Reminder: London.pm Social Meeting, Tonight, The Old Fountain near Old Street
A quick reminder: we're going to the pub this evening (Thursday)! I look forward to seeing you there, Tom On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 01:25:07PM +, Sam Thompson wrote: Hello! The next london.pm social will be held on Thursday the 4th of December at The Old Fountain, not too far from Old Street station: http://www.oldfountain.co.uk/ https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Old+Fountain/@51.526999,-0.088963 A couple of tables downstairs by the window/bar are reserved for us and I'm aiming to be there by about 18:45. The london.pm group is welcoming to Perl users of all levels and is a good chance to share ideas and some quality pub time with others with the same interests. I'm looking forward to seeing regulars and new faces alike. Any questions or issues please get in touch! Cheers, Samantha Thompson
LPW Videos Online (Was: Yet More Perl Workshops!)
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 10:48:33PM +, Steve Mynott wrote: For anyone not in the pub still who can't get enough of the Perl Workshops there are new videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCautJ6yqxYAHjUYYAdLc0pw I hope nobody's still in the pub after this year's London Perl Workshop, but Mark has already uploaded videos of many of the talks: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxavAW22r8AkOjZQENZzCZZYYgcYAtcg9 Thank you, Mark. Tom
Re: London.pm Social Meeting, Friday 7th November: Barrowboy and Banker, London Bridge
Hi all, Our next social meeting takes place on Friday, the evening before the London Perl Workshop: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20141027/025517.html The LPW's schedule is now online. Please star the talks you plan to attend: http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/schedule The LPW's news page has been busy with lots of updates over the past few days: http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/news Finally, if you'd like to help organise London.pm events, please attend http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/talk/5853 - I'm sure there are many more interesting things we could do. See you on Friday and/or Saturday, Tom
[ANNOUNCE] London.pm Social Meeting, Friday 7th November: Barrowboy and Banker, London Bridge
For a change, the next London Perl Mongers social meeting will take place on Friday (not Thursday) 7th November. We've changed the date to accomodate visitors attending Saturday's London Perl Workshop and to avoid splitting the group between two consecutive evenings. We'll meet in the Barrowboy and Banker, a large Fuller's pub near London Bridge: http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Barrowboy_And_Banker,_SE1_9QQ https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/82770796 I'll arrive some time between 6 and 6.30 in the evening, but please arrive whenever suits you. I'll have a stuffed camel with me to help you spot us. We don't have any reserved space in the pub, but it's big enough that we'll certainly find room. If you think you might have trouble finding us, please ask for my mobile number off-list. The pub is a short walk from London Bridge mainline and underground station, and a pleasant walk across the bridge from Monument. Our social meetings are open to anyone who wants to talk about Perl and related things regardless of their level of knowledge. This meeting gives you the added bonus of meeting the speakers other attendees from outside London before Saturday's workshop. I look forward to seeing you next Friday, Tom
Re: YAPC::EU 2014 Sofia Videos online
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 09:54:16AM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: https://www.youtube.com/user/yapceu Over the past few days many more talks have found their way online at the address Steve posted. If you missed anything interesting, it's much more likely to have found its way to YouTube by now. Tom
[ANNOUNCE] London.pm Dim Sum, Thursday 16th October, Docklands
Hi all, London Perl Mongers will meet for lunchtime Dim Sum on Thursday at the Lotus Floating Chinese Restaurant: http://www.lotusfloating.co.uk/ Dim Sum involves sharing a selection of small dishes amongst a group: http://www.lotusfloating.co.uk/menu/dim_sum_menu.html It's a couple of minutes walk away from Crossharbour DLR and about a ten minute walk away from Canary Wharf tube: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/169119484#map=17/51.49782/-0.01526 We visited this restaurant in March and enjoyed it. If you plan to attend, please let me know so I can warn the restaurant of our numbers in advance. Everyone's welcome for a casual lunch eating tasty treats whilst discussing Perl and related matters. Let's meet outside the restaurant at 1pm (if you work in the same office as me, we'll leave 10 minutes beforehand). Tom
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder for Thursday 2nd October !!
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 02:54:51PM +0100, Sue Spence wrote: I do. I suspect Tom is still on holiday so he might not make it either. I'm back and will remember to bring the toy camel with me to make us easier to recognise for newcomers. As I'm feeling rested after my holiday, I'll make an extra effort to talk to everyone and introduce the regulars to our less frequent attendees. I look forward to seeing you all later today, Tom
CPANTS and CPAN Testers (Was: Open/Free BSD users -- help needed to fix Test::PostgreSQL)
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 03:08:40PM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote: Because people will insist on using these OSes, and it's worth at least trying to make sure your code works in as many environments as practical. Which is why CPANTS exists I hope this comes across as informative rather than picky, but I often see people confuse CPANTS and CPAN Testers. They're quite different. CPANTS looks at CPAN distributions from the outside using several heuristics to guess their quality: http://cpants.cpanauthors.org/ CPANTS is a centralised system that runs under the complete control of its maintainer(s). CPAN Testers collates the test output from CPAN distributions produced by a distributed set of volunteers who configure their systems to submit these reports: http://www.cpantesters.com/ If you run an unusual version of Perl, an unusual operating system or an unusual hardware platform, it's especially helpful if you can submit the output of any tests you run: http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/QuickStart Sometimes people describe CPAN Testers as a competition to see who can submit the most test reports. Whilst this encourages the more prolific testers, the database also benefits from lots of people running tests on lots of different systems. It's worth considering whether you want to run it on your development system or a build machine: it's not just for high volume automated smokers. Tom
Re: Updating london.pm.org website
To give this some context, I was discussing this with Chris off-list. On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 02:05:25PM +0100, Chris Jack wrote: As I understand it, the html (or equivalent?) repository for the website is stored in github I mentioned perl-doc-cats a couple of times. With a little bit of searching for this term, I found it: https://github.com/perl-doc-cats/London-pm-website because of the age of the website server, releases cannot be done from git to the website. There are also IRC bots and mailing lists on the server. I believe we don't have a functioning release process on windmill (our server) at the moment. We've tried moving things over to new servers a couple of times, but it's a big project with several components (Web, mail, IRC) and nobody wanted to oversee the whole thing although various people were keen to help. That's fair enough, it's not fun. I welcome anyone who wants to approach this problem (thank you, Chris) but peronsally I want to focus on smaller, easier tasks that will have larger benefits for the group. Tom
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl Hack Day, Saturday 20th September 2014
On Saturday 20th September, 2014, London Perl Mongers will host our first hack day. We invite anyone who would like to work on anything Perl-related to attend. Everyone from complete Perl beginners to experts is welcome. This event will take place at the London Hack Space between 12pm and 5pm. See https://london.hackspace.org.uk/ for more information about the Hack Space. If you want to attend, you will need to sign up at http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers/events/194285872/. If you find you can't attend, please cancel so that someone else can take your place. So, what will we do? Well, everyone's free to hack on anything Perl-related that they fancy. If you have an idea, please share it on the Meetup page or on the London.pm mailing list at http://london.pm.org/join/. You'll be free to work on your own or collaborate with others to whatever extent you choose. You might want to ask other attendees for help with your work, or offer help to others: probably both. Make sure you bring a laptop that you can write code on, or one that you would like us to help you install Perl on, an enthusiastic, open mind and a cheerful demeanour. Please spread the word to anyone who you think might want to attend. See you for fun Perl hacking in September! Tom
Re: YAPC::Europe 2014, 22-24 August in Sofia, Bulgaria
On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 09:29:29PM +, Tom Hukins wrote: This year's event takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria between the 22nd and 24th of August: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/ Some of the talks have been announced and the organisers have asked for more talk submissions: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/news/1217 If you plan to attend, please mark which talks interest you to help the organisers with their scheduling. Tom
Re: Next Technical Meeting: 24th July @ Conway Hall
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 03:18:27PM +0100, Alex Balhatchet wrote: You sound busy!! Anything I can do help with the technical meeting? I'm discussing this with Alex off-list (thank you!) but anyone can help support this event by doing the following things both before and afterwards: blog/tweet about it, tell your friends/colleagues about it and, of course, show up on the evening. I'll be at Thursday's social meeting in Shepherd's Bush and I'm happy to discuss organisational stuff with anyone interested in that. Tom
Re: Next Technical Meeting: 24th July @ Conway Hall
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 02:35:42PM +0100, Chris Jack wrote: Is there a website for signing up to this? If I search on google for London Perl Mongers, the likely suspects seem to be things like: http://london.pm.org http://londonpmtech.appspot.com http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers Hi, Chris. I've mentioned to you before that London.pm is run by a small number of volunteers if and when we have time. We're always looking for more people to help out with making things happen. If we're not meeting your expectations, please join in and help out. The meeting was announced yesterday and I haven't got round to updating the calendar on london.pm.org yet. We no longer use appspot.com, so there's no news there since 2012. We'll update meetup.com soon. I can find it on the Conway Hall website: http://lanyrd.com/2014/london-perl-mongers-technical-meeting Lanyrd is not the Conway Hall's web site. It's a worldwide events and conferences listing site. (Aside, one of their developers is an ex London Perl Monger). but I'm guessing that's not the official location for sign up. Whilst it would be helpful for people to sign up on Lanyrd (or meetup when the meeting's listed there) to give us an idea of numbers, it's not required. So, if you (or anyone else) would like to help run the group, please let me know. We're not doing half the things we would like to, we know we don't have enough time and reminding us of this achieves nothing. Helping out will achieve much more. Thank you, Tom
Re: Interview - a Dancer in London:)
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 02:53:05PM +0100, Andrew Solomon wrote: Just so you know where Andy's coming from... http://blog.geekuni.com/2014/06/why-learn-perl-interview-2-andy.html Thank you both for an interesting interview. There's only one part that worries me: Is there any chance you'll give a presentation at the next LPW? Possibly, but I don't feel I've got to that level yet! As Sue suggested yesterday in her request for technical talks, the most interesting technical meetings cover a range of topics from a variety of speakers. It's interesting to hear Perl experts talk about the advanced details of how Perl works, but it's dull to only hear about this. It's always nerve wracking to give a talk, but most of us have interesting stories of our experience with Perl that would make a good 5 minute talk to get people thinking. I encourage you to offer those talks. Meeting organisers will always help you plan your talk if asked, and social meetings are a good opportunity to bounce around ideas. Tom
[ANNOUNCE] YAPC::Europe 2014, 22-24 August in Sofia, Bulgaria
As we approach summer, Europe's major Perl event, YAPC::Europe gets closer. This year's event takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria between the 22nd and 24th of August: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/ It's traditional for lots of us from London to attend, but this year, Houston, we have a problem: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/stats YAPC consists of three days of Perl talks, with plenty of time for informal discussion with other attendees. Evenings involve chat about Perl and other things over drinks, card games, dinner or sightseeing (or a combination of those things). In case you haven't been before, I strongly recommend it. If you'd like to spend time around (or perhaps avoid) other Perl Mongers add your details to the Arrivals, Departures and Accomodation pages linked to at the bottom of the Travel Wiki page: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/wiki?node=Travel Please spread the news about this event to anyone who you think would like to know about it. I hope to see you in Sofia, Tom
Re: Evaluating user-defined conditions
On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 09:55:40AM +0200, Mark Overmeer wrote: * Andrew Beverley (a...@andybev.com) [140609 10:57]: I'd like to take a condition specified by a user and use it to perform a set of tests on a data set. Is there a module to do this? What about PPI: parse the string as Perl, then walk throught the result tree to check for unsupported nodes. PPI provides a complicated way to parse as much of Perl as possible. It has 68 bugs currently filed against it. I wouldn't be surprised if a malicious user could generate simple code that would cause PPI to consume lots of resources. Given that Andy wants to process untrusted input, this seems like a bad choice. The earlier suggestions on this thread of using a specialised mini-language or constructing one using a parser seem like better solutions than generalised approaches like using PPI or Docker containers. Tom
Re: Getting the schema for a DB table
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 08:20:02PM +0200, Thomas Klausner wrote: I've never had problems with installing deps since cpanm came out. I usually do something like cpanm --installdeps . -n -L local That's fortunate. In recent months I've encountered problems taking this approach with a client's code base. Off the top of my head, I recall problems with Net::Amazon::S3 and Net::Server. I might have forgotten others. Of course, I'm using open source software so I submit patches (if others haven't beaten me to it) and wait patiently. I'm not complaining: I don't feel entitled to anything more. To work around this, you can point cpanm at your own Pinto with local patches, but I don't see unpatched CPAN as a frustration-free way of stating dependencies for large code bases. Tom
Re: Module namespace for projects
On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 09:59:00AM +0100, Andrew Beverley wrote: Following on from the above, should I then be uploading the modules to CPAN? In addition to James's helpful reply, one of my colleagues reminded me of PrePAN this morning: http://prepan.org/ It's a place to review people's code before it hits CPAN and to submit your code for review. I haven't used it myself. Also, consider putting your code in a Git repository somewhere and posting a link to it here. If you do so before a social meeting, you might find a few people in the pub who would like to talk through your work over a drink. :) Tom
Re: Dim Sum tomorrow Joy King Lau
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 12:32:24PM +0100, Chris Jack wrote: Sue Spence wrote It's been a month or so since the last Thursday dim sum, so I would like to propose meeting up for some dumplings, steamed buns and other tasty treats. FYI: I'm on the digest form of the list and it turned up in my email at Thursday 12:10pm which is a bit late to decide to go. That's a shame, but Sue helpfully also posted to the low volume announcement list and I added it to our Google Calendar last night. Please consider tracking either of these if you want to find out about events in a more timely way. Thank you, Sue, for organising Dim Sum: I hope everyone who could make it is having tasty food and interesting conversation. Tom
London.pm Social Meeting, 3rd April, The Counting House - EC3V 3PD
Hi all, For some reason, Rick's announcement of our next social meeting didn't make it to this list from the announcement list: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2014-March/000347.html (where it says March in the subject, it should say April). I hope to see you at The Counting House in the City of London on Thursday 3rd April. Tom
Re: London Perl Mongers March Social - 2014-03-06 - The Antelope SW1W 8EZ
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 05:22:30PM +, Andrew Beverley wrote: The March London.pm Social will be on Thursday 6th March, at The Antelope, just off Sloane Square. Thank you for organising this, Andy. It was good to have our own private space in such a lovely pub. Rick Deller is organising April's meeting but we have no social meetings planned after that. If you'd like to organise a future meeting, please let me know. Tom
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Damian Conway Speaking at London.pm: Monday, 10th March
On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 07:56:28PM +, mascip wrote: I can't make it. Hi, Pierre, that's a shame. I would be grateful if anyone who can't attend frees up their space on meetup: http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers/events/167483972/ This means people on the waiting list can attend instead. Also, if you know anyone on the list who can't make it, please ask them to free up their space. Any chance that our will be filmed? The evening won't be filmed. Tom
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London.pm Dim Sum, Wednesday 3rd March, Docklands
On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 12:48:49AM +, Paul LeoNerd Evans wrote: On Mon, 3 Mar 2014 21:45:53 + Tom Hukins t...@eborcom.com wrote: Subject: [ANNOUNCE] London.pm Dim Sum, Wednesday 3rd March, Docklands Perhaps you mean Wednesday 5th? Yes, we'll go for Dim Sum on Wednesday 5th. Tom
[ANNOUNCE] London.pm Dim Sum, Wednesday 3rd March, Docklands
Hi all, London Perl Mongers will meet for lunchtime Dim Sum this Wednesday at the Lotus Floating Chinese Restaurant: http://www.lotusfloating.co.uk/ Dim Sum involves sharing a selection of small dishes amongst a group: http://www.lotusfloating.co.uk/menu/dim_sum_menu.html It's a couple of minutes walk away from South Quay DLR and about a ten minute walk away from Canary Wharf tube: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/169119484#map=17/51.49782/-0.01526 I've never been here before, and when I walked past today it was closed - apparently it's always closed on Mondays - so we'll have to treat this as an explorative adventure into uncertainty. As an extra treat, Nicholas Clark is visiting London and will join us for lunch, hopefully not in dumpling form. Let's meet outside the restaurant and head inside at 12:50 (to beat the 1pm office-leaving rush). If you plan to attend, I'd be grateful if you let me know in advance. All are welcome for a casual lunch eating tasty treats whilst discussing Perl and related matters. I hope to see you for lunch on Wednesday, Tom
[ANNOUNCE] Damian Conway Speaking at London.pm: Monday, 10th March
London Perl Mongers invite you to join us on Monday, 10th March to see and hear the renowned Damian Conway talk about A Few Of My Favorite Things: http://damian.conway.org/Seminars/FavoriteThings.html If you wish to attend this event, you will need to sign up beforehand: http://www.meetup.com/London-Perl-Mongers/events/167483972/ We are extremely grateful to our sponsors, Venda and Mozilla, who have made this event possible. This talk will take place at Mozilla's central London offices: 101 St Martins Lane (3rd Floor) London WC2N 4AZ https://wiki.mozilla.org/London http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/160978349 Please arrive at 6.30pm for a prompt 7pm start. See you on Monday, 10th March, Tom
Re: Main general Perl mailing list
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:08:28AM -0500, Chris Devers wrote: On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:52 AM, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: What is the main general Perl mailing list, ie. most active for general Perl questions? lists.perl.org has over 200 entries. That's it? This is purely a surveying activity? Or did you want to ask this hypothetical general list a question, too? In case this adverserial conversation turns unpleasant, I think Chris is pointing out that if you explain why you're asking a question we can provide more helpful answers. You've already received the correct answer there isn't one but if you tell us what you would do with such a list if one existed, we might be able to point you at other helpful things. Tom
Re: Perl 6 what can you do today
On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 02:04:43PM +, Steve Mynott wrote: http://video.fosdem.org/2014/K3201/Saturday/Perl_6_what_can_you_do_today.webm It looks like other videos from Fosdem's Perl room have made it to http://video.fosdem.org/2014/K3201/Saturday/ so there's lots of interesting things to catch up on for those of us who didn't make it to Brussels. Tom
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers February Social - 2014-02-06 - Edgar Wallace WC2R 3JE
On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 08:48:20PM +, Michael Jemmeson wrote: The February London.pm Social will be on Thursday 6th February, at The Edgar Wallace just off the Strand. They serve tasty pub food and have a large and varied selection of lovely ales. As an extra incentive, there will be free beer! Christine Wong from ReThink Recruitment is generously putting £200 behind the bar. Christine can't be there herself, but a colleague will attending on her behalf, so please say hello and thanks. We've got space reserved upstairs from 19:00 onwards. This meeting takes place tomorrow: please join us. See you in the pub, Tom
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London.pm Social - 2nd January 2014 - Gunmakers
Hi, all. If, like me, you're unsure what day we're on after the recent holidays, you might appreciate the reminder that we're meeting in The Gunmakers, Clerkenwell this evening. See you later, Tom On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 06:15:11PM +, James Laver wrote: Should you be needing respite from a period of overindulgence, you’ll be out of luck at our January social. For the rest of us, we’ll be enjoying foamy beer, fruity ciders and fragrant wines and possibly a bit of food to cap it off with (not that this was in short supply recently for most of you I’ll wager). We haven’t been to the Gunmakers in quite a long time now, but we’re going back in the only month of the year we have a chance of getting a social there. As per usual, people who haven’t attended a social before will get a free (as in beer!) pint. Find us. We’ll be the ones that look like perlmongers. I’ll be there from about 6pm. The Gunmakers, 13 Eyre St Hill, Clerkenwell EC1R 5ET http://thegunmakers.co.uk/ James
Re: Volunteers Wanted to Organise Future Social Meetings
On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 05:19:41PM +, Tom Hukins wrote: Please get in touch if you would like to organise a future social meeting. I'd be extremely grateful. Thank you very much to the volunteer organisers of next year's first three social meetings: James Laver (January), Michael Jemmeson (February) and Andrew Beverley (March). They're the people to politely remind if planning seems a little late, and to enthusiastically thank after a few drinks on the night. In addition to our regular social and technical meetings, I'm planning a couple of different events, one of which I expect to announce soon. Tom
Re: Volunteers Wanted to Organise Future Social Meetings
On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 12:02:32PM +, Tom Hukins wrote: So, I'm looking for volunteers. If you'd like to organise a future meeting please contact me off-list. I'm happy to help if you'd like to arrange a meeting but aren't sure what you need to do. Currently we have no volunteers, which prevents us from giving plenty of advance notice for our social meetings. Volunteering only requires you to organise one social meeting: it won't be a regular responsibility. I'd be really grateful if one or more people could offer to sort out our next few social meetings so I can focus on sorting out other interesting things I'm planning for our group. Please get in touch if you would like to organise a future social meeting. I'd be extremely grateful. Thanks, Tom
Volunteers Wanted to Organise Future Social Meetings
For some time, London.pm has had a series of pub minions who organise our social meetings. Every month, our pub minion chooses a suitable pub, reserves some space for us there and announces the meeting. I discussed this with Peter Corlett, our current pub minion, a while ago and suggested that we try something different: rather than one person arranging our social meetings every month, as of January let's give someone different the chance every month. So, I'm looking for volunteers. If you'd like to organise a future meeting please contact me off-list. I'm happy to help if you'd like to arrange a meeting but aren't sure what you need to do. Ideally, we will meet in a variety of pubs, in different parts of central(ish) London and announce our meetings and their location plenty of time in advance. More immediately, Mark Keating is still looking for someone in London to organise a pub on the Friday night (29th November) before this year's London Perl Workshop. If you'd like to do that, please contact me or him off-list. Finally, I want to thank Peter for choosing an interesting variety of good pubs for us to meet in. I encourage those of you who enjoyed them to repay his generosity by helping organise future meetings. See you all soon, Tom
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 02:57:33PM +0100, gvim wrote: On 18/09/2013 14:21, Jérôme Étévé wrote: Probably a book about trolling on London.pm would be most entertaining. I think it reflects badly on our community when any concern raised about something lacking is automatically dismissed as trolling. Hi, gvim. I think Jérôme was being silly rather than dismissive. Also, I think your question is quite open-ended and has all sorts of answers, most of which will be hard to validate. This sort of discussion perhaps lends itself better to chat over a few drinks than a mailing list. Having said that, there's no harm in asking it here. If you come along to our next social (Thursday, October 3rd) I'll buy you a drink and we can have a chat about this. I don't think we've met before as I'm fairly sure I'd remember meeting someone called gvim. Tom
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 03:22:06PM +0100, gvim wrote: On 18/09/2013 14:59, Joel Bernstein wrote: Again, I seriously wonder if you're trolling Wikipedia defines trolling as: I don't care. Please let's not discuss what trolling means or whether anyone's doing it. Let's keep this thread to its original topic. If anyone wants to start new threads, that's fine, as long as they're not about the semantics of trolling or whether anyone's doing it. If anyone has a problem with anyone else's behaviour here, please contact me off-list and wel'l discuss it. Tom (London.pm leader)
Re: while in London
On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 06:34:01PM +0300, Diana Donca wrote: I'm Diana Donca, member of cluj.pm. I'm in London till September 30th, but since I'm working Monday to Friday, I think the weekend would be best for hanging out. Hi, Diana. We have a social meeting on the 5th (location to be arranged) and probably a technical meeting on the 19th: http://london.pm.org/meetings/ But the group's usually happy to meet up on other occasions: I'm sure someone will suggest something suitable during the weekend as well. Please Cc Diana on your replies as she's not subscribed to the list - I had to approve her post. Look forward to meeting London.pm community. Yes, see you soon! Tom
Re: Assigning anonymous hash to a list
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:44:23PM -0300, Hernan Lopes wrote: if you dont understood what i meant, i am not going to explain. Please keep pointless, unhelpful messages like this off our mailing list. Tom (London.pm leader)
Re: WANTED: Speakers for technical talk 2013-07-25
On Mon, Jul 08, 2013 at 08:12:06PM +0100, Jason Clifford wrote: On Mon, 2013-07-08 at 19:35 +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: I'm looking for speakers for a technical talk on 2013-07-25 around Liverpool Street. If you're interested in speaking on something vaguely Perl-related for around 20 minutes, for example to practice a YAPC::Europe talk, please email me offlist. What is the event? I may be free and I'd be willing to talk. It's the the next London.pm technical meeting. Tom
Re: OT: Cheapo vps hosting
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 05:13:05PM +0100, Pierre M wrote: Any recommendation on Web proxies? For the situation Ben describes, I use ssh -D to create a SOCKS proxy on my local machine and point my Web browser at that to relay traffic through a remote sshd. I also use this approach for using a company's intranet if that company provides SSH access to its internal network. I use http://www.exonetric.com/ for such things. It's handy to get limited amounts of tech support at London.pm socials (although that might not help from Berlin). Tom
Re: Regex lookahead example not as stated in Camel 4th
On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 03:02:32PM +0100, gvim wrote: On 19/06/13 14:52, Abigail wrote: That's not a lookahead assertion. So there's a typo on p.248 Yes, and it's listed in the errata on the publisher's Web site: http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9780596004927 Tom
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:37:08PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: I attended most of the London PM tech meetings until they stopped. I'm pleased that you enjoy your involvement in our community, but please don't spread the rumour that anything we used to do stopped happening. With a small group of volunteers and a large group of followers and mailing list subscribers, reality sometimes disrupts our aspirations. We get distracted and occasionally overwhelmed, but we don't stop. Tom
Re: New perl features?
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 09:40:53PM +, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:31, Mike Stok m...@stok.ca wrote: Even if it wasn't ... the question I try to ask is How can I make it easier to deploy my app? rather than What must I do to fit into your infrastructure?. Not what I was asking. That doesn't matter. Mike described the question he tries to ask and considered an answer to that question. This list allows us to discuss things that interest us and explore ideas related to the original question, even if they don't address that question directly. Tom
Re: London.pm Server for Mailing List and Web Site
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 01:41:30PM +, Peter Corlett wrote: On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 08:44:08AM +, Tom Hukins wrote: The server running this jail is very old, so Exonetric have also provided us with a much newer FreeBSD 8 jail that various people have done some work on migrating us to. I suspect that the lack of volunteers is that there aren't many people with experience with that particular platform ... Were it running Debian, say, you'd no doubt have plenty of volunteers, myself included. Yes, I agree. One person has offered to help with the migration off-list, but I appreciate the advantage of using a platform that more of us prefer. Perhaps you might want to consider following up on those offers of alternative hosting? :) However, yours is the first alternative offer I remember receiving. Thank you. (Heck, a whole dedicated low-end server at Hetzner is under £250/year and could be easily lost in my hosting bills.) In my opinion, the main advantage of using Exonetric is that they don't charge us and at least two of their staff are London Perl Mongers. I don't worry about the price of a low end server, but remembering to pay would create a recurring task that we musn't neglect. Again, thank you for your offer. I'll get in touch off-list. Tom
London.pm Server for Mailing List and Web Site
Hi all, London.pm runs its mailing lists, Web site and IRC bot from a FreeBSD jail called windmill kindly hosted by Exonetric. The server running this jail is very old, so Exonetric have also provided us with a much newer FreeBSD 8 jail that various people have done some work on migrating us to. However, as far as I can tell work on this has stalled. I want to put my energy for the group into organiastional tasks and I suspect others have other things they would rather do. Before I start thinking about moving away from our own server to standard pm.org infrastructure I thought I should ask whether anyone wants to complete the work done so far. Please note, I'm not asking for alternative offers of hosting. We have a server. We just don't seem to have people willing to configure, update and maintain a server. I have no problem with that, but I thought I should check this is the case before changing anything. Tom
Re: Device for reading perldoc
On Sat, Jan 05, 2013 at 06:04:39PM +, gvim wrote: I realised after posting that Perl is ideal for converting between formats so generating PDF from Pod should be no problem. However, I suppose I'm really looking for something which will also give me a command line + Perl + bash. Ah well, guess it's a bit early for that. Maybe when Ubuntu mobile hits the tablets? I find it difficult to understand what you want. Here's my best guess so far: You want a device that you can view PDFs on. You want that device to run Perl and bash. You want to generate PDFs from POD on that device. Many devices offer that, as I suspect you know, including the Linux box I'm sat in front of now. When you use the word device I think you specifically mean some sort of modern mobile thing like a tablet. You probably have certain other requirements that you haven't told us yet. Before you post to this list, please take the time to describe what you want carefully to help us understand your question. In this case, if you can explain what you mean by device I reckon we're very close to having enough information to help you. Also, tell us anything else important that you haven't mentioned yet. Tom
Re: The Perl Review Magazines Available
On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 09:27:03PM +, Tom Hukins wrote: If you'd like any or all of these, please mail me off-list. I can bring them to any london.pm meeting. I brought them along to this evening's meeting and they all found new homes for the new year. It was good to see you all again. Those of you who couldn't make it missed some good beer, good food and interesting conversation. See you all in February, Tom
The Perl Review Magazines Available
Hi all, I've just tidied up several issues of The Perl Review that need a new home. See http://theperlreview.com/ for details. I don't want any money for them - they'll find their way to my recycling bin if nobody wants them. I have volume 1 issues 1-3, volume 2 issues 0-1, volume 3 issues 2-3, volume 4 issues 0-3 and volume 5 issues 0-2. If you'd like any or all of these, please mail me off-list. I can bring them to any london.pm meeting. Tom
Re: cpan you have to see
On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 08:02:28PM +, Lyle wrote: It seems this guy is sticking up for himself following the regular LPM taunts. Shouldn't most of you now follow up with more nastiness, some insults in ASCII art, then when he gives anything back kick him from the list? As far as I've experienced, this is how you do things. Lyle, you posted a rude, unconstructive message. Your rudeness contrasts with the polite, helpful replies that London.pm members have written to Alexej. If you can't behave reasonably on this list, please take your delusional conspiracy theories elsewhere. Tom
Re: cpan you have to see
On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 04:05:58PM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote: On 12/12/2012 11:46 AM, James Laver wrote: Just because you get to work with all of the nice clean code in the world doesn't mean some people aren't stuck with the mistakes of others. Then again, my primary income stream is writing code and yours is recruitment, so it's expected I'm more likely to have to clean up messes. you still have strange views of my career. i have worked with some of the ugliest code and team(mis)work in existence. I asked you both not to bicker on the list last week, yet you're at it again. I have temporarily set both of your subscriptions to moderated mode, along with Lyle's. The moderators will approve any interesting posts that you write. Tom (London.pm leader)
Re: Agents part CCXXXIV
On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 10:40:02AM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote: On 12/03/2012 07:05 AM, James Laver wrote: one reason i ask my candidates where else they are being submitted is to avoid those duplications. Bullshit. You ask because you want to try and muscle in on those positions. If you really asked permission before submitting every time (as you claim later in your email) you'd never be in a position of double submission. Pimp standard trick #4. James, stop making unfounded rude accusations on this list. That kind of behaviour has no place here. and you can read my mind? wow. too bad my tin foil hat foiled you. i have never tried to learn about open leads from my candidates. Uri, I completely understand why you feel the need to defend yourself. However this list has a tendency to set itself alight from only the smallest spark. Let's all try to keep our focus on making this group the way we want it. Tom
Duct Tape Quotation
This possibly leads on from Dave's question earlier: Perl was once described as the duct tape that hold the Internet together. As I recall this phrase comes from the webmaster of sun.com in the mid-nineties, but I can't find any evidence for this. Wikipedia points at some anecdotal salon.com article that fails to cite the original source. Popular search engines don't reveal anything helpful either. Hopefully someone here can remind me, if only to reassure me that I haven't invented yet another faux-fact. Thanks, Tom
Re: Available...
On Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 10:42:57AM +0100, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: Just thought I'd throw it out there so I don't have to deal with recruiters if at all possible, but I'm available right now. I should mention that we have separate jobs mailing lists for this kind of thing. I suspect Dave has forgotten about them. jobs-announce deals with job announcements, and by extension I'd guess vacancy announcements, although I'm not sure we've used it for that before. jobs-discuss deals with conversation amongst group members - various people have posted looking for work announcements there before. I dislike us having these separate lists, but after various people were unpleasant towards recruiters on the main list, they seemed necessary several years ago. Consequently, we have a policy. Let's stick to the few policies we have without creating the need for enforcement. Tom
Moderated Mailing List
Hi, I've set this mailing list to moderate all postings. I'll switch it back to normal in due course. I hope to see many of you in the pub on Thursday for the usual enthusiastic, interesting discussion about Perl and (un?)related chat. Tom
Re: Moderated Mailing List
On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 08:09:02PM +, Tom Hukins wrote: I've set this mailing list to moderate all postings. I'll switch it back to normal in due course. For those who don't already know, this means I, or another moderator, will filter what shows up on this list for now. If we reject your post, we'll explain why. Tomorrow evening, I'll switch the moderation off if the list remains calm. Nobody's censoring you: I'm just deferring the over-excitement. I hope to see many of you in the pub on Thursday for the usual enthusiastic, interesting discussion about Perl and (un?)related chat. Remember, we're a group for people in and around London who share our enthusiasm for Perl. But everyone's welcome: even outsiders. Despite our broad inclusiveness, let's focus on the interesting things we use our language for and that hold our community together. If you want to post to this list, please help improve our community. If you want to settle a score or state your moral superiority, please go elsewhere. Thanks, Tom
Re: Who made the law?
On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 06:47:47PM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Where is the usage policy of #london.pm IRC channel. Hi, sorry I'm a little late to this therad. Thank you all for the constructive discussion. I'm going to think for a while before making a decision on this: I want to avoid rushing anything important. I'm happy to listen to everyone's thoughts, either on the list, privately, or in the pub on Thursday. All of us have limited time and energy to put into this group. Let's focus on doing good things. If there's something we should be doing, but we're not, let me know. Tom
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers Technical Meeting 2012-07-12
On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 02:54:05PM +0100, Taka wrote: I was told that we would have last tech session slides short after? But nothing yet happend. Hi, We're all a group of volunteers, so sometimes things get missed. We're currently in the process of migrating the Web site, but the future version lives at: https://github.com/perl-doc-cats/London-pm-website If you're keen to see the slides online, why not contact the speakers and get their work incorporated? If you need help with git, please ask. I'll be at tomorrow's social meeting and next week's technical meeting. Please come and say hello if you can think of things we should be doing or if you would like to help out. Or just come and say hello if you'd like a drink and a chat. If you can't make it, feel free to mail me. Cheers! Tom (wearing his shiny new(ish) leader hat)
Re: Best practices for API wrapper development?
On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 04:52:14PM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: I hated the Amazon one, it was overkill. Probabl my usual approach of flinging hashes around is suboptimal. Schwern's position on the shoulders of giants by using DBIC for a relatively simple interface might be too heavy. It's unclear what you're talking about here. It would help if you explained what Schwern's position refers to in this case. No giggling at the back. I assume you want to talk to some sort of Web Service API over the Internet. I have a few gripes with how several CPAN modules do this using LWP, most of which I'm occasionally guilty of. Let your users pass in their own LWP objects if they wish. This means they can reuse existing LWP instances, can configure LWP as they wish, or can pass in an object with a similar interface for testing. If users don't explicitly pass in an LWP instance, create one with reasonable defaults. Enable HTTP persistent connections by setting keep_alive to a value greater than 1. This particularly helps when using SSL as the client and server don't need to negotiate an SSL handshake for each request. When talking to Salesforce.com's API using LWP a few years ago, I found my code ran around 20 times faster with this (from memory: I might misremember, but it helped lots). Set max_redirect to 0 if you don't expect to receive redirect responses and restrict the protocols_allowed to avoid information leaking out over protocols you don't want to use. I don't know whether this answers your question, but I hope it helps. Tom
Re: A new leader is born...
Hi all, I'm flattered to have been chosen to follow in the footsteps of Leo and London.pm's previous leaders. Thank you, Leo, for all your work over the past year and a bit. As an established group, London.pm already has several people successfully fulfilling various roles. I aim to help these people (I won't try to name you all because I'll forget someone) continue to do a great job, and encourage others to pursue unfilled roles they care about. I look forward to helping anyone in or near London with an interest in Perl make this group welcoming, informative and fun. I hope to see lots of you for drinks and pleasant conversation on Thursday. Tom
Re: London Perl Workshop: Newsletter 4
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 07:15:03PM +0100, Mark Keating wrote:
(http://shadowc.at/oqPG7h), added it to Lanyrd
(http://shadowc.at/nhq3kN), liked the Facebook page
There's also a LinkedIn event to help promote the Workshop on that
network:
http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1_ch_panel_id=1_ch_app_id=30_applicationId=2000appParams={%22referrer%22%3A%22hub%22%2C%22go_to%22%3A%22events%2F760993%22}_ownerId=2726581completeUrlHash=_B8i
Tom
Toshiba Laptop Repair in London
Hi, Mongers. A friend has a year old Toshiba laptop with a broken DC input jack. Toshiba have decided this consists of reasonable wear and tear and so want to charge £80 just to look at it. They refuse to estimate or guess how much a repair might cost. So, how should I go about getting this laptop fixed? Do you know of anywhere in or around London (the nearer Sutton the better) that would do a good job? Tom
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 02:00:41PM +0200, Abigail wrote:
I'd rather go for sacking people that don't know the difference
between
if (something) { ... }
and
unless (!something) { ... }
It's sunny outside and pubs are open: I can think of worse times to
lose my job.
Or does everyone think they are always equivalent?
I'm not everyone, and with a language as flexible as Perl I hesitate
to make strong statements involving words like always, but I don't
recall encountering a situation where they differ.
In response to your question, I started out thinking about zero but
true values, but this doesn't matter because double negation of
truthfulness won't care about the value. So I got stuck.
The only special situation I can think of would be when someone
overloads the ! operator. I would console anyone doing this on code
I maintain by mentioning that it's sunny outside and pubs are open.
I suspect I've missed lots of other interesting syntactical
peculiarities, though. Would you mind sharing them?
Tom
Re: Security of HTTP based authentication
On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 07:29:33PM +, Alexander Clouter wrote: [Lots of good advice snipped] I personally would just HTTPS *everything*, the solution is in making your website cache friendly. I don't understand this, given that nothing should cache HTTPS responses. Using HTTPS and cache friendliness seem like two contradictory goals to me. http://www.ircache.net/cgi-bin/cacheability.py For a more modern, improved service by the same author, see http://redbot.org/ Tom
Re: London.pm leader election
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 03:45:11PM +0100, Denny wrote: Seriously then, I propose that we consider being an autonomous self-organising collective instead of having a leader. That's a reasonable proposition. Anyone who wants this can stand for election as leader and let the cats herd themselves. Aren't pub meets and tech meets (and dim sum, and heretics) already organised by different people anyway? Yes, but I suspect that London.pm benefits from having an individual co-ordinate these different activities, occasionally gently guiding the group in a suitable direction. Dave, Paul, Mark, Simon, Greg and Leon have all done a good, often thankless, job of leading London Perl Mongers. I hope someone of a similar calibre will offer their service this time. Alternatively, is there a duties and responsibilities list for the role of leader somewhere? London Perl Mongers has no formal constitution unlike, say, Birmigham Perl Mongers who operate as a limited company. I believe London.pm works very well in this informal way and I hope it will continue to do so. Despite the benefits of informality, I doubt that a self-organising collective would work as well as having a clearly defined person checking tasks don't become neglected. That might lead to some more serious consideration of good candidates for nomination. How so? If someone wants to reform London.pm, what stops that person becoming the next leader and defining their duties having satisfied the voters? Tom
Re: Need a CRUD thing
On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 02:40:57PM +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote: On 25 Aug 2010, at 14:28, David Cantrell wrote: Dear interwebs, please point me at a Thingy which will allow me to point a tiny script at a database and have it do CRUDdy web stuff. A while back I would have pointed you to CatalystX::ListFramework::Builder However I see it has now been deprecated in favour of Catalyst::Plugin::AutoCRUD Oliver renamed LFB to AutoCRUD in the hope that the new name would describe what it does better. While I like it lots, I don't believe it will help Dave as it's not easily scriptable. Someone sufficiently sick might script it using something like WWW::Mechanize::Firefox, or maybe even Mechanical Turk, but I would never dream of considering Dave as such a person.. Tom
Re: Need a CRUD thing
On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 03:00:35PM +0100, Tom Hukins wrote: On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 02:40:57PM +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote: On 25 Aug 2010, at 14:28, David Cantrell wrote: Dear interwebs, please point me at a Thingy which will allow me to point a tiny script at a database and have it do CRUDdy web stuff. A while back I would have pointed you to CatalystX::ListFramework::Builder However I see it has now been deprecated in favour of Catalyst::Plugin::AutoCRUD While I like it lots, I don't believe it will help Dave as it's not easily scriptable. 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. Tom
Re: formatting HTML in a gtksourceview widget
On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 07:11:11PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote: The documentation on HTML::Tidy is less than helpful: clean( $str [, $str...] ) Cleans a string, or list of strings, that make up a single HTML file. Returns the cleaned string as a single string. I believe it's more helpful than it was before I submitted a patch: it used to say Returns true if all went OK, never mentioning that it returns the cleaned up HTML. The author didn't commit my patch directly, so the documentation doesn't contain what I wrote (see the RT ticket referenced from my journal entry), but I'm grateful that he chose to commit any sort of improvement. Not exactly obvious is it? Perhaps not, but if you can improve it, you should send a patch to the author. If you can't improve it, I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by mentioning this here. Tom
Re: formatting HTML in a gtksourceview widget
On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 04:23:41PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote: So it seems I shall have to format it first. HTML::Tidy seems only to do checking. I used to think this too: http://use.perl.org/~tomhukins/journal/27445 I've not used HTML::Tidy in a while, but I suspect its clean() method does what you want. Tom
Re: [Fwd: Betonmarkets CTO position]
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 07:57:31PM +, Peter Corlett wrote: Rather bizarrely, I was pimpspammed about a Head of Technology role at Endemol. It's day one and the candidates have been asked about their five main strengths and weaknesses... Has anyone made a self referential TV show yet where they follow a group of people trying to make a TV show? Tom (no TV since 1999)
Re: The bar receipt for Saturday night...
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 05:23:07PM +0100, Luis Motta Campos wrote: Mike Whitaker wrote: Indeed. It wasn't even remotely humerus. Anh... I guess that would be an arm joke. Do you think it was worth the risc? Tom
Re: Recommended hotels or crash place for LPW 2009?
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:03:43PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: http://www.laterooms.com/en/hotel-reservations/145131_croydon-serviced-apartments-tg10-croydon.aspx Ah yes, Croydon. Zone 10. I thought that too from glancing at the URL, but decided to check the page itself before making a fool of myself in public. Tom
Re: git vs mercurial
On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 10:58:12AM +, James Laver wrote: I used mercurial in a nondistributed fashion at $previous_work and that was a disaster. One guy kept pushing every 30 seconds and I couldn't get a commit in edgeways. I haven't used Mercurial, but that sounds like a social problem rather than a technical shortcoming. Version control involves more collaboration between people than most software problems. Nonetheless, I like version control tools that deal exclusively with the fiddly things humans find time consuming like branching and merging, keeping out of the way of interpersonal issues. I have used a few collaborative tools that try to resolve human issues, and they seldom do as good a job as most humans. Tom
Re: Payment Providers
On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 10:26:06AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: However, one can't take payments from Maestro unless one has 3D insecure. (And it seems that even easyJet are no longer large enough to wiggle out of that one) Nor are Google: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4356-why-has-google-checkout-dropped-maestro Paypal probably meets most of your criteria too :-) They meet all of them. Tom
Re: Payment Providers
On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 01:40:55PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: We had a chat at lunch, and (IIRC) Tom said that he thinks that Amazon are now not taking Maestro. You remember correctly, but I'm wrong. I managed to end up looking at the list of card types accepted on amazon.com and somehow convinced myself I was on the UK site. I probably need a holiday. Tom
Re: [OT] SalesForce + CVS
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 06:59:00PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote: David Cantrell wrote: On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 04:35:18PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote: Without getting into religious wars about it, both CVS and SVN are designed for individuals or (very) small teams to be working on one problem at a time on a particular unit of source. You're talking about merge conflicts? Git doesn't prevent them. No I am talking about nasty CVS simultaneous repository conflicts where several people have the same code checked out and then check it all back in separately. Have you also encountered this problems in a post 1.0 release of Subversion? I assumed you were talking about merge conflicts because CVS and SVN deal with atomicity differently, and you seemed to describe a problem that affects both products. Tom
Re: setting up a file hierarchy
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 04:02:19PM +0200, Jurgen Pletinckx wrote: A .docx file is just a zip container with a handful of XML documents (plus extra media, if applicable). For most of these, the default content is fine. But what is the optimal way of generating them? ... I set up the hierarchy in a folder, and package that up with Archive::Zip, as it makes interactions with the files easier. I could write directly into a zip file, but that doesn't really make a difference to the problem. I think I'd use Template Toolkit's ttree to build the internal structure, then package that with Archive::Zip as you suggest. That seems cleaner to me than a script with lots of END in it because the input file structure matches the output archive structure, but then I'm easily confused. Tom
Re: setting up a file hierarchy
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 05:19:16PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 04:50:06PM +0100, Chisel Wright wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 04:33:06PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: I'll pay attention when it doesn't rely on Module::Install. Should I ask why? Would you like to install mandatory pre-requisite Foo::Bar for this 'ere module what you told the comptuer to install? Y/n I think we're supposed to believe that everyone somehow knows to set the correct environment variable to deal with this. The environment variable exists, and it's documented. And we should all somehow find the right documentation, and if we consider it sufficiently annoying, patch the code or stop whining about backwards incompatibility. I worry about things like Modern Perl and Enlightened Perl, not because I want to remain stuck in the past, but because I worry about how we convey fundamental changes to Perl users outside our clique. Sometimes the word Schumpeter sounds like an elephant trampling everyone to death. Sorry, I don't have any constructive advice here other than that the constructive advice we offer should remain helpful in future, lest we eventualy alienate those we briefly appeal to. We've taught people how to use CPAN, then thrown away our credibility with Module::Install. Please replace the elephant, and grope it again. I feel fortunate to belong with the in-crowd that can ask the right people for help. Consequently, I've managed to make Module::Install behave how I want. People outside our clique won't know who to ask and won't readily get such helpful answers. Tom
Re: Beautiful is better than ugly
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 07:53:31AM +0100, Léon Brocard wrote: Which Perl website do you think looks the worst? Which has the worst navigation? It's as much about the content as its presentation, but I have a certain fondness for a particular entry in the CPAN FAQ: http://cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#VRML_error Tom
Re: Perl Christmas Quiz
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:04:17AM +, James Laver wrote: http://uk.php.net/array_intersect -- yes, you can just put a function name and mod_rewrite will help find the docs, it would be nice to have something similar for perl ). http://perldoc.perl.org/ does a fairly good job of this. I have a keyword bookmark in my browser connected to its 'Search' box that I created by right clicking on the box, so I can type, for example, perldoc unlink into my browser and end up at the right place. JJ has easier linking listed in his Future Plans: http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/perldoc Personally, I think the site works fine in its current form and it's a huge improvement over what Perl had before. Tom
Re: Perl's lack of 'in' keyword
On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 09:57:38PM +0100, Iain Barnett wrote: Ok, no problem. I read it that way because the default monger response to any criticism of perl is the old Wimbledon chant, No one likes us but we don't care. I think you mean Millwall, although Wimbledon 2.0 (MK Dons) have adopted this chant probably because they're less popular than Millwall. To paraphrase John Lennon. Badly. Some people eat pie at football matches, so I declare this post on-topic. Tom
Re: compression (was: gzipping your websites)
On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 01:13:56AM +0100, Sam Vilain wrote: On Mon, 01 Sep 2003 21:11, Tom Hukins wrote; Also, I suspect the case for bzip2 becomes stronger in the future. Assume Moore's Law continues to hold for CPU speed increase. Disk and This argument is irrelevant in general, because the size of files to be compressed in general also increases with Moore's law. I don't understand how this changes anything. If CPU increases outstrip bandwidth increases, CPU intensive compression/decompression becomes more appropriate compared to bandwidth intensive compression. It's already been mentioned that bzip2 performs better on large files than on small files, so if anything I would expect larger file sizes to favour bzip2. Tom
Re: compression (was: gzipping your websites)
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 07:13:47PM +0100, Paul Mison wrote: bzip2 is much, much slower than gzip, but doesn't provide significantly smaller files I've heard this argument before. I agree with the point, but bzip2 works well for some current problems: we've already heard about compressing Web server log files[0]. Also, if space is at a premium, bzip2 (obviously) helps. Imagine you want to distribute lots of software on CD/DVD, with the assumption that users don't want to change disks. This is part of the reason why FreeBSD packages use bzip2. Also, I suspect the case for bzip2 becomes stronger in the future. Assume Moore's Law continues to hold for CPU speed increase. Disk and memory capabilities increase faster, so none of these things matter as much as now. Bandwidth increases less rapidly than other factors[1], so for downloading files over the Internet, size becomes relatively more important. Tom [0] I remember when I used to call to call these Web logs, but that means something else nowadays. [1] I don't always agree with Jakob Nielsen, but he's been more accurate than many in this respect: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html
Re: No multipart or HTML
On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 03:48:33PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: Martin Bower recently appears to be posting in text/plain from a hotmail.com account. There have been others too it seems (mutt: ~f @hotmail.com) I've asked a few Hotmail-using friends to switch from HTML (or rich text as Hotmail call it) to plain text. When I explained the reasons, they were happy to do so. Does anyone have any URLs they like explaining switching to text/plain in Outlook etc? http://www.expita.com/nomime.html#programs Tom
Re: XML XML::LibXML declarations issue
On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:44:51PM +0200, Robin Berjon wrote: Toby Corkindale wrote: Am I doing something wrong here, or is XML::LibXML, or is the VoiceXML standard? When you call findnodes, you are not providing the necessary namespace context, which is why it works when you remove the namespace but not when it's there. So yes you're doing something wrong, but it's not really your fault because this is the single most confusing part of the XPath spec. I encountered this problem a few months ago, asked for help, and got some useful feedback, including a more detailed explanation of this: http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=242028 Tom
Re: Hundredweight was Re: UK Money, again
On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 11:31:46AM +0100, Peter Haworth wrote: megabyte 1024 kbyte gigabyte 1024 megabyte +terabyte 1024 gigabyte +petabyte 1024 terabyte +exabyte1024 petabyte +zettabyte 1024 exabyte +yottabyte 1024 zettabyte her reply: that bytes. Well, she has a point. Those multipliers should all be 1000. To use multipliers of 1024, the units are kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte, pebibyte, exbibyte, zebibyte and yobibyte. Surely everyone is using these by now? :-) I thought I had problems with standards and common practice differing as a Web developer - I should know better than to get involved with scientific things. I realise my changes aren't officially accurate, but at least they're consistent. If units(1) uses a multiplier of 1024 for kilo-, mega- and giga- bytes, it should do so for the others, rather than inheriting the default multiplier of 1000. I wonder what the value should be for a trilobyte. Hey, who locked me in this bike shed? Tom
Re: XML book recommendations?
On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 05:01:13PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Can someone recommend a decent XML book or books? I've been asked to have a look at XML and XSLT, and the book they gave me is Wrox's _Professional XML_ (first edition, I believe). It depends on how you like to learn, but I found Addison Wesley's Essential XML: Beyond Markup (0-201-70914-7) very helpful for understanding these things. I found this book a tough read, but after reading a chapter several times I have a clearer idea of how things work than I do from other XML/XSLT books I've read. It's written in a verbose style, given the amount of detail it covers. If you like lots of examples and tutorials it won't be much use - one of my colleagues tried reading it and said he found it difficult. I found it cleared up much of my confusion with XML by explaining details that other books gloss over, though. The authors teach good habits for writing terse yet readable XSLT where other books often use unnecessarily verbose syntax. Tom
Re: Hundredweight was Re: UK Money, again
On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 06:44:55PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: GNU units has 'brhundredweight' defined whereas the FreeBSD 4.5 units(1) doesn't (and probably should). You've inspired me to write this simple patch, which is now waiting for the approval of a src committer: http://people.freebsd.org/~tom/tmp/units/ Tom
Re: The joys of web development
On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 07:49:27AM -0800, jonah wrote: On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jon Reades wrote: Unless text-to-speech software has improved dramatically in its ability to parse anything except basic HTML since my last exposure to it, then something like Jaws would roll over dead on the impaired part of the site. http://restal.sunderland.ac.uk/ This is 'specially bad for an academic institution since IIRC UK Universities are legally required to adhere to the W3C WAI guidelines (priority 1 and 2) under the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001. I only have second hand knowledge of Senda, but I've never heard that before. I believe the Act expects institutions to provide acceptable alternatives for inaccessible content but does not enforce any particular requirements. I also gather that the enforcers of the act hope to work with institutions that provide non-compliant content rather than instigating legal action. I'd be very interested to see anything that suggests otherwise. The important point is that a reasonable alternative doesn't have to be a direct substitute - it just has to convey the same message. Website accessability to the disabled is one of my little pet rants, but I won't bore you lot with it. Indeed, but it worries me that anything important (be it accessibility, or anything else) can suddenly become perceived as so important after having been ignored for years. I encounter people overreacting to Senda, focusing on it to an extent where other important measures of quality get too little attention. I like working with people who appreciate my HTML pedantry, though. ;-) It doesn't help that the certain assistive software products support W3C standards in ways that make Netscape 4 and IE 5 seem like saints. You're all much better at ranting than I am. I've tried to restrain myself. Do I win a prize? Tom
Less/Fewer (Was: [Job] Looking for a Sales Guy)
On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 03:29:49PM -0500, Mike Jarvis wrote:
On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 03:38:56PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote:
'Less' is for singular, 'fewer' is for plural. ('More' can be used
with both.)
What do you mean for plural, since both have to do with quantities? I
think of it as 'less' is things you can't count and 'fewer' is for
things you can. Less sand, fewer grains of sand. Or less email, fewer
messages.
I think of this distinction in terms of discrete data and continuous
data in statistics.
If you measure something in discrete terms (2, 7, 29 apples) you have
fewer: if you measure something in continuous terms (1.8, 56.249
metres) you have less.
Perhaps we should say not more to avoid confusion. ;-)
Tom
Re: Open Source E-commerce
On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 12:04:05PM -, Steve Mynott wrote: Does anyone know of an implementation of Sun's Pet Store in Perl? http://petshop.bivio.biz/ Tom
Re: mod_perl v. FastCGI
On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 04:04:28PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Nicholas Clark wrote: Having looked at some of the crap in HTML, it seems to be lots of font and colo(u)r tags, things more tersely done once in a CSS, especially if the spec is allowed to say we're aiming at $modern browser where modern is defined to mean CSS works. And that is consistent with my view that unless Modern ? CSS working ? HAH ! Indeed. Few browsers deal with CSS 2 well - most implement parts of the specification and ignore other parts. I agree with Nicholas that simple things like colour, font and text settings are best done with CSS, but much of CSS 2 is best ignored unless you have lots of time and patience. I just spent a day struggling to get a nice css page working only to discover that M$ haven't bothered to implement position: fixed so all that work went down the pan. Opera supports this even worse - I've yet to understand why it positions elements where it does. My solution for IE was to make the CSS degrade gracefully by dealing with positioning in a bodydiv#id CSS selection which IE doesn't understand. Bah. hate hate hate. I'm glad I'm not the only one... Tom
Re: ADSL woes
On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 05:39:53PM +, Marty Pauley wrote: So my guess is that the problem was bad timing: Zen internet dropped the connection at their end for 40 minutes just after you had been messing around. I couldn't connect to Zen's ADSL service around 8pm last night. My PPP logs suggest their RADIUS server was unreachable so I couldn't authenticate. Tom
Re: more mailman
On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 08:37:20PM +0100, Natalie S. Ford wrote: My main 'problem' is that,for one of the mailman lists, mutt replies to the sender but for all others (london.pm included), mutt replies to the list. Mutt deals with mailing lists flexibly. By default, pressing l replies to the list, g replies to all senders/recipients and r replies to the sender unless Reply-To munging is set. If you find mailing lists awkward to use in Mutt, it might be worth taking a quick look at: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-3.html#ss3.9 http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html#using_lists Tom
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 06:41:02PM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: Life is a journey, not a destination. London.pm doubly so. So London.pm is a return journey? Tom
Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?
On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
How many people use {} in real regexps? IIRC There are almost none
in any script used to build perl.
I've used it quite often for validating input, for example to check
the user entered a number containing x and y digits/letters.
Tom
Re: OSX
On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 01:13:10PM -0600, Chris Devers wrote: On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Paul Mison wrote: You may want to have a look at fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/) which is based on Debian's apt package management system and provides a bunch of Unix-y things for OS X, including rootless X, Gimp, and, I'd hope, the packages you mention above. (I can't be sure as I'm not running an OS X machine at the moment.) Yes, Fink is very nice too. The problem with it is that you end up downloading everything as source [automagically] building it yourself, and not everything works that way If you run Fink's sudo dselect from the command line you can install binaries. All the packges listed above are available in binary form, as are most of the entropy.ch packages. I'm finding myself rapidly becoming very keen on OS X... Tom
Re: Perl Based Email Archiver
On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 11:45:32AM -0500, Tommie M. Jones wrote: Also the Archiver does not know anything about thread structure. If anyone is an email expert and has some suggestions about it please let me know. I did not want to base it on the subject line so if there is another possible solution Read http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html Tom
Re: Co-lo, was Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2001-12-31
On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 02:57:55PM +, robin szemeti wrote: On Wednesday 09 January 2002 14:26, Mark Fowler wrote: If I choose to do a full backup of my box via dump and ssh, it may take a day or so, but it'll do it for free. once you get sorted with rsync you'll never need to do this ... because rsync only copies down the changed bits, you can do it pretty much as often as you like with no huge bandwidth penalty ... That's fine if you're working with a typical filesystem, but what if you're working with database tables? I'd normally dump the tables to a file and backup the dump. However, I guess you'd end up rsyncing the whole database if you did this. I guess you could archive transaction logs, but for a frequently changing database the logs will get quite large. Any alternatives? Tom
Re: [JOB] Senior Perl Programmer (part onsite), United Kingdom, London (fwd)
On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 04:01:08PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Tom Hukins [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It is genuine - it's with sports.com. OK, and how many people round here have NOT interviewed at sports.com? Taking the spread of people hereabouts I know who _have_ interviewed there I doubt there is a person in existence who would match their criteria. Okay, perhaps I should rephrase what I wrote: The vacancy is genuine, but it may or may not be filled. ;-) Tom
Re: NNTP and SNTP (was Re: REVIEW Securing Windows NT/2000 Servers fo r the Internet)
On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 03:14:28PM +, Steve Mynott wrote: /var is intended for machine specific files (traditionally /usr is machine common files and often used to exist as an NFS mount). A mail setup is machine specific and lives on /var. I'd argue that the binaries belong in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and the configuration files belong in /etc. FreeBSD's hier(7) seems to back this up, claiming that var is for multi-purpose log, temporary, transient, and spool files. I'm not aware of any other application that stores binaries and man pages in /var. I like qmail, though, and run it, but it's definitely quirky. Tom
