blogs.perl.org

Birds of a feather... flock together.

YAPC::EU is a great place to meet face to face with others in the community that share your interests, even non-Perl ones. To make it easier for you organise these informal gatherings - known as BoFs - we have created a page on the wiki.

Fancy getting together to watch the premier of the new season of Dr Who, going for a run, or discussing the future of Act (A Conference Toolkit? Then sign-up now!

If none of the current BoFs interest you then please feel free to make your own suggestions for a meet-up on the wiki and help us make the conference even better.

Once in a while, I search the web for Perl/Tk. I'm always happy to find some old jewels. This time, it was keen little rabbit ears, which is a simple ear training program for Linux and Windows. It has a Perl/Tk GUI and comes with good installation instructions.

You can find it here: Keen little rabbit ears.

I downloaded the script, got the dependencies (it relies on timidity to play MIDI files) and tried it out. Then I did some changes, like use FindBin to locate files relatively to the script in the file system, use File::Spec to build paths, and use File::Temp to create the temporary MIDI file for timidity in a proper place.

But, then I wanted to share the code with Matthias Nutt, the original author. He has a web site: matthias-nutt.no-limit.de. But the feedback form is dead (have a look at the anti-spam picture).

So, does anybody know Matthias Nutt? Or: does anybody know how to handle this kind of code? Can I set up a git repo with the new code without risking expensive lawsuits?

I'm giving my CPAN workshop at cPanel* in Houston on Thursday July 31 at 7pm. In this workshop, you can go from nothing to releasing a CPAN distribute in a couple of hours. We'll go through the entire process using an actual distribution you create and uploading to a live server. You may even get actual CPAN Testers results by the end of the night.

If you plan to be there, make certain that you request a PAUSE account ahead of time.

If you'd like to participate in CPAN Day on August 14, this is a good way to get ready.

Although I won't have time before CPAN Day to do this for other groups, I'd be delighted to give this workshop again wherever someone wants to host it.

[*] cPanel is at 3131 W. Alabama, Houston, TX.

If the abstract for your module is up to snuff, then have a look at the SYNOPSIS to see whether you could improve that in a CPAN Day release. The SYNOPSIS should briefly show typical usage of the headline features of your module.

Here are some guidelines for a good SYNOPSIS:

Most Perl programmers using named captures in regex probably pick the (?<NAME>...) syntax, as that's what's displayed more prominently in the Perl documentation and tutorials.

However, Python does not support this syntax and uses (?P<NAME>...) instead (notice the extra P character). Incidentally, visual regex tool like kiki is built with Python and only support this syntax.

(?P<NAME>...) is also supported by Perl. So if you work with Python or use kiki, you might, like me, want to accustom yourself to using the P syntax.

PCRE (and thus PHP and other PCRE-using languages) supports both syntax. Komodo IDE's Rx toolkit support both. However, Ruby and .NET only support the non-P syntax. Well, that's how the real world works.

So, very recently the excellent Vastyn (Henry Van Styn) pointed out that we should be at the top of git.io:

" I came across our very own Kent Fredric’s GitHub profile today and did a double-take when I read his contrib stats:

https://github.com/kentfredric
# "Year of contributions: 21,996 total

Without even speculating by what kind of dedication/witchcraft this number is even possible, it made me curious about stats in general for GitHub, and some googling turned up this page:

http://git.io/top

This is a report of the “Most Active” 256 GitHub users. Well, not quite… The current number 1 on the list has HALF the contribs (kevinsawicki at “11,430”).

kentfredric doesn’t show up because of this second caveat: "Only first 1000 GitHub users according to the count of followers are taken. This is because of limitations of GitHub search.

I have app which do some stuff via HTTP/HTTPS. Here it is, already posted about it on blogs.perl.org

There is simple logic:

1) Use http. If user wants https, use https but check that LWP version >= 6 AND LWP::UserAgent->is_protocol_supported("https")
2) Retry HTTP 500 server errors. There can be a lot (coming from server, it's normal)
3) Retry HTTP 500 errors with Client-Warning=Internal response (LWP could raise this in case of conenction problem and socket timeout) with warning "connection problem"

So now I got two reports at once that everything completely broken and HTTPS does not work.

After some investigation I found that:

LWP 6.00 and 6.01:

1) ship LWP::Protocol::https as part of LWP::UserAgent distr, not a separate dist.
2) Do not ship and depend on Mozilla::CA. Instead there is note in docs:

If you're looking for something to release on CPAN day, check the abstract for your modules, and make sure they have a good abstract. The abstract should not only be compliant pod, but should succinctly describe what your module does. The name and abstract are often the first thing that potential users see, so make them count.