Recently in Perl Category

I like MovableType. It’s Perl. That’s a plus for me. It keep getting better, and now there’s MTOS. That’s where my love stops.

First, the default templates combined with one of the 5 types of formatting for entries STILL yields non compliant XHTML, even within some of the templates themselves. Publishing is still too hard in that respect. It’s 2008, and I still can’t just plop in a paragraph or two and have awesome auto generated XHTML.

Their “4.1 supports FastCGI” is not very good support. mt-upgrade/check/xmlrpc still don’t work under FastCGI, and it’s so slow under normal cgi that it’s still annoying. Again, it’s 2008 and it still doesn’t support mod_perl under Apache2. WordPress and PHP: Just Works.

Just out of curiosity, I installed SVK on my laptop and started tinkering with it. For those not aware of it:

svk is a decentralized version control system built with the robust Subversion filesystem. It supports repository mirroring, disconnected operation, history-sensitive merging, and integrates with other version control systems, as well as popular visual merge tools.

Like most tinkering sessions of mine, I always end up stumped because I find some bug on the edge. In this case, it appears to be a date/time formatting issue on Win32 when changes are commit and pushed upstream.

Here's a sample message from a recent commit to local, pushed up to the mirror/master:

r118@np5660: claco | 2007-03-25 Eastern Daylight Time

If it weren't for the missing time, it wouldn't be so bad. I would expect something more like this format, which is what I see on commits made by 1/x and non Win32 svk users:

r118@np5660: claco | 2007-02-16 16:29:26 -0500

Curious. Then I finally thought to just try using the log command and compare both svn and svk:

C:\Development\CPAN\Mango>svn log
http://svn.handelframework.com/CPAN/Mango/trunk/lib/Mango/Provider/Products.pm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r1784 | claco | 2007-03-25 01:37:32 -0400 (Sun, 25 Mar 2007) | 3 lines

r118@np5660: claco | 2007-03-25 Eastern Daylight Time

Added tags() to products provider

C:\Development\CPAN\Mango>svk log
http://svn.handelframework.com/CPAN/Mango/trunk/lib/Mango/Provider/Products.pm
----------------------------------------------------------------------
r119 (orig r1784): claco | 2007-03-25 Eastern Daylight Time

r118@np5660: claco | 2007-03-25 Eastern Daylight Time

Added tags() to products provider

There's also this message in the Changes file for SVK:

Use POSIX::strftime for date formatting rather than Date::Parse

Yup. Something is definately afoot. Time to file an RT bug report and move on. Sigh.

Well, after a loooong downtime, it looks like the RubberCity Perl Mongers group may be getting back together.

Last night we met at the Cafe' Momus with our guests Andy Lester (PETDANCE) and Pete Krawczyk (PETEK). We had a nice long discussion about TDD and Perl testing, and Andy showed off ack.

With any luck, I'll be putting together some slides for our next meeting to go over Handel.

After some encouragement from online folk and with the support of the Catalyst community, I managed to write an article about the software I've been working on and it got published on O'Reillys Perl.com!

Hopefully I'll get to do a few more of those.

After starting a big crapstorm on the perl-qa list about META.yml generation in ExtUtils::MakeMaker vs. Module::Build, and Schwerns following rant about Module::Build, I decided to eat the dog food I've created and convert to using Module::Build and Build.PL.

Minutes after starting I had issues with my dists that were based on Apache::Test. When running perl Build test I would be in an endless loop of A::T asking where Apache.exe was. That info was already in Apache/TestConfigData.pm and worked just fine under ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Makefile.PL.

After a couple weeks of ignoring the problem and a few hours of frustration this evening, I finally found the problems. Yes, two problems not just one.

I love Perl because it gets the hell out of my way. If I had a dollar for every language that made this more difficult than it had to be:

my $var = somethingelse() || 'default';

I'd be a friggin millionare. Strongly typed or not (.NET), other languages just suck at something simple like that, or even things like this:

if ($anyobjectorvariableortype) { };

Geez, I love Perl.

Yet another module in the CPAN arsenal. AxKit::XSP::L10N is a quick and dirty taglib for localizing text using Locale::Maketext.