For all fans of zombie web application frameworks.
Posting here because it seems the most likely place I can pick up
afficionados of zombie technology :) And to Sydney.pm because it's home.
Might be able to make it to the next meeting to do a talk about it.
I have inherited a codebase that's about 200k lines. It started life as a
set of CGI scripts about 10 years ago, and made afrankenstein transtion to
a mod_perl application about 5 years ago. My goal is to turn it into PSGI
and progressively refactor
it so that the (otherwise ok to good model code) will run under Catalyst.
For bonus points it contains swathes of dead code but nobody quite knows
where the dead code is. The dead code is often deeply nested in if else
blocks. I've done some work with PPI to interrogate it thoroughly, but in
the end I needed to find a way of pulling off a near equivalent of
PSGI-finalize. Here is where I am asking for sage advice.
First up I figured I'd try Class::Method::Modifiers in a subclass of
Apache2::Request:
package Apache2::ShimRequest;
use parent 'Apache2::Request'; use
Class::Method::Modifiers;
before print = sub {
my ($r, @stuff) = @_;
...; # log the crap out of $r and stuff, and make a stacktrace.
}
which failed miserably.
So then I tried to do it in the documented fashion:
package Apache2::ShimRequest; use Apache2::Request; our @ISA =
qw(Apache2::Request);
sub do_print { my ($self, @output) = @_;
...; #same }
followed by a find . -name '*pm' | xargs perl -p -i -e
's/\$r-print/\$r-do_print/g'
Which works, but is itself miserable. Bonus points, $tt-_output seems to
obtain an Apache2::RequestRes, not an Apache2::Req so needs a monkey patch.
Can anyone suggest a better way™?
Re: For all fans of zombie web application frameworks.
Cheers Mark, Yeah I've proof of concepted the Plack::App::FakeApache stuff which works well for the bits of the program that are not too badly frankensteined. But now I have to go back and saw off and replace the bits that won't work under P::A::FA (hence the static/stack trace analysis tool I wrote) - identify the bad bits so that they will run under P::A::FA. On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 1:21 AM, Mark Fowler m...@twoshortplanks.com wrote: Hi Kieren, (removed sydney-pm to avoid cross posting problems) First up there's a couple of solutions on the CPAN that you might want to take a look at to see if they're helpful: https://metacpan.org/pod/Plack::App::FakeApache (which I've used) https://metacpan.org/pod/APR::Emulate::PSGI (which I haven't) If neither of these are wonderful solutions then the other option that I might consider instead of subclassing Apache2::Request is that you mock the entire thing yourself (i.e. write a class from scratch that has the same interface.) If necessary you could even call this Apache2::Request and make sure it's loaded instead of the real Apache2::Request (either by calling it Apache2/Request.pm and putting it somewhere in @INC before the real one, or by putting the code at the bottom of another module you ensure you load before Apache2::Request is loaded. HTH. Mark.
Re: Schwartzian transform
And the first rule of the Schwartzian transform it to put a comment at the top
of the code paragraph:
# Warning, schwartzian transform ahead. If you need help with maintenance hit
whoever git blame says’ fault it is.
On 13 Aug 2014, at 8:03 pm, Abigail abig...@abigail.be wrote:
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 10:50:39AM +0100, Alex Balhatchet wrote:
Hi Dermot,
You have a few problems with your code:
1. First argument to map is a block
First argument of map is either a block, or an expression.
You should be wrapping your code block to map with curly braces.
eg. map { [ $_, $ref-{$_}{position} ] }
No, not required. His code is fine.
2. No need to use $ref in your second (chronologically by execution,
first by line number) map
The Schwartzian Transform puts the original value into the first
element of the array reference, so to map back you just take $_-[0].
But then you would end up with a list of keys, his code ends up with a
list of records. Those are different things.
3. Some mis-placed commas
When chaining maps and sorts you don't need commas, because there
should be no comma separating your block from the next argument to map
(this is related to my first point.)
This goes back to point one. You don't know map. The commas are actually
required here, as he's using the map EXPRESSION syntax.
His code is actually fine, and runs without any modifications.
Abigail
Re: Finding the intersection between two regexes
On 21/04/2014, at 6:45 PM, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: This may be related to the question I asked recently about turning (up to) a few hundred REGEXes into one giant REGEX. The goal being to test all those disparate REGEXes in the most efficient way possible on a string. Dirk With respect to stuff like this, I'm sure that Regex::Assemble and the modifications in core inspired by it's problem space are well worth significant thought for someone with motivation to do so.
Re: Web scraping frameworks?
I've had luck with Web::Scraper in the past: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Web%3A%3AScraper Add a bit of WWW::Mechanize: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?WWW%3A%3AMechanize%3A%3APlugin%3A%3AWeb%3A%3AScraper and you might be good to go. On 05/03/2014, at 8:33 AM, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: Does something exist? If it doesn't does anyone want to help make it happen? I *really* don't want to have to write the code all over again ten times...
Re: Web scraping frameworks?
Gearman's fine until you need a reliable queue. It's certainly less of a pain to set up than rabbitmq, but if you start with gearman and find you need reliability after a while there's substantial pain to be experienced (unless you already know all about your reliable job queue implementation of choice). On 05/03/2014, at 10:35 AM, Jérôme Étévé wrote: - For queuing jobs, I'm a big fan of Gearman. It's light, very stable and very simple.
Re: smutty british expression?
On 13/02/2014, at 7:00 PM, Sue Spence wrote: I wish I could get fish for 4p now. Six pints of bitter, said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. And quickly please, the world's about to end. The barman of the Horse and Groom didn't deserve this sort of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing. So the barman said, Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it, and started pulling pints. He tried again. Going to watch the match this afternoon then? Ford glanced round at him. No, no point, he said, and looked back out of the window. What's that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir? said the barman. Arsenal without a chance? No, no, said Ford, it's just that the world's about to end. Oh yes sir, so you said, said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did. Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised. No, not really, he said. He frowned. The barman breathed in heavily. There you are sir, six pints, he said. Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on. None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for. A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them. Get off, said Ford, They're ours, giving him a look that would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing. Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, Keep the change. What, from a fiver? Thank you sir.
Re: Recommended IDE...?
I've never found any emacs related package that provides more than incremental improvements over dabbrev-expand (M-x /). Although I did use dconway's recommendations in my .emacs some years ago. I always curse that when working on TT templates (along with davorg's tt-mode) , but not enough to want to fix it. On 20/01/2014, at 10:49 PM, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: I did some research on this for emacs a while back. http://www.davehodgkinson.com/blog/2012/01/using-emacs-as-an-ide/ Having Perl::Critic integrated is nice, and I've done this in some places that care. Perlysense got some votes. ctags/etags is good if you need to zap between files looking for symbols. I bind M-x compile to a key to run the perl script. But as I say in the blog, despite using emacs for 30 years I'm still a philistine. My elisp-fu is long dead. On 17 Jan 2014, at 10:18, Andrew london...@unitedgames.co.uk wrote: Looking to try using an Integrated Development Environment. Is there an industry standard everyone uses and I should get familiar with, or will any do? My previous experience is with NotePad and TextWrangler. I've Windows98SE and OSX 10.5.8 [Leopard] ;-), and use both in tandem via a KVM switch, XD. Thanks in advance, =). Yours, Andrew.
Re: Recommended IDE...?
On 20/01/2014, at 6:38 PM, Ovid wrote: * Run something from the command line Having access to a decent command line also eliminates many use cases for IDEs. So on the rare occasions I do windows work, I tend to avoid using windows until the last possible minute, and I make sure I use CPAN libs that are robust to platform differences (especially Path::Class and whatever end of line library seems appropriate for the use-case). Once your development cycle involves working out how to make the problem testable, writing some code, testing it, lather. rinse repeat, flashy (rather than utilitarian) IDE features become unimportant, in my opinion.
Re: PDF to CSV?
pdftotext++ I've had lots of success with that for a variety of use-cases. I wouldn't bother with a more robust library based solution for personal data mangling problems. On 12/12/2013, at 10:17 PM, Stanislaw Pusep wrote: 1) xpdf's pdftotext CLI utility 2) regexp On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.comwrote: I'm about to hit CPAN, but any wisdom from you lovely people would be nice! I've got bank statements in PDF from Barclays. Would it be easy to produce a CSV of the statement parts from them? What's the go-to PDF module?
Bug?
In a short subroutine, this:
use List::Util qw/shuffle/;
my @list = @{$self-answer_list_orig_order};
@list = shuffle @list if $self-random_order;
return \@list;
does what's expected. Returns the shuffled list.
This:
use List::Util qw/shuffle/;
my @list = @{$self-answer_list_orig_order};
@list = shuffle @list if $self-random_order;
return \@list
returns the list unshuffled.
What's up with that?
Re: Minification and concatenation of CSS and Javascript (with Plack?)
does the exmple in the docs, or t/basic.t in the distribution not point you in the right direction? Is there something missing from the docs that is causing you pain? On 24/11/2013, at 9:57 AM, Pierre M wrote: Hi there, I've tried using Plack::Middleware::Assetshttps://metacpan.org/pod/Plack::Middleware::Assets, without success so far (most probably my bad). I've written to the author to see if they can help. Do people use anything else? --- Pierre Masci I check email a couple times daily; to reach me sooner, you can send me a text message via this page: https://awayfind.com/mascip
Re: Database Design Advice
On 10/11/2013, at 4:24, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: On 8 Nov 2013, at 19:33, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: [...] Because you might need to know which of two events at 2013-11-08Z19:31:04 happened first. Sure you could use microseconds or whatever to get better resolution, but all that does is make the problem less likely, it doesn't make it go away. You also normally want sort order to be consistent. If you have two records where the sort field is the same, the order they come out is going to be unpredictable. That's just a specific example of the general problem where one desires a stable sort by a non-unique column. The simple solution is to just add more columns to the ORDER BY until the tuples *are* unique. The primary key is an obvious choice of tie-breaker if you don't care about the order so long as it's consistent. Also, the time I tried to use a date field for ordering, it wasn't susceptible to this problem for reasons related to the specific use case. It was still a bad idea though, for scope-creep related reasons.
Re: Database Design Advice
On 08/11/2013, at 19:38, Mark Stringer m...@repixl.com wrote: On 11/08/2013 08:17 AM, James Laver wrote: Smylers smyl...@stripey.com wrote: William Blunn writes: Instead of storing a version ID (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), you could store a SERIAL. So for one document ID, you might store versions 10, 11, 12, 50, 75, 87. This was my immediate thought as well, but I'd probably cheat and declarr the document version numbers to be oureky decorative and thus the realm of userspace to turn them into 1,2,3,4,5 etc. -- one can, after all fix this with a single line of code. Performance (and complexity) would be much better than triggers From the OP: But version should start at 1 for each document and be consecutive. I'd guess that the date_created is being stored in the table, so could be used to order the records without the need for a serial, if ordering is the only concern. I've tried to get away with that in the past. I was told that I'm not the messiah, I'm a very naughty boy. It's fine in one respect, but a total pain to fix if the business logic shifts on you at a later stage.
Re: Database Design Advice
I must say I quite like playing with triggers. A well encapsulated trigger shouldn't take too much developer time, and so long as people read the schema definitions, and the trigger is correctly documented/linked to in the right places (which may be tricky to anticipate in advance, where the right places are), then that's what I'd do. Although I'd make a view instead if someone on the team felt strongly about it. On 08/11/2013, at 10:41 PM, James Laver wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Smylers smyl...@stripey.com wrote: James Laver writes: This was my immediate thought as well, but I'd probably cheat and declarr the document version numbers to be oureky decorative ^^ “purely”, I presume? Yes. Phone keyboard, sorry. and thus the realm of userspace to turn them into 1,2,3,4,5 etc. -- one can, after all fix this with a single line of code. True. I'm all for cheating. But reporting will be done by Crystal Reports connecting directly to the database (and there's a distinct possibility that there will end up being more than one code base (in different programming languages) using the database too), so I'd rather any serial-number-to-per-document- version-number conversion was handled in the database, so it's in just one place. That conversion could be abstracted by a view, so the complexity is hidden for somebody just doing a SELECT — but my attempts with the Rank() window function seem like too complex complexity to be worth it. In this case, a view seems like the best solution. But if you're going to materialise it for extra performance, then you're back in the world of triggers (assuming eager materialisation), and back comes the complexity :( James
Re: Could use some hotel/travel help
Yeah, but I already won. Ungetlemanly as my strategy was. -- Sent from my phone, so please excuse spelling mistakes, top posting, brevity etc. On 26/09/2013, at 17:03, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 26 Sep 2013, at 05:29, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: Mornington Crescent. (with apologies) Surely only at the end of his trip?
Perl Doom and Gloom
I've noticed a couple of threads in here recently about how perl's situation is all doom and gloom. Just so you know, I've noticed a handful of new, very non-trivial perl projects to produce important infrastructure of international importance over the last few months.
Re: Could use some hotel/travel help
Mornington Crescent. (with apologies) On 26/09/2013, at 2:14 PM, Randy J. Ray wrote: (TL;DR version: I've lost my A-Z and haven't been to London in ages, so I need help locating a Metro station and hotels.) Greetings all! I will be traveling to England this November to spend time in London and Telford. I am arriving in London (Heathrow) on the 2nd of November, going up to Telford on the 7th, then returning to London for one night on the 10th before I fly back to California on Monday the 11th. For the 7th-10th, I have a hotel reservation in Telford (I'm coming for a hobby convention, so I've reserved at the hotel near the International Centre). However, for the 2nd-7th, and for the night of the 10th, I still need to make some reservations. Problem is, I haven't been out there in about 7 years. I can't even find my old A-Z guide. I have forgotten which station I'll be taking the bus (or rail) from to get from London to Telford, and vice-versa. (Fortunately, the rail and bus station in Telford is right by the International Centre, so I'm not worried about the Telford side of my trip.) Last time I was out, I stayed near the theater district district. I was a pleasant walk to the Metro station, one of the major ones (Victoria, maybe?). But it wasn't the station I used to get to Telford, and *this* time I expect to be carrying a little more luggage (I plan to bring a few models to the show). So I would prefer to get a hotel closer to the Metro station that I'll be leaving from for Telford. I would also like to find a place that will make it (relatively) easy to get to Heathrow Monday morning for my flight out. So, what I could use help with is this: Firstly, can someone identify for me what the Metro station is that I would be leaving from to go to Telford. Then, what postal code(s) should I look for hotels in? I figure I'll use hotels.com or something like that to actually find a place in my budget range. But I don't know where anything is, and without my A-Z I can't even look things up! Lastly, suggestions for a place, or at least the postal codes to look in, to stay on the 10th as well. Cheers in advance for all help! Randy -- Randy J. Ray Sunnyvale, CA http://www.rjray.org rj...@blackperl.com twitter.com/rjray Silicon Valley Scale Modelers: http://www.svsm.org
Re: Robot turtles
Meanwhile, may I remind you that MIT Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) is still going strong, and is suitable for all children from 2 to 222. On 23/09/2013, at 10:43 PM, Mark Keating wrote: On 23/09/2013 13:22, Joel Bernstein wrote: On 23 September 2013 13:39, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals. I'm not aware of any 3-8 year olds in this group, am I missing the point? /joel Really, I can think of quite a few people whose behaviour clearly places them in that age bracket ;) But i agree with Nicholas, i have a 3 year old and I want him to be a rockstar-actor-programmer to look after me in my dotage, which is actually already here, so the younger he starts earning the better. -mdk -- Mark Keating BA (Hons), Writer, Photographer, Cat-Herder. Managing Director: http://www.shadow.cat For more that I do visit: http://www.mdk.me
Re: Robot turtles
purl is usually 3-5% better than what you woud get from the bank (more like 10-15% from the holes in the wall travelex thingies in towns). On 24/09/2013, at 12:15 AM, Nicholas Clark wrote: Currency rates were from purl while I was writing the e-mail
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 20/09/2013, at 11:50 PM, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 09:34:01AM +1000, Kieren Diment wrote: On 20/09/2013, at 9:21, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: If you are so passionate about seeing new niche Perl books written as you are making out, you had better fire up your editor and get cracking. Many publishers prefer msword ;) You can export Word format files from Scrivener :) I've moved most of my writing activities to git+markdown plus some extra extensions of my own for handling citations unobtrusively (to make integration with Zotero easier while maintaining readability for normal humans).
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
think about $20-30 and at least one day out of your life per week for 6 months to work on the book. It's not lucrative, but I found the whole experience fun and rewarding. Except for the day when I wrote around 4000 words and felt quite mentally unstable at the end. The following day I threw at least 3/4s of that work out. On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: think about $6k for having at least one day of your life per week full time for six months. On 19/09/2013, at 10:01 PM, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: On 19 Sep 2013, at 12:21, Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: [...] - it would be more apparent how little money is sometimes available for the effort of writing a book I don't know the exact figures, but it's roughly a four figure sum for a reasonably successful Perl book. And given that one is having to resort to Kickstarter because no publisher will touch it does not bode well. To write such a book involves many months of work. In comparison, somebody skilled enough to write said book could also go contracting and make the same amount of money in a few weeks. It's a fair comparison, since writing books is also effectively contracting. I would very much like such a Kickstarter to be a success, but realistically it is likely to tank.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
$20-30 per hour that should say. Why don't mailing lists have an edit button? On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: think about $20-30 and at least one day out of your life per week for 6 months to work on the book. It's not lucrative, but I found the whole experience fun and rewarding. Except for the day when I wrote around 4000 words and felt quite mentally unstable at the end. The following day I threw at least 3/4s of that work out. On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: think about $6k for having at least one day of your life per week full time for six months. On 19/09/2013, at 10:01 PM, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: On 19 Sep 2013, at 12:21, Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: [...] - it would be more apparent how little money is sometimes available for the effort of writing a book I don't know the exact figures, but it's roughly a four figure sum for a reasonably successful Perl book. And given that one is having to resort to Kickstarter because no publisher will touch it does not bode well. To write such a book involves many months of work. In comparison, somebody skilled enough to write said book could also go contracting and make the same amount of money in a few weeks. It's a fair comparison, since writing books is also effectively contracting. I would very much like such a Kickstarter to be a success, but realistically it is likely to tank.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 20/09/2013, at 9:21, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: If you are so passionate about seeing new niche Perl books written as you are making out, you had better fire up your editor and get cracking. Many publishers prefer msword ;)
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
Writing a book is fun so long as you are backed by a good team (co-authors, editor, tech reviewer, project manager, copy editor and a mate who happens to write dictionaries for a living spotting the copy editor's slip-ups). From a purely financial perspective it doesn't pay well, but so long as the book ends up well regarded (and maybe if it doesn't) it can be good for the career. It's certainly the best thing I've ever done in terms of generating instant credibility for myself. If you're interested in writing a perl book, I would recommend going with chromatic's mob, and doing it as a not-especially-commercial proposition. While I got to feed my family, and a nice musical instrument from the Catalyst book it was: a. the subsequent benefits (I got some opportunities to do small team, high impact stuff with perl which previously seemed closed to me) and b. the ability to point people asking questions at the relevant part of the book/downloadable code that previously would take long IRC sessions. Although the book sold reasonably well - should pay back its advance this year, and continues to sell slowly - the publisher hasn't (yet) approached me for a new edition. Anyone who wants to approach Apress about a 2nd edition, please do. If they're interested, you can have first author slot, so long as you let me keep an eye over your shoulder while you're updating it. Applicatants should send me an outline of a chapter to replace the final chapter on Reaction which is no longer relevant. The outline should be three headings deep, and contain a chunk of prose (e.g. the introductory paragraphs). This is essentially a micro version of the process that publishers normally require for a book proposal. Maybe the chapter should be replaced with something about web programming with Catalyst for async applications, or job queues or similar. All example code should result in a minimal working application. On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:03 AM, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: On 18/09/2013 18:48, Peter Corlett wrote: Dancer and Mojolicious are lightweight, DBIx::Class only slightly less so, and are not separately enough material for a full-sized book. At best, you're talking a 100 page print-on-demand labour of love. I've come across no less than 3 Sinatra books so why should a Dancer book be considered lightweight? Mojolicious and Moose *have* such a book, and although I can't find the ISBN for the Moose book, Mojolicious's is http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/** obidos/ASIN/3848200953/**improtripe-21http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/3848200953/improtripe-21 . I don't think a book published purely in German is that relevant. The hypothetical Modern Perl Cookbook is a layering violation. Perl Cookbook is a collection of short hints and tips on how to do simple tasks. Modern Perl is how to architect a large system. That's two separate topics, and thus two separate books. Which already exist. Perl Cookbook is 10 years old so not relevant to Perl 5.10+, ie. Modern Perl. Hence my layering violation. Python Cookbook has had 2 new editions since the 1st edition appeared in 2002. All I'm saying is that when major pillars of the Perl library fall behind like this it gives the impression that the language is also dated. We don't see it that way from the inside, of course, but I'm addressing how Perl appears to new developers making a choice of language. Then you have books where you've taken some other topic, and just stick with Perl on the end: Agile Development with Perl Moose RESTful APIs with Perl HTML5, Javascript Perl Network Programming with Perl (maybe an update from Lincoln Stein) Scientific Programming with Perl What does the and Perl add to the material? It may as well say and Intercal for all the good it does. The and Perl makes all the difference. If I'm a new developer choosing a language and I see RESTful APIs with Python/PHP/Ruby and nothing from Perl it may influence my choice of language even if there is a chapter tucked away in a Catalyst book somewhere. Whether it's marketing or not, Ruby and Python are taking the initiative, as I see it, by producing plenty of books which combine the language with another technology. You may not like it but it seems to interest developers. Analysing Big Data with Perl This is also just a with Perl title, but merits picking out. Big Data is a nebulous term of art much like Web 2.0 is, and roughly means the fashionable technologies we're using with a big layer of marketing slathered on so people don't realise it's mostly hot air. I'm sure your purist's aversion to mixing Perl with any other technology serves you well but the fact remains that Ruby and Python seem to have benefited from doing a little of what the publishers want. Contrasted with the dearth of Perl publications a newcomer to the scene can be forgiven for surmising that Perl has become less relevant. gvim
Re: Heathrow Pushchair on BA
A pushchair is handled in essentially the same way as a wheelchair in my experience. You'll probably be able to get it to the aircraft door or steps before stowing it. On 08/07/2013, at 4:21 PM, Smylers wrote: Hello there. We've just booked a flight and have a couple of questions about it, which I was wondering if anybody who's flown from Heathrow terminal 5 or travelled with a pushchair on BA before will be able to help with. How long do we need to allow for getting through terminal 5? We don't want to set our alarms unnecessarily early and have to fill time at the airport, but obviously we don't want to miss our flight either. The booking information says that we need to drop bags off by 45 minutes before departure and have entered security at least 35 minutes before departure. Any guidance for translating this into 'time by which we need our Tube to have arrived at the platform' gratefully received. We'll have bags to drop off, and ideally will be avoiding stairs and escalators. Our other question is about flying with buggies, especially with BA. The flight information says our baby can take one fully collapsible pushchair (stroller) in addition to his checked luggage allowance. Does this mean the pushchair gets handed in with the checked luggage, and we have to carry him through security and the gate without? Also, any idea if fully collapsible means something different from collapsible to BA -- does our buggy have to be particularly small when folded in order to be allowed on at all? Thanks for any advice. Smylers -- Stop drug companies hiding negative research results. Sign the AllTrials petition to get all clinical research results published. Read more: http://www.alltrials.net/blog/the-alltrials-campaign/
Re: New pet keeping rules in the Netherlands
I particularly like it when they have babies and there are hundreds of tiny cute huntsman spiders all over the ceiling. For a bonus, they eat cockroaches. On 21/06/2013, at 7:39 AM, Damian Conway dam...@conway.org wrote: According to the NCIS fact sheet I looked up, in 2011 there were deaths caused by camels, cats, cattle, dogs, and sheep. As well as the expected killers - bees, crocodiles, emus, horses, kangaroos, sharks and snakes. No mention of spiders, which I find highly suspicious. There is actually a simple explanation. One of our commonest house spiders is the ominously named Huntsman. (http://largestfastestsmartest.co.uk/largest-spiders-in-australia-huntsman-spider/) They are nocturnal and their venom is non-lethal to humans. An adult Huntsman will usually be 15-20cm/6-8 inches in leg-span, but they can easily grow up to 30cm/1ft. And they definitely prefer to live indoors. I would estimate that I unexpectedly encounter one in my house about every 3-4 weeks. The all-too-common experience of turning on the light in a dark room only to discover a huge spider on the wall right next to your hand never ceases to be an exciting one. Hence, many Huntsman deaths are listed under heart failure. Oh, and they *love* traveling by car, as this excellent video demonstrates (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCO56iyBXtU). Hence, most of the remaining Huntsman fatalities are recorded under traffic accident. ;-) Damian
Re: New pet keeping rules in the Netherlands
I did see a very large wasp dragging a huntsman corpse along around the side of my house a few months ago. On 21/06/2013, at 8:03, James Laver james.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 Jun 2013, at 22:50, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: I particularly like it when they have babies and there are hundreds of tiny cute huntsman spiders all over the ceiling. For a bonus, they eat cockroaches. There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Wait, what eats huntsmans again? James
Re: New pet keeping rules in the Netherlands
Apparently the Easter Quoll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_quoll) is a good replacement for a cat. However the australian regulatory environment makes this very difficult to do. On 20/06/2013, at 5:55 AM, Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com wrote: Wow, and I thought Oakland (California) was permissive allowing us, in a large (~1M pop.) city, to keep cows and horses. You need an acre minimum for a horse, but so long as you can demonstrate adequate manure processing capacity, cows are a go. Where is this fabulous discussion happening? Is there any urban precedent for water buffalo, or camels, in .NL? Paul On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: It appears that my esteemed government has changed the rules about about which pets one might keep at home. Apart from all the usual suspects, it appears one may keep a water buffalo but, crucially, one will *not* be able to keep a camel. Apparently, camels are dirty, disease ridden animals but water buffaloes (by definition) must be clean and (contagious) disease free. Given the respective O'Reilly colophons (MSCE Core Elective Exams in a Nutshell and er.. the Camel Book) what does this all mean? Dirk
Re: Living with smart match breakage
Presumably CPAN testing of a blead perl with smartmatch removed/deprecated could pick that up pretty quickly. I mean I have under-used experimental cpan modules that have some test failures, but if they suddenly started throwing do not compile errors[1], even I would pick them up. [1] Not that I use many of the newer core features, occasionally I have to account for some of my $work code having to work on 5.8. On 14/06/2013, at 6:32 PM, jason wrote: On 2013-06-14 09:11, Smylers wrote: There isn't such a list -- its experimental nature means anything might change. P5P doesn't have consensus, and no decision has been made on what's going to happen. There are some on P5P suggesting that smartmatch is so broken it should be removed entirely. That was the impression I got from the sparse details in the 5.18 announcement and what worried me more than anything else was precisely that uncertainty. That there is no consensus that at least some of smart match and thus, given/when, can be considered non-experimental (and thus safe to use in production) means that a lot of application and library code may have to be rewritten at some point but nobody is really able to definitively determine what the scale of that risk is. Certainly we can continue to declare use experimental and things will continue to work but that is a risky strategy.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? On 14/05/2013, at 8:13 AM, Job van Achterberg wrote: I second this. Every YAPC::EU I chat with the sponsors there but none of them are particularly welcome to telecommuters. Is there a pattern in responses to that question, Mark? I find that it's mostly wanting to have an in-office representation, especially when it comes to meetings. Job On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? Mark
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
When you're employing a builder, if the house is steel framed, you might want to employ someone with experience with the framing system. If you're building a steel framed housing estate, you will need to familiarise your crews with the technology, but that's a small amount of overhead compared to the effort of delivering the project. On 14/05/2013, at 11:49 AM, Avleen Vig wrote: You're not alone in facing this, and as a rule it isn't a perl-specific issue. Perl's just at the leading edge of this. 1. There are fewer perl programmers than PHP programmers. There are many reasons for this, they really don't matter that much. In the end, perl doesn't get as much exposure and it becomes a vicious circle where fewer and fewer people learn perl. 2. There are fewer programmers than there is demand. This is only going to get worse. If you think it's bad now, wait 5 years. 3. The telecommute issue, which has already been brought up. The biggest blockers to this are general fear of the unknown, and a poor understanding of how to manage remote employees. It's really very different to managing local ones. Have you considered hiring existing programmers and teaching them, or giving them time to learn perl? You should. Or you'll have to massively up the price you're willing to pay for someone (either an existing perl dev, or someone who will be able to learn enough perl quickly and well). Simple supply and demand. Again, it'll only get worse. I'd encourage every company to hire more junior people and give them a lot of training. Go ask your HR / recruiting departments how much it costs to hire someone. Don't be shocked when they come back and tell you the number is over £20,000 *just to find someone*. Spend that time and money on training instead - you'll help yourself and everyone around you. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Re: Working from home (was: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers)
Very similar to my experience except I work as a contractor with a bunch of other contractors across three or more continents to develop and support a reasonably high profile high value product in it's domain. I meet a subset of the people I work with face to face once every couple of years (but was doing that before this work started anyway), and I've never met the principal in person. We talk on the phone up to 4 times a year, but generally it all happens through IRC, bug tracker, wiki and git repo. For big companies where slacking or low value staff are a problem I don't think telecommuting is a great option (hence Marissa Miller's recent proclamations), but could be solved with an organisational culture turnaround. The very nice thing about perl from my experience is it seems to attract people from a greater diversity of social and educational backgrounds than other programming communities (in my experience), but you've got to make the working conditions good to take full advantage of that. On 14/05/2013, at 12:40 PM, Sam Kington wrote: On 13 May 2013, at 23:27, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? Can't speak about management per se, but I can talk about how a team with off-site developers can work. [snip]
Re: ISNIC DNS
On 08/05/2013, at 7:37 PM, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting AJ Dhaliwal adhaliwa...@gmail.com: Dave... [Who is seriously considering replacing fkth.is with fkth.at] Too late. I have purchased fkth.at and will sell it to you for 1 million dollars. First rule of domains: never mention in public a domain you might be interested in, without buying it first. http://whois.net/whois/fkth.at Sounds like a useful url shortener.
Re: ISNIC DNS
for us outer suburban dwellers, it looks like fkthcity.net is still available. On 08/05/2013, at 8:04 PM, Will Crawford wrote: On 8 May 2013 10:37, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: http://whois.net/whois/fkth.at changed:20130508 11:14:29 Is their clock fast, or is that Icelandic time?
Re: URL shorteners (was: Re: ISNIC DNS)
On 08/05/2013, at 10:01 PM, Sam Kington s...@illuminated.co.uk wrote: On 8 May 2013, at 11:07, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: On 08/05/2013, at 7:37 PM, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting AJ Dhaliwal adhaliwa...@gmail.com: Dave... [Who is seriously considering replacing fkth.is with fkth.at] Too late. I have purchased fkth.at and will sell it to you for 1 million dollars. First rule of domains: never mention in public a domain you might be interested in, without buying it first. http://whois.net/whois/fkth.at Sounds like a useful url shortener. Getting off-topic here, but what use are URL shorteners now that Twitter converts all links to be t.co/blah ? They don't save you any space in tweets, and they obfuscate the URL you're linking to. Is link-tracking really that useful? If Dave got of his behind by now and implemented it I would have posted an informative reason in this email right now via a shortened url : http://fkth.is/sh1t URL shorteners were around well before twitter.
Re: PDF creation?
Similarly one can use pandoc (markdown to pdf and many other formats including pod and TeX) in the same way. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc I really like pandoc, although it is not bug free. On 22/04/2013, at 8:28 PM, Peter Corlett wrote: On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 07:43:11AM -0400, Mark Fowler wrote: In a few weeks I'm going to want to be creating PDFs from Perl, something I haven't done in a few years. What's the recommended approach these days? My *favourite* approach, which is almost certainly not the consensus answer, is to generate a LaTeX document (e.g. using Template.pm) and then run that through xelatex to generate a PDF. This does however require you to learn how to drive LaTeX and how to trawl CTAN etc for useful packages. (FWIW, pretty much all of the useful LaTeX packages are already in Debian.) I know I'm going to want to create the document from scratch, not fill in a template, and I'm probably going to want multi-line text and basic drawing (a horizontal line or two) The template in this case would be the LaTeX preamble that pulls in and configures all of the packages you use in your document. You get multi-line text, tables, page reflowing and all sorts of other goodies for free.
Re: PDF creation?
With an optional job queue and expensive OCR package deal with scanned document. On 22/04/2013, at 8:57 PM, Roger Bell_West wrote: On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 11:45:43AM +0100, Mike Whitaker wrote: On a similar subject, what PDF (or even text, assuming I can find something to extract the text on a page by page basis) indexing solutions are there out there in Perl? pdftotext and then throw the text at a generic indexing package. I keep meaning to do something with Plucene.
Re: API wrapper best practices?
I don't think there's any special magic involved. Consider DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader or its opposite $schema-deploy https://metacpan.org/module/DBIx::Class::Schema#deploy Mostly integration with some existing system is a matter of ticking off all the detail and banging your head against any existing bits of the system that behave in interesting ways. This article also looks interesting. http://modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/05/testing-dbix-models-without-the-database.html On 24/03/2013, at 9:51 AM, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: On 23 Mar 2013, at 21:19, Dave Lambley dave.lamb...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 March 2013 20:50, DAVID HODGKINSON daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Are there any tutorial type docs for Moose Meta the way you used it or which man page should I be able to work it out from? Moose::Meta::Class and Moose::Meta::Attribute are probably what you want. I have an over engineered example here, https://github.com/OpenIMP/OpenIMP-APIClient/blob/master/lib/OpenIMP/APIClient/Loader.pm#L121 where a schema described in YAML is inflated into a Moose class hierarchy. Hm. I'll look at this. In my use-case both APIs are going to poke stuff straight into a database so you're probably going tell me there's Cat Model stuff I should be doing too...?
Re: Raising Perl awareness on Tiobe + Wikipedia, etc.
perl also has a dark and sordid past shoving stuff for big systems through 1800 baud modems. They're well matched. On 20/03/2013, at 8:55 PM, Mallory van Achterberg wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 04:58:38PM +0800, AJ Dhaliwal wrote: ... Good points. I wonder about node.js. JS was designed to be a scripting language. Aren't they pushing it too far with node.js? I admit I have only heard about it and don't have an in depth understanding of their approach. Javascript has a dark and sordid past, but today it's finally getting on-par with most other programming languages. Getting MVC and testing frameworks and 1.8 adding basic things Javascript lacked since forever for example. They've even added in Python's list comprehensions and generators, though I haven't seen anyone using those yet. -Mallory
Re: Ungooglable interview questions (was: Re: New perl features?)
On 17/03/2013, at 8:24 PM, Abigail wrote: On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 01:54:37AM +, Sam Kington wrote: At $WORK we ask new hires, over IRC (because everyone potentially works remotely), a variant of chromatic's http://modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/01/how-to-identify-a-good-perl-programmer.html So far, when we've put people through the test (some people have been omitted because they obviously had a clue), nobody has managed to identify * as a sigil. Have you hired any of the people any of those people? If so, does this question have any value? Does it really matter when someone during an interview can remember that * can be used as a sigil? But loooking at chromatics list, does it actually work? Does it identify good Perl propgrammers? I guess it can be used to weed out people claiming to know Perl very well, but don't, but someone who can answer all the questions may still not be able to code his/her way out of a wet paper bag. I''m not sure I'd want to hire someone for a routine job who was keen to remember that * is a sigil. If someone I know and trust uses it, then it's usually clear what they're doing with it without having to talk to them about it. OTOH I doubt I'd want to hire a random off the street who was keen to tell me about it unless we started off the discussion with an advisory about chicken's blood and mystical symbols, and that the rest of the discussion was about more conventional approaches. Also, effective use of search is a desirable attribute in a technical person. I'm not sure I'd be keen on an un-googleable trick question. I think that the correct approach is to triangulate such that you have multiple independent lines of evidence that the person you have been talking to is right for what you're offering.
Re: Billing a client
When I deal with small building contractors or consultants they want invoices paid on 14 day or 30 day terms. When I deal with massive multinational IT companies, they agree to pay invoices on 90 day terms. So somewhere between 14 and 90 days seems to be normal practice. I'd generally ask for closer to 14 than 90 all other things being equal. On 11/02/2013, at 6:56 PM, Alex Brelsfoard wrote: Here's a slightly off-topic question for you all. I'm planning on doing some consulting work and was wondering what I should expect as the norm for delay between when I bill my client and when I should receive their money. Is there such a norm? Or is it entirely dependent on the client and/or our agreement? Thanks for any advice. --Alex
Re: Billing a client
Oh, I did have an engineering report - in that instance, they refused to give me the report until I'd paid them for it (they're also giving me an implicit support agreement for the life of the project with that deal). The surveyor on the other hand asks for 30 day terms (and they charge for everything they do). I think the best compromise is to state terms explicitly in the contract. Withholding until payment is a good way to fix the problem in absence of a contract. On 11/02/2013, at 6:56 PM, Alex Brelsfoard wrote: Here's a slightly off-topic question for you all. I'm planning on doing some consulting work and was wondering what I should expect as the norm for delay between when I bill my client and when I should receive their money. Is there such a norm? Or is it entirely dependent on the client and/or our agreement? Thanks for any advice. --Alex
Re: Agents part CCXXXIV
On 03/12/2012, at 7:32 AM, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: If an agent sends your resume somewhere without telling you, is there any kind of redress? Sue them for libel or defamation?
Re: Outreach II
On 30/11/2012, at 9:12 AM, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: OK, so great bikeshedding there. Are we in a position to form a team to go hang at the meetups and make our presence felt? Meetups include, but are not limited to: DevTank MiniBar FlagonsDen AngelHack SiliconRoundabout Unsexy Startups I have a 30 minute slot at a polyglot conference next week (in Sydney where perl jobs are rare). One of my reasons for trying to help decide what colour the bike shed should be was to see if I could think about how to integrate some outreach stuff into my talk.
Re: Perl outreach
On 30/11/2012, at 12:24 PM, Tomas Doran wrote: On 29 Nov 2012, at 12:33, gvim wrote: If we want to be Perl noticed again as a serious contender for new projects I'd say our best bet is to finally get Perl 6 finished, or at least production-ready. I know Perl 5 is excellent but Perl needs something new to get noticed again. That something is Perl 6. So what you're saying is patches, not rhetoric? Where are your patches? Solving problems using the same or better new and shiny as the others (in combination with the old solid and reliable which perl excels at), in equal or less time. Perl 5 does that well. But we're a bit shy as a community, and ought to blow our trumpets more. Perl 6 has been an exceptionally useful research project for perl 5. Maybe one day it will be useful for the likes of me.
Re: Perl outreach
On 27/11/2012, at 22:41, Guinevere Nell guinevere.n...@gmail.com wrote: ... Now, those who love objects (and there are quite a few) might argue that Java is fun, Python is fun, and Perl is incredibly frustrating, when it comes to designing nice OO projects. Fine, true, good. Perl is fun and enjoyable for many things, but perhaps not for clean, neat OO. Except that last month I designed a lovely neat and tidy perl API that was OO all the way through (excepting a couple of places where some functional asides came in very handy) using Moose and Moose roles (in this case for a better abstract base class). Of course the primary purpose of the code was to provide at least whole horses worth of glue across 4 or 5 interacting systems in a way that was both reusable and extendable, hence the need for neat and tidy OO. I guess that it's breadth is perl's biggest problem and it's biggest strength at the same time.
Re: Perl outreach
On 26/11/2012, at 22:49, andrew-per...@mail.black1.org.uk wrote: On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 11:11:56AM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: What with having Copious Free Time recently, I've been attending a fair few start-up and online tech meetups. They all have one thing in common: people turn their noses up at perl. Can I make an analogy. I have spent a lot of time working on VMS. In theory I still regard it as a good OS but I don't think there is much work in it. People percieve VMS as running on VAXes and thefore old hat. In the same way there is a perception that Perl goes back to the .com era and Matt's script archive. Maybe the analogy isnt perfect but it helped me.. We (me, a principal contractor and supported by a well known perl consultancy) are doing fairly sexy and interesting stuff on the latest and greatest hardware 95% in perl. It's a fun and interesting gig. So I can't see the VMS analogy - I doubt there are any sexy new and interesting VMS gigs, while many perl shops I know of have weathered the GFC recessions rather well. On the other hand, theres a local (to me) business who it's clear to me and my friend on the inside that I'd be a really good fit for. But they don't take perl seriously (their perception issue) for the most part which so far has created a pretty big barrier.
Re: Perl outreach
On 27/11/2012, at 8:03 AM, Salve J Nilsen wrote: Peter Sergeant said: On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 8:12 PM, Salve J Nilsen sjn+oslo...@pvv.org wrote: «So you want to write some useful software? Learn from Perl. We in the Perl community saw what happened when one just focuses getting stuff done without spending any attention on software life-cycle management. So, what did we learn? Write software that is easy to understand and fun to read. In fact, try to write software that one only needs to read once, but that one *wants* to read twice. This is difficult, but less so with Perl. You need a language that is flexible and malleable enough so you can express the intention of your code in the way that is best for your readers. This is where Perl shines. If you wield the tool well you can make wonderful things, and if you don't you'll probably end up making crap.» Comments? :) I think you could swap in any language name there, and no-one would be any wiser that you started off with Perl. Would mentioning TIMTOWTDI address your point? e.g. «... This is where Perl shines. We call this flexibility TIMTOWTDI, and it's a core philosophy in our language. ...» Maybe this pitch can be improved in other ways too? (I'm sure if someone with a better grasp of the English language than myself would spend a little attention, we could get something useful out of it). Couple of things: 1. https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/18188_446555698725246_2146270287_n.jpg 2. I don't think language choices make a huge difference. Perl is still huge in the networking and telecoms world, and that's not going to change any time soon. Bioinformatics people seem to be moving over to python a bit due to a. better integration with R than perl (although last time I looked this had improved in perl a bit) and b. because perl gives poor unskilled[1] scientific programmers more than enough rope to hang themselves in comparison to python. I think I've said on this list before that I did an evaluation of Python and Ruby to see if I wanted to do any immediate career development in that area recently, and the answer was basically oh well if I'm going to get paid for doing that stuff it looks OK, although it seems to lack the flexibility of perl, and Ruby has a lot of incomprehensible syntax that will take little getting used to. But for the case where I have a budget to organise a team I can get really good perl people together quickly and easily. [1] Anyone who's looked at scientific code much will know exactly what I mean by this.
Re: Perl outreach
On 27/11/2012, at 10:13 AM, Abigail wrote: For me, the top two reasons I use Perl (and there really isn't a third reason): - It's good enough for most of what I do. - I'm just too damn lazy to learn a different language. I quite agree with this. Or, phrased differently, the cost of learning something else doesn't seem to outweight the benefits. Or to put it yet another way: cross learning a different language in the same class as perl (wide field) is clearly trivial for a competent perl programmer (for some value of trivial that implies an initial discount on productivity or billable hours). So maybe what we should be promoting is that good perl people are valuable in any dynamic language situation where doing things the cheapest possible way isn't the primary goal. (not that perl's expensive - just a focus on cheap at all costs tends to be a sign of very bad management or a toxic industry segment).
Re: Perl outreach
On 27/11/2012, at 1:24 PM, Anthony Lucas wrote: On 26 November 2012 23:26, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: cross learning a different language in the same class as perl (wide field) is clearly trivial for a competent perl programmer (for some value of trivial that implies an initial discount on productivity or billable hours). This. 100 times. So maybe what we should be promoting is that good perl people are valuable in any dynamic language situation where doing things the cheapest possible way isn't the primary goal. (not that perl's expensive - just a focus on cheap at all costs tends to be a sign of very bad management or a toxic industry segment). Between your previous replies, and this one, I'm a bit confused on your stance (so forgive me if I misunderstand). Surely a good Perl developer is a good $lang developer as well? Surely such a developer would take the time to learn one or two other languages... Indeed. I'm a moderately competent with javascript and R for example. Due to the need to deal with stuff that they handle well from time to time. I agree with your premise, but I can't agree with the conclusion. Based on your first statement, there is no need to push, promote, or force Perl onto any client or employer. Yeah I'm usually unclear on complicated answers - it's the bane of my life. I guess there's two aspects. Personal and technical. On the personal, If you want me to run a technical team, you'll be much better off to let me do it with perl at the core, and I'll happily arrange for quick cross training of ruby and python people. If you want me to be a part of a technical team then any dynamic language will do, although you'll have to give me some lead time to reinvent a few mental wheels early on. I would probably not be happy in a hands on coding role in a predominantly Java or C# environment due to the bureaucratic nature of the languages. On the technical side, perl supports a number of different programming styles - procedural, functional, oo, and others. Python and Ruby are much more tied into OO. So it's less likely that a good perl person will need to reach for other languages to demonstrate their competence with a diversity of styles, so their CV may look thinner than those of others'. Perl is not a marketing product, it's not a political party, and not a religion. I don't agree with pushing agendas in this way, even though much of FOSS seems to be going this way recently (I'm surprised those projects don't see the irony in their actions). I think David H was simply asking about positive involvement within the tech community. Sharing our enjoyment of it, our creativity, our lessons from it. This is the best way to see changes of opinion in the people we meet. I get a little upset at the offhand dismissive attitude of much of the Python (there are some really stupid comments about perl in Programming Python for example) and Ruby communities towards perl. Something that's not done much in the reverse (sometimes I do see perl people getting a bit cross about Py/Rb code reinventing infrastructural wheels badly mind you, but that's about it). So what I'm trying to promote is the value of using/knowing a toolchain with a quarter century of history that keeps up with and sets modern approaches, and a general approach of love and acceptance towards everyone in the broader community (except VBA and VBS of course ;-) ). I am somewhat concerned about perl jobs drying up (you can really see this in Sydney for example, but strangely not in Melbourne where the weather is worse and where they are a more cultured bunch), so I'm trying to think of how to deal with this either by creating more perl jobs, or by demonstrating that high level perl skills are extremely useful even for non-perl projects.
Re: Perl outreach
On 27/11/2012, at 6:05 PM, Peter Sergeant wrote: Great! Now, any ideas how we further Perl outreach? It probably got lost in the length of my last post, but my points re this were: 1. Stealing or creating the latest and greatest. 2. Peace and love.
Re: 25 Years of Perl
On 21/11/2012, at 8:17 AM, Randy J. Ray wrote: On 11/20/12 1:10 PM, Dirk Koopman wrote: On 20/11/12 20:42, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: As did PHP. And the rest is history. Speaking of which, is it just a folk memory that suggests that the first 'P' in PHP once stood for perl? I thought, for the longest time, that PHP had originally been an acronym for Perl Hypertext Pages. But people deny that, so I can't be sure. I was understanding that it stood for Personal Home Page. Which is why at one point I called a Catalyst app I wrote for offline web publishing 'MyPHP' - which clearly stood for My Personal Home Page. I should probably rewrite it using Dancer or Flask or something.
Re: 25 Years of Perl
On 21/11/2012, at 8:29 AM, Uri Guttman wrote: On 11/20/2012 04:17 PM, Randy J. Ray wrote: On 11/20/12 1:10 PM, Dirk Koopman wrote: On 20/11/12 20:42, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: As did PHP. And the rest is history. Speaking of which, is it just a folk memory that suggests that the first 'P' in PHP once stood for perl? I thought, for the longest time, that PHP had originally been an acronym for Perl Hypertext Pages. But people deny that, so I can't be sure. i recall it was perl home pages. and it definitely was written in perl in the earliest versions. note how much of the syntax and other stuff was stolen from perl and then ruined beyond all recognition. I was also under the impression that PHP took the worst bits of perl and went off on that trajectory.
Re: [OT] benchmarking typical programs
+1 And as a bonus, you cover pretty much the whole data munging market as a side effect with this one. On 21/09/2012, at 17:56, Simon Wistow si...@thegestalt.org wrote: On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 12:35:18PM +0100, Nicholas Clark said: Lots of one trick pony type benchmarks exist, but very few that actually try to look like they are doing typical things typical programs do, at the typical scales real programs work out, so As a search engineer (recovering) I'm inclined to say - get a corpus of docs, build an inverted index out of it and then do some searches. This will test 1) File/IO Performance (Reading in the corpus) 2) Text manipulation (Tokenizing, Stop word removal, Stemming) 3) Data structure performance (Building the index) 4) Maths Calculation (performing TF/IDF searches) All in pretty good, discrete steps. Plus by tweaking the size of the corpus you can stress memory as well. Simon
Re: [OT] benchmarking typical programs
On 21/09/2012, at 19:22, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 08:56:34AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 12:35:18PM +0100, Nicholas Clark said: Lots of one trick pony type benchmarks exist, but very few that actually try to look like they are doing typical things typical programs do, at the typical scales real programs work out, so As a search engineer (recovering) I'm inclined to say - get a corpus of docs, build an inverted index out of it and then do some searches. This will test 1) File/IO Performance (Reading in the corpus) 2) Text manipulation (Tokenizing, Stop word removal, Stemming) 3) Data structure performance (Building the index) 4) Maths Calculation (performing TF/IDF searches) All in pretty good, discrete steps. Plus by tweaking the size of the corpus you can stress memory as well. Thanks, this is a useful suggestion, but... I'm not a search engineer (recovering or otherwise), so this represents rather more work that I wanted to do. In that I first have to learn enough of how to *be* a search engineer to figure out how to write the above code to do something useful, and *then* how to write such code to a reasonably performant production versions, and then to turn working code into something sufficiently stand alone to be a benchmark. I don't want to be spending my time figuring out the right way to do all the above algorithms in Perl. I want to get as fast as possible to the point of figuring out how the perl interpreter (mis)behaves when presented with extant decent code to do the above. Unless there's a CPAN-in-a-box for doing most of the four steps. (which doesn't depend on external C libraries. That was one of my preferably criteria) So, next question - if I wanted to be as lazy as possible and write a search engine (as described above) using as much of CPAN as possible, which modules are recommended? :-) I think you want Plucene. But please let someone else correct me if I'm wrong. Nicholas Clark
Re: Brainbench perl test?
On 05/09/2012, at 2:40 AM, David Hodgkinson wrote: On 4 Sep 2012, at 17:24, Roger Burton West ro...@firedrake.org wrote: On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 05:18:20PM +0100, David Hodgkinson wrote: When was the last time you recursed in day to day web type code? Within the last month. I meant normal people. Me too. Actually a bug in some long standing code for a web based front end for a text analysis platform. Let's just say that recursion, Tree::Simple and Template Toolkit are an interesting combination. Code on somewhere on github (with the bug because I didn't push yet for obscure reasons).
Re: BBC jobs
On 16/04/2012, at 9:44 PM, David Cantrell wrote: On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 04:15:00PM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: In case anyone missed this: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=jobId=2859626 And for those who aren't on Linked In? Job Description BBC Future Media is looking for experienced, professional and enthusiastic Perl Developers to join our world-class team responsible for delivering services to a suite of major BBC online products, including BBC iPlayer and the BBC homepage. The Publishing Services team is our team dedicated to the ingest and serving of public-facing BBC and non-BBC programme and user metadata. We are part of the Core Services team which is the core engineering team in our Programmes and On Demand (POD) department which is in turn part of the wider BBC Future Media (FM) division. Core Services provides shared software/hardware services built to power BBC Online’s programme based propositions across a range of platforms from web to mobile and IPTV. These services include programme metadata APIs, rights and metadata management tools, as well as audio and video transcoding. The roles require an excellent knowledge of Perl, web frameworks (Catalyst, Mason, TT) RESTful web services, security, caching, architecting for performance, mysql and web standards, along with proven experience of working in a mixed discipline team on large scale web application projects. The roles also involve the possibility of cross-training into Java, and candidates should be prepared to move into Java development when appropriate. Key Responsibilities • To write robust, scalable, high-performance, world-class code using object oriented Perl, Apache, mysql, memcached and other server side technologies to create dynamic web applications with multiple data serialisations • To write reusable code libraries as well as application specific object-oriented software • To write unit and functional tests within automated test environments to ensure code quality • To write concise yet comprehensive technical documentation - for APIs and other interfaces • To work with web service developers, system administrators, information architects, client side developers and QA to develop fast and dynamic web applications. • To work with all relevant parties on the deployment of applications to the live site and all intermediate hosting environments. Desired Skills Experience Essential Knowledge and Experience • Demonstrable competence in one or more established web frameworks (eg Catalyst, Mason, TT, Zope, Django, Spring) • Strong familiarity with Apache API, mysql and a modern Perl ORM • Proven experience working on a large mission critical code base, maintaining a regular release cycle, while ensuring the overall performance and stability of the product. • Strong SQL database experience and sound understanding of data normalization, database design, query tuning and transaction management. • Ability to work in an unstructured, fast changing environment with rapid release cycles • Proven experience of project working and commercial web development processes - particularly Agile methodologies • Experience of working in an environment where products have to be delivered to specific time-scales • An ability to rapidly and effectively understand and translate product and business requirements into technical solutions • Experience of supporting, modifying and maintaining systems and code developed by teams other than your own • Experience of software quality practice - eg TDD, continuous integration, version control automation, software metrics Desirable Knowledge and Experience • Memcached/nosql experience • Java experience • Experience working on high volume, highly available, horizontally scalable architectures • Amazon simpleDB, CouchDB, MapReduce or any experience with Object DBs Additional Information: • We are recruiting for various levels of Perl Software Engineers and the information on this page is a generic overview. For more detailed information on the specific requirements of each level and to apply, please follow the link and download the full job description at the foot of the page. During the application process, please indicate which level(s) you would be most interested in applying for when prompted. • Please note that the salary available for the role depends on which level of experience you are considered for. • We will be advertising this position until May 3rd. We will review applications after 2 weeks and then after the May 3rd close date. •Your application will be reviewed and if successful we will send you a coding task to complete. If that task is completed successfully then we would be delighted to invite you in for a face to face interview where you will get to know more about the role, the team, the department and
Re: Programming Heresy
On 30/03/2012, at 20:24, Steve Mynott st...@gruntling.com wrote: Has anyone tried programming outside? E-ink (like on the Kindle) works well in sunlight and I wondered if any such device would be useable (ideally with a decent keyboard). You'll get sunburn from sitting in the sun. Just sit in the shade and the glare and sunburn problems are both solved. Plus the e-ink has a horrible refresh rate.
Re: Where to buy Cassocks?
On 31/01/2012, at 8:15 PM, Ian Norton wrote: Is there a place to go to buy a used Cassock other than the 'Bay? With great difficulty. As Dirk said, most people who do wear them do so until they fall apart and even then it's likely they'll be kept to patch up others in a less worse state. J. Wippel Co. Ltd certainly sell new ones - http://www.wippell.co.uk/ though a bit extreme for making kites out of :) I would imagine that if anyone can find you a second hand one, Armstrongs in Edinburgh could.
Re: Laptop Recommendation
On 24/01/2012, at 9:34 PM, David Cantrell wrote: Just get a Mac. I tend to agree. Although I have not 'upgraded' to lion, as given that I'm running a glorified xterm[1], microsoft office[2] and web browser[3] launcher, I don't really see the point. [1] Yeah I could use mutt. Right now I'm not, although I feel that I should care more about this than I do. [2] Which is the worst widely deployed software in the history of computers. $boss[1] seems to think that I'm somewhat defective in holding this opinion. However she's under the misapprehension my position is an opinion rather than a fact. [3] Virtualbox works fine for needing to use IE given the current state of the market.
Re: Laptop Recommendation
On 24/01/2012, at 9:56 AM, the hatter wrote: On Mon, 23 Jan 2012, Smylers wrote: Is two-finger scrolling any good (when it works, obviously)? I've never had a system where that was an option. It will become instinctive in a very short time. You will curse and swear and question the parentage of other laptops you use that lack this feature, swiping your fingers around hopelessly for an instant before pitying the poor excuse for an input device and hunting for some scroll bars or cursor keys. +1. Seriously.
Re: Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best? (slight diversion)
On 16/12/2011, at 11:23 AM, Toby Wintermute wrote: Melbourne.pm is the most active of the Australian perlmonger lists, and I believe the only one in Australia to manage regular meetings (almost) every month. Although maybe I'm just biassed because I've been managing those for the last couple of years :) I must say that Sydney.pm is moderately active, and has been moving back towards monthly meetings recently. My theory on this is that it's the second La Niña year in a row, so the weather is somewhat cold and rainy, making going surfing, fishing, mountain biking or some other outdoor pursuit a less attractive proposition than a .pm meeting. On the other hand, I haven't been to any sydney.pm meetings this year. I mainly use the 1:15 hour train ride as my excuse. I've been meaning to head up to sydney to catch up with a few things for about 3 months now, but haven't got round to it yet. I guess I might make it to the February meeting. (Sydney in January is like Paris in August - it mostly shuts down).
Re: [Commercial]Looking for Perl Telecommuting work - How to approach
On 17/12/2011, at 12:24 PM, Simon Cozens wrote: On 16/12/2011 22:20, abhishek jain wrote: Any suggestions? Where and how to look for such a thing / work. Follow http://jobs.perl.org/rss/telecommute.rss in your RSS reader. A lot of telecommute gigs come through personal contacts too. Get yourself on start making useful contributions to one or more significant Perl projects (e.g. p5p, DBIx::Class, Moose, Dancer, Catalyst etc.). You can find out what people need done by asking around on IRC.
Re: Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best?
On 14/12/2011, at 6:57 PM, Avleen Vig wrote: On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 12:41 AM, David H. Adler d...@panix.com wrote: Also, pubs. Bars just aren't the same. Love your local pub, Londoners. Be cosy in it. Enjoy meat pies and warm beer. This is also a good point. I have no problem with bars here in the US, but they are definitely not the same thing as pubs. I've found the selection of scotch available in bars in the US is almost always MUCH better than pubs in the UK. You've clearly not spent any time in Scottish pubs then. /justsayin. Possibly you spelled London wrong.
Re: Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best? (slight diversion)
On 14/12/2011, at 20:23, Richard Foley richard.fo...@rfi.net wrote: Adding a little diversity here, by including Germany, where I currently live with my family. Simon's museum reference hit hard, I sympathise, and can confirm it's the same here in Munich. The paucity of anything comparable to the London, open to the public, museums is quite extraordinary, given that Munich is the capital of the free state of Bavaria, and virtually it's own little country even today. Well I will hand the museum/cultural life to London. There's got to be an upside to being part of an empire which has declined within recent memory. (I've got to concur with Toby btw. Australia is a pretty good option in a lot of respects. Outside of Melbourne, Perl jobs (as opposed to jobs with some perl) are a bit thin on the ground, but personally I telecommute to both my jobs (one at the local university and almost completely not a perl job, a 20 minute train ride away, where I have a badly ventilated office with no windows in a region with spectacular geology and expensive geotech issues, the other to a distributed team with an interesting set of time zones from this side of the international date line.
Re: Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best? (slight diversion)
On 15/12/2011, at 2:52, Travis Basevi tra...@cricinfo.com wrote: On 14/12/2011 09:39, Kieren Diment wrote: (I've got to concur with Toby btw. Australia is a pretty good option in a lot of respects. Outside of Melbourne, Perl jobs (as opposed to jobs with some perl) are a bit thin on the ground... Not that I'm necessarily in a hurry to move back just yet, but by outside of Melbourne do you mean in the areas just outside of Melbourne, or are you including the rest of Australia in that and implying that Melbourne is some sort of IT hot-bed? To my mind there seems to be much more Perl going on in Melbourne than elsewhere (possibly the influence of Monash University). Although if you do a search for perl on com.au a fair bit of stuff usually comes up.
Re: Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best?
On 14/12/2011, at 8:01 AM, Simon Wistow wrote: --- The Politics --- This is somewhat related to point below but, to be frank, the politics out here scare the bejesus out of me. I realise that everything in the UK and the rest of Europe aren't exactly peaches and ice cream at the moment but watching the entire spectrum of poltical discourse and manouvering out here makes we want to hide under the duvet until the bad people go away. Neither of the political sides seems in anyway based in anything I would casually refer to as Reality. Part of this is because I can't vote. Disenfranchisement and the ensuing sense of lack of control (yes, yes - believing that whether I vote for the puppet on the left hand or the puppet on the right hand has any control is an illusion that I cling to for succor) is unnerving. I'm actually ok with not being able to vote unless I'm a citizen - I don't think it's an unreasonable requirement - but it's still unnerving. It annoyed me that before my wife was an australian citizen, she couldn't vote. I on the other hand as a former permanent resident in the UK got to vote over there, and had the pleasure of voting for Alistair Darling, and against Michael Forsyth (back in the dark days of the post-Thatcher era). Over here we have compulsory voting which is one of the few things that fills me with a glow of patriotic pride, especially as it's not terribly rigorously enforced (just enough to work reasonably well). --- Uncanny Valley --- I will never fit in here. I will never be an American. I don't have the right base level of shared cultural memories and semiotics. The music and toys and tv shows and memes and clothes and developmental touchstones and rituals that my friends bathed in growing up are profoundly different from mine. It would be slightly better, maybe, if they were more different and completely alien but they seem oddly familiar (perhaps from watching American movies and tv shows) but also somehow unnervingly unfamiliar. I agree rather here. I went to an American International School for a while, and compared to everyone else (the french, the australians, the kiwis, the dutch, the poles), the Americans were really odd and much more insular than the rest. Maybe that's because rather than foreign aid workers they were generally oil company employees kept in gated communities. But the British and French commercial operations didn't seem to enforce that lifestyle on their staff. Out here I will always be different. People will always ask about my accent (which many seem to think is Australian for some reason). As an australian who spent some of my childhood near london, I have trouble discriminating between some variants of london accents and australian accents. On the other hand, I have a really good ear for british regional accents. So anyway, given that australia and SF are relatively close, and there are a lot of 'straylians working in SF, I can see this is very plausible. More disturbingly, in Australia there's a general tendency for people to mistake scottish accents for irish ones. Having lived in scotland for 8 years, and being married to a scottish lady, I find it exceptionally disturbing that after 12 years back in australia, there are some variants of scottish and irish accent that I now have trouble discriminating between.
Re: Telecommuting
On 12/12/2011, at 9:13 PM, David Cantrell wrote: On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 11:06:14PM +, ian docherty wrote: [snip] 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. Yeah, I'm trying to write a PhD thesis on this topic at the moment. Except my cavemen are aged care nurses being forced to use computers, rather than computer nerds being forced to use meatspace.
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On 13/12/2011, at 9:30 AM, James Laver wrote: On 12 Dec 2011, at 22:16, Simon Wistow wrote: That's not implausible. A good but junior programmer in San Francisco is generally looking at a 100K USD salary which equates to about 65K UKP. Unless things have changed since I left London that would be high for a junior. Minus health insurance premiums (and you'd want good cover, wouldn't you) for a start. And all of the other things you don't get included over there. Health insurance, and saving for your kids future, as well as paying down all that debt you've accumulated over the years take a big dent out of US pay rates. It's difficult to comprehend how broken and expensive the US health system is (although hopefully for them ObamaCare will partly fix that for them).
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On 09/12/2011, at 22:25, Ian Knopke ian.kno...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, I'm finding this quite informative. The whole corporate behaviour thing is pretty interesting. When I do research on the topic, me and my ethics committee are generally pretty careful about the who and how we mention sensitive stuff. My worst recruitment experience resulted in me getting a small cheque at the end for my expenses after I had a whine at them (and their overly elaborate recruitment process). Things were fairly bad for me work-wise at the time, and I ended up having to pawn my wetsuit not long afterwards. Which in turn closed the door on a career change to illegal abalone fisherman for me. From what I've seen Net a Porter does quite a bit to maintain good relationships with the Perl community and I've heard a lot of good things about them in the past from friends working there. It sounds like the recruitment agency could be the real source of problems here. Maybe that's who we should really be talking about. Ian Knopke BBC On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Steve Mynott st...@gruntling.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 10:13:49PM -0500, Rudolf Lippan typed: About six weeks ago, I was contacted by a recruiter and asked if I was interested in a team lead position in New Jersey, and so begins my story. I've no particular reason to defend NAP or doubt your story but publically publishing complaints about recruitment doesn't strike me as professional. Shit happens. Deal with it. We have all been messed around. Save the venting for the pub or IRC. -- Steve Mynott st...@gruntling.com
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
I suspect this is a symptom of the GFC rather than anything more sinister. I'm sorry you and your not-to-be colleagues appear to be friendly fire in this circumstance. I can tell that GFC][ has people twitched. Although I live in the best functioning developed economy in the world (fsvo), the bank I've recently been going through the motions with were asking some weirder-than-the-last-time questions about my situation. (disclaimer, I barely know who net a porter are as they don't offer telecommute positions). -- Sent from my phone, so apologies for any spelling errors, top-posting, brevity, etc. On 09/12/2011, at 14:13, Rudolf Lippan rlip...@remotelinux.com wrote: Good morning, Perl Mongers, This is a followup to my post to the Perl jobs-discuss mailing list. Terrence picked it up here: http://livingcosmos.posterous.com/beware-of-net-a-porter-perl-jobs and the original can be found here: http://www.mail-archive.com/jobs-discuss@perl.org/msg01469.html About six weeks ago, I was contacted by a recruiter and asked if I was interested in a team lead position in New Jersey, and so begins my story. I was wanting to get back into the community after a limiting contract, but this wasn't really the sort of splash I hoped to make. I've never been moved to do something like this in the 10+ years I've been programming professionally. I've experienced some less than honest recruiting techniques and companies that had no issue jerking people around, but I was made aware this morning that there were at least two other Perl programmers affected, including junior candidates that probably had more hanging on this than I did. I sent the following list of events to both NET-A-PORTER and the recruiting agency 7 Dec. Earlier today (8 Dec.), the recruiter called me and confirmed this, point by point. NET-A-PORTER has, as of yet, not replied. 1) That NET-A-PORTER was fully aware of the contract rate during the interview process. 2) That NET-A-PORTER selected me to lead their US team and I was asked to wait for final sign off. 3) That NET-A-PORTER was aware that I let another opportunity go based on my understanding that my employment was pending a 'final signature'. 4) That as a condition of final sign off NET-A-PORTER asked that, at the end of the 6 month contract period, I would be willing to accept $30K less than the original budgeted salary with the proviso that the salary would be open to renegotiation based on the market conditions at that time. Furthermore that I agreed to this. 5) That NET-A-PORTER decided to withdraw the position at this point and no longer build out a US-based Perl development team. The reason given is that it would cost 1/2 as much to build out a team in the UK. For a company that espouses their programming culture and community support, I can't understand how they could think this was even remotely acceptable. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me. The recruiter gave permission to share contact information with any interested parties regarding this situation. I know I'm not in the UK but, short of trying for slashdot, I thought this was the most appropriate venue for informing those who should be most aware of their actions. -r
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On 09/12/2011, at 5:54 PM, Rudolf Lippan wrote: On Thursday, December 08, 2011 at 11:23:35 PM, Kieren Diment wrote: I suspect this is a symptom of the GFC rather than anything more sinister. I'm sorry you and your not-to-be colleagues appear to be friendly fire in this circumstance. I don't know if I buy that: 6 December 2011: ...Net-a-porte[sic] has decided not to build a team here in the US. Apparently it's half the cost for them to build a team in the UK vs. here in the US... 7 December 2011: http://jobs.perl.org/job/14442 Posted: December 7, 2011 Company name: Net-a-porter Internal ID: Junior Perl Developer - New Jersey Location: New York, NY, USA Despite that information, I still buy it. Business entities that no longer fit the small definition can hit the wall of stupidity/psychopathy (whereby the becoming one of the two become interchangeably unidentifiable, despite prior good work) pretty fast. So I'm still reading this as *symptom* of the GFC rather than caused by NAP being a bunch of bleeps. However, it still sucks. I'm just reluctant to point fingers etc.
Re: Perl Skills Test
On 29/09/2011, at 5:32 PM, Simon Cozens wrote: On 29/09/2011 01:30, Paul Tweedy wrote: != true I'm afraid. They just have the temerity to not live in (and are unable to move to) the south east or near a major city. If you want to be a fisherman, it helps to live near the sea. If you want to be a fisherman and not live near the sea and then complain about it, fine, but don't expect many others to be sympathetic. Remote opportunities are quite good once you have a reputation and a network of contacts ... In this case the sea is the intertubes and the fish are TCP/IP packets I suppose.
Re: Perl Skills Test
On 29/09/2011, at 6:17 PM, lesleyb wrote: On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 05:40:25PM +1000, Kieren Diment wrote: On 29/09/2011, at 5:32 PM, Simon Cozens wrote: On 29/09/2011 01:30, Paul Tweedy wrote: != true I'm afraid. They just have the temerity to not live in (and are unable to move to) the south east or near a major city. If you want to be a fisherman, it helps to live near the sea. If you want to be a fisherman and not live near the sea and then complain about it, fine, but don't expect many others to be sympathetic. Remote opportunities are quite good once you have a reputation and a network of contacts ... In this case the sea is the intertubes and the fish are TCP/IP packets I suppose. feeding the forty thousand with TCP/IP packets and intertubes ...? Well in my case feeding the 4, otherwise you seem to be correct :) An allegory for our times perhaps Regards L.
Re: Perl Skills Test
On 29/09/2011, at 8:00 PM, Abigail wrote: On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 10:12:34AM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 28 September 2011 13:54, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 01:27:41PM +0100, Victoria Conlan wrote: Auntie is ALWAYS looking for perl people. ALWAYS. Really? I've been shunted into a non-programming job for the last year precisely because they aren't. We are. We had someone start just a coupla days ago, and we're still looking for MOAR PEEPUL. We're still looking for 3 more perl devs at headforwards btw - to join our 2 teams of 3 and 4 devs. not in london, but very nice location ;) Just in case there's someone who has been living under a rock the past several years, and doesn't know it yet: Booking.com is hiring as well. AFAIK, it's still we want 20 more Perl devs (a number that doesn't seem to decrease regardless of how many devs we hire). We also hire sysadmins (Unix, Windows), DBAs, web designers, iPhone devs, etc. Some people even think Amsterdam is a nice location. I wouldn't leave London for it... Yeah, it would be interesting to do a large scale study on productivity/culture for remote versus office based setups.
Re: Perl Skills Test
Kieren Diment PhD Candidate Health Informatics Research Lab, Faculty of Informatics, University of Wollongong Tel: +61 4221 3952 On 29/09/2011, at 7:12 PM, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 28 September 2011 13:54, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 01:27:41PM +0100, Victoria Conlan wrote: Auntie is ALWAYS looking for perl people. ALWAYS. Really? I've been shunted into a non-programming job for the last year precisely because they aren't. We are. We had someone start just a coupla days ago, and we're still looking for MOAR PEEPUL. We're still looking for 3 more perl devs at headforwards btw - to join our 2 teams of 3 and 4 devs. not in london, but very nice location ;) The only bit of the British Isles I would want to live in IIRC (Scotland's nice in May too). But as a wild colonial boy, I'm biased.
Re: Should I get my mum a Kindle?
On 21/09/2011, at 6:29 PM, Nicholas Clark wrote: 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?) In the good old days, the only way that I was aware of was to have a cassette deck set up to record, with the mains power controlled by an external time switch. (Optionally, with the radio too.) When the power pings on, recording starts. Obviously, recording ends at the earlier of the power going off, or the tape running out. To record a second programme, replicate the above equipment. Yes indeed. Chasing up a reasonable cost recording of the original hitch hikers guide to the galaxy TV series was essentially impossible for me until the 21st century. Then my sister-in-law bought us 6 CDs for Xmas, and then I had a toddler who was obsessed with Marvin and Zaphod for quite some time.
Re: Perl e-commerce?
My understanding is that you've been looking at front ends. I know that Perl has rich sets of libraries for back end transactions, but for front end stuff you either need to roll your own (surprisingly economical with tools like Catalyst, Dancer, Mojo co) or lash your perl code into one of the existing ecommerce front ends like what you have referred to below. On 14/09/2011, at 7:11 PM, Mallory van Achterberg wrote: Hello all, I was looking around at popular e-commerce setups like Magento and Zend Cart. And I realised most of these are PHP based, for whatever reason. Is there a (decent, maintained) Perl-based e-commerce platform out there? I've found lists of scripts (as they called them) for things like groupin clones, pay button scripts, and things like Aardvark... but there isn't much information about what all comes with this, and the information I do find is pretty old (2004). Also preferably free and open source, unless there's a really good paid-for or closed version. I can find plenty of, for example, shops running Magento and I can see (as a user) what all comes with that. Can someone point me to a site or resource that really compares Perl e-commerce packages to these popular PHP ones? Something that describes all that they come with and what merchants can and cannot do with them, without having to actually install all of these and try setting them up just to see? Like, a review site. Thanks, Mallory
Re: Writing About Perl
Writing about perl is like dancing about architecture. With apologies to Thelonious Monk. On 24/08/2011, at 6:31 PM, Hernan Lopes wrote: And dont forget to say what is cpan.. 22000 modules email of developers automated tests for every module released on all platforms win/linux/mac/freebsd/solars easy to search module.. type in 'google' to search google modules, type in twitter for twitter modules nice documentation for the modules, with usage example and it has everything, type in the name of some formula and it will most likely be found ie. bank formulas, etc On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Peter Edwards pe...@dragonstaff.co.ukwrote: On 23 August 2011 18:11, Leo Lapworth l...@cuckoo.org wrote: Installing / using / extending Domm's App::Timetracker ( https://metacpan.org/release/App-TimeTracker) might make an interesting article. He gave a talk about it at YAPC::EU http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/talk/3391(slides: http://domm.plix.at/talks/2011_riga_app_timetracker/) Oh that's pretty cool. The git sync idea would go down well with Linux hackers. -Peter
Re: Writing About Perl
On 25/08/2011, at 12:09 AM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: Kieren == Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com writes: Kieren Writing about perl is like dancing about architecture. I dunno. It's been an enabler for pretty good living for a few of us. Yes, I should have put facetious tags around the my comment. Writing a perl book was one of the better career moves that I've made.
Re: LPW 2011 carpooling
On 19/08/2011, at 10:14 PM, David Cantrell wrote: On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:57:16AM +0100, James Laver wrote: 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. FWIW, my order of preference for travelling to and from the Netherlands would be Eurostar / City / Gatwick / Lydd (sorry, London Ashford) / boat from Harwich and failing that, don't travel. Heathrow is both deeply unpleasant and a pain in the arse to get to. Gatwick is also a pain in the arse to get to unless you live where I do, but at least once you're there it is just about bearable. I'd only use Heathrow, Luton, or Stansted if I was being paid to do so. Personally my favourite airport is Changi in Singapore, and has been since I was a wee bairn in the 1980s. Heathrow, Luton and Stanstead airports have all been shit holes for the same amount of time or longer. So my recommendation is to catch a plane to Changi, hit the train to malaysia,and then north until you get to one of the stops on the Orient Express, and then direct to Euston.
Re: website maintenance gig available
Personally I think that playing a game of annoy the nerds with broken defacto standards is amusing, and I would prefer that you didn't retreat. [ deliberately top-posted from a more-or-less defacto standards compliant email client ] On 03/08/2011, at 11:42 PM, ian.doche...@nomura.com wrote: -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of David Cantrell Sent: 03 August 2011 14:26 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: website maintenance gig available On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 01:43:21PM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On 3 Aug 2011, at 13:12, ian.doche...@nomura.com ian.doche...@nomura.com wrote: Isn't 'PHP skill' an oxymoron? No, but your sig is moronic. Please play nice, both of you. -- David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david ... [Ian replied.] OK, last post (at least from work). It's annoying too many people, which I don't want to do. I don't like the sig, I don't like top posting but (as you can see) my email client does not indent or '' as I would wish, so you will have to try and unravel this as best you can. Use of mobile phones to email is frowned upon. Corporate firewall is a pain but I have to live with it. I only joined from this email address initially because of a need to post to the group on behalf of my company. Apologies that I continued to use it in an attempt to 'be part of the community'. Obviously it is not working. Catch you all on a very less frequent basis from another email address on the (few) hours I have available to me outside of work hours. Ian. This e-mail (including any attachments) is confidential, may contain proprietary or privileged information and is intended for the named recipient(s) only. Unintended recipients are prohibited from taking action on the basis of information in this e-mail and must delete all copies. Nomura will not accept responsibility or liability for the accuracy or completeness of, or the presence of any virus or disabling code in, this e-mail. If verification is sought please request a hard copy. Any reference to the terms of executed transactions should be treated as preliminary only and subject to formal written confirmation by Nomura. Nomura reserves the right to monitor e-mail communications through its networks (in accordance with applicable laws). No confidentiality or privilege is waived or lost by Nomura by any mistransmission of this e-mail. Any reference to Nomura is a reference to any entity in the Nomura Holdings, Inc. group. Please read our Electronic Communications Legal Notice which forms part of this e-mail: http://www.Nomura.com/email_disclaimer.htm
Re: Gatwick
On 26/07/2011, at 12:12 AM, Dirk Koopman wrote:
On 25/07/11 14:34, Smylers wrote:
Hello. How big is Gatwick Airport? More specifically, about how long do
I need to allow for walking from its railway station to the check-in
hall ('Terminal S', according to my ticket)?
Be warned that the Gatwick Express is noticeably more expensive, and not
much quicker (if you choose your starting point in London correctly), than
yer normal train.
I used to love the Gatwick Express back in the 80s when I used to commute
between Sussex and the Equator/ Southern Hemisphere a couple of times per year.
Mind you, I was about 10 at the time, and I wasn't paying the fare.
Re: Slightly offtopic - coordinate conversions
On 13/07/2011, at 7:09 PM, Michael Lush wrote: I suppose it could be some kind of attempt to obfuscate the numbers in order to prevent 'coordinate harvesting'? Mmm, tasty random salt. Yum. [ OT: gmail seems to understand top posting, versus bottom posting. They do struggle with inline posting mind you, for which you need a kick ass mail client like mutt. I'm guessing that the DejaNews guys had it wired by the time they bought it ]
Re: Perl under MacOS X
On 02/06/2011, at 5:55 PM, Randy J. Ray wrote: I find myself the unexpected caretaker of a MacBook Pro, handed off to me when someone at $JOB left recently. It's shiny. And very eye-candy-ish. But I am now wishing I'd paid more attention to recent discussions of OSX-related stuff. I seem to recall some issues with Xcode 4 and compiled CPAN modules? And some references to something called perlbrew? Some of this I've learned a bit about with the help of The Google, but if anyone can offer me some tips they'd be most appreciated (and duly rewarded with drink the next time I'm in London). The problem here isn't lack of information, rather the problem is over-abundance of it. And much of what I find on Google is years old, and the problems I'm vaguely remembering seemed more recent than that... Short answer (this was for solaris where the situation is even worse than OS X but the same applies): 1. Obtain perl, e.g. current stable (as of the 12th of Jan 2011) (yes there's a newer one around now): $ curl http://cpan.perl.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.2.tar.gz -O $ gunzip -c perl-5.12.2.tar.gz | tar xvf - $ cd perl 5.12.2 $ sh Configure -des -Dprefix=~/perl-5.12 # install into ~/perl-5.12 add -Duserelocatableinc if you want to be able to move the ~/perl-5.12 dir around $ make $ make test $ make install 2. Configure PATH and cpan config, by putting the following in ~/.bashrc: export PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 export PATH=~/perl-5.12/bin:$PATH then: $ source ~/.bashrc Make CPAN slightly nicer to deal with. $ cpan Bundle::CPAN $ cpan App::cpanminus Perlbrew makes this easier apparently. Randy -- Randy J. Ray Sunnyvale, CA http://www.rjray.org rj...@blackperl.com twitter.com/rjray Silicon Valley Scale Modelers: http://www.svsm.org
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
I'll have a side order of diacritics with that please. On 01/06/2011, at 7:34 PM, Andy Wardley wrote: On 31/05/2011 15:08, David Cantrell wrote: And Hungarian notation is good! pronounI adjectiveRespectfully verbDisagree. initialA
Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...
On 21/04/2011, at 7:08 PM, Jason Clifford wrote: On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 23:06 -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote: He's embarrassed that didn't think to run apt-get install libnet-twitter-perl? That doesn't work so well on a vanilla OS X box. Whcih is what his workstation is. That's not a perl fail but rather a fail on the part of those who package (or don't package) perl modules for that platform. In fairness it's also a fail on the various Linux platforms I've encountered too as nobody has, so far, produced a comprehensive cpan to $whatever_distro repository I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. I've spent a fairly small amount of time lately packaging up perl applications for 4 or 5 different operating systems, on systems with varying degrees of security (ie. from apps that need root, to locked down windows workstations and uncooperative admins). On a unixy system, grabbing the latest stable perl, and compiling a relocatable binary is the go. After that either update $PATH or call the perl binary explicitly and install cpanminus is by far the lowest friction strategy. The only trouble I've had with this approach is Alien::SVN's insistence that it compiles binaries to /usr/lib. If I didn't have root on that system I would have been more annoyed. Oh and some module was broken in version 0.45 in linux, so I bisected old versions, and it turned out that version 0.44 installed OK, so I shoved a comment in the Makefile.PL, and in INSTALL.pod. The fact that admins will be expanding an archive rather than having to go through the install machinations themselves makes the inconvenience minor. On windows, strawberry portable perl is the go. Just like the unix version except much slower (at least on the VMs I use, and the ludicrously underpowered/small disk space workstation that $employer[0] gives me). Does anyone have a .bat file handy that will strip out all the toolchain stuff for deployment? And if you're so inclined you can keep your ~/perl install in a git repository, and while there's some overhead to this, it's a handy way to annotate what you've been doing with your perl. Of course I don't do sysadmin type stuff. If I did I'd be using the system perl, pure perl modules and App::FatPacker (oh and Path::Class). However, none of this is a solution for your management problems. Leave the system perl for the system and the system will leave perl up to you.
Re: Flickr CPAN module
On 22/03/2011, at 1:04 PM, Toby Wintermute wrote:
A way to ask for photos, and to be given back an iterator of
Flickr::...::Photo objects, rather than the current method which is
just a big hash of keys that vary depending on what objects you've
been given.
Every time I've looked at evern $web-{'big name service provider's'} API the
cognitive load has been horrendous, and because I haven't had a day or two for
someone to pay me to get my head around it I've just given up. An iterator or
array of Flickr::Photo objects sounds like the solution for this particular
problem. Next on your list can you write up an Ebay::Simple module for us?
Re: iPhone Barcode Readers
On 01/03/2011, at 10:05 PM, Christopher Jones wrote: On 1 March 2011 09:49, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Need some advice on iPhone Barcode reading apps - so I turn to london.pm, my favourite group of iGeeks. My wife is a teacher and they're about to start a stocktake of all of the books in the English department. Rather than count them all, she wondered if there was an iPhone app that could help them. I'm fascinated to know how you could use an iPhone to scan a barcode - can someone explain? With the camera ;) Scanning high contrast images for information is a reasonably well solved problem. Get rid of noise and highlight edges with a LoG (laplacian of gaussian filter - could be wrong here my knowledge is ancient and theoretical), then seeing as a barcode is basically a 2d image, use the barcode spec to get the information out of it by walking along the line measuring the thickness of the bars.
Re: Recommendation for simple Web Frameworks
On 12/01/2011, at 7:26 PM, Mark Morgan wrote: That being said, it's been a couple of years since I last used, so that situation may have changed. Apparently not: Gabor Szabo szabgab at gmail.com wrote: I have been using CGI::Applications for many years. IMHO the biggest problem with it is its name[1]. AFAIK it the development is not that active because the developers 1) do not want it to be a big framework like Catalyst 2) find that it has been mature for several years now Even though I do [hear] things happening on the mailing list here and there. I am now playing with Dancer because it is a new toy and it has a cooler name than CGI::Application.
Re: London.pm leader election
On 24/09/2010, at 9:02 PM, Léon Brocard wrote: On 24 September 2010 11:34, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: Orange! No, wait. I had a serious question. Who is eligible to vote? All subscribers to this mailing list as of this morning. Leon Can we vote for the stuffed Camel?
Re: Need a CRUD thing
On 26/08/2010, at 12:59 AM, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote: David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk writes: On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 03:12:29PM +0100, Tom Hukins wrote: Oh look, I misunderstood the question and made a fool of myself on the list. But it's also not a tiny script as it has lots of dependencies. Dependencies I don't care about - the computer can take care of those for me. I just don't want to have to write any code to glue all the dependencies together. So, provided that it's CGI-friendly, AutoCRUD looks like a good candidate. You _really_ don't want to run Catalyst (especially not 5.80 with all the Moose stuff) without a persistent process model. Doubly so if you're using DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader in dynamic mode, like you indicated you'd like to in another post. Don't run Catalyst under CGI. However if it's your own web server, rather than crappy shared hosting it's trivial to run the catalyst dev server (maybe using Catalyst::Engine::HTTP::Prefork[1]) and reverse proxying it to your web server. If it's crappy shared hosting, use phpmyadmin instead (or work out how to configure fastcgi) [1] Yes, I know there are newer, sexier plackier ways of running a catalyst app, but this wfm.
Re: Posting to blogger.com?
On 03/06/2010, at 8:06 PM, Steve Mynott wrote:
On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 05:52:40PM +0100, Mark Fowler typed:
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote:
On 2 Jun 2010, at 21:38, Egor Shipovalov wrote:
use File::Slurp;
This is the start of most scripts I've been writing recently.
I dumped this since I started using Path::Class all the time.
my $content = file(something)-slurp
Does it work with UTF-8?
File::Slurp seems to, or am I missing something:
$ cat utf
김치
k...@fenchurch/tmp$ perl -MFile::Slurp -e 'read_file('utf')'
k...@fenchurch/tmp$ perl -w -MFile::Slurp -e '$u = read_file(utf);
write_file(u2, $u)'
k...@fenchurch/tmp$ cat u2
김치
Emergency lunchtime social?
Hi all, I'm going to be in London (travelling between Brixton and Barbican FWIW) on Monday the 14th of June. Does anyone want to meet up for lunch somewhere in the middle of town on this day? Cheers Kieren
Re: Facebook apps
On 23/05/2010, at 8:57 AM, Pedro Figueiredo wrote: http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Facebook-API/ App Engine might also be an option - although I don't know how it'll behave when your app reaches a few million users. Stay away from the commonly used Java SDK, it's bloated and it doesn't do what it says on the tin and it's unnecessarily complicated. It's simple enough to write your own, just a couple of methods to build and sign the requests plus whatever API calls you require - WWW::Facebook::API takes exactly this approach. What would be nice if someone volunteered (or funded) the writing of a DBIx::Class/FQL connector. This would make everything really super-easy. (http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?WWW::Facebook::API::FQL). I put together a proof concept command line thingy for my own amusement with facebook at one point, but didn't take it very far.
Re: French Perl Workshop 2010: June 11-12 in Calais
damn it, I will be on my way from paris to london that night (coming from the german perl workshop who sponsored me to come over). I can't see a way of changing that arrangement without it costing a modest sum of money unfortunately :( On 07/05/2010, at 7:55 PM, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote: Hi, Some of you probably know this already, but for the rest of the London.pm crowd, here's a special call for participation (and presentations). Friday June 11, 2010 and Saturday June 12, 2010, the French Perl Mongers (Les Mongueurs de Perl) organize the seventh French Perl Workshop (aka Les Journées Perl). This year, the event will be held at Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (ULCO), in Calais. Calais is practically British, right? It's probably even closer than Central London for many of you! ;-) The conference will be free of charge (but you'll have to buy your T-shirt of the event). We want to reach a large public, and would love to offer presentations in French and English. The standard presentation times are 20, 40 and 80 minutes, plus lightning talks. Sign up now: http://journeesperl.fr/fpw2010/ Hoping to see you there, -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) Your reputation is what you make of it... and what you choose to take with you. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #48 (Epic))
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder: London Perl Mongers social on Thursday 1st
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.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder: London Perl Mongers social on Thursday 1st
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.
Re: [Fwd: Betonmarkets CTO position]
On 11/02/2010, at 10:00 PM, Mike Whitaker wrote: On 11 Feb 2010, at 10:58, Dirk Koopman wrote: Snap.. I got one of these as well. Wonder if that is coincidence :-) Perhaps we should ask whose mailing list he has managed to get hold of? Dunno, but, FWIW, mine was addressed to my IRC nick not my real first name. Mine came to my mailing lists address. The job is in an absolutely beautiful part of the world with great food and just about the most benign weather you could possibly imagine by the way. It's a shame I'm not in the market right now.
