Re: metacpan
On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 10:38:18AM +, Leo Lapworth wrote: If you were trying to replace search.cpan.org/foo/bar - a metacpan URL (the main use of search.metacpan.org I think), we now use the 'search.mcpan.org' domain, So if you are on: http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Data-Page-2.02/lib/Data/Page.pm Add in the 'm' in front of 'cpan.org': http://search.mcpan.org/~lbrocard/Data-Page-2.02/lib/Data/Page.pm And you will be redirected to: https://metacpan.org/pod/release/LBROCARD/Data-Page-2.02/lib/Data/Page.pm Hope that helps. So, does this mean that if I doctor my /etc/hosts file so that search.cpan.org is 23.235.37.143 23.235.33.143, then I can click on Google results with impunity, and always end up on a useful page on metacpan? Nicholas Clark
Re: Google app engine perl language support
On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 11:29:46AM -0800, ๏̯͡๏ Guido Barosio wrote: Meh :/ https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=34 Is anyone actually using Google App Engine for new projects? Unlike Compute Engine, it doesn't have Microsoft and Amazon undercutting it on price twice an hour* And it's stuck on Python 2, despite Google (seemingly) being partly a Python shop: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=909 (I'm wondering when Google will show their hand on that ticket. Was the Perl request ticket the only one they closed, or are they having a cleanup?) Nicholas Clark * possible exaggeration
Re: jnthn's talk from YAPC::EU
On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 10:03:09PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhAIyrk2ogo Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances jnthn's talk from YAPC::APW2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhCx3CTauBY Objects ∩ Concurrency [APW2014 talks arrived from the video guys on a USB stick in the post. Bandwidth...] Although probably the talk that the most people wanted copies of the slides of was Tim Bunce's Application Logging in the 21st Century https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qj-_eimGuE Allocate 45 minutes of work time to watch that one :-) Nicholas Clark
Re: windmill blades turning?
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 07:52:37PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: On 15 October 2014 15:09, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 08:44:54AM +0100, Sue Spence wrote: This message took an hour to arrive, as opposed to 3-4 hours. So some progress has been made. I approve of this tilting at windmills, and would welcome the opportunity to buy Steve appropriate beer* once he considers the job done. Nicholas Clark * or malt, or whatever. Although I hope that it's malt by choice, not by desperation. Single Malt not Malt beer! I wasn't really aware of what malt beer is. Having now looked it up, most definately, malt whiske?y. Although a pint of scotch is always an option, in the right parts of the world. Nicholas Clark
Re: windmill blades turning?
On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 08:44:54AM +0100, Sue Spence wrote: This message took an hour to arrive, as opposed to 3-4 hours. So some progress has been made. I approve of this tilting at windmills, and would welcome the opportunity to buy Steve appropriate beer* once he considers the job done. Nicholas Clark * or malt, or whatever. Although I hope that it's malt by choice, not by desperation.
Dear Dr Who experts...
Dear Dr Who experts (I'm sure that there are many here)... IIRC there's a scene in an episode of Dr Who (in Tom Baker's time) where the Doctor escapes by climbing up through a hatch in the TARDIS ceiling, calling down a one liner to the Daleks stuck below just before he closes it 1) Am I remembering this correctly? 2) If so, is a clip of this online somewhere, in an easily linkable form? * Further, my understanding is that in the more recent episodes, the Daleks have figured out how to overcome their previous inability to cope with stairs, ladders, etc, uttering levitate before doing exactly that. 3) Is there a representative clip of this online? Nicholas Clark * please don't post links to places that would make Auntie upset.
Re: Building Perl 6
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 06:40:11PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew I'd recommend $ rakudobrew build moar_jit # just in time MoarVM $ rakudobrew build-panda # like cpanm $ panda install Task::Star # some useful modules It's a lot faster to build than even a few months back and (for a tiny number of restricted and probably misleading benchmarks) faster than eg its startup is faster than perl -MMoose (so it can run Hello World\n in less time than Moose), but for runtime benchmarks your mileage may vary. It does create threads faster than ithreads. But no-one sane would be using threads even on Rakudo, because it has much nicer concurrency abstractions. Which makes it easy to write code that uses more than one CPU core, including fanning computation out to multiple cores. Which starts to matter now that even phones are quad-core. (Are there any 8 core phones yet?) Nicholas Clark
Austrian Perl Workshop 2014, Salzburg, 10th-13th October
This year's Austrian Perl Workshop will be in Salzburg on 10th-13th October. We are very lucky to have have three star guests: Larry Wall Tim Bunce Jonathan Worthington who will all be talking [but not at the same time :-)] Talks will be on Friday 10th and Saturday 11th October, and a hackathon on Sunday 12th and Monday 13th. (Obviously hackathon attendance is optional. We won't tell anyone if you decide to be tourists instead.) http://act.useperl.at/apw2014/schedule The schedule has space for a few more talks (in German or New High German*), if anyone would like to present something: http://act.useperl.at/apw2014/newtalk We also like sponsors: http://act.useperl.at/apw2014/sponsors.html For the avoidance of doubt, other Perl workshops are available** Nicholas Clark * strictly this is not accurate. N.H.G. is really the Germanic equivalent of Franglais. ** eg http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/
Re: Happy Social Birthday London.pm
On Wed, Aug 06, 2014 at 09:08:37PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: Lest we forget.. https://web.archive.org/web/20090626070009/http://london.pm.org/nx_meetings/1998_aug.shtml (yes my jacket is awful but at least I brought a woman along) It also seems that there were more Daves in the good old days. However, I suspect that the beer is better these days, and generally the meetings are above ground. Nicholas Clark
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder: Tech Meet this Thursday 7pm at Conway Hall
On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 08:41:44PM +0100, Sue Spence wrote: In my experience you can't put the traffic and parking aside, because it's pretty difficult to drive in central London. Be sure to pay the congestion charge if you manage to get near the venue before 6pm! Also, pick a route that doesn't involve going round the M25 from the M3 to the M4. If you play with the typical traffic on Google maps, you can see that that stretch is a very unhappy red (in both directions) after about 4pm That's probably not the only hot spot to avoid - the M4 from Slough to the M25 doesn't look very happy, and some of the A roads are marked orange. IIRC the average speed of traffic in central London remains stubbornly around 11mph, pretty much unchanged for over 100 years. I think that you will be lucky to get from the M25 to the venue in less than 75 minutes, and if you actually want to be sure to make it for the start, you'll need to allow quite a bit more for that stretch. Finding somewhere a bit further out to park and making the final part of the journey by train or tube will massively increase your journey time reliability. Nicholas Clark
[ANNOUNCE] Emergency Social, Monday, Royal Oak, Borough
I'm in London right now, and there isn't a social. This is an emergency! So, I'm going to the Royal Oak in Borough on Monday, because I like Harveys. Nearest Tube is Borough Station (which is Zone 1), it's short walk from London Bridge Station, where there are lots of buses. See you there from (I guess) about 6pm. We'll be colonising space as needed. http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Royal_Oak,_SE1_4JU Nicholas Clark
tablets for parents
Dear knowledgeable hive mind, It seems that my parents are finally cracking and amenable to the idea of buying a device for the purpose of videoconferencing. My sister and I suspect that the right thing is a tablet connected via 3G (my parents alternate between two locations in southern England, so fixed line would mean 2 fixed lines, and two lots of fixed infrastructure, which feels like a pain) So, what is good to get. Specifically 1) What tablet? (with camera, obviously, 3G, and possibly not much else special) 2) What data plan? You can infer from this that they don't currently have an Internet connection, and I don't think that once they get one they are going to start heavy surfing or high bandwidth activities such as watching videos on YouTube or iPlayer. (They have had the recording the TV thing sussed for a decade or more now, and whilst they have migrated from VHS to hard drives, I don't think that they are going to move from the idea of a box under the TV connected to an aerial, that they program after circling programmes in a paper listings magazine) I don't think that they care what OS, and I don't think that I do hugely either. I just that care it doesn't get abandoned by the manufacturer as soon as the next model comes out*, and it needs to work without assuming that the owner has a PC for any sort of regular service activity. My sister has Macs (and a Blackberry too, I think), but is dealing with Windows at work, so between us I think we can hand-hold most things. Nicholas Clark * So *this* would put me off Windows RT even if it ticked all the other boxes, as I can't see how MS are going to sanely sustain 3 different OSes and ecosystems, and I suspect that RT is more than 33% likely to be the one for the chop. And even if it isn't, well, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8 - they have a pedigree now of dumping their customers.
Re: consolidate regexes
On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 03:25:54PM +, Alex Balhatchet wrote: On 25 February 2014 14:59, Aaron Crane p...@aaroncrane.co.uk wrote: That's because, thanks to demerphq++, Perl 5.10 and above have a built-in trie optimisation which is defeated by the cleverness of the Regexp::Trie regexes. To take the example from the Regexp::Trie documentation: Oh my, thanks for the heads up :-) Nice work Perl 5.10! This future has been available to one and all for just over six years. I believe it's even installed as standard on current RHEL if sysadmins are allergic to the idea of building something even more current from source. IIRC booking.com thought that they got roughly a 30% CPU drop in going from vendor supplied 5.8.5 to vanilla 5.14.mumble built from source. They never did blog this though :-( Nicholas Clark
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Damian Conway Speaking at London.pm: Monday, 10th March
On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 01:26:40PM +, Alex Balhatchet wrote: On 21 February 2014 13:13, David Leadbeater d...@dgl.cx wrote: If you care about people not having your full postcode make sure you enter something else (I used SW1A 1AA). They don't seem to be demanding anything as exacting if they think that you are in Austria. Then again, the Austrian numeric codes are fairly naff - the full code is roughly equivalent to part before the space in the UK (which I believe is termed an out code). Or pick something fun from this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom#Special_postcodes (David's suggestion is on that list) I was not aware of that list. Useful. Of those, GIR 0AA breaks the pattern for postcodes, doesn't it? No number in the out code. Anyway, yes, meetup.com. Lovely people. $n people are interested in a Perl meetup in your area. Pay us to find out who. Or it looks like you don't care. I wonder if eventbrite will go evil if they ever manage to get similar market share. Nicholas Clark
Re: Email list
On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 12:47:20PM +, Fred Youhanaie wrote: On 08/11/13 12:29, Nicholas Clark wrote: For future reference for anyone else finding this message in the archive, if you get your e-mail client to show full message headers, you should see: List-Id: London.pm Perl M\[ou\]ngers london.pm.london.pm.org List-Unsubscribe: http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm, mailto:london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org?subject=unsubscribe List-Archive: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm List-Post: mailto:london.pm@london.pm.org List-Help: mailto:london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org?subject=help List-Subscribe: http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm, mailto:london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org?subject=subscribe BTW, I've noticed in the past that the lpm-announce list has the same ID as above, is this intentional? I personally don't know, and the lack of response from anyone else suggests that no-one else knows either. My guess would be that one was cloned from the other, and no-one realised that this part needed changing. I guess that this should be fixed, but I don't have the level of access needed to do it. I can ask. Nicholas Clark
Re: Email list
On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 12:04:06PM +, Ben Smith-Sport wrote: I seem to have ended up on the above email list by mistake. I’d be very grateful if you could remove me from it. All the best It would have been a confirmed-opt-in mistake :-) I've unsubscribed your e-mail address. For future reference for anyone else finding this message in the archive, if you get your e-mail client to show full message headers, you should see: List-Id: London.pm Perl M\[ou\]ngers london.pm.london.pm.org List-Unsubscribe: http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm, mailto:london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org?subject=unsubscribe List-Archive: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm List-Post: mailto:london.pm@london.pm.org List-Help: mailto:london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org?subject=help List-Subscribe: http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm, mailto:london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org?subject=subscribe and you can use either the mailto link or the http link to unsubscribe yourself. You're still welcome to attend socials, tech meets and the London Perl Workshop even if you're no longer subscribed to the list. Some of these even have free food and drink :-) Nicholas Clark
filesystems for external drivesx
Dear knowledgeable hive mind, 1) I can mount NTFS read/write on Linux. But is there any good way on Linux to correctly copy files from one NTFS file system to another, preserving everything? (specifically Alternate Data Streams, which I see that I have here, when I mount said file system read-only on OS X) 2) Is there any sane choice of file system to use which will mount read/write on both Linux and OS X, and support at least basic POSIX features? (ownership, permissions, hard links) (on Snow Leopard, if it matters) 3) Is there any Linux equivalent to OS X sparse bundles? (And if the answer to that is yes, I guess it mostly doesn't matter, as one just formats the disk as FAT32, and makes images on top of it) It's turning out to be impressively hard to Google* for any of these. Nicholas Clark * Am I using the wrong search engine?
Re: Cancelled Event: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers October Social - 2013-1... @ Tue 1 Oct 2013 15:30 - 16:30 (simon Quain)
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 03:56:43PM +0100, simon Quain wrote: Hi London.pm, Hugely embarrassed lurker on the list. Apologies to all. I tried to add it to my google calendar. It was added incorrectly so I removed it. and then software was hateful... Apologies again. Perhaps I will have to come on Thursday after all... Remember, if you haven't been to a social before (or your disguise is good enough) you should locate our current glorious leader Tom, who will buy you your first drink. (and for the benefit of anyone else reading this message and now thoroughly confused, that's still: The Sekforde Arms 34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA This Thursday. From, I guess, about 18:30 ) Nicholas Clark
Re: Robot turtles
On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 02:55:24PM +0100, Martin Robertson wrote: So I was too slow to get in on the '1st 10' as arranged by el Smyler. Am told there are 5 others thus far in a similar state, so : I'll poke my head above the parapet long enough to make the same offer to organise a group purchase. currently 2 confirmed; msg off-list please! cheers, mart. Thanks for volunteering to herd cats [in your own self interest :-)] I've just done 10 for vienna.pm/2 in Salzburg/a friend There are about 36 hours left. I hope this all works out, else I'm going to be left looking a bit silly. Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl Doom and Gloom
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 01:21:25PM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote: I know my last employer was very reluctant to know let anyone know we used perl internally, as he felt if there were security holes found in the language we'd be open to hackers. Not that his paranoia was entirely unjustified (the company would be a bit of a high profile target at times), but I'm not convinced it was always necessary. Would he have been equally paranoid with any other language? Or just open source hippie code? :-) -- And a big Hiya goes out to the fun crew from GCHQ. I wonder if they're using Perl. We've never seen any bug reports from them. Nicholas Clark
Robot turtles
So, there is this kickstarter for Robot Turtles: Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer The kickstarter closes on Friday. We are attempting to organise a group purchase of this in Vienna, and given the level of interest there, I thought I'd like to point it out to the denizens of london.pm in case there is similar enthusiasm. So, to purchase one, with the international shipping, it's not very cost effective (ie $60) There is a 3-pack, which is $120 including shipping, and a Deca-pack, which is $340. These look viable, as they bring the unit cost down to something like the price of a regular new board game (eg Settlers of Catan or Monopoly ship from amazon.de for about 30 EUR) So, I'm *not* going to organise this for London, but if anyone wants to, here's my homework I've already done for Vienna, but converted to real money: $34 is £21.18, but I'm suspicious that the delivery price isn't going to be that. gov.uk takes lots of pages to say that tax and import duty are both payable. It's 20% VAT on anything over £15, and phone us up, because we make it way too complicated with 14000 categories% (typically 5-9%) import duty for anything over £135 If I assume that VAT is unavoidably going to be charged, at 20%, but only on the games, not the shipping, then the price actually isn't terrible: 3-pack: $80 * 1.2 + $40= $136 = £84.70 = £28.23 each 10-pack: $240 * 1.2 + $100 = $388 = £241.65 = £24.16 each I don't know the UK duty rate, but they work out that (I think) duty has to reach 23% before the 10-pack is more expensive than the below-threshold 3-pack. I also don't know if there's an extra sting thanks to a charge that gets made by the delivery firm for collecting the duty. So, if you're interested, you have about 96 hours to JFDI. Nicholas Clark PS I'm not kidding about the 14000 categories.
Re: Robot turtles
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 02:22:29PM +0200, Joel Bernstein wrote: On 23 September 2013 13:39, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals. I'm not aware of any 3-8 year olds in this group, am I missing the point? Yes! I'm planning for my retirement, and others on the list might well be too. Elizabeth needs to learn skills to earn enough money to keep me in the style to which I am accustomed! :-) (The IRC hive mind thinks that duty for board games might well be 0%, but the IRC hive mind is not a lawyer^Wdomain expert, and its advice is worth as much as you paid for it.) Nicholas Clark
Re: Robot turtles
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 01:43:15PM +0100, Mark Keating wrote: On 23/09/2013 13:22, Joel Bernstein wrote: On 23 September 2013 13:39, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals. I'm not aware of any 3-8 year olds in this group, am I missing the point? /joel Really, I can think of quite a few people whose behaviour clearly places them in that age bracket ;) But i agree with Nicholas, i have a 3 year old and I want him to be a rockstar-actor-programmer to look after me in my dotage, which is actually already here, so the younger he starts earning the better. To be honest, I'm not certain about any of those careers. Even programmers. Whereas plumbers can't be offshored, and unlike electricians, if you have a problem needing a plumber, quite often it can't wait until the morning and the less wallet-busting on call rates :-) But E seems to be more interested in rockets than water*. Maybe she'll become a rocket scientist. Nicholas Clark * Particularly as the slightest amount of damp on her clothes is major crisis.
Re: Robot turtles
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 02:20:40PM +0100, Will Crawford wrote: On 23 September 2013 13:58, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: ... But E seems to be more interested in rockets than water*. Maybe she'll become a rocket scientist. Or, if the hydrophobia is strong enough, a hovercraft engine? She certainly seems to have enough energy. But I'm not sure how to harness it effectively. Will I get into trouble with the authorities if I build a child-sized hamster wheel? Will the feed-in tariff make it worth me connecting it to the grid? :-) Nicholas Clark
Re: Robot turtles
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 03:00:53PM +0100, Smylers wrote: Nicholas Clark writes: So, there is this kickstarter for Robot Turtles: Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer Oooh. Thanks for letting us know about that, Nicholas. And more thanks for doing the maths, currency conversion, and so on. Well, there may be errors. I'm assuming that the VAT divide is correct. Currency rates were from purl while I was writing the e-mail, etc The Kickstarter estimates delivery for Christmas. And it's Kickstarter, so it's risky (although the guy doing it seems to check out) 3-pack: $80 * 1.2 + $40= $136 = £84.70 = £28.23 each 10-pack: $240 * 1.2 + $100 = $388 = £241.65 = £24.16 each Plus the cost of distributing the extra copies around the UK. My calculations were always on the basis that buyer collects from the (relevant) social. [There are places outside the M25? Really! No - it's a tale told to scare small children :-)] PS I'm not kidding about the 14000 categories. Last time I looked at this I found there were different duty rates for radios and CD players, and that a combined CD player and radio had a third rate which was lower than either of the two individual ones. It cannot possibly make sense for this list to exist. That sounds like the Raspberry Pi folks finding that the duty on an assembled Raspberry Pi was lower than on the components. This, obviously, was done to encourage local manufacturing :-( (Politicians are involved. The cost of implementation is an externality. Or treated as such. Heck - who cares - 5 years hence is S.E.P., and 5 weeks hence might as well be) Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 04:15:08PM +0200, Abigail wrote: On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 01:14:54PM +0100, gvim wrote: Something's gone wrong. Is it that publishers are not interested in publishing Perl books or that Perl authors aren't writing about interesting and specific applications of Perl? Those are the only two options you consider? How about there aren't enough people actually buying Perl books? I'm sure publishers would love to publish Perl books if they can make money of it. But the only way to make money of books is to actually sell them. Yes, exactly. To me, more Python and Ruby books suggest that both are selling well. So the question then becomes why are more people buying Python and Ruby books? My guess would be that (proportionally) more people feel the need to learn those two languages. Maybe everyone already feels that they know Perl well enough to blag an interview. Nicholas Clark
Re: Assigning Classes
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 11:42:25AM +0200, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 11:24:10AM +0200, Abigail wrote: There's also the lazy solution: randomly assign students to classes. Tell them they're allowed to make any change they want, provided that: 1) it gets a buy-in from any student involved in the change, and 2) no class exceeds the max capacity and no class has just one student. I'd say it's more of a distributed solution, since the work is distributed over the computing power of the students. It also has the nice benefit that the more dissatisfied a student initialy is, the more computing power they'll apply to improving the solution. Which should improve the overall satisfaction. It might be impractical in this case. If the bandwidth and latency of the interconnects between the distributed nodes isn't good enough, then it may not be possible for the hive mind to find a solution before classes need to start. Nicholas Clark
Re: Almost on-topic
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 02:07:19PM +0200, Th. J. van Hoesel wrote: it needs quite a lot of training ! Op 12 jul. 2013, om 11:58 heeft Denny het volgende geschreven: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAMSrKqpl_c Do London Zoo have similar videos available showing how to train water buffalo, for the benefit of residents of the Netherlands? :-) Nicholas Clark
Re: Living with smart match breakage
On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 02:13:00PM +0100, Jason Clifford wrote: On Fri, 2013-06-14 at 19:26 +1000, Kieren Diment wrote: Presumably CPAN testing of a blead perl with smartmatch removed/deprecated could pick that up pretty quickly. Automated CPAN testing occurs on new releases of modules only doesn't it or is there comprehensive testing of every current release on CPAN when a new perl is being prepared for release? For several years now Andreas König has been smoking existing CPAN modules using development versions of perl. He's found (and we've fixed) a lot of problems before anyone ever realised that they existed. Nicholas Clark
Re: npm, PyPi overtake CPAN
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 11:59:03AM +0200, Mallory van Achterberg wrote: I was at the PyGrunn meeting in Groningen recently. Holger Krekel (https://twitter.com/hpk42) gave a talk about the problems of pypi and compared it to CPAN, and then showed some new work he was doing to help fix the multiple issues. He loves CPAN's searching, testing, multiple mirrors etc. Mirrors matter. (Well, mirrors are important, but that doesn't have the alliteration) because 1) in an online environment, just a URL to a master site is a single point of failure. Start to chain enough dependencies, and however reliable they are at building and testing, it doesn't work if you can't download the code because one server is down 2) in a secured environment it is easi*er* to make a mirror and ship it in 3) Sometimes I am on a $DHH plane. Or in a tunnel. Or in data-roaming-multiple-limb-loss land. So having a mirror is useful. He has slides but I haven't seen them published anywhere, but the praise for CPAN was great and mighty, and it's good for Python to see someone basically wants to make the Cheeseshop more like CPAN :) Yes, it nice to know that Perl is doing at least some things right. I was also surprised to notice that the new (8 weeks old) official mirror client for PiPy, bandersnatch, is written in Python 2.7. Official, because the description and link are from here https://pypi.python.org/mirrors to here https://pypi.python.org/pypi/bandersnatch Nicholas Clark
Re: URL shorteners (was: Re: ISNIC DNS)
On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 02:56:33PM +0100, Dominic Humphries wrote: On Wed, 2013-05-08 at 13:01 +0100, Sam Kington wrote: Getting off-topic here, but what use are URL shorteners now that Twitter converts all links to be t.co/blah ? They don't save you any space in tweets, and they obfuscate the URL you're linking to. Is link-tracking really that useful? IRC? Links that take more than one line are annoying, and some even manage to hit the 512-character limit. The mention of the new-fangled IRC thing made me wonder if anyone has been perverse enough to create a link-shortener that serves things via gopher, or some other quirky protocol. Although I can see an immediate flaw in this plan - link shorteners rely on HTTP redirection codes, which I think that most other protocols don't have. Meanwhile, Dave notes that this thread has going wildly off at a tangent from the original problem - who to use to serve DNS for an Icelandic domain. Nicholas Clark
Re:
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 04:04:18PM +0200, Joel Bernstein wrote: The jobs list is -- that way. I assume that Tom will contradict me if he feels that I am wrong here, but I thought that it was perfectly reasonable for someone who sponsored a social with a considerable sum to be permitted to mail the main list to say thank you for an enjoyable evening. I would hope that recruiters and firms would continue to think that sponsoring london.pm events is a worthwhile investment to increase leads. A reaction of thanks, but sod off isn't likely to encourage this. I'd like to thank Christine Wong for sponsoring the social. (Even though I wasn't able to attend, now being somewhat further from London than most people on the list. Because I like the idea of free beer and would like to see it happen more often.) Nicholas Clark
Re: Any known islandic Perl Mongers?
On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 03:18:16PM +0200, Joel Bernstein wrote: Do you mean *Iceland*? If so Avar is there, at least. Well, last I knew he was working for booking.com in Amsterdam, so I suspect that he's not in Iceland, unless he's on holiday. (And given that the photos of snow and skiing have stopped appearing on his Google+ stream, I suspect that he's not on holiday.) Nicholas Clark
Re: Any known islandic Perl Mongers?
On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 03:49:39PM +0200, Roland Schmitz wrote: Am Freitag, 5. April 2013 schrieb Joel Bernstein: Britain is an island after all. Is it still one, after building the tunnel? ;-} I think that the island mindset is going to cost a lot more than a paltry £5 billion to eliminate. :-/ And, technically the north of Scotland is an island since the construction of the Caledonian Canal, but no-one seems to think of it that way. Nicholas Clark
Re: A stranger arrives in town ...
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 06:44:27PM -0400, James E Keenan wrote: Which 'The Gunmakers'? Use of a prominent Internet search engine suggests that there are at least two such public facilities in areas plausible for invasion by London.pm. The on in Eyre Street Hill, off Clerkenwell Road: http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers%2C_EC1R_5ET What that doesn't say is that there's also a private room upstairs (above the front bar), which some groups (including london.pm) sometimes get to use. The tricky bit being that it's up the stairs past the sign that says staff only. The solution is to ask the bar staff where the London Perl Mongers are, as they know who we are (and are very nice), and will direct you upstairs if that's the right place. Nicholas Clark
Re: New perl features?
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 05:00:55PM +0100, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:00:32AM -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: Dave == Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk writes: Dave Does anyone pay for Perl articles these days? :-) I got paid for one a few years back. Nothing like the heyday of the 255 paid articles I wrote during the dotcom boom. The French GNU/Linux Magazine (http://www.ed-diamond.com/index.php#homelm) would still pay us, if we managed to write articles for them. :-) That sounds like people don't have the time sufficient to write articles. Are there people for whom translating articles to French is easier? And as bonus (because we accept to get paid a little less), the articles are put under a CC-ND-NC license after a few months, and end up here: http://articles.mongueurs.net/ You'll need to write in French, though. And get paid in Euro. ie, is there a viable split of the payment such that it's enough to motivate a team of two, where one writes in English and the other translates? (and I don't know if any of the German language publications will pay, in which case, translating to both for near-enough simultaneous publication might pay three people better than one publication pays two) Please note, I'm not looking to write articles (paid or not). But I can see that having more articles about the Perl programming language* would be a good thing, and I'm not sure if anyone has suggested this approach before. Nicholas Clark * Maybe the highly rigorous method behind Tiobe's index is simply to search the various London user groups' list archives for traffic. If so, that would explain a lot. Perhaps someone should name a programming language Beer. To see how fast its ranking rises. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpagev=PAHBZImmXsI#t=1153s So it turns out there's a big overlap between people who like computer programming and people who like beer (I found all 35 minutes of that keynote is worth watching.)
Re: FW: 3/15/2013 10:26:49 AM
http://www.occamobile.com/ this bit and that bit: zhvrm/htdza/hsp/gr/vo Obviously, don't follow that link in anything more sophisticated than wget. Sigh, is there an easy way to put all Yahoo! accounts onto manual moderation, given how easy it seems to be for blackhats and bots to hijack them and spew malware? And I'm kicking myself a bit for not spotting this one coming, given that the PDX.pm list has already had something similar from the same hijacking. Nicholas Clark
Re: CVE-2013-1667: important rehashing flaw
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:52:59AM +, Dave Mitchell wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 09:50:56AM +, Chisel wrote: I've just stumbled across http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html which says: Latest releases in each branch of Perl Major Version Type Released Download 5.14 5.14.4 Devel 2013-03-07 perl-5.14.4-RC2.tar.gz 5.16 5.16.3 Maint 2013-03-11 perl-5.16.3.tar.gz 5.14 5.14.4 Maint 2013-03-10 perl-5.14.4.tar.gz To me it looks odd having the RC2 there ... should that be dropped until there is (another) release candidate? Presumably its counting 5.14.4-RC2 as the most recent development release, and when 5.17.10 is released this will be updated? If that is the case, it would still be good to fix/change it. As I suspect that this situation will occur again, and what it presents to the end user is not the right answer. RCs are immediately obsolete if there is a real release. (or a newer RC) And therefore should no longer be mentioned. (ie a more correct algorithm would be to discard all obsolete releases, and then show the most recent non-obsolete development release. However, at the point that 5.18.0 is released, there will be a few days for which there is *no* current development release, as 5.18.0 will obsolete 5.17.everything) Nicholas Clark
CVE-2013-1667: important rehashing flaw
Technically this is off topic: - Forwarded message from Ricardo Signes perl@rjbs.manxome.org - Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 10:20:11 -0500 From: Ricardo Signes perl@rjbs.manxome.org To: perl5-port...@perl.org Subject: CVE-2013-1667: important rehashing flaw User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) The following message concerns a hash-related flaw in perl 5, which has been assigned CVE-2013-1667. In order to prevent an algorithmic complexity attack against its hashing mechanism, perl will sometimes recalculate keys and redistribute the contents of a hash. This mechanism has made perl robust against attacks that have been demonstrated against other systems. Research by Yves Orton has recently uncovered a flaw in the rehashing code which can result in pathological behavior. This flaw could be exploited to carry out a denial of service attack against code that uses arbitrary user input as hash keys. Because using user-provided strings as hash keys is a very common operation, we urge users of perl to update their perl executable as soon as possible. Updates to address this issue have bene pushed to main-5.8, maint-5.10, maint-5.12, maint-5.14, and maint-5.16 branches today. Vendors* were informed of this problem two weeks ago and are expected to be shipping updates today (or otherwise very soon). bleadperl is not affected. This issues affects all production versions of perl from 5.8.2 to 5.16.x. It does not affect the upcoming perl 5.18. This issue has been assigned the identifier CVE-2013-1667. In the next few weeks, expect to see a more detailed post from researcher Yves Orton or me. -- rjbs - End forwarded message - You will be wanting to be sure that this one is patched, either by your vendor, or locally if you maintain your own build. The fix is under 40 lines, most of which is *deleting* code and comments. If you know how to attack it, the results are pretty ugly, and pretty much impossible to mitigate in user code. Right now, we don't think that anyone *else* knows how to do it. You're only safe from DOS as long as this remains the case. Nicholas Clark
Re: Booze Minion
On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 03:26:38PM +, Peter Corlett wrote: [bit I can't answer snipped] Assuming there are none, I shall tentatively propose the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell for our next social. I'm not sure we've ever had a London.pm social there, but it's always been a hit whenever I've suggested it for non-Perl related drinking. http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Sekforde_Arms,_EC1R_0HA says that it has food in the evening, and decent beer, which seem to be the two most important features. The other two questions seem to be is is possible to reserve a space? and is it possible to have a conversation that isn't drowned out by music? I don't think that london.pm has ever been there. At least not officially. Nicholas Clark
Re: [OT] blessed sub-refs in the symbol table
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:12:30AM +, David Cantrell wrote:
I am most disappointed to find that if you put a blessed sub-ref in the
symbol table and then replace it, its DESTROY method doesn't get called
straight away:
package Immortal;
sub new { return bless sub { print called the object\n }, shift; }
sub DESTROY { print called DESTROY\n; }
1;
$ perl -MImmortal -e '*Foo::bar = Immortal-new(); Foo::bar(); *Foo::bar =
sub {print blargh\n}; Foo::bar();'
called the object
blargh
called DESTROY
looks like the blessed sub continues to exist right to the end of the
process, even though all references to it have gone away. Is this a bug?
Yes, in as much as it's an optimisation that goes too far. The internals cheat
to avoid copying subroutines (that as not closures). So, it's the same
reference each time. Even if you bless it:
$ perl -MImmortal -le 'print Immortal-new() for 1 ..3'
Immortal=CODE(0x100818088)
Immortal=CODE(0x100818088)
Immortal=CODE(0x100818088)
The right solution probably involves unwinding this optimisation, either
making CVs cheap to clone, or putting in another level of indirection so
that the addresses (and the part that you bless) are not shared, but the
expensive stuff is.
Nicholas Clark
Re: Fosdem Perl-devroom AW1.126, Saturday, Feb 2nd, 11:00-19:00; Success! 14 speakers!
On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 09:48:17PM +0100, Wendy G.A. van Dijk wrote: Hello all, Fosdem. https://fosdem.org/2013/ We made it. We've got 14 speakers with 14 talks, one for each speaker. We even have 4 lightning talks. The schedule is craamed with Perly goodness, even without a lunchbreaks and with short 5-minutes breaks. We even have It's a schedule specially tailored to Ilmari :-) On Saturday and Sunday, 2nd and 3rd February, we will have a Perl-booth in Building K, level 2, stand number 3. At the booth you will find the largest library of Perl-books, the big Perl camel, goodies, brochures, tuits, and who knows what more. Guest of honor at the booth will be: Curtis Ovid Poe. He will present (and sign!) his brand new book Beginning Perl, of which we will have a decent pile. Wow, you've got a booth *and* a dev room. That's impressive. (But not as impressive as getting a schedule put together in 4 days) I'm curious if there's any easy way to work out which is more effective at breaking out of the echo chamber. I suspect that it's rather hard to measure. Nicholas Clark
Re:
On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 08:51:32PM +, Schmoo wrote: Many profuse apologies. If this is continuing, please block this account from posting to the list. You've already been set to needs moderation, but I think that this happened after all the compromised messages had escaped. I've only seen one (to the jobs-discuss list), so I infer that some are being caught by spam-filtering somewhere between you and my inbox. Hence I know I don't know how many have actually been sent. Nicholas Clark
Re: PHP community
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:21:11AM +, Stephen McCullough wrote: Hi, I have to be honest. One of the reasons I think people will get turned off any language will be scenarios like this within a mailing list/community. Maybe the person that sent this email meant it in a funny way, maybe they meant it in a nasty way or maybe it was a comment on how open the Perl community is. Either road there is no need fuel the fire. It's really not clear whether it was a pro-PHP troll, or a pro-Perl troll. Be nice as this list has more to offer than silly pounding on people that release things onto the CPAN or send unclear emails. But yes, either way, it's not helpful. Nicholas Clark
Re: [OT] benchmarking typical programs
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 08:56:34AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 12:35:18PM +0100, Nicholas Clark said: Lots of one trick pony type benchmarks exist, but very few that actually try to look like they are doing typical things typical programs do, at the typical scales real programs work out, so As a search engineer (recovering) I'm inclined to say - get a corpus of docs, build an inverted index out of it and then do some searches. This will test 1) File/IO Performance (Reading in the corpus) 2) Text manipulation (Tokenizing, Stop word removal, Stemming) 3) Data structure performance (Building the index) 4) Maths Calculation (performing TF/IDF searches) All in pretty good, discrete steps. Plus by tweaking the size of the corpus you can stress memory as well. Thanks, this is a useful suggestion, but... I'm not a search engineer (recovering or otherwise), so this represents rather more work that I wanted to do. In that I first have to learn enough of how to *be* a search engineer to figure out how to write the above code to do something useful, and *then* how to write such code to a reasonably performant production versions, and then to turn working code into something sufficiently stand alone to be a benchmark. I don't want to be spending my time figuring out the right way to do all the above algorithms in Perl. I want to get as fast as possible to the point of figuring out how the perl interpreter (mis)behaves when presented with extant decent code to do the above. Unless there's a CPAN-in-a-box for doing most of the four steps. (which doesn't depend on external C libraries. That was one of my preferably criteria) So, next question - if I wanted to be as lazy as possible and write a search engine (as described above) using as much of CPAN as possible, which modules are recommended? :-) Nicholas Clark
Re: [OT] benchmarking typical programs
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 12:28:20AM +0100, Rafiq Gemmail wrote: On 19 Sep 2012, at 12:09, Nicholas Clark wrote: So, what I missed from this was: I'm trying to get better benchmarks for the perl interpreter itself. Lots of one trick pony type benchmarks exist, but very few that actually try to look like they are doing typical things typical programs do, at the typical scales real programs work out, so Does the mighty hive mind of london.pm have any suggestions (preferably useful) of what to use for benchmarking typical Perl programs? Needs to do realistic things on a big enough scale to stress a typical system. Needs to avoid external library dependencies, or particular system specifics. Preferably needs to avoid being too Perl version specific. Preferably needs to avoid being a maintenance headache itself. Sadly things like regression tests *aren't* decent benchmarks because they're a) trying to test corner cases, not common cases b) trying to do this as efficiently as possible As I'm still gainfully siphoning money from TPF to HMRC, I don't have an employer from whom to derive test cases to turn into benchmarks. http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-perl-5-grant-report-9.html Not sure if that helps. Sadly not really. My fault for not asking a good enough question. (Oooh. I managed to mention pony in context, quite unintentionally) Nicholas Clark PS: Ilmari, lunch!
[OT] benchmarking typical programs
Sorry to ask an off topic question... It's very easy to write a benchmark for a particular thing. It's fairly easy to get such a beast to show that a particular change will speed that benchmark up. But Such benchmarks typically don't actually represent realistic code. They usually don't throw enough data around or create enough objects to start to stress the memory subsystems. And they don't do enough different things to thrash any CPU instruction cache. So It's much harder to show whether a particular change slows everything else down meaningfully enough to not be worth it. So Does the mighty hive mind of london.pm have any suggestions (preferably useful) of what to use for benchmarking typical Perl programs? Needs to do realistic things on a big enough scale to stress a typical system. Needs to avoid external library dependencies, or particular system specifics. Preferably needs to avoid being too Perl version specific. Preferably needs to avoid being a maintenance headache itself. With a pony too, if possible. :-) Nicholas Clark PS Ilmari, lunch!
Re: Brainbench perl test?
On Thu, Sep 06, 2012 at 10:23:21AM +0100, Jasper wrote: On 5 September 2012 23:25, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: Nor's a naive iterative method though - it takes no time at all before you overflow your ints and then (assuming that you're aware of this and use bigints, instead of just doing a fandango on core^Wvariable) every single operation after that is on bigints, and so is like trying to suck molasses through a straw. Python seems to handle big integers much better (that is a complete Python newbie's POV). Maybe you could switch language ;) But to Python 2, or Python 3? That is the question. Python 3.0 was released December 3, 2008. As listed on PyPI - packages in red don't support python 3, packages in green do. Hopefully one day everything will be greener. Status: 82/200 Updated: 2012-09-01 04:23:39.745820 http://python3wos.appspot.com/ Nicholas Clark
[ANNOUNCE] Social tonight with free beer, The Edgar Wallace, Strand, WC2R 3JF
The social is tonight, with free beer: On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 02:44:59PM +0100, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote: ilm...@ilmari.org (Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker) writes: Hi all, The September London.pm Social will be next Thursday, September 6th, at The Edgar Wallace in Aldwych/Strand. They serve tasty pub food and have a large and ever-changing selection of lovely ales. We've got tables reserved upstairs from 18:30 onwards. See you there! As an extra incentive, PhotoBox has agreed to put a few hundred quid behind the bar, so there will be free drinks not just for newbies. Details here about the pub, and how to get to it: http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Edgar_Wallace%2C_WC2R_3JF Nicholas Clark
Re: Who made the law?
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:31:16AM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 04:28:27PM -0400, Mark Fowler wrote: Here's my longer drawn out version, stolen from YAPC::NA's code of conduct. Comments on this are genuinely welcome, and I'll leave it to the current London.pm leader to make a call on what exactly we should adopt (if anything) Code of Conduct My feeling is that this is far too long and offputting. If they have to specify all this in nitpicking detail, it's because they've got people who are trying to game the system and they don't have the guts to throw them out. I'd much rather have a mostly-benevolent dictatorship which is able to treat cases as individual matters than a huge set of rules which still won't cover all eventualities. won't cover all eventualities I think is nicely confirmed with: On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:34:34AM +0100, David Hodgkinson wrote: And I don't think a mental image of Gillian Keith masturbating falls under any of that. Collateral damage maybe. Ho hum. That is not exactly something I want to think about, let alone look at. But that might just be me. Nicholas Clark
Re: Does anyone know a London Based Devops Engineer/Manager ? if you recommend someone and I place them - ill but two tickets to Paris on the Eurostar !!
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 09:21:29AM +, Rick Deller wrote: Rick Deller Technical / Digital Recruitment Consultant Perl, Java Search Marketing You're really not supposed to post job adverts to the main list. See http://london.pm.org/about/faq.html#job (which I agree isn't linked that prominently from the front of the site) Please could you re-send the job advert to j...@london.pm.org [without the 500 lines of london.pm list digest you didn't delete :-)] As that page linked above says: If you are a recruiter with a Perl job you might also consider submitting free of charge to http://jobs.perl.org Nicholas Clark
YAPC::Europe advice
Free advice that might be useful to anyone going to Frankfurt, or might just be annoying: 1) If you have Euro small change, look it out and take it. When I was visiting in October last year, it really wasn't obvious whether any ticket machines at the airport would accept credit cards.* Machines with card slots often only take EC cards, which everyone in Germany seems surprised don't exist outside of Germany. Meanwhile, credit card penetration in Germany is low. In 2011 the machines at the main station *did* take credit cards, but they seemed to be the exception. 2) Frankfurt has Apfelwein. It's often available in large jugs, from which you refill a small glass, traditionally with a diamond pattern on it (That's what the rightmost icon on the t-shirts is - an Apfelwein glass) Generally it's more Old Rosie than Aspells. So it can be a bit fun drinking it in large quantities. Nicholas Clark * In 2008 we had massive fun in Mainz (the far end of the line from the airport), trying to find a machine that would sell the right kind of tickets and accept the size of banknote that the cash machine had just dealt out. I forgot to blog about it at the time, but it was an epic farce lasting something like 10 minutes. And no, the small value tickets we needed were not available for sale using a credit card. Or from the human staff at the long distance ticket window, who did have change.
Re: OT: video cameras and tripods
(Sorry that this is completely off topic, but I think it might amuse Dave) On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 01:14:57PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: Any recommendations for a cheap tripod and camera? On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 02:26:18PM +0100, Damon Allen Davison wrote: You could possibly use an iPhone or Android phone with camera and a Gorillapod http://joby.com/gorillamobile/iphone4/ The newer mobile phones seem to work quite well with all sorts of lighting. Looking at two digital cameras today, and noticed that both had the standard fitting for a tripod mount. Even in this age of digital and metric, these 21st century devices still have integral to them a 3/16 British Standard Whitworth thread :-) Nicholas Clark
Re: search.cpan.org MIA?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:43:38PM -0400, Chris Devers wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: Er... search.cpan.org seems not to be responding? Just you. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/search.cpan.org And everyone else in Europe, I think. (I checked earlier too, and it wasn't there for me) It's never occurred to me that there is a systematic design bug in http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ Or maybe it's by design. everyone as in http://www.theonion.com/articles/relations-break-down-between-us-and-them,715/ Nicholas Clark
Re: [OT] Are there any Contracts roles open at the moment
On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:00:27PM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote: On 2 May 2012 21:19, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Speaking of which - both my employer and Dominic's are recruiting perl people (we're in cornwall, they're in london overlooking Tower Bridge and the Shard) He gets a much better referral bonus than I do, but I'm only 15 mins from some of the nicest beaches in the country ;p And no hosepipe ban? Wasn't sure we were still looking, but when I look on the intranet apparently we are. Still, the signing bonus is balanced by the fact that to the best of my knowledge no one in this department actually knows anyone with perl skills who's actually looking for work. Has your glorious employer actually mailed the job spec to the jobs list? (I've lost track. Base don what Aaron said, I think it might be a yes, else how did he know when you did not?) Nicholas Clark
Re: Regex help
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 10:23:36PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: at some point I should properly parse the assembler file using a grammar but since the spec is still in flux I'll go with my bodged parser for So there's still a chance it will converge onto the VAX instruction set? Nicholas Clark
Re: BBC jobs
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 09:57:00PM +1000, Kieren Diment wrote: * Please note that the salary available for the role depends on which level of experience you are considered for. And here's the current Freedom of Information response giving numbers for pay grades: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/foi/classes/disclosure_logs/rfi2046_salary_ranges_aug_2011.pdf Nicholas Clark
Re: A new leader is born...
On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 09:59:59AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting Leo Lapworth l...@cuckoo.org: Dear London.pm members, [ snip ] A NEW LEADER! Tom Hukins (who was in London many moons ago, forgot himself and now has been reborn to the one true city) has agreed to take on the role of Leader (and I didn't have to bribe him nor nuffink) There's been some off-list discussion about this email. Leo was so keen to share the news with you that he forgot to check the date. It was sent in the afternoon. This wasn't an April fool either: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17576745 p.s. Right, soa whose turn is it to move to the US next? Or south of the river? (Last week, with no foreknowledge of this impending transfer of power* I noticed that all our ex-glorious leaders are either living south of the river, or in (or moving to) the USA). Prospective next leader victims beware - Tom is already living south of the river, so he doesn't need any major logistics planning before going tag, you're it Nicholas Clark * I'm really not sure what power the leader has. Mostly responsibility. And outgoings. But no pay.
Re: Dim Sum tomorrow?
On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 09:42:40AM -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: Dave == Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com writes: Dave Anyone round the West End fancy parcels of tasty goodness and Lo Dave Bak Gao tomorrow? How far west? :) I suspect he means Zone 1. Not even White City. Not Dim Sum I realise, but I did like the (IIRC - I was jetlagged) Indian at the end of Santa Monica pier, mainly because it was just a tad more west than where I'd woken up that morning. (And when in California, I failed to take advantage of the Indian-ness of the Indian food there. In contrast to the I'm not going to ask you which cricket team your support if I don't already know the answer nature of the Indians round here.*) Nicholas Clark * For example, the local to my parents when I grew up: http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Sonali_Tandoori,_SE12_0DZ Which will support Sri Lanka if playing Australia. So will I. Sorry Damian :-)
Re: Perl problem - COM ports and filehandles
On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 11:59:17AM -0500, Darren Harwood wrote: good afternoon all, me=long time lurker, first time poster! It happens that there's a social meeting tonight near Euston station - you could also come and lurk at that: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2012-January/000266.html (or not lurk, and claim a free beer (or beer-equivalent thing) if it's your first time.) (warning! there is code in the post below - but as a first time poster i have no idea how well that is going to format itself for your consumption...we'll seei apologise now if its a garbled mess. i did try to find posting advice on the london.pm website, but no joy) Something like: 1) jobs go to the jobs list at j...@london.pm.org 2) Perl is sometimes considered Off Topic, as a joking reference to how much other chat is on the list. ? Yes, there's not much advice. i am trying to convert a perl script from *nix to win32. i am having difficulty with a couple of things: 1) the unix script opens a filehandle to a device like this: open my $pipe, '+', '/dev/ttyUSB0' or die Couldn't open pipe for reading and writing; my $mb = myDevice::myObject-new($pipe); this filehandle is then referenced in the module via a mechanism containing: my $rin = ''; vec($rin,fileno($pipe),1) = 1; my ($nfound, $timeleft) = select($rin, undef, undef, $timeDelimiter_s); last if($nfound == 0); my $bytes; sysread($pipe, $bytes, $nfound); The intent of that code looks to be doing non-blocking reads from the serial port. And just the serial port - it's not using select to multiplex between more than one input device. my (clearly incorrect) approach was to substitute the open for a use Win32::SerialPort; (because the device is connected via a virtual serial port over usb) with the following: my $PortObj = tie (*FH, 'Win32::SerialPort', $Configuration_File_Name) || die Can't tie: $^E\n; which i would expect to allow me to code: my $mb = myDevice::myObject-new(FH); but perl complains about the FH bareword. using *FH in the new method allows the script to compile, but i am unsure of the impact!?! *that* part should be fine, but. with my (dodgy?) *FH, i then hit the problem: Can't locate object method FILENO via package Win32::SerialPort when it hits the line: vec($rin,fileno($pipe),1) = 1; and i go no further. i clearly dont have a valid filehandle in my FH at this point - but i'm not sure why or what alternate approach to use. (aside - how do i know if my tied filehandle is opened for input/output/both in this context?) i appreciate that the vec and fileno commands are quite rare (to me, they were brand spanky new) and primarily associated with low level tty operations - so perhaps they dont work the same on win32 as *nix? thoughts on equivalent code? Right. I don't know Win32 at all. But from what I can infer the Unix code is looking to read data from the serial port when data is available, but not block when it is not. It's using file handles and select() as the mechanism to do this. From the code you give I don't think that they are only an implementation detail. The fact that Win32::SerialPort provides a *tied* file handle strongly suggests that it's only emulating a file handle interface for compatibility. I don't think your code needs to use file handles, as I'm guessing that they aren't exposed externally. The documentation for Win32::SerialPort seems, um, big: https://metacpan.org/module/Win32::SerialPort but skimming it I can see that there's reference to non-blocking reads. I think you need to look to see what API Win32::SerialPort provides to do a non-blocking read natively, and use that. I have no idea about the answer to your other question. Nicholas Clark
Re: The proper way to open()
On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 01:42:05PM +, Peter Corlett wrote: On 31 Jan 2012, at 05:18, Avleen Vig wrote: [...] This is the problem with TMTOWTDI. There should just be one way to do it. Then we wouldn't have this problem. If you want Python, you know where you can find it. Although, interestingly, PyPy have now raised enough money to start on their Py3k plan: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2012/01/py3k-and-numpy-first-stage-thanks-to.html So fairly soon one might have to decide which Python one wants to use - Guido's, or PyPy's. Which would mean that There's More Than One Way To Do It. :-) Nicholas Clark PS Happy birthday 5.8.8 - 6 today.
Re: Laptop Recommendation
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 04:01:33PM +, Taka wrote: On 24/01/2012 15:52, Andy Armstrong wrote: On 24 Jan 2012, at 15:47, Andy Armstrong wrote: You have to order them with a US keyboard - or swap it - to get a # key and a decent Enter key instead of the nasty hockey stick thing. You can order US keyboards from the UK store. Specifically you can order laptops with US keyboards... Well, well, well... just add an extra keyboard from OS X! you can have as many as you wish for any different languages!!! This doesn't change the physical shape of the Apple laptop keyboard. The UK keyboard has an evil shaped enter key. One of the most important keys on the keyboard, and it's *half width* at the bottom. Curiously, the Japanese Apple laptop keyboard doesn't. It seems that it shifts the entire keyboard left about half a keywidth within the recess available within the laptop case. I think the reason for all these problems is that Apple observed that on a US keyboard, the enter (or return) key is *very* wide, about 2 standard keywidths, as are several other keys at the right of the keyboard. Hence it wouldn't hinder usage, but would save space, to cut the width a bit. So they did this on the keyboard, and on the space in the laptop case for the keyboard. And only after all this was decided (and set in plastic, if not stone) did they then stop to wonder how to accommodate the different conventional layout for UK keyboards. Also, as well as the physical craziness of the Apple laptop layout, there's a logical craziness. It has § on a keysim, and no #. WTF? Which UK made UK keyboard ever has §? Whereas all the genuine items have a #. You can map that out. But software can't fix the shape of the enter key. Only the 6 P principal can. Nicholas Clark
YAPC::Europe is 20-22 August in Frankfurt
YAPC::Europe now has dates! It's Monday 20th to Wednesday 22nd August (in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) It's at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, which isn't that far from the central station, and (like the rest of Frankfurt) is 120km from the lie that Ryanair fly to. Location: http://j.mp/xIyqQN Registration: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2012/register No call for papers (yet) or prices, but I'd guess that the latter is 100 Euros. BA fly from City to Frankfurt, which is probably nicer than most of the other options. Nicholas Clark
Re: Laptop Recommendation
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 06:47:12PM +, Smylers wrote: Joel Bernstein writes: On 23 January 2012 19:17, Smylers smyl...@stripey.com wrote: I realize that I stupidly omitted to state that I'll be running Ubuntu on whatever I buy. Surely not on a Macbook Air though? Yes. I'm currently running Ubuntu, on a laptop which needs replacing. It's almost certain that whichever laptop I buy will come with an OS other than Ubuntu, but I don't really care what that is. It ships with a far superior desktop OS. Possibly (though I think that's subjective; I know people who've switched each way). I'm not looking to change OSes right now though, and would rather put up with the infelicities I'm used to rather than have a whole bunch of unfamiliar ones inflicted on me. The cynic in me can't resist suggesting that if you just track current Ubuntu, you can get all of the pain of progress-free change, without actually needing to install someone else's OS.* But I think I'd feel the same about upgrading this laptop from Snow Leopard to Lion. In particular, the missing scrollbars. I can't help with laptops. All the laptop hardware I've ever had experience of is no longer in production. Nicholas Clark * If I need to build a new *nix desktop, it may well be FreeBSD, because the last time I had a FreeBSD desktop, I liked it much better than the mess that Linux installed. Currently I'm disliking what Ubuntu is doing. Although, much like Apple, I think I understand why they are doing it.
Re: Laptop Recommendation
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 08:50:45PM +, Smylers wrote: Thanks for the advice -- dis-recommendations like this are also useful. (Also I've never been keen on giving Sony money since the root-kit audio CD incident, thought that's probably irrational of me to hold that against an entirely different part of Sony many years later and without researching what other laptop manufacturers have been up to which could be just as bad.) You should also be holding against Sony that they disabled an advertised feature of the Playstation 3 by remote update (the other os). Provably not a trustworthy firm. But yes, I am curious what the other scumballs get up to. Nicholas Clark
Re: Testing databases with DBIx::Class
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:19:19PM +, Peter Sergeant wrote: On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Ian Knopke ian.kno...@gmail.com wrote: I need to test some DBIx::Class code where the database may not be available. I can set up something to generate a small, temporary SQlite db, but I was wondering what approaches others are currently using for this. DBD::Mock seems ok but not especially well suited for use with DBIx. What does the rest of the community currently do? I've tried a few approaches with this. Where I've used a different DB backend, I've been bitten by differences in the DB from Unicode handling to different feature sets. Where possible, a blank(ish) testing database running the same DB software as the target is infinitely preferable to faking it with a different system. Yes, at ex-employer, it came to pass that trying to test a MySQL database using fixtures in SQLite produced a steady stream of work trying to cope with differences between the two, which only emerged as one tried to write tests for more parts of the system. (eg differences in SQL, what functions are named, emulating functions, that in SQLite everything is a string) Whereas building a system using MySQL's fast flat file loader paid off in the medium term, as it eliminated needing to code around differences, because the test database system was pretty much identical to the real thing. Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl threads and libwww wierdness
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 12:38:16PM +1100, Toby Wintermute wrote: 2011/12/16 Peter Vereshagin pe...@vereshagin.org: (i)Threaded perl5 ( 'use threads' ) doesn't seem to be recommended for production environments. I know it certainly wasn't recommended back in the days of 5.6 or 5.8, but I thought things had improved since then.. Well, they have in that bugs have been fixed. But the whole design, and the constraints imposed by the API of the core mean that has got some fairly fundamental flaws that I don't think can ever be fixed. Not that Python (well, CPython) or Ruby (to the best of my knowledge) have figured out how to retrofit proper concurrency of threads performing computation within the VM. Total throughput is actually slightly faster than the threaded version, it uses quite a bit less memory, and critically, doesn't get any spurious errors. I'm not surprised by the less memory, but it's nice to get anecdotal confirmation of this. On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 06:31:53PM +1100, Toby Wintermute wrote: 2011/12/16 Peter Vereshagin pe...@vereshagin.org: Hello. 2011/12/16 12:38:16 +1100 Toby Wintermute t...@wintrmute.net = To London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers : TW (i)Threaded perl5 ( 'use threads' ) doesn't seem to be recommended for TW production environments. TW TW I know it certainly wasn't recommended back in the days of 5.6 or 5.8, TW but I thought things had improved since then.. They did. Perl6 was released and it seems to have threads those can be recommended. Perl5 have fork() that 'just works' and seems to be enough. So, you're saying that threads under perl5 is forever going to be considered broken and not worth touching then? :( I think he did. Strictly all I can say is I can't see how to fix it and if I make such statements without any further qualification then it's always also implied and I've thought about this for a while [contrast with http://onefte.com/2011/11/04/taking-the-rough-estimation-oath/ ] Why do all the main distros ship a threading-enabled Perl? I note that Padre won't build without threads enabled either. Remember that the default config is no threads, and no shared perl library. 1: You seem to be assuming that distros actually know what they are doing when it comes to perl [IIRC Mandriva *stopped* defaulting to threads at some point while Rafael Garcia-Suarez was working there. There. One example is proof :-)] 2: Distros don't like to ship more than copy of perl. They see that ithreads- enabled perl supports everything that the default config does. Likewise shared perl library means that anything embedding perl (eg mod_perl) takes less space. So they seem to tweak both of these from the defaults Nicholas Clark
Re: Telecommuting
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 10:08:14AM -0200, Lindolfo Lorn Rodrigues wrote: This discussion about Telecommuting reminded me this blog post -Remote worker vs distributed teamhttp://opensource.com/life/11/11/remote-worker-vs-distributed-team?sc_cid=7016000IDmjAAG That's a really nice explanation of the distinction between remote worker and distributed team. I'd sort of started to figure out the distinctions myself based on experience of various awkward things, but I'd not seen it explained that nicely before. I was also amused by the (current) second comment, which is actually spam: Thanks for taking the time to discuss about this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me. followed by a link to a completely unrelated e-commerce site. Nicholas Clark
Re: Telecommuting
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 11:10:35AM +, Dirk Koopman wrote: Being constantly interrupted is one of the programmers bugbears. Especially as I argue that this probably wastes even more time than dealing with email. It isn't just the time the interruption takes, but also the time lost whilst one gets back into whatever one might have been doing. I remember the comment of a (now) retired friend of my father. He said that the tendency with e-mail was to simply add people to the Cc: list, because it was cheap for the *sender*. Instead of the sender thinking who actually needed to see the message and keeping it trimmed, save time and effort by just adding everyone plausible. Of course, once everyone plays that game... [I can't remember if he was also the first person to alert me to the thought that it's also a cover your back mechanism for your actions. If you Cc: it to people, then later you can tell them that they *had* a copy back then, so it's hard to complain later] All this leads to the default being a flood of e-mail. Which everyone (and the organisation as a whole) pays for. Nicholas Clark
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 11:42:14AM +, Smylers wrote: This is a followup to my post to the Perl jobs-discuss mailing list. Terrence picked it up here: http://livingcosmos.posterous.com/beware-of-net-a-porter-perl-jobs and the original can be found here: http://www.mail-archive.com/jobs-discuss@perl.org/msg01469.html Hmmm, I thought one of the features of the job discuss list was that it isn't archived, but apparently it is. That URL is for the perl.org jobs list. The london.pm jobs discuss list is not archived. That's the one you're thinking of. Nicholas Clark
Re: london.pm Digest, Vol 73, Issue 18
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 02:47:55PM +, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk: On 29/11/11 12:55, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting Shantanu Bhadoria shant...@cpan.org: [It's unclear what you're talking about as you haven't left any context. But let's assume it was AFNIC and the .pm domain extension.] Gandi are selling a year's registration for £10. A French company selling a French product and charging in not-Euros. Hmm :-) Nicholas Clark
Re: london.pm Digest, Vol 73, Issue 18
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 03:46:35PM +, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org: A French company selling a French product and charging in not-Euros. Hmm :-) That'll be because I have an account with Gandi and the site is honouring my charge me in Sterling dammit! cookie. Gosh. .pm domains for sale. Tolerating la perfide Angleterre. Whatever next? Supporting br_FR? Nicholas Clark PS Yes, I had to do some research to find out that it was br, and check that the language is first, the country second.
Re: Ruby?
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 11:17:00AM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On 16 Nov 2011, at 10:53, Leo Lapworth wrote: On 15 November 2011 22:05, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: Any freelancers out there with Ruby experience could use some retainer time for support work? /me checks he's subscribed to the right list... yep.. says Perl in the title still! So perl programmers aren't allowed to know other languages? Nah. Perl is not just the best tool for any job, it's the only tool! I thought everyone knew that. It would be heresy to think otherwise. After all, Perl itself is written in, er... It's for the well-known West London media company who also make wide use of another dead language. Not actually very well known to us. At least, very few of them seem to appear at (Central) london.pm events. Do they have their very own Perl Masons* group that they're successfully keeping secret? :-) Or are they all in Salford already? Doublepluswest London. Nicholas Clark * http://www.slideshare.net/davorg/perl-masons No idea if the video from the LPW is online yet.
Re: Ruby?
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 02:21:03PM +, Peter Edwards wrote: I believe there are a couple of lost souls still at BBC WS. Not me though :-D Anyway, shouldn't daveh's pimping activities be on the perl-jobs list ? :- Depends if you define the jobs list's on topic as being Perl jobs in London, Perl jobs of interest to Perl programmers in London or Jobs of interest to Perl programmers in London. Whilst Ruby might well be of more interest to Perl programmers than Python, Java, VB or COBOL, I can't see how to have some did-not-mention-Perl jobs on that list without it turning into a general London jobs list, which I didn't think was the intent. The middle definition seems to be the working definition of what's OK (according to the denizens of the jobs-discuss list, when critiquing the information-free missives the pimps send to the jobs list) - ie a job that a Perl programmer currently working in London could take, without needing to move. So any location to which people could sanely commute, starting from somewhere where people can also sanely commute to London. With more flexibility on the sanity for adverts that are interesting, or at least informative and buzzword free. So my take was that it's off topic for the jobs list, but this list sort of only has an off topic of things that should have been on the jobs list, so it's not that off topic here. And I wasn't going to say anything about it, except that I seem to be now. Oops. london.pm is having two socials in December. For the avoidance of Heresy*, the one with the free drinks for newcomers is on the 8th December. Are there any active Ruby groups in London? Are there even any Ruby programmers in London? Nicholas Clark * http://london.pm.org/about/faq.html#heretics
Re: Ruby?
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 02:44:37PM +, Mike Whitaker wrote: On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 14:39 +, Nicholas Clark wrote: For the avoidance of Heresy*, the one with the free drinks for newcomers is on the 8th December. Damn. I had forgotten that when I turned up at the October one, which was actually my first :D Just wear a V for Vendetta mask and bring a suitably long straw to the December meeting. Once there, consistently use a Google+ compatible WASP-like fake name and I'm sure you'll be able to bypass the checks. Nicholas Clark
Re: Exiting eval via next [perl v5.14]
On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 12:08:54PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: True. I'm ingesting HoP at the moment, hopefully some of that will rub off into better structured code. Strangely, the most immediate effect it had was on my C code. (I spotted places where I could uses function pointers.) I still owe MJD a proper review for Higher Order Perl. For now, the executive summary will have to suffice: Don't only *buy* this book - read it. Nicholas Clark.
Re: job. data scientist
On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 02:46:31PM +, Avishalom Shalit wrote: hi, first post (so far just lurked , and did not attend any meeting), so i'll introduce myself I am an algorithm developer, living in london , originally from israel, Welcome to the list. If you want to attend a meeting, there is one tonight at the Edgar Wallace. Find our glorious leader Leo to claim a free drink. http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm-announce/2011-November/000256.html There's also the London Perl Workshop in 9 days' time: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/lpw2011/ i hope that this mailing list is the right outlet for this post Technically not. Really you should mail it to j...@london.pm.org [no need to subscribe - it gets moderated through fairly quickly. And yes, you send it, as that way your e-mail address is in From:] Archives are here: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/jobs/ You'd probably want to inline at least some of the job spec into your e-mail, with see this URL for further details. If you look at the archived messages, most give quite a bit more details than this: we are looking for someone to join our algorithm analytics team, in the role of data scientist https://careers-upstream.icims.com/jobs/1209/job [such as location, yes, we do want Perl :-), and possibly even an indication of salary] You can also advertise on http://jobs.perl.org/ Nicholas Clark
Re: Impending arrival
On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 11:15:03AM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: I wouldn't touch 3, precisely because of nonsense like that. Their network is rubbish even in the UK - so much so that they have roaming agreements *in the UK* - but roaming 3 customers don't get 3G. Another reason to not use them is that their name is rubbish. So on that basis the approved-by-london.pm network is the one that isn't sure whether its name is #ff5500 or #ff6600 ? [or several other variants nearer the edges of its logo, at least the version on its website. I'm a bit surprised that there is this much variation. A long time ex-employer of mine was bloody sure that its (then) new logo was Pantone Rhodamine Red: http://www.tnsglobal.com/ And yes, I think it's misnamed. Improved Engine Red would be better :-) ] Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl Skills Test
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 01:54:35PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 01:27:41PM +0100, Victoria Conlan wrote: Auntie is ALWAYS looking for perl people. ALWAYS. Really? I've been shunted into a non-programming job for the last year precisely because they aren't. We are. We had someone start just a coupla days ago, and we're still looking for MOAR PEEPUL. Should the jobs list be told about this? Strikes me that even a 4 line message with little more meat than the department, location and a suitable contact address would be be sufficient. What's really not clear is the suitable contact address Find a sacrificial manager who needs to hire and volunteer its e-mail address for the greater good of Auntie? Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl Skills Test
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 02:25:10PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 02:13:43PM +0100, Victoria Conlan wrote: We are. We had someone start just a coupla days ago, and we're still looking for MOAR PEEPUL. Hmm, maybe you lot just scare me too much. :-P He's really not dangerous at all. Cute and cuddly, and easily disarmed by placing a pint glass of (decent) beer in each hand. I think I've forgotten how to write code now, anyhow. :-( Nah, coding is like falling off a bike - easy to do, hard to forget, and not very stylish :-) Surely not knowing how to code is a feature, as it makes it easier to unquestioningly accept the current fashion, without having to first unlearn last year's current fashion? Not that I know what this year's fad is. I merely know that I don't know it, and so usually fail to meet several of the ticky boxes of required experience on most job ads. Which pretty much goes to show how required required is, as people at said organisations when pointed at such ads usually then say that I'm still the sort of person that they'd want. Nicholas Clark PS If anyone's employer *is* recruiting, $10,000 is less than you'd pay a pimp. TPF would love to thank you for your donation on their front page: http://www.perlfoundation.org/ PPS london.pm's beer kitty will undercut TPF's price, but doesn't offer as much visibility.
Re: Perl Skills Test
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 04:07:50PM +0100, Paul Tweedy wrote: I know three people (all good engineers) who lost their jobs this year and are struggling to find work, so I find it hard to complain about any sort of adjustment to my salary in the current climate. I'm not sure how to respond to that, other than it made me stop and think, and Yes, good point well made. But it also made me think - that's not in London is it? There seems to be a hiring frenzy at the moment. IIRC currently recruiting are (at least) Net-A-Porter, Photobox, Venda, LOVEFiLM and Dave's-bit-of-the-BBC. (or if it is London, then is there a difference between companies who say that they are recruiting and those that actually *are*?) Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl Skills Test
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 03:08:13PM +0100, David Dorward wrote: On 27 Sep 2011, at 14:51, Jones, Christopher wrote: PS I've since improved my blagging skills, would be happy with less money, and might spot a few more problems with the script than I did 4 years ago. Just in case Auntie is still hiring. They are, I got double spammed by jobstheword about a BBC job this morning. Would be nice if $pimp knew to mail the jobs list. Nicholas Clark
Re: Should I get my mum a Kindle?
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 09:04:29AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: Yeah. Especially radio programmes that you missed, so (a) you weren't there to hear them live and (b) you didn't think to program your stereo deck to record the show to cassette in advance. (Are there stereos these days that can record to CDs or internal storage of some kind? For that matter, are there stereos that you can make them record something on a timer?) In the good old days, the only way that I was aware of was to have a cassette deck set up to record, with the mains power controlled by an external time switch. (Optionally, with the radio too.) When the power pings on, recording starts. Obviously, recording ends at the earlier of the power going off, or the tape running out. To record a second programme, replicate the above equipment. I'm not aware of time programmable recording devices appearing (for consumers) until the rise of the video recorders. Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl e-commerce?
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 02:03:14PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote: On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 08:14:03PM +0100, Simon Wilcox wrote: PHP solved the problem of making web-based applications easy to install. Something that all the 'big brains' of Perl still haven't solved. Ease of installation leads to ease of adoption. Hence why PHP has hammered Perl into the ground for web apps. That's because said 'big brains' don't have an incentive to optimise the language towards solving that particular problem. Want them to have an incentive? The Perl Foundation awaits your large donation! I'm not sure that that's actually going to work. TPF does quite well at spending donations when it has a good idea who to pay (ie who would be competent for the task, and is available to do it). Historically, as an outside observer, it's looked to me like it's not very good at identifying how to spend a targeted donation if it doesn't already have an idea *who*. Instead, it politely and patiently waits for the right who to contact it. So, [obvious plug] donating to the Core Perl 5 Maintenance fund *works*, because Dave and I (and possibly others) are keen to earn money from it [Donate here: https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give Evil page source prevents me from even finding out if there's a way to anchor to the Perl 5 Core section, which is below the fold] details here: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund Whereas a hypothetical solve the easy to install fund is likely to sit there, looking pretty, but not actually solving anything, unless there's also a suitable victim lurking, ready to pounce with a proposal that needs funding. Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl e-commerce?
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 08:23:26PM +0100, Sue Spence wrote: On 14 September 2011 10:11, Mallory van Achterberg stommep...@stommepoes.nl wrote: Hello all, I was looking around at popular e-commerce setups like Magento and Zend Cart. And I realised most of these are PHP based, for whatever reason. Is there a (decent, maintained) Perl-based e-commerce platform out there? I am not an expert in this area but it seems to me that you are looking at one particular aspect of one segment of the e-commerce market and extrapolating far too much from that. Some hypotheses have already been advanced as to why Perl might not be as competitive as it used to be in that arena. That doesn't mean it isn't used in medium - large - enterprise environments. I have certainly seen it in the last one. Furthermore, even if Perl no longer has a place in e-commerce, which isn't true*, I don't believe you could infer that Perl marketing efforts are a bad idea or doomed to fail or that Perl itself is utterly b0rk3n and needs somebody to hurry up and fix it. If I have misinterpreted your message then I apologise in advance. I didn't think that she was (that doom and gloom). But I did think that she's right that there's going to be a bit of a so what can I use? reaction from one segment of software end-users, given that Perl seems to be far more about toolkits to let you write something, and less about packages that do what you (think you) want out of the box, and thereby suck you in slowly. *Unless Venda has gone out of business :-) No, they are recruiting: http://jobs.perl.org/job/14828 As, I believe, are NAP, who use Perl for e-commerce, and Photobox, who use perl for e-commerce. But that's all in-house systems, not released open-source platform code. Possibly that's part of the difference here. Possibly not. Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl e-commerce?
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 08:14:03PM +0100, Simon Wilcox wrote: On 14/09/2011 19:47, Andrew Suffield wrote: PHP is a thorough and effective solution to the following problem, which is also its main design goal: How can stupid people create poor-quality web sites cheaply? Turns out this is in high demand, due to the large quantity of both those things in the world. I refer the honourable gentleman to Matt's Script Archive. It's easy to write crappy code in any language. You do Perl a disservice with such mindless and ill-considered attacks. PHP solved the problem of making web-based applications easy to install. Something that all the 'big brains' of Perl still haven't solved. Ease of installation leads to ease of adoption. Hence why PHP has hammered Perl into the ground for web apps. These three I agree with completely. These days it is just as possible to write a secure PHP application as it is to write an insecure Perl one. Agree. Mediawiki is a good example of this. But I'm not convinced that core PHP developers are competent at release engineering. [recent example is crypt, but there was an earlier case where they changed the behaviour of arrays. Citation fail on my part] I'm not convinced that their language design is sane [specifically, adding 'goto' to a language that worked without it, in particular when changing break to take a label rather than an integer would have addressed most of the problem space in a structured way] I'm not convinced that using \ as a package separator is sane. Double quoted strings, hello? Haven't Windows pathnames taught you anything? I'm pretty sure that decent code review would have flagged Paamayim Nekudotayim as something that doesn't fit in a programming language otherwise documented, for better or worse, in English. I remain unconvinced that date_sunrise() and date_sunset() belong in the global namespace of functions. I'm not sure that being case insensitive is a great idea, but doing it based on locale isn't, when it's the same locale as userspace uses. (Remember, in Turkish the uppercase of 'i' is not 'I', and vice versa. But third party code was relying on that? Oh dear...) And the most risky of all the things I'm typing - many of the bugs in the month of PHP bugs were core interpreter bugs. Most other dynamic languages [at that time] failed to have that many unresolved structural security bugs in their core interpreters. But yes, agree totally, as far as mass-market web apps go, they are wiping the floor with everyone. Nicholas Clark
Re: LPW 2011 carpooling
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:57:16AM +0100, James Laver wrote: On 19 Aug 2011, at 11:41, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: The great thing about London is there are so many airports to choose from. Bonus points for using Southend, Oxford or Birmingham (best for me from NW1). For those not actually familiar with the airport situation in London, Southend and Oxford have prepended 'London' to their names but they're bloody ages away. And yes, he probably can actually get to Birmingham faster than anything except city airport because he's just down the road from Euston. If you're being sensible and you have the money, fly from city, else heathrow, else gatwick, else luton, else stansted. In that order, preferably avoiding scumming it from stansted. If you're using another airport and you don't happen to live near euston, don't even think about any of the others. Stansted is a 46 minute train ride from Liverpool Street, with a station at the airport. Southend is a 50 minute train ride from Liverpool Street, and a station at the airport, judging by http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14291564 Similarly amusing abuse of London that I remember being amused by was a cruise ship docking at London, Dover. Note that some cruise ships can just fit under Tower Bridge, and hence can dock next to HMS Belfast, in the Pool of London. Zone 1, beating even London City Airport's Zone 3. Nicholas Clark
Re: LPW 2011 carpooling
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 04:29:13PM +0200, Abigail wrote: I've done LPWs by leaving home in the morning, arriving at the venue of the LPW only second after Josette, and be back home in the evening. Ah yes, bad news. LPW unfortunately clashes with a big geek event in Portugal, which Josette will be attending. (It's warmer in Portugal.) A less famous member of O'Reilly staff will act as understudy at LPW. Further bad news. Frankfurt is in Germany, which means that O'Reilly Germany will cover it. So no Josette at YAPC::Europe 2012 either. Who will we get to do the auction? Will there even be an auction? :-/ Nicholas Clark
YAPC::Europe summary
So YAPC::Europe in Riga was great fun. I've probably failed to include some important things, but * Lots of excellent talks [most of which I think were videoed] * Lots of excellent socialising [most of which was not, fortunately] * Net-A-Porter donated $10,000 to the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund Thanks. They are recruiting, in London * Dijkmat donated $5,000 to it * Oslo Perl Mongers donated 1000 Euro to it (currently $1428.50) [They aren't recruiting. Well, except perhaps for something unpaid on the first Wednesday of the month - see http://oslo.pm.org/ ] You can read the all about it at http://www.perlfoundation.org/ The good news feed there is entirely about the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. Except for one interruption about someone called Leo Lapworth getting some sort of non-orange dromedary [or something like that :-)] for his work in improving the design of many many Perl websites. Next year's YAPC::Europe is in Frankfurt, probably late August, probably at the University, but not yet confirmed as nothing is signed. Judging by this year's stats [http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/stats/], UK top on 58 attendees, Germany second on 45, next year might actually have somewhere non-UK top. Terrible :-( Big thanks to Andrew Shitov for organising an excellent conference. [He also got one of the non-orange dromedary things, as did Daisuke Maki] Nicholas Clark
Re: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 06:51:38PM +0100, Michael Stevens wrote: On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 05:57:45PM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: London.pm, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. I feel so loved. We should make an account. Will they stealthily add new yes options to the privacy policy without [proper] notification, to pimp us harder? I so want to be pimped harder by some valueless post IPO firm. Nicholas Clark
Re: perlisalive.com?
On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 11:53:42AM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote: On 9 August 2011 11:32, Anton Berezin to...@tobez.org wrote: Anyone has any idea who is behind the site? Perl might be alive, but ad...@perlisalive.com is surely pretty dead. :-/ whois says: Simon Wilcox. Gmail says he's a regular poster to this list. I do note that perlisdead.com is thankfully un-registered. Is it better that it's unregistered, waiting for someone unhelpful to register it and spread FUD? Or that it's registered and used in some suitably amusing way? Best I can think of so far is a 418 response, with pages linking to what we would like people to read. Nicholas Clark
PHP (was Re: website maintenance gig available)
On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 12:12:11PM +, ian.doche...@nomura.com wrote: Isn't 'PHP skill' an oxymoron? On this topic, dear lazyweb, er list. My search engine skills fail me. Isn't there some quote, roughly you don't program PHP, you ??? it until it works, possibly attributed to Randal Schwartz? Does anyone know the one I'm failing to describe? And the citation? [And if I'm seen as maybe being unfair on a language which takes the worse-is-better approach to dazzling new depths [Larry Wall] I point you all to http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?word1=php+vulnerabilityword2=perl+vulnerability ] Nicholas Clark
Re: website maintenance gig available
On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 05:28:20PM +0200, Tara Andrews wrote: On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: That's the company telling you to stop posting to mailing lists from work. Heaven forbid that Perl be relevant to anyone's work. This list is about Perl? :-) [But yes, you both have valid points. I suspect it's more for regulatory oversight reasons that a bank is discouraging non-work-visible means of sending messages, than some organ-grinder management mentality that knowledge workers need to sit chained to their designated task 60 minutes of every hour] To atone for mentioning the 4 letter word (and quoting another mention of it), I should remind everyone that there is a social tomorrow at The Victoria, W2 2NH*) Nicholas Clark * Somewhere near Paddington, and convenient for the Central Line, so maybe we'll see some people from a large West London Media Organisation, and other large enclaves of 4 letter word users from out west.
Re: mutt
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 11:23:08PM +0200, Joel Bernstein wrote: On 24 July 2011 23:14, Mallory van Achterberg stommep...@stommepoes.nl wrote: So what is this # key for mutt? Breaks the thread and creates a new one from the message. A client-side fix for incorrect References: headers. A client side fix fixes that client. (Which is useful, don't get me wrong) But online mail archives preserve the sender's faux pas in perpetuity. [Although I *also* think that the mail software's authors aren't innocent here. This happens often enough that the software ought to be able to spot you replied to this message, but changed the subject completely and deleted all quoted text and then ask is this actually a new message?, and scrub the References: and In-Reply-To: if you tell it that it's not a reply. Software still hateful.] Nicholas Clark
Re: Google +
Is there a way to harness dancing monkeys to generate electricity? Can we back feed it to the grid, for great profit (and hence free beer?) Nicholas Clark On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 11:45:45AM +0100, Edmund von der Burg wrote: So this seems to be turning into a threading thread - please reply with a different subject to mark it as such. Also you're putting your replies below the previous message - please top-post like this so I don't need to scroll. Hugs Kisses, Edmund. PS Social on Thursday at the Gunmakers. Sadly, no free beer, as none of the bazillions of firms responsible for the great hiring explosion can be convinced that the publicity they'd get is worth it. :-(
Perl 5 core maintenance fund drive
You may or may not be aware that Dave Mitchell, one of the longstanding Perl 5 core committers, has been paid for the past year or so to work on fixing hard and long standing bugs in the Perl 5 core, thanks to a generous grant of $50,000 booking.com made to TPF. However, that money is almost exhausted. Dave would be happy to continue, and I'm now in a position where I'd be able and willing to be paid to work on maintaining and bettering the Perl 5 core. Hence The Perl Foundation has launched a Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund, and a funding drive to raise an initial $25,000, to cover 3 months work. Better still, Vienna Perl Mongers will match the first $10,000 of donations, dollar for dollar, putting the surplus from YAPC::Europe 2007 to very good use. http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund http://vienna.pm.org/10_000_dollars_for_the_perl5_core_maintenance_fund.html https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give-- donate here -- TPF are looking for both for individual and corporate donations. I'd hope that it particularly appeals to companies wishing to give something back to Perl, or wanting to raise their visibility in the Perl world, and to Perl developers. Given the number of firms in London currently trying hard to recruit Perl developers, I'd hope that they see this as a much-cheaper-than-pimps way of getting themselves noticed, ahead of their competition. Much that I'd love to, I can't actually promise that donating will get you a better class of candidate when recruiting, but TPF is able to offer the following * donating $1000 or more gets your logo used, and a mention in the weekly report(s) you paid for * donate $1 or more and TPF will issue a joint press release thanking you profusely, on their homepage and of course, while match funds last (so get in quick) * Buy Dave, get me free. Or something like that :-) Nicholas Clark PS Even though this message mentions the naughty 4 letter word, I consider it still on topic, as it's about raising money for me to buy beer. [And pay the rent, utility bills, food, and all the other things that real life (tm) has to offer to separate the living from their money]
Re: Cool/useful short examples of Perl?
On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 10:26:22AM +0100, Matt Lawrence wrote: On 08/06/11 18:19, Philip Newton wrote: On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 15:37, Matt Lawrencematt.lawre...@virgin.net wrote: Perl's canonical true and false are 1 and '' respectively Is that so? How would one find that out? Dump-ing 4==4 and 4==5 with Devel::Peek implies to me that true and false are PVNVs with integer, floating-point, and string values filled simultaneously, so I'm not sure how any of the three fields could be considered the value of those, er, values(?). Isn't that true of all scalars, under the hood? All I meant was: $ perl -le 'print \x27$_\x27 for 1 == 1, 1 == 0' '1' '' truth has a value, and it's consistent with any other 1 that's been used in an integer, floating point and string context: $ perl -MDevel::Peek -e '$a = 1; sprintf $a%g, $a; Dump $a; Dump 1 == 1' SV = PVNV(0x1008031a0) at 0x100811948 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (IOK,NOK,POK,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK) IV = 1 NV = 1 PV = 0x100201790 1\0 CUR = 1 LEN = 16 SV = PVNV(0x100802c20) at 0x100800828 REFCNT = 2147483643 FLAGS = (IOK,NOK,POK,READONLY,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK) IV = 1 NV = 1 PV = 0x100200090 1\0 CUR = 1 LEN = 16 It's falsehood which is special: $ perl -MDevel::Peek -MScalar::Util=dualvar -e '$a = dualvar(0, ); sprintf %g, $a; Dump $a; Dump 0 == 1' SV = PVNV(0x100803a40) at 0x100815418 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (IOK,NOK,POK,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK) IV = 0 NV = 0 PV = 0x1002017c0 \0 CUR = 0 LEN = 16 SV = PVNV(0x100802c00) at 0x100800810 REFCNT = 2147483647 FLAGS = (IOK,NOK,POK,READONLY,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK) IV = 0 NV = 0 PV = 0x100200080 \0 CUR = 0 LEN = 16 It's effectively a dualvar with a string value of an empty string, and a numeric 0. (Yes, an empty string has the value of 0 when used in a numeric context, but it warns about the conversion. The dualvar doesn't) [whilst beer is foamy, and none of the above] Nicholas Clark
Re: Perl under MacOS X
On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 09:37:36AM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote: Install Virtualbox or Vmware and use a linux perl. Much simplier in the long run than playing around with payware DVD sized downloads for gcc, case insensitive filesystems and the like. $ date Foo $ uname foo $ cat Foo foo Thu Jun 2 10:02:54 BST 2011 Darwin Admittedly that's not the default - you do have to fiddle with the disk partitioning to create a case sensitive file system. And gcc is on the install DVDs. (And IIRC someone mailed here that if you did hard enough on Apple's site you can find the download for the previous version of XCode) I'm not sure what other and the like have been problems, since the switch to dlopen() some years back. But everyone's mileage varies. Nicholas Clark
failing to steal from Java (was Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...)
On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 01:28:14PM +0100, Pedro Figueiredo wrote:
On 27 Apr 2011, at 13:02, Nicholas Clark wrote:
The issues seem to be dependency management and code reuse.
How is Java solving these in ways that Perl is failing at?
It's not automating the (to some degree necessary) bureaucratic
permission-gaining exercises. So what is it doing differently?
From my point of view, when we decide to update a dependency, run the tests,
get Ops approval, have run it on a few live servers, etc (the whole
bureaucratic process), all I have to do is update or add the dependency
information in the POM file:
dependency
groupIdmysql/groupId
artifactIdmysql-connector-java/artifactId
version5.1.13/version
scopecompile/scope
/dependency
I would either add this block, if it's a new dependency, or change the
version number. Then I would run 'mvn deploy' and go have a coffee.
But a dependency in a Makefile.PL can do that just as well, so what's the
difference/advantage of the Java toolchain?
As a partial answer, most everywhere I've worked has *not* packaged up its
internal code as modules with Makefile.PL - it's just one (or more) big trees
of modules in place. Is the problem that the compile first nature of Java
forces one to package everything up within a build system (a sunk cost, which
can't be avoided, unlike perl), so that it's always going to be a low
*incremental* cost to add proper dependency metadata to a Java project?
Ops aren't even involved in this other than to deploy the new package (a
single file) to live and having given their amen to the results of the
previous testing.
Is that the *big* advantage - process?
In that it's standard, reliable and easy to distribute java code as a single
file, that's known good to work? Meaning that a lot of the process cost of
installing dependencies can be pushed back from operations to development,
meaning in turn that operations are not as averse to changing/adding new code,
because for them it's pretty-much a no brainer?
[Whereas you can't usefully compile a single perl module or distribution into
a single file package that the runtime only needs to load and link-edit into
the rest of the code, and I think that it's a hard problem to solve
because
a: Perl can run code at compile time, thanks to BEGIN {} blocks
b: Perl code is happy/allowed to fiddle with anyone else's namespaces,
including globals, so it's hard to know what the actual impact of
Cuse Foo really was
neither of which, I believe, is the case for Java.
Plus,
c: The relative ease of XS, and the things it lets you that you can't in
pure Perl means that it's fairly common to end up indirectly depending on
an XS module. Which is fine locally, but means that your remote deploy is
now (at least) 2 things - the Perl code, the shared object from the XS
code, and then potentially any dependencies on other shared objects.
whereas, for Java, nearly everything is written in pure Java, and deployed as
Java bytecode?]
And what of this can't be solved by building packages for the OS packaging
system? Which boxes *don't* those tick that Java does?
Nicholas Clark
Re: Speed v Version
On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 11:12:48AM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On 1 Jun 2011, at 09:46, Dirk Koopman wrote: I contemplating providing encouragement to a customer to upgrade from 5.8.7 to something more modern. One of the overriding issues is speed. The customer is fixated with speed. Unfortunately one of the major things the customer's clients do is replicate their ISAM data into databases, usually MS-SQL via DBI and DBD::ODBC. The ISAM data is always on Linux (and a few Unix) boxes. The replication is a batch process that must complete overnight. Currently it is a fairly close run thing. I don't suppose anyone has done any speed benchmarking on the various perls to date? Still less on newer DBIs etc? All the customer's modules are circa 2005. Then the version of perl is very unlikely to be the problem. Tried benchmarking? How CPU bound is the batch process? Is there latency waiting for the database? Can you run the job as a parallel process? My hunch is with Dave that perl likely isn't the biggest bottleneck, but I don't know your code, and I'm guessing that you've already tried the obvious things, so it may be wrong. 5.10, 5.12 and 5.14 should (on average) each use less RAM for the data structures than the previous version, but that may be negligible performance gain in this case, as I'm guessing that RAM isn't the bottleneck. 5.14 should use about 2-5% less CPU than 5.8 to 5.12, for the general case. 5.14 under ithreads likely shows a bigger speedup compared with earlier versions. Moreover, if the customer isn't actually needing ithreads, but currently has a threaded perl, then switching them to unthreaded *also* should be a speedup. But all this won't help much if the database is really the bottleneck. I'd suggest a: profiling the application under Devel::NYTProf with representative data, and seeing where it spends most of its time - waiting on the database, or actually chewing local CPU b: if 5.14.0 is faster than 5.8.7, then plan on upgrading to 5.14.1 (which I think is due within a few weeks), but don't bother upgrading to any earlier version, as 5.8.x and 5.10.x are already end of life. (the Linux vendors are own their own now) Nicholas Clark
