Pythian Group

Yup. Plucking the alpaca’s eyebrows again, I’m afraid…

You see, because of merciless peer pressure, I’ve revived Perl::Achievements. I thought that would keep the wolves at bay, but noooo… Not a hour after the announcement was sent, I got a new feature request. I really should not but… okay, I wanted to do it anyway and if somebody is actually asking for it, why the heck not? Plus, it’ll give me the opportunity to see if my Template::Caribou is up to snuff.

A few hours later, I have a bug report for MooseX::App::Cmd and (after some touch-ups) released the first version of Template::Caribou on CPAN.

And that’s roughly where things get silly…

Read the rest of this entry . . .

So there I was, leisurely perusing my twitter feed… Oh, an entry by brian d foy? Should be interesting. So I clickety clicked, and let my eyes wander and almost immediatly fall on

Yanick already has perl achievements (although it’s not on CPAN, wtf Yanick? :)

Read the rest of this entry . . .

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -V:news

Do you regularly scuba dive in a motley sea of other peeps’ codebase, trying to bring on surgical changes without doing too much collateral b0rking on the code formatting? If so, Steffen Mueller has a nifty trick to share with you. Using Text::FindIndent, he shows how to configure Vim such that it can magically adapts to any indentation policy.

Talking of Vim, Andy Lester let us know that Vim 7.3 is out, with a bunch of upgrade to its Perl-related support files (and that includes brand-new support for Perl 6).

CPAN is great, CPAN is awesome. But, as we all know, the leviathanesque amount of distributions it contains is sometime daunting. Which module should I use to perform $random_task? Jesse Thompson proposes to look at how many other modules are dependent on a distribution as a metric, and provides a greasemonkey script to retrieve that information straight on the CPAN search page.

This year we’ve seen the rise of a lot of über-cool cpan* and perl* utilities. The latest, announced by Cornelius, is a little speed-demon called cpansearch. Written in C (which gives it mongoose-like response time) it is a module searching tool. Already cool on its own

$ time cpans XPath | head
Source list from: http://cpan.nctu.edu.tw/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
Apache::AxKit::Language::XPathScript     - 0.05 (M/MS/MSERGEANT/AxKit-1.6.2.tar.gz)
Apache::XPointer::XPath                  - 1.1 (A/AS/ASCOPE/Apache-XPointer-1.1.tar.gz)
AxKit2::Transformer::XPathScript         - 0 (M/MS/MSERGEANT/AxKit2-1.1.tar.gz)
B::XPath                                 - 0.01 (C/CH/CHROMATIC/B-XPath-0.01.tar.gz)
Cindy::XPathContext                      - 0 (J/JZ/JZOBEL/Cindy-0.15.tar.gz)
Class::XPath                             - 1.4 (S/SA/SAMTREGAR/Class-XPath-1.4.tar.gz)
Config::XPath                            - 0.16 (P/PE/PEVANS/Config-XPath-0.16.tar.gz)
Config::XPath::Reloadable                - 0.16 (P/PE/PEVANS/Config-XPath-0.16.tar.gz)
Email::MIME::XPath                       - 0.005 (H/HD/HDP/Email-MIME-XPath-0.005.tar.gz)

real    0m0.168s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m0.020s

it can yet achieve higher levels of radness if combined with other Perl tools like cpanm:

# install all that is tiny
$ cpans -n Tiny | cpanm

YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe came and went, but Karen Pauley reminds us that there’s still YAPC::Asia happening in Tokyo in October, and that the tickets are now on sale.

What? Didn’t attend any YAPC::* yet this year? Oh well, at least Matt S Trout points us where we can download videos of some of their talks.

Have you noticed that you can’t use the 5.10 features (like the smart match, say, given / when) under the Perl debugger? Pablo Marin-Garcia did, and dug to find out why. Also check the comments for a dirty way to force the debugger into a more modern attitude.

Moose is a mighty beast, but it’s not the fastest ungulate you’ll ever meet. But thanks to Dave Rolsky, it now compiles 10% faster than it used to. w00t!

Alberto Simões reports that the Perl Foundation accepted grants for 2010Q3 are in. From the look of it, lots of documentation — game development with SDL, Perlbal, Perl 6, Parrot — is coming our way.

Does anyone remember Mazinger Z? Each time we thought that giant robot achieved the peek of ultimateness, it would interface with a new ship/contraption/coffee machine and become even awesomer. Moose, with its MooseX cohorts, is a little bit like that. But with antlers. Florian Ragwitz shows us how the raw power of parameterized traits given by MooseX::Role::Parameterized can now be harnessed by MooseX::Declare.

use MooseX::Declare;
use 5.10.0;

role Gizmo ( Str :$codename ) {

    has 'upgraded' => ( is => 'rw' );

    my %gizmo_ability = (
        'wingy_thingy'  => 'fly like a butterfly',
        'smash_o_tron'  => 'squish things',
        'expresso_core' => 'make darn good coffee',
    );

    method "summon_$codename" {
        say "Giant robot summons its $codename";
        $self->upgraded(1);
    }

    method unleash_power {
        say $self->upgraded
            ? "Giant robot can now $gizmo_ability{ $codename }"
            : "No gizmo? No super-power for you"
            ;
    }
}

class GiantRobot::Omega {
    with Gizmo => { codename => 'expresso_core' };
}

my $robot = GiantRobot::Omega->new;

$robot->unleash_power;         # No gizmo? No super-power for you

$robot->summon_expresso_core;  # expresso core, to me!

$robot->unleash_power;         # *mouahaha*

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -E'sleep 2 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 # see y'all in 2 weeks!'

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -MLWP::Simple -MNetscape::Bookmarks \
    -E'getprint($_->href) for @{ Netscape::Bookmarks->new(pop)->{thingys} }' news.html

Jochen Hayek makes hushing sounds, points at the radio, and motions us to listen to the Perlcast of Stevan Little on Moose.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ tail -f news | perl -nE'say if /interesting/'

Huzzah! It’s official, Perl 5.12 is out! If you haven’t already, check out the changelog! As one might expect, this little piece of news made its way on several blogs, both internal and external to the Perl community.

Module authors, there are some other changes at the horizon for your modules’ META files as well. David Golden announced the release of version 2 of the CPAN META Spec. One of the biggest changes is the adoption of JSON (over YAML) as the preferred serialization format.

Plabo Marin-Garcias wrote about how to manage multiple local perl installations using perlbrew. If, for whatever reason, you have to juggle with more than one perl installation on the same machine App::perlbrew, written by Gugod, this might be a (gu)godsend that will make you sing hosannas for months to come…

In a nice little success story, chromatic tells us how Dist::Zilla, Github and Gitpan are helping to alleviate the complexity of distribution maintenance, turning what many consider a chore into… well, okay, still a chore, but at least a well-oiled, smoother one.

It’s a web framework smackdown! Adam Kennedy writes a series of articles in which he gets his feet wet with two modern Perl web frameworks:Mojolicious and Dancer.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? No more! Kartik announced that the beloved game Frozen Bubble is now directly available on CPAN.

Sawyer X got fed-up of manually hunting for module versionsand created Module::Version to take care of the deed. Turned out he wasn’t the first to have that itch — in the comments people also recommended Module::Which and V.

On the microscopic side of things, garu shared a few shell aliases that will make your one-liner even tinier.

Tags. Everything taste better with tags. In consequence, Ovid presented a way to add tags to Test::Classtests.

Moose has a new website, Stevan Little reports. Because it’s not fun till it turns meta, the code producing the site is itself available via a git repository.

Finally, it looks like miyagawa went on a hacking frenzy. The result is Subana a cloud service that can run any Plack application.

^D
[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -E'sleep 2 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 # see ya in 2 weeks!'

Welcome to the first issue of Shuck & Awe: Hunting for Perl. Inspired by Blogrotate and Log Buffer, I’ve decided to try jump-starting a bi-weekly review of everything and anything that caught our attention in the Perl world. Okay, that’s enough introduction. Let’s cut down to the meat already, and see what I’ve collected for the last two weeks.

First and foremost, Adam Trickett (ajt) trumpeted on, fittingly enough, Perl is Alive, that RC1 of Perl 5.12.0 is out. If you haven’t already, it’s time to read what shiny new toys 5.12 is bringing along. I don’t know about you, but I have the feeling I’ll be compiling myself a new perl this week-end…

In the same “still kicking strong” frame of mind, Ovid has posted a follow-up on his Perl 5 is Dying. If nothing else, the programming job trend graph he quotes is heart-warming for us Perl hackers.

It’s Spring! In a most seasonal spirit, brian d foy is calling upon CPAN authors to harken the call of Spring cleaning and tidy up their CPAN directory in an effort to boost the Schwartz ratio a wee bit.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

(Picture from Yanick Champoux)

Tuesday, May 26, the Ottawa Perl Mongers will be meeting once again at the Pythian headquarters. There will be two presentations given:

• Yanick Chanpoux will be presenting on Moose.
• Tim Procter (myself) will be presenting on Portable Perl Daemons. The focus is on developing light-weight background processes that will be compatible with both Unix and Windows systems. Additionally, I will be demonstrating communications with the daemon and child processes over TCP from an independent controller.

The presentations are now available online thanks to Andrew Ross at the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre

• Portable Perl Daemons
• Moose

Comments are welcome.