Fw: [dancer-users] Sad news regarding James Aitken (LoonyPandora), Dancer contributor and pluign author
Hi all, (Posted this to dancer-users first; it was suggested that it be posted to london-pm too as several mongers had met/knew James.) Sadly, my friend and colleague James Aitken (LoonyPandora/JAITKEN), who contributed to Dancer and wrote several Dancer plugins, died unexpectedly last week. He was hit by a car back in June and suffered head injuries, but had mostly recovered - but then took a sudden turn for the worse, and passed away last week. Details as to exactly what happened are still sketchy at this point. Due to how unexpected it all was and the fact he has no immediate family / next of kin, he will receive a very very basic state-funded pauper's funeral unless enough money is raised to cover the cost of a proper funeral - so his ex-girlfriend set up a fundraising page to accept donations towards the cost: http://gogetfunding.com/project/james-aitken-s-funeral If you used his code and found it useful, and have a couple of quid to spare, any donations would be very much appreciated. If you cannot, but he or his code made a difference to you, you can still leave a comment there if you'd like. Dave P -- David Precious (bigpresh) dav...@preshweb.co.uk http://www.preshweb.co.uk/ www.preshweb.co.uk/twitter www.preshweb.co.uk/linkedinwww.preshweb.co.uk/facebook www.preshweb.co.uk/cpanwww.preshweb.co.uk/github
Re: Once a week, every week
On Sun, 1 Jan 2012 10:10:35 + Mark Fowler m...@twoshortplanks.com wrote: Morning Perl peeps, how's the hangovers? So as I blogged and tweeted I've got a new new year's resolution: to release a distribution to the CPAN once a week, every week. http://blog.twoshortplanks.com/2011/12/31/once-a-week-every-week/ Now, I'm of the understanding that London Perl Mongers are the kind of people that can't resist a challenge. So I ask...are you with me? Whilst I agree that pushing oneself to release more stuff to CPAN is a Good Thing, I think committing to release a distribution a week is likely to encourage gaming by just releasing tiny changes to existing distributions to meet the criteria, without actually adding any real value. On the other hand, though, it might encourage one to make release a small change that you'd been considering doing at some point but had never got round to, and any release indicates to potential users that the distribution in question is still maintained, not abandoned, so it might not be a bad thing :) -- David Precious (bigpresh) dav...@preshweb.co.uk http://www.preshweb.co.uk/ www.preshweb.co.uk/twitter www.preshweb.co.uk/linkedinwww.preshweb.co.uk/facebook www.preshweb.co.uk/cpanwww.preshweb.co.uk/github
Re: Telecommuting
On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:13:02 + David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 11:06:14PM +, ian docherty wrote: The small 'ping' of an IRC is less disruptive than a tap on the shoulder and you can complete your current work before giving it, and your co-developer, your full attention. Doesn't work so well when the IRC window is buried under twenty other windows because you're actually *working*. At my last job (woo-hoo! I can say that about the BBC now that I am unemployed - by the way, I don't yet have any trousers on and had marmalade flavoured vodka and ice cream for breakfast. Once I've put some trousers on I'm going to go shopping for Lego) messages on IRC would go unnoticed for hours or even days. Likewise emails, because people would disappear into their work. At $work, we use IRC a lot; I have irssi open in a small terminal window at the top right of my screen, always visible (I use Terminator to manage my terminals). Thus, it's always visible, and I glance at it occasionally; mentions of my nick will cause it to briefly flash then show the channel name highlighted, so I know someone wants my attention; I can then actually look at it when I'm at a point where I can spare a moment without ruining my conversation, and I find it easy to devote a little concentration to an IRC conversation whilst still getting work done. On the other hand, when I'm in the office, if someone comes over to my desk, they're essentially demanding more or less 100% attention there and then, and many people feel you're being rude if you don't give them that attention quickly, thereby disrupting your mental focus. For that reason, most of the time even when we're in the office and sitting close to each other, we'll often discuss stuff on IRC, unless it turns into a discussion that's better carried out as a meeting rather than a quick chat. We also have some degree of social chatter on IRC, which I find helps us all feel part of a tight team, even when we spend the majority of time working from home. It's hardly the end of the world to tell someone I'll be with you in a few minutes. As mentioned, though, a lot of people (especially non-technical types) don't fully understand the effects of breaking off concentration when you're deep in code, and feel a little offended or awkward being brushed off if only for a few minutes. In fact, often it goes: Me: [code code code code code] Supplicant: Hey, Dave Me: gimme a moment Supplicant: I'll put it on IRC Me: [code code code code code cup of tea IRC] You're basically replacing a convenient, non-obtrusive notification that someone wants a moment of your attention on IRC when you're free to give it with a real-life nudge instead; I find the former much less disruptive, and as a bonus it works equally well when I'm sitting at home instead of the office. which instead of trying to solve a problem with Magic Technology is a blend of technology and primitive caveman grunting, which IME works better than either of 'em on their own. It's not about a magic bullet, but using whatever technology works well for you. Also, caveman grunting has limited range :) -- David Precious (bigpresh) dav...@preshweb.co.uk http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
Re: Impending arrival
On Tuesday 04 October 2011 10:38:43 Paul Makepeace wrote: My 3-supplied UK HTC Desire isn't picking up 3G in the US so I'm stuck with Edge (as, say GPRS would be). Not horrible, but still. By comparison my US Nexus One picks up 3G on both sides of the Atlantic. I don't know if it'll be the cause, but you can switch between what type of networks it should connect to. If I switch mine to GSM/WCDMA auto then I get 3G (HSPDA) in supported areas, but often with a slightly weaker signal; if I set it to GSM-only, it gets a stronger signal, but with slower data. You can find it under Settings - Wireless networks - Mobile networks - Network mode. More fun, though, is to dial *#*#4636#*#* to get into the testing widget, where you can get all sorts of info and set preferred network type, etc.
Re: Expected Config File Locations
On Tuesday 30 August 2011 13:55:48 Smylers wrote: Hi. I'm looking for some advice on where I should put the config file for a command I'm distributing on Cpan. Where would you it to be? I'm interested in opinions of Windows, Mac, and Unix users, for both per-user and system-wide config. snip Config::Find looks like it is designed for exactly what you're looking for - have you seen that? I was also going to recommend Config::Auto (which even parses the config, supporting various formats), but it seems to be Unix-centric, and likely not useful on Windows. It wasn't entirely clear to me whether you're looking for suggestions on how to *find* the config file in a sensible location, or how to install a default config file into a suitable location as the module is installed, though - have I got the wrong end of the stick here? -- David Precious (bigpresh) http://www.preshweb.co.uk/ Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: perlisalive.com?
Hi Denny, On Tuesday 09 August 2011 13:02:15 Denny wrote: Extra hands to help with comment moderation (rarely needed, the spam problem isn't that bad) and writing content (please!) would be greatly appreciated - anybody can contribute articles, via the link on the right. I'll happily assist with the moderation if you need. I'll also consider submitting content whenever I blog about Perl-related stuff too, if that would be welcomed. -- David Precious (bigpresh) http://www.preshweb.co.uk/ Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Dear Git Users
On Thursday 21 July 2011 22:16:42 David Cantrell wrote: I have a single gigantic repo with all of my perl modules in. It should really be broken up into a seperate repo for each module. I would also like to move them to github. Does anyone have a recipe for this, which won't lose any history? You may assume that I have no branches and everything has always been in 'master'. http://help.github.com/split-a-subpath-into-a-new-repo/ should be of help. -- David Precious (bigpresh) http://www.preshweb.co.uk/ Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
On Monday 30 May 2011 11:40:57 Leo Lapworth wrote:
Hi,
I'm working on http://learn.perl.org/ and I'd like to have a few rotating
example of what can be done with Perl on the home page.
The first two I've thought of are below, does anyone have others?
They don't have to use CPAN modules, one liners are fine as long as it
is simple to see what they do. I'll have a 'more' link which goes on to
show full example with line by line explanations.
Disclaimer: this is one of my modules so I'm obviously biased, but I figure
it's a reasonable example of a common task being made easy - doing a database
query and outputting the result as a HTML table quickly:
use HTML::Table::FromDatabase;
my $sth = $dbh-prepare('select * from widgets');
$sth-execute;
my $table = HTML::Table::FromDatabase-new(
-sth = $sth,
-borders = 0, # all HTML::Table options are valid
);
$table-print;
Another good example would be the newish edit_file() / edit_file_lines() from
File::Slurp, allowing stupidly-easy in-place editing of files, for instance:
edit_file { s/foo/bar/g } 'filename' ;
edit_file_lines { $_ = '' if /foo/ } 'filename' ;
Cheers
Dave P
--
David Precious (bigpresh)
http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support
it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
On Monday 30 May 2011 14:27:25 'lesleyb' wrote:
I am a little fearful people will substitute variables on the
RHS in a CGI script without untainting first and then complain
when the problems show up.
Whilst I agree helping people learn about taint mode and how to untaint is
valuable, I'm not sure it has a place in look how simple this can be / how
easy it is to do cool stuff examples.
Taint mode can be useful, but a user trying out simple examples is unlikely to
have enabled taint mode unless they know about it.
[...] Even an example of how to untaint a
'basic' RFC822 email address?
[...]
if ($data =~ /^([-\@\w.]+)$/) {
$data = $1; # $data now untainted
} else {
die Bad data in '$data'; # log this somewhere
}
I'd really not want to see people being encouraged to attempt to validate
email addresses with a regex; that's a wheel that should not be re-invented;
using e.g. Email::Valid to both untaint and check for validity properly would
be a far better approach IMO.
In fact, a how to validate an email address properly example would probably
be worthwhile, for instance:
use Email::Valid;
if (! Email::Valid-address($email_address) ) {
print Sorry, that email address is not valid!;
}
Cheers
Dave P
--
David Precious (bigpresh)
http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support
it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
On Monday 30 May 2011 16:27:30 Denny wrote:
On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 15:36 +0100, David Precious wrote:
if (! Email::Valid-address($email_address) ) {
Something wrong with 'unless'?
Depends whether you follow Damian Conway's PBP strictly :)
At $work, we mostly do follow PBP, but with some exceptions - avoiding unless
is one of the bits we ignore when it makes code clearer.
In this case, however, we're talking bits of code for people who are just
learning Perl, and unless might be somewhat new to them still; if they're
coming from another language, if is probably going to be more familiar and
easier to mentally parse, I'd imagine.
--
David Precious (bigpresh)
http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support
it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Best practice for unit tests that rely on internet access?
On Friday 29 April 2011 08:33:47 Leon Brocard wrote: If the module is all about testing a live service then by all means test it. Unless it takes too long, or costs money, or might change in the future when you don't have time to update the module... Arguably, if whatever service the module talks to changes in the future in a way which stops the module working, failing test reports helps to highlight that; even if the developer doesn't have time to fix it, it highlights to potential users that the module doesn't work any more. That, to me, is a good reason to offer the ability to test against the real service. On the other hand, you could end up with incorrect failure reports when the service is temporarily unavailable, or cannot be reached due to a restrictive firewall, for instance. Having to force install because the tests fail because the firewall hasn't been updated to allow connections yet isn't too pretty.
Re: Security of HTTP based authentication
On Thu, 2011-01-13 at 14:09 +, Andrew Black wrote: I have often wondered about that - what is the risk in mixing HTTP images and HTTPS text? One reason could be that if the web app didn't include 'secure' in the Set-Cookie header, the session cookie could be sent in the clear for the image requests too, assuming they're requested from the same domain as the rest of the page. Of course, marking the cookie as secure (to be sent only over HTTPS requests) would take care of that, as would requesting images from a different domain as often seen (ebaystatic.com etc). -- David Precious dav...@preshweb.co.uk (bigpresh) http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
Re: Recommendation for simple Web Frameworks
On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 18:42 -0200, Eden Cardim wrote: Matt == Matt Sergeant mserge...@messagelabs.com writes: Matt But the dependencies list *is* much larger for Catalyst. That's hardly the topic at hand. When the OP is looking for simple frameworks, it's a valid thing to take into consideration - something which installs quickly with minimal dependencies might be preferable. I doubt anyone is going to make the decision based solely on that, but it's another criterion. -- David Precious dav...@preshweb.co.uk (bigpresh) http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
Re: Server side chart/graph library?
On Thursday 06 January 2011 13:45:12 Leo Lapworth wrote: Or use Google's Graph API: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ This, via URI::GoogleChart, can make things dead simple, e.g.: use URI::GoogleChart; my $chart_uri = URI::GoogleChart-new(lines, 300, 100, data = [45, 80, 55, 68], ); print qq[img src=$chart_uri ... /]; Flot (http://code.google.com/p/flot/) is a quite nice Javascript solution, if you're happy to shove data to the client and let it handle rendering the graph. For graphs actually generated on the server as an image and sent to the client, I've used GD::Graph in the past, and it's done the trick. Cheers Dave P -- David Precious dav...@preshweb.co.uk http://blog.preshweb.co.uk/www.preshweb.co.uk/twitter www.preshweb.co.uk/linkedinwww.preshweb.co.uk/facebook www.preshweb.co.uk/identicawww.lyricsbadger.co.uk Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Recommendation for simple Web Frameworks
On Thursday 06 January 2011 19:04:13 Simon Wistow wrote: I want to build a web site. In Perl. It needs to be dynamic but it's unlikely to need a database - it will however be pulling data from another data store and putting stuff into job queues. In short - I don't really need the CRUD stuff from a framework, I really just need the url based dispatch. I played around with Catalyst (which I'm familiar with from 6A) but it felt like it was a bit of a sledgehammer and that it was (not unreasonably) tied to an ORM. I was going to step in with a somewhat biased recommendation of Dancer, but I'm happy to see that it's already been recommended :) Actually, since I'm being lazy - is there a good guide or an example for doing OAuth under Plack / Dancer / Plack+Dancer? Not that I'm aware of, but there should really! I think there needs to be a Dancer::Plugin::Auth::OAuth - I'll try to get round to writing one as soon as I have a chance, but there's a fair chance someone else might well do it in the meantime. By the way, you'll find the Dancer dev team (and some users, too :) ) on IRC in #dancer on irc.perl.org if you want to ask questions quickly. Cheers Dave P (bigpresh) -- David Precious dav...@preshweb.co.uk http://blog.preshweb.co.uk/www.preshweb.co.uk/twitter www.preshweb.co.uk/linkedinwww.preshweb.co.uk/facebook www.preshweb.co.uk/identicawww.lyricsbadger.co.uk Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)
Re: Solid state drives
On Tuesday 20 April 2010 10:36:54 Simon Wilcox wrote: On 20/4/10 10:07, James Laver wrote: On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:08:10AM +0100, Richard Huxton wrote: Having said that, there are clearly plenty of applications where power-failure isn't an overriding worry. Or 'on any machine connected to a UPS that's correctly configured to shut the machine down properly'? Or 'on any machine in a datacenter with generators for backup power'. These are not the same. Ironically, in a datacentre with generators for backup power, you are MORE likely to experience sudden power loss than on a machine with a properly configured UPS. The infrastructure of a commercial datacentre (e.g. Telehouse/HEX etc) rarely has the means to send shutdown commands to servers if any problems are experienced with the power feeds, meaning the UPSs will inevitably run out of power whilst the engineers run around in circles and you are unlikely to find out about it in time to do an orderly manual shutdown. Or if a PSU goes bang and manages to trip out the supply to a rack... (Yeah, ideally you'd be running a dual-PSU box with each PSU connected to a different supply, so you should never lose both, of course.)
Re: TT and UTF8?
Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On 29 Jan 2010, at 14:48, Ash Berlin wrote: 2) stick a BOM in the .tt file BOM? Byte-Order Mark - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
Re: SHA question
Andy Wardley wrote: On 14/01/2010 17:41, Philip Newton wrote: Yes - you're missing the fact that in order to compute the differences (which it has to if it doesn't want to transfer the whole file), it has to read the entire file over the slow NFS link into your computer's memory in order to compare it with the local file in order to tell which pieces have changed. No, I don't think it does. My understanding[*] is that it computes a checksum for each block of a file and only transmits blocks that have different checksums. Of course, but to compute a checksum for each block of the file, that block first needs to be read, over the NFS connection, which is the whole issue. Normally, rsync would be speaking to rsync running on the remote box, but the situation David described was one rsync process on box A, accessing files on box B via an NFS mount (as opposed to speaking to an rsync daemon on box B). I'm not entirely sure, but I think that rsync will first compare the timestamps of the the two files, and if the timestamps match (to within the window specified with --modify-window, defaulting to an exact match), and the sizes match, it will consider the file to be the same, and skip generating checksums (so the file's data won't be read over NFS).
Re: Bug tracking SaaS
jesse wrote: On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 12:38:33PM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: PS https://rt.cpan.org not having a CA-issued cert is a bit odd given how cheap they are these days. Does Best Practical really need a helping hand there? Only if you can knock heads at .org. The issue isn't one of cash. It's one of the admin and tech contacts for cpan.org point to a dead address, so we _can't_ get a reasonable SSL certificate as they can't verify us. (Also, rt.cpan.org is, yes, on what's now a very old version of RT. That's something that a minion is actively working on). FWIW, Comodo will provide basic SSL certficates as long as an email to one of a list of addresses they deem to be acceptable is received a link within clicked on. That list includes the admin/tech contacts for the domain, but also sslad...@$hostname, ad...@$hostname etc (for rt.cpan.org, that'd be at either rt.cpan.org or cpan.org). Presumably, getting such an address to go to someone who can click a link wouldn't be hard. At $work we deal with Comodo to offer free SSL certs to our customers; if anyone is interested in getting a CA-issued cert set up, feel free to drop me a mail. Cheers Dave P
Re: Payment Providers
On Friday 02 October 2009 11:13:35 Ovid wrote: OK, I give. That's two references to how insecure 3D secure is. Given that I know nothing about it other than the annoying fact that I've forgotten my password for it, could someone explain why its broken? Well, there's the fact that, for years, we've been trying to educate Internet users not to enter details into untrusted websites, and now all of a sudden they're expected to trust some random page that appears in a popup/iframe from some domain entirely unrelated to the one they're in the middle of trying to give their card details to? Like, for instance, securesuite.co.uk - would you trust that random domain? (Incidentally, that's the domain that RSA forgot to renew at one point...!) See, for instance, http://ambrand.com/2006/09/06/is-securesuitecouk-a-phishing-scam It's a poor attempt towards three-factor authentication, but relying upon entering a password - which will be picked up by the same keylogging/sniffing techniques they'd use to grab the rest of your details if you're entering them on a compromised machine. However, now, the bank has shifted liability to the customer, claiming that since the transaction was authorised with their secret password, they have no right to repudiate the transaction. Cheers Dave P
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Denny wrote: I have in the past had Virgin Media's '20Mb' cable service at this address - it never managed 2Mb in the evenings, and often dropped below 1Mb. Apparently their contention ratios are rather high. Avoid. It must depend upon location and how many heavy users are nearby, as I have their 20Mbps service, and consistently get good download speeds, even during the evening. For instance, using www.speedtest.net right now (7pm), I got 16.86Mbps down and 2.45Mbps up. That's slightly lower than previous tests (I normally see 18-19 at least), but then I have to bear in mind that all traffic is going over a VPN connection to my server in London and coming out there, in order to have a static IP, and a connection that Virgin/Phorm etc cannot snoop upon, and to avoid their transparent caches (I believe they still use them). I've only had to contact their tech support once in a couple of years - the support agent I spoke to seemed clueful enough, understood that I knew the problem was theirs and not mine (modem kept losing sync), and agreed to send an engineer out the next day to sort it. The problem magically went away the next day (without an engineer visiting my house), so I don't know if it was fixed remotely or an engineer did something at a local cabinet, all I know is it was sorted out. Cheers Dave P
