Posts Categorized: Perl
I was happily minding my business today, until I got sight of Tim’s tweet bemoaning the fact that Test::Difference tests can’t easily be used outside of a test harness. Darn him, that’s exactly the kind of happy little puzzle I can’t resist. So I began to think about it. Of course, the Right Solution is probably to add alternative non-TAP-tied functions to the test modules themselves. But what if you just want to quickly leverage the module’s functionality without having to re-arrange its innards? Well, most test modules use Test::Builder, so there’s surely ways to twist that to our advantage. After a hour or two of hacking, I think I got one.
If you are, you might like the little greasemonkey script (available on userscript.org and github) that I churned. The script finds the AUTHORS/CONTRIBUTORS section of POD pages on http://search.cpan.org and add Gravatar pictures where it finds author email addresses. The picture on the right is an example of what it does to the main Catalyst CONTRIBUTORS section.
Inspired, but not completely satisfied with Camelia, the Perl 6 mascot, Sebastian Riedel came up with a new set of butterfly logos for the Perl 5/6 family. Very purty, methinks, very purty indeed.
A little hacking happened to decouple the core engine from its Apache roots, and XML::XPathScript was born. That module served me quite well throughout the years, but for some time now I’ve had this plan of doing a clean rewrite patiently sitting on my back-burner. This week I had a smashing staycation, and thanks to a very understanding wife, I was able to indulge in the necessary hacking sessions to get the ground work done. The result is not on CPAN yet, but can be perused on GitHub. As an example is worth a thousand pages of documentation, let’s say that you want to turn the piece of docbook-ish xml
No one is safe from the TPF Inquisition. Alberto Simões cornered Michael Schwern at YAPC and exacted a confession about the state of Test::Builder 2. No doubt threatened by the horrid torments that only torture by the comfy chair can provide, the Schwern spilled the beans.
Holy Zarquon just released the initial results of the 2010 Perl Survey. The slides are also available. Now for my 2cents worth. Looking at the results I see that very few of the respondents have be ‘taught’ Perl (slide 16) and the majority have an educational background in Computing or Engineering.I think that we in the Perl community should be asking why ‘Perl’ is not being taught at higher institutions.
I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed a great post by Gwen Shapira — Deliberate Practice. That’s reminded me about another aspect of learning that I didn’t mention — learning is a continuous process.
Remember me mentioning David Wheeler’s CPAN-like project for PostgreSQL? Well, by now it has an official name — PGXN — and the ball has now been set into motion. This is going to be good.
Here are two little things I hacked on top of Dist::Zilla that peeps might find useful. The first, as hinted by the blog entry’s title, is a direct adaptation of Aristotle’s perldoc-complete for dzil. The second is actually the one that started that round of shaving for me. As there is about a gazillion Dist::Zilla plugins, I wanted to have a quick way to see all the plugins installed on a specific machine. Enter a new dzil sub-command: plugins.
Laziness and a severe addiction to yak shaving conspire to constantly make me tweak configurations and hack scripts to make my everyday editing / shell / development experience as holistic as possible. Unfortunately the same laziness, combined with my constant hopping between home and work computers, severely gets in the way of effectively using those optimizations. Indeed, although I have those nifty toys installed here and there, because they are not uniformly installed everywhere I constantly find myself using the machines’ functional lowest common denominator. To fix that, I’ve began to dump all my environment’s custom configurations, plugins, tweaks and hacks on Github. That way, I can import my whole baseline toolbox on any given box with a simple line….
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