ivor Williams
James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: As L?on has just posted to the list, slides from the last techmeet are now available in PDF format from the london.pm website. It would be really nice if we could dig up as many past slides as possible and host them on london.pm.org. A lot of links to slides on other sites are now dead, which is tragic. I too noticed some of the links were broken to London Perl Monger talks - in particular some of the talks Ivor Williams gave. Some of these seem to have moved to http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ivorw/slides and also http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ivorw/slides/geogmod.ppt which is missing a link from the top page. As Ivor is recently deceased, I imagine they may not stay there indefinitely and it might be a nice small tribute to Ivor if we copied them to the London Perl Monger site so they don't disappear. I found Ivor's presentations by searching for the file names on google - it may well be possible to track down a lot of other broken link files this way. For those who don't know: a memorial event for Ivor Williams will take place on the 25th April (i.e. next Saturday), beginning at 2pm, at the West London Trades Union Club, Acton High Street (http://www.wltuc.org/) If you are planning to attend this event, please respond to (e-mail ian.gri...@stcatz-oxford.com), in order that catering can be organised in advance. Regards Chris _ View your Twitter and Flickr updates from one place – Learn more! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/137984870/direct/01/
Re: Sad News
Ian maybedin...@gmail.com wrote: I am sorry to inform you that Ivor Williams passed away last weekend. His brother, Richard, has indicated his funeral will be in Manchester, where his mother lives. Richard is planning to organise a celebration of Ivor's life, and is open to suggestions as to the form this should take. Please contact me with any messages for Richard, and I will pass them on to him. This is sad news - and quite unexpected given he was still quite young. Do we know any more details of the circumstances of his death? I knew Ivor at LCH where he evangelised Perl and was very friendly and helpful with answers to questions. I know he had done some NLP training and was visibily happier as a result. I can't make it up to Manchester but I would be quite receptive to going along to a London pub or party for a night in his memory. Chris _ View your Twitter and Flickr updates from one place – Learn more! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/137984870/direct/01/
Re: Recession rates
On 10/3/09 17:07, Dirk Koopman wrote: ?300? Don't be daft. A lot of recruiters wouldn't get out of bed for ~25%, they will be looking for at least %50 (and in the bad old days 100%). I would not be surprised if the saps are being offered ?200 in these difficult times This was no doubt true 10 years ago but, at least in the city, if you want to get on the preferred supplier list to a lot of companies, you have to agree a set rate. This was in direct response to people who found out their agent was taking 100% and up and left on the day they found out. The truth is, once you've been had once in this way, you ask what your agent is taking and refuse contracts where the rake is excessive. This in itself acts as a brake on agencies taking the Michael. I think 17.5% is fairly usual in the city nowadays - but I'm not currently working through an agency so don't quote me. I think the truth about agencies is also that they are tending to amalgamate and there are fewer mom and pop style places around - which in turn means they tend to be run more professionally and with a greater sense of integrity as they suddenly have a brand name to preserve. Chris _ 25GB of FREE Online Storage – Find out more http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/134665320/direct/01/
Re: Optimisation
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Nigel Peck nigel.p...@miswebdesign.com
wrote:
When the list could be empty, which is faster?
if ( @list ) { foreach ( @list ) { } }
- or just -
foreach ( @list ) { }
Or is it a pointless question?
The chances that the formatting up in the following stuffs up from hotmail's
html being converted to text are high. If I run the following:
my @list;
my $k;
my $i = 0;
while ($i 1000) {
if (@list) {
for $k (@list) {
print $k;
}
}
$i++;
}
it takes 8.315 seconds. If I remove the if (@list) and rerun it, it takes
11.781 seconds. If I rerun the same two tests but with one element in the list
the timings go to 25.337 seconds and 21.704 seconds respectively - so you would
only expect an improvement if over 50% of your cases had an empty list.
But I agree with most of the other comments. I had to put the loop up to 10
million to get meaningful timings and life is to short to save 3 seconds on 10
million interations - and it's much clearer and readable without the if.
Chris
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RE: [OT] Perl woes
dominic.thor...@googlemail.com wrote: $ perl -le 'print yes if a == 2' $ perl -le 'print yes if a == a' yes $ perl -le 'print yes if 1 == 1' yes $ perl -le 'print yes if 1 == 0' $ perl -le 'print yes if 1 == 1' yes $ Can you give an example where perl is doing something surprising to youI have always considered: % perl -le 'print yes if 0' % perl -le 'print yes if ' yes to be, if not surprising (because it's well documented), undesirable to the point of deprecating the use of if clauses without operators altogether. If you mean if ($a == 0) - you should say so. If you mean if ($a eq '') or if ($a =~ /^\s*$/) - you should say that instead. It is perl being inappropriately helpful and creating potentially subtle and occasional bugs. Bit like one of C's conventions of allowing 0 to mean success so you constantly put ! before functions to test for success. Of course C also has the advantage of also having a convention of allowing a negative number to mean success to avoid that horrible thing called consistency ;-) Chris _ Check out the new and improved services from Windows Live. Learn more! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/132630768/direct/01/
Re: My New Job (Was: Social Thurs 8 Jan 2009)
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 9:30 AM, David Dorward da...@dorward.me.uk wrote: No, its a, um, er, Django shop. You wouldn't be a coffin-dragging gunslinger by any chance? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/ _ Are you a PC? Upload your PC story and show the world http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/122465942/direct/01/
Sample answers to Christmas Quiz
Having written the quiz, and as actual answers seem to have faded to a trickle,
I thought I ought to offer some sample answers of my own. Apologies ahead of
time for any line break issues - but I have tried my hardest to avoid them!
1) Name as many different reasons Larry Wall has given for how Perl came to be
named (including where he has given them) as you can. Make up a brand new
reason of your own.
From Wikipedia:
Perl was originally named Pearl, after the Parable of the Pearl from the
Gospel of Matthew. Larry Wall wanted to give the language a short name with
positive connotations; he claims that he considered (and rejected) every three-
and four-letter word in the dictionary. He also considered naming it after his
wife Gloria. Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before
Perl's official release and changed the spelling of the name.
While the name is occasionally taken as an acronym for Practical Extraction and
Report Language (which appears at the top of the documentation), this expansion
actually came after the name; several others have been suggested as equally
canonical, including Wall's own humorous Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish
Lister. Indeed, Wall claims that the name was intended to inspire many
different expansions.
Perl gained it's name from knitting as it is often used to knit together data
from many sources.
2) Name all the built in file handles in Perl.
STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR, ARGV, ARGVOUT, DATA
3) Write a Perl function that takes two references to arrays and returns the
intersect of them. If an entry appears n times in array 1 and m times in array
2, the output should list that entry min(n,m) times. Bonus mark for one line
solutions.
Lots of good answers, but I'm going to republish Jasper's solution which has
the advantage of working plus looks appropriately unreadable and terse. I asked
the perl proficient guy next to me what it did and he has yet to get back to
me. I thought the use of 1x was interesting and novel, albeit inefficient
especially when there are lots of duplicates, and the use of a comma to avoid a
semicolon obviously fudges the one-line bonus mark but nevertheless...:
sub intersect {grep(!++$_[2]-{$_},@{$_[0]}),grep 1x$_[2]-{$_}--,@{$_[1]}}
In the absence of the one line edict, which of course encourages bad style,
this is a more readable version of basically the same algorithm:
sub list_intersect_duplicates {
my($list1, $list2) = @_;
my %hlist2;
grep {$hlist2{$_}++ } @$list2;
grep {$hlist2{$_}-- 0 } @$list1;
}
4) How many different variable types are there in Perl? Be as sensibly
voluminous in your answer as you are able.
I have been asked this in more interviews that I care to recall and generally
interviewers seem to be looking for 3 (scalar, list, and hash) but code,
filehandle, and format are also high level types.
You could also look at my, our, and local - and mention typeglobs, references
(which in turn can be subcategorised), and read-only constants.
You could then differentiate between file handles and directory handles - and
split scalars into the different ways they can be stored internally: e.g. as
integers, doubles and strings.
There is also the internal special purpose magical object which is used to
implement things like blessed objects and the various sorts of tied objects.
5) What animal is on the front of the Perl Cookbook (bonus mark for knowing
both the first and second edition)?
Bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) on both editions.
6) What company was Larry Wall working for when he wrote Perl 1?
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at NASA. Did someone say rocket science?
7) What does the L in Randal L Schwartz stand for?
Lee.
8) Name a Perl module Leon (Brocard) has written (bonus mark if you've used it).
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/search?query=Brocardmode=author
9) When will Perl 6 be released?
Perl 6 is free so it doesn't need to be released.
10) Who was the most important pioneer of Perl Poetry?
Sharon Hopkins.
11) Write a limeric about Perl. Bonus mark for making it perl parseable.
_;
There was a perl hack from Nantucket,
Who wrote one-line scripts by the bucket,
He tried to write verse,
But twas longer and worse,
Especially since he didn't know any swear words.
_
12) What year was CPAN founded in?
1995
13) Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and answer
it.
Which 1998 movie featured a snippet of code from the Perl FAQ?
Sphere.
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Perl Christmas Quiz
I was feeling bored so decided to write a Perl Christmas quiz. 1) Name as many different reasons as you can that Larry Wall has given for how Perl came to be named (including where he has given them). Make up a brand new reason of your own. 2) Name all the built in file handles in Perl. 3) Write a Perl function that takes two references to arrays and returns the intersect of them. If an entry appears n times in array 1 and m times in array 2, the output should list that entry min(n,m) times. Bonus mark for one line solutions. 4) How many different variable types are there in Perl? Be as sensibly voluminous in your answer as you are able. 5) What animal is on the front of the Perl Cookbook (bonus mark for knowing both the first and second edition)? 6) What company was Larry Wall working for when he wrote Perl 1? 7) What does the L in Randal L Schwartz stand for? 8) Name a Perl module Leon (Brocard) has written (bonus mark if you've used it). 9) When will Perl 6 be released? 10) Who was the most important pioneer of Perl Poetry? 11) Write a limeric about Perl. Bonus mark for making it perl parseable. 12) What year was CPAN founded in? 13) Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and answer it. _ Imagine a life without walls. See the possibilities. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/122465943/direct/01/
Thanks for sponsoring me!
Thanks to everyone on this list who supported me on my trek through the Sahara on behalf of mental health charity Sane: and it's still not too late if you were just waiting for proof that I'd actually do it. Just click on: http://www.justgiving.com/chrisjack and follow the instructions... The grand total will have come to over £3500 when the last minute sponsorship comes in! For anyone who wants to see them, I have uploaded small copies of all the photos I took to: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/chrisjej/SaharaTrek and http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/chrisjej/SaharaTrek2 (there were too many to fit in 1 album). I will be pruning them down when I have some time... Thanks again Chris _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/
RE: Learning Regression Function / Neural Networks
Alistair MacLeod wrote: 1. Is a perceptron the best approach? Is your data linearly separable? If not, the algorithm is not guaranteed to converge. _ Catch up on all the latest celebrity gossip http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/
Re: Perl's lack of 'in' keyword
Mark Blackman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrOte List::Util::first or List::MoreUtils::any for older perls, perhaps. or even grep(/^$job$/, @list) _ Discover Bird's Eye View now with Multimap from Live Search http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354026/direct/01/
Re: Pie
Dirk Koopman wrote: Chris Jack wrote: Jacqui Caren wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/7622561.stm A nice thought - and a mere 223 miles from EC1 Chris I am doing a 9 day trek through the Sahara on behalf of the mental health charity Sane.For more details and to support me, go to: www.justgiving.com/chrisjack And your reason for not going via Lancashire might be??? A true London PMer would laugh at the piddling extra 223 miles for pie, especially as it mean travelling via that wonderful airport known as Manchester. You might even get more sponsorship... You're so quick to read sarcasm into my emails. I was working this out - I'm doing around 100 miles walking in 7 days in Morocco (plus 2 days touristing) so, at that pace, it would take me 16 days to walk from EC1 to get my pies but I suspect they would be cold by the time I brought them back to the next London PM meeting. I did actually send Holland's an email asking for further details - but they haven't replied (yet). I also found this: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/business/s/1066934_hollands_seek s_pie_tasting_panel which unfortunately says The new MD is looking to select two people from the Manchester area to join a 12-person panel from across the Lancashire region to help ensure products are of the highest quality which would make it a choice between moving to Manchester or leaving London PMers. I'll have to think about that for a bit... Chris
RE: Pie (Jacqui Caren)
Jacqui Caren wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/7622561.stm A nice thought - and a mere 223 miles from EC1 Chris I am doing a 9 day trek through the Sahara on behalf of the mental health charity Sane.For more details and to support me, go to: www.justgiving.com/chrisjack _ Make a mini you and download it into Windows Live Messenger http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354029/direct/01/
Re: [job advert] looking for a perl person to write a web control panel
Greg McCarroll wrote: I personally reckon he'll get a taker, and I'm not sure either of them will be fully satisfied, but thats ok. And of course you can always suggest to Martin you'll do it for more as a counter offer. What's maybe more interesting is the value/cost people put on fixed term work vs. contracting and of course the value people put on a really good job (and what that means) and a shoddy job And also the question of the degree to which technical acumen correlates with business acumen - and the client's ability to assess both. First contract I ever took - the agency got 30% of what I got - because I didn't know enough to know to ask or what was reasonable. And I got off relatively lightly. I met another contractor who's agent took 100%. He quit the day he found out and they were pretty much whatever in their attitude. I have a rule about never taking fixed price contracts on unless the spec is pretty much nailed. Rumour is Ross Perot made his billions on change requests... Chris _ Make a mini you and download it into Windows Live Messenger http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354029/direct/01/
