blogs.perl.org

The meeting first night was in a large beer bar in the centre of Nuremberg.
We went back to the Best Western to find a certain exPumpkin already resident in the bar.
Despite several of the well named Bitburgers we managed to arrive at the
conference venue on time the following morning. Since my knowledge of German was
limited to a C grade 'O' Level last century my review talks will be mostly
limited to English talks. Apologies in advance to those giving German talks
(not unreasonable considering the country). Hopefully other blog posts will
cover these.

Masak spoke about the dialectic between planning (like physics) and chaos (like
biology) in software development.

http://masak.org/carl/gpw-2016-domain-modeling/talk.pdf

Tobias gave a good beginners guide to Perl 6 in German and I was able to follow
most of the slides since I knew more Perl 6 than German and even learnt a thing
or two.

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week. Enjoy!

20 years ago, I really wanted the chat2.pl domain name, to commemorate the one piece of code I ever contributed to the core. I even wrote the .pl administrators, and got no response.

Well, guess what I have now! chat2.pl!

Behold the wonder that is:

# XXX hardwired $PF_INET, $SOCK_STREAM, 'tcp'

# but who the heck would change these anyway? (:-)

$pf_inet = 2;

$sock_stream = 1;

$tcp_proto = 6;

Why, SystemV, and later Linux, didn't follow BSD numbers, I'll never know, but the comment was prophetic!

Recently to help users understand how to use swat, I have added some useful info at swatpm site :

• a detailed hello world example

• a FAQ page answering to some potential questions about swat

PS the information on swatpm will be updated

This is a silly post. I am going to show you a contrived example of Perl code that is emulating what 8-bit assembler code does to loop through a 16-bit value. Why?

I have an ongoing researching project involving the Atari 2600 Video Console System, which has a MOS 6502 microcontroller at its heart. Assembler is not my native tongue and it helps to unpack these squirrelly bits into Perl to verify my understanding.

In a larger sense, though, seeing other ways to implement common tasks is salutary. If nothing else, you may appreciate how much lift you get from using higher level languages.

Anyway, the code:

my ($MAX_X, $MAX_Y) = (256, 256);
my ($x, $y) = (0, $MAX_Y);
printf("%-3d", $y);

RELOAD_X:
   $x = $MAX_X;

DEC_X:
   $x -= 1;
   printf("\t%-3d\n", $x);
   goto DEC_X if $x;

   print "-----------\n";
   $y -= 1;
   printf("%-3d", $y);
   goto RELOAD_X if $y;

print "\ndone\n";

This code essentially decrements the least significant byte ($x) until it is zero. It then decrements the most significant byte ($y). If $y is greater than zero, the program reloads $x to the maximum value begins decrementing it to zero again. The program ends when $y is zero.

No loop directives. No subroutines. Just goto spaghetti.

You're welcome.

We're delighted to announce that ZipRecruiter has decided to sponsor this year's QA Hackathon.

ZipRecruiter.com is a website where job seekers can find jobs all over the world, and employers can list their open positions. Not only will those positions be listed on ZipRecruiter.com, they will be pushed to more than one hundred job boards and social networks. Job seekers get free email alerts with postings that are tailor-made for their skill set and location.

For the last five years, the version comparison code in Git::Repository started with this:

my ( $r, $v, @o ) = ( shift, ( grep !ref, @_ )[0], grep ref, @_ );

The above line looks clever (that's probably why I wrote it that way in the first place), but it also has a subtle bug.

This post is a follow-up to MacPorts openssl versus Perl. That post told of a problem with a recent MacPorts openssl upgrade, and gave a workaround.

The right thing to do, however, is to use the current openssl. That involves finding all Perl modules that use openssl and re-installing them.

To do this, I wrote a small Perl script that traversed @INC looking for binary files. It spawned the file command to determine whether they were Mach-O files. If they were, otool -L was used to determine whether they actually linked to openssl. The script requires Perl 5.10, but uses only core modules. The file and otool commands come with Mac OS X, at least with OS 10.11 El Capitan. The script itself is available as a GitHub gist.

In my case all I found was Net::SSLeay. So I took my MacPorts openssl back to the current version using the same commands detailed in the previous post to do the downgrade, and then did the following in the cpan client:

cpan> test Net::SSLeay
cpan> # to make sure it passes
cpan> force install Net::SSLeay
cpan> # forced because it is already installed