Recent Entries

The CERT Perl Secure Coding Standard

The CERT Perl Secure Coding Standard "provides a core of well-documented and enforceable coding rules and recommendations for Perl"

Here, have an interactive Perl Debugger: Regexp::Debugger

He did a talk on this at OSCON, but this video I can share:

(Sorry, the captions are no good on it.)

It IS on CPAN by now, since OSCON has passed!

Notes from the 2012 perl QA hackathon

So I took part in the 2012 Perl QA hackathon, where I somehow managed not to pester anyone too much (I think), and achieved the following:
- Got a round tuit (click for picture).
- Edited Devel::Cover PODs for consistency and readability, sent patch to author.
- Wrote filk inspired by the above (see under cut)
- Ate way too much (hush, Wendy!)
- Got close to centerstage in the mandatory group pic.

( Here be filk! )

Skeleton XML parser

This is the Perl skeleton XML parser I always keep handy. It might be useful for you, too.

Current Mood: cold

Fan Fiction Fetcher, now with added LWP

For those of you who were interested in my fanfic-fetching perl script, I've just released version 0.16 of WWW-FetchStory (http://search.cpan.org/~rubykat/WWW-FetchStory-0.16/) (well, that will be the URL when CPAN finishes processing it).

The big news: it no longer depends on wget! It uses the LWP perl module instead. This means that MS-Windows users should be able to use the script (fingers crossed).
I have retained the option to use wget, because some sites work with wget that don't work with LWP.(*)

There are a bunch of other improvements, and another new fetcher (Project Gutenberg), but the LWP stuff is the important bit.

(*) I have spent HOURS trying to get LWP + Cookies to work with LiveJournal, but no joy, and I have given up. LWP and Cookies work with other sites (I tried it on Ashwinder) but not with LJ. (throws hands in air) Anyone who can figure out why the cookies sometimes work and sometimes don't, that would be great. I have pored over debugging output, I have made observations with wireshark... The only difference seems to be that wget sends the right cookies and LWP only sends some of the right cookies.

Current Mood: cold

Fan Fiction Fetcher!

For all of us here who are fannish as well as geeky, you might be interested in this.

I have written my own fan-fiction downloader in Perl, which can be installed from CPAN as "WWW::FetchStory". There are probably Linux-isms in the code. (frown) For example, it uses the "wget" program to do the actual downloading.

But I would love other people to use the script! It has plugins (which I am calling "fetchers") for various different fiction sites, which know how to download multi-chapter fics from those sites, so you only have to give the table-of-contents URL for the fic and it will figure out the rest. Depending on the particular fetcher, it will get not just the title and author, but the summary, the categories and the characters.
It also has an option to create an EPUB file rather than HTML files.

Currently, I have written fetchers for:( list of fanfic archives )
But every now and then, those sites change their code and the fetcher for that site breaks. (frown)

Also, for a number of those archives, you must be logged in if you want to download "adult" rated fic. The solution I devised for that is rather clumsy (and Linux-centric); it looks for a "cookies.txt" file in your home directory, which you need to have exported from your browser after you logged in to the site.
If someone has a better solution, I would love to hear from you.

For the more geeky among you, the source is in my git repository at https://github.com/rubykat/WWW-FetchStory
I would LOVE people to contribute to it, whether that be fixing bugs, fixing documentation, improving fetchers, or writing new fetchers.

"I wonder what this perl code does..."

When I get one of those moments, I reach for "perl -e" (because it's always available with perl), but someone mentioned the following 2 tools recently on a mailing list I read, so I thought I'd pass them on:

- perlconsole
- Devel::Repl

DW Perl module client

Hello,

perl!

Does LJ::Simple work reliably with Dreamwidth? If not, is there a comparable perl module that does? (I'd rather rely on someone else's testing than conduct my own, which is likely to be more slipshod)

Also (and relatedly), is there a way that given a DW entry that's been either imported from, or crossposted to, LJ, I can get (programmatically) the ID or URL of the LJ entry, without resorting to comparing timestamps and post contents?

(x-posted from my own dw)

Testing code that isn't perl in your Perl test suite

Run PHP tests in your Perl test suite

I don't want to forget about this link someone shared with me a while ago, and figured it might come in handy to someone else, too!

Oh Perl, you so crazy

Self replicating spiral of Perl code

Perl Survey 2010 is live

Here's the announcement I saw:

The Perl Survey 2010 is now live. Its purpose is to better understand the demographics and opinions of the Perl community. You can complete the survey at http://survey.perlfoundation.org - it should take about 10 to 15 minutes. Once you've done that, please let your relevant friends and colleagues know about the survey so they can coplete it as well. My aim is to get a response of over 1000 individuals, and to run the survey (lightly adapted) every two or three years so we can see how the community changes over time. The official announcement of the survey is here: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/05/grant-update-the-perl-survey-1.html

Passing this on, for anyone interested inn YAPC::EU::2010

Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 12:38:31 +0100
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Send-A-Newbie, notice to apply for funding

The application process for the Send-a-Newbie initiative to allow participation at
YAPC::EU::2010, which allows applicants to attend who would otherwise be unable due
to financial constraints, is now open.

Please go to: http://www.send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org/applications.html for
more information on how to apply.

Please note that the only condition is that you have not attended a YAPC or major
Perl Workshop previously. No constraint on age, experience etc., is made.

If you know of any mailing list that this notice may be displayed then please
forward the contents/repeat the information there.

If you wish to donate to this initiative then please visit:
send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (or send your donation to
send-a-newbie@paypal.com).

Kind regards

Mark Keating
Secretary to the EPO

Do they eat newbies?

If a hypothetical person knew bugger all about computers, but was made curious by the way half of Dreamwidth seems to be involved in the programming side, where would you suggest that person begin?

I've Googled and found lots of resources, but because I know nothing I have no way to tell if they're good resources, so I'm looking for advice from actual people.

All suggestions welcome - online, books, or "Don't bother, go away and come back when you've learned [other language]".

Large amounts of data in CPAN packages

I have a CPAN package called Lingua::EN::Alphabet::Shaw which transliterates between the Latin and Shavian alphabets. Currently it keeps the transliteration data, a few megabytes, in /usr, and it gets installed along with the package. I was thinking that it would be useful to add the ability to download the data every so often from shavian.org.uk, but unless that involves me actually updating the CPAN package every week, it doesn't seem workable to keep the data in /usr, since the user generally doesn't have write permission there. So either we keep one copy in /usr and any updates in /home, or we require the user to download the data on first use of the package rather than during installation.

I'm wondering what your opinion is of packages which do this. I remember it was one of several annoyances I had with Lingua::Phoneme.

(Of course, the user might not even have much of a home directory, say if it was the Apache user, which makes things a bit more complicated.)

Nifty CPAN visualizations

I found this from Visual Complexity: CPAN Explorer.

Women at YAPC

I wrote two blog entries trying to get some attention to the issue of women in the Perl community and women at YAPC.

The percentage of women on YAPCs was 4-5%, the percentage of female speakers was 6% on YAPC Europe.
It is similar to what

damned_colonial got on her 2007 survey of the Perl community.

What do you think about those posts?

Padre community in DW

Hi, I just wanted to mentioned that I opened

padre_the_perl_ide community to discuss anything you might want to know about, well, Padre, the Perl IDE.

Looking for help on SDL Perl

I posted a note on my blog about New life in SDL Perl.

In short we are looking for help with SDL Perl, the extension that was used to build Frozen Bubble.
We need help in both improving the content of the web site (do you know of any application written in SDL Perl?) and in helping to make it look nicer.

Checking the waters

I just signed up to dreamwidth and slowly trying to explore what can I do here and how can I do that.
Finally it seems I managed to understand how to post to a community.

So let me say hi!

I just joined the community.

Don't know how many people are here yet, but I figure I'd introduce myself.

My name's Curtis Jewell, and I've been hacking on Strawberry Perl for about 6 months now.

I'm on LJ as "curtis" (I was an early adopter. Go figure.) and on a few IRC channels (including irc.perl.org/#win32) as "CSJewell".

As you can probably guess, most of my Perl experience is on Windows, although I'll help out anywhere I have at least a little knowledge of what's going on - and I've done a little bit of quite a lot, and am learning quite a bit more.

Don't have my own JAPH yet... One of these days.

Anything else?