Ergo Letter Bag

There has been a recent flurry of blogs on Perl's perceived popularity problem: Solutions Are Not Problems. Problems Are Problems , Ovid seems to be asking us to ignore the symptoms and work harder to identify the underlying causes Is the Perl Community Schizophrenic? , Phillip Smith argues that the Perl community needs a benevolent branding dictator Is it really hard to find good Perl programmers? , Gábor focuses in on the belief that Team leaders and managers think about Perl that it is dead, unmaintainable Perception is Reality , Gábor recommends getting professional help (PR/Marketing) What does the Outside of Perl look like? , Ovid on the negative perceptions of Perl I'm a little cynical. Many good insights and areas for improvement are identified. But Perl needs to gain mindshare. And the only way to do that is to deliver the goods: Perl needs best of breed and/or innovative killer apps... There is very little going on today which makes Perl relevant to anyone outside the...

Here's an interesting dialogue from #perl6 yesterday: TimToady but the fact is, Perl 5 is basically in a no-win situation long term, which we first recognized in 2000 PerlJam TimToady: now you're alienating all the staunch perl 5 supporters :) TimToady I'm only alienating them "long term" KyleHa If loving Perl 5 is wrong, I don't want to be right. 8-) PerlJam Someone mentioned (probably on use.perl somewhere) that Nicholas tried regular release cycles a while back. I'd like to know if that's true and if so, what became of it. ruoso I don't really think the regular releases is the issue... TimToady I love Perl 5 too, but it's stuck (culturally, and maybe technically) in a legacy trap, and the Perl 6 approach is the only long-term way out of that. moritz_ ruoso: it's not about *regular*, but about being able to rele...

This is more a note to myself than anything else, but perhaps someone else will find it useful? I certainly find it useful to transfer DVDs over to the kids' OLPC XOs running teapot's Ubuntu intrepid distro for XO . On OSX using VLC , the following will transcode a video stream/file down to something that will play well without skipping on an OLPC XO 1.0. I.e., a theora/vorbis file named w/ the ogg extension using a 320x240 resolution at 15fps. -You'll wind up with an out.ogg file in the current working directory. Open an editor and save the following to a file named vlc2xo: #!/bin/sh /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy -vv "$1" \ --sout='#transcode{width=320,height=240,scale=1,vcodec=theo, \ vb=768,acodec=vorb,ab=64,channels=2,deinterlace, \ audio-sync}:standard{access=file,mux=ogg,dst=out.ogg}' \ vlc:quit Make it executable: chmod 755 vlc2xo.sh Now, you'll be able to open terminal and execute the script with an argu...

I've got an old gentoo Apache mod_perl Mason site which I maintain for work. Mostly it is used for mining data from our less than desirable issue tracking system (Soffront Track) in order to help make realistic guestimates of what we can deliver and when. It is running on an old quad xeon box that we'd experimented with, and decided not to use in production. Since work is a "Microsoft" shop, it has long been an item on my todo list to move it over to a windows box... but for some reason, I've never really gotten around to it. However, a couple years back I did do the least amount of work necessary to get it to run in a windows w/ Catalyst::View::Mason environment. I've changed laptops a couple times since then, Perl 5.10.0 was released and Catalyst 5.8. So last week, I reinstalled the latest version of all of the above on my laptop so I could take my work with me on the go. I found that I had to add: __PACKAGE__->config(use_match => 1); to my ...::View::...

I was asked the other day to help setup a website for our elementary school's PTA. I thought for a while about the various free services available vs. virtual hosting and finally wound up going with Google Apps. You might be wondering what this has to do with Perl. Well one of my quirks, is that I tend to alternate between adding perl or linux to my google searches whenever I want to find a decent dialog on a topic. Guess what turns up with a search on: google + apps + perl ? Apparently about 9 months ago, Stephen Adkins, Dean Arnold, Brad Fitzpatrick, Artur Bergman, Chia-liang Kao, Yuval Kogman, Jonathon Rockway, and others were working on a Perl App Engine implementation for Google App Engine. It looks like it stalled . But maybe with your help, and a show of support, we can get them to pick it up again. On the "Open Issues" list for Google App Engine, the top 3 requests are adding support for PHP, Ruby, and Perl. You can express your preference for Perl support by goi...

Work and life have been keeping Perl mostly on the sidelines this past week. I've been following Gabor Sazbo's blog posts on Padre since he first asked for suggestions for a name. But I haven't actually used it. The idea of a cross platform internationalized open source editor written in Perl is actually pretty exciting. Especially with all the pluggins available and promise of better syntax highlighting. I've always heard that only perl can parse Perl. So it is nice to see a lot of developers actively developing a best of breed editor in Perl. I noticed that the instructions for installing Padre on OSX would have had me running a massive update of the system's perl via cpan. I've always been a little risk averse. The idea of upgrading the operating system's perl sounds like a recipe for trouble. So I tried installing padre using my local install of Perl 5.10.0. Unfortunately, Padre requires a Perl compiled with -Dusethreads. So... why not... I recompil...

Most days, I try to drop by http://irc.pugscode.org and scan through the conversations of the various people actually implementing and testing Perl6. More often than not, 98.6% of the conversations involve details that are over my head. But it is still nice to check in on the ebb and flow of progress. As often as not, I learn a thing or two too... Today it was nice to see über tester Jonathan Worthington and Rakudo 's Patrick Michaud talking about refactoring Rakudo's p6opaque. What was nice, beyond the open and informative dialog... was the many references to SMOP 's design and dialog with Daniel Ruoso. (FYI: SMOP is a bottom up implementation starting with Perl6 OO features.) I often hear references to how the various implementations have exercised the specs from different angles. It is nice to see how the various implementations are strengthening and facilitating each other. http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2009-05-04#i_1116697

I've decided to do the download, compile and run the test suite for each of the Perl6 implementations which are being actively developed: Rakudo , SMOP , and Elf . Rakudo seems to have the largest number of developers, the most activity, and passes more of the spec tests. So I'll start with it. From the Get Rakudo page I found the latest snapshots . At the time I'm writing, the latest snapshot is rakudo-2009-04.tar.gz . So starting with my macbook running OS X 10.4... I downloaded it, opened terminal, untarred it, cd'd into the resulting rakudo-2009-04 dir and per the instructions executed: $ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot This results in: Generating Parrot ... perl build/gen_parrot.pl Checking out Parrot r38250 via svn... Can't exec "svn": No such file or directory at build/gen_parrot.pl line 46. [...] Looks like I never reinstalled Subversion when I reinstalled OS X 10.4 onto a larger drive. Okay. So I head over to http://subversion.tigris.org/getting.h...