Pythian Group

As previously reported, last week-end’s activities could be summarized as me going to town on a yak herd with a lawnmower. And although the rest of Saturday and this morning haven’t been as fast and furious as Saturday morning, there’s a few more things to report:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

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 . . .

In this modern world, time is a rare commodity. It’s a well-known fact. It has to be carefully budgeted and thriftily spent. There is never enough time to do everything one wants to do, so we have to prioritize, pick what is important and cut our loses on the rest.

I so wish my brain had gotten the memo on that.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Or how to have an answer other than “I don’t know” when asked “How long does that take?”.

Recently while working on a client site I discovered that it takes 30-90 seconds to make an ssh connection to one of the servers. Connections between servers for this client typically take < 1 second, so the lengthy connection time was definitely out of order.

If you are familiar with debugging ssh connections you are probably familiar with the ‘-v’ option that directs ssh to output verbose comments stating which operation is currently taking place.  You can add up to three -v options on the command line, increasing the verbosity with each one.  An example follows: Read the rest of this entry . . .

After enjoying the excellent hospitality of our host here in Pisa (6 courses) we were ready for our second day at YAPCEU 2010 here in sunny Pisa.

Larry’s new catch phrase “My Language is a four letter word” was the ‘Buzz word’ for today. We settled down to some very interesting talks, the highlight for me being Tim Bunce’s talk on using Devel::NYTProf to Optimize your code. Tim first gave us a quick and dirty overview of optimization which covered the basics of where to start and what to look for he followed up with real examples of Optimizer output and than wrapped up with a few before and after results on an optimization effort.

The rest of the day was dedicated in my opinion, to the future of DBs in with Nelson Ferraz giving an excellent presentation of his concepts for using Perl as to glue for a Data Warehouse application. Next on my agenda, Martin Berends reports on the present state of Perl 6 and interfaces database. There is progress here as we now have some access to the DBI for MySQL and some others. Also great news is the fact there is a good deal of development work going on.

Martin was quickly followed by Tim Bunce again who presented his proposal for the new Perl 6′s DBDI. Seems
we are going to use the JDBC specification with a little tweaking as our road map for the future. Tim also
showed of some Perl 6 black majik from Jonathan Worthington and he was able to how us DBI with DBD::Pg
running on Perl 6.

Allison Randal finished off today’s formal presentations with her “Migration Strategies” presentation. She
gave us some good insight into migration in that we, as developers, cannot force migration on the community. She also provided two examples of migrations: Apache, which took seven years but has almost full buy-in by users and Python, which was quick and dirty but has not received the same buy-in from the community.

Finally we all enjoyed the lightning talks as our wrap up. A number of neat quick ones such as ‘I speak Perl with a ‘c’ accent’, was a highlight for me.

Seems the videos and most of the slides (including my presentation on XS) may be online tomorrow. I will be sure to post them as soon as I see them.

Larry Wall gave another of his unique keynote addresses at the first day of YAPCEU 2010 here in sunny Pisa (yes the place with the tower)

This year was a little diversion from his usual pattern as Larry was assisted by his better half and his demon seed. Larry told us as a language designer his life is one of siting on the fence, not making up his mind until that one little voice in one ear (his better half) and that other little voice in the other ear (his demon seed) work it out somehow.

Larry also showed us some neat little one line Perl 6 tricks for playing perfect numbers. His demon seed seem very keen on ’6′ as it is the first perfect number.

Larry also talked about the latest high tech ‘buzz word’ that the three piece and office window crowd is bantering about these days: ‘Disruptive Technology’.

Something that may do some things bad but others very well.

Of course he pointed out that PERL was labeled the same way when it first appeared some years ago in the UNIX world. As it broke the cardinal rule in UNIX ‘Do one thing well’, Perl did most things sort of ‘OK’ and very sloppy to start, but got much better later. Sort of the idea that worse is better.

He left us pondering PERL 6 as we all know that it does ‘worse’ better and now that ‘worse’ is better it is the ‘worst’ as being better.

Holy Zarquon just released the initial results of the 2010 Perl Survey.

The slides are also available.

Now for my 2cents worth.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -MFile::Find::Rule \
    -e'INIT{@ARGV=File::Find::Rule->file->name("*.news")->in("blogs")}'

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.

bingos decided to take the Dist::Zilla leap this week. A few plugins have already been churned out as the result.

Danger Will Robinson! If you are using File::chdir, David Golden warns that Perl 5.13.1 broke it by fixing a tied variable-related bug. Things are expected to be back to normal with Perl 5.13.2.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Does anyone know of a Yak Shaving Anonymous association hackers addicted to shearing Tibetan bovines could join?

Anyway, 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.

$ dzil <tab>
build     install   new       plugins   rjbsver   smoke     xtest
clean     listdeps  nop       release   run       test

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.

Read the rest of this entry . . .