jerakeen.org

I will be attending London Perl Mongers Social Meeting on Thursday October 02

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1139807/

Another attempt at replacing mod_perl

http://hydricacid.com/general/perl-in-apache-with-mod_per...

shiny shiny perl web server for long-running data connections. I vaguely remember something at hack day using this. Real-time wireless stats, I think.

http://meteorserver.org/

bwhaahaha. ahhahahah. haaha. ah.

http://perlce.sourceforge.net/

• Updates for new PoDo::IRC
• No longer do 2 server connects on startup
• the connect test doesn’t break itself by faking a connection first

The perl implementation of JSON-RPC. Ships with JSON.pm, which is nice.

http://search.cpan.org/~makamaka/JSON-1.05/lib/JSONRPC.pm

Looks like it solves my favourite all-time problem in perl - no clear distinction between characters and byte sequences. Horay.

http://search.cpan.org/dist/encoding-warnings/lib/encodin...

http://combust.develooper.com/

Yay. I liked last year’s

http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-2005...

looks.. so.. fun..

http://babyl.dyndns.org/perlwar/wiki/PerlWarRules

http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=JavaScript

http://search.cpan.org/~fotango/Froody-42/

Props to Brad Choate, who has released Text::Textile 2.03, freeing me from the burden of maintaining it myself. Yay.

http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Locale-Maketext-1.09/lib/L...

http://annocpan.org/~MARKOV/MIME-Types-1.15/lib/MIME/Type...

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/25304983

All I want, and I don’t feel that this is a lot, is to be able to put photos on my web page from iPhoto. Because writing iPhoto plugins is a pain, this requires me to use either Flickr, which I don’t want to (because I’d like to control my own photos, please, and not pay money for it), or php gallery, which has it’s own issues for me, mostly that it’s written in php.

As a perl (most of the time) programmer, I resent the fact that my web page is increasingly powered by php, but alas that’s where all these little toys come from nowadays. I’ve dabbled in php myself a little now, and it seems like a bearable language, although not one I’d actually want to write serious code in. Of course, with my colo going through.. pain recently, it’s tempting to restrict myself to a very simple subset of things, specifically, a subset of the stuff that the main box admin uses, because I know that it works and I don’t have to think about it. No more compiling weird perl/C modules on solaris as root with bizarre things tacked onto the end of my library path for me. The other colo has debian on it, which I like, but only 64 megs of memory, which I don’t. Hardware (even virtual hardware) sucks.

Of course, having got a gallery, I want to do things like have ‘5 most recent’ pictures on the front page of the site, and this is where things fall down a little. Noone else seems to want to do this stuff - I may end up subscribing to my own RSS feed, syndicating from one bit of my site to another, which seems disgustingly wasteful.

I discovered the other day that you can do quite horrifying things with perl. A closure in perl is a nice concept - it’s a block that can reference things in the scope that it’s declared in, but that can be passed around and used in quite different scopes. For instance, suppose I wanted a function that, say, converted a string to utf8 bytes (yes, I’m obsessed with utf8). I can do this like this:

my $closure;
$closure = sub {
  my $val = shift;
  return Encode::encode("utf8", $val);
};

And call it later as:

print $closure->("héllo");

This is dead nifty. But because a closure can reference things in it’s scope, and $closure is in it’s scope, it can call itself, or at least, it can call the function pointed at by $closure. So we can make this function recursive:

$closure = sub {
  my $val = shift;
  if (ref $val eq "ARRAY") {
    return [ map { $closure->($_) } @$val ];
  } elsif (ref $val eq "HASH") {
    return { map { $_ => $closure->($_) } keys(%$val) };
  } else {
    return Encode::encode("utf8", $val);
  }
};

Until the assignment is complete, the inside of the closure won’t work, because $closure is undefined. But by the time we call it later..

return $closure->( [ "héllo", { foo =>"bår" } ] );

..everything works.

Crazy, I tell you.

I gave a talk today at the London Perl Workshop, brilliantly organised by a shadowy cabal of mysterious figures. Every talk I saw was great, to the point that the inevitable clashes with other talks that I wanted to see were really annoying, but fortunately everything was filmed, so presumably there’ll be video of the talks I missed available at some point. Likewise, all the slides will be around at some point, but until then, my slides are here. Powerpoint, I’m afraid, it’s what the work laptop has, and 1.5 megs, because it’s full of pictures…

Bot::BasicBot 0.50 is released. The big thing in this one is nick tracking - the bot will keep track of what nicks are in a given channel, and if they’re opped or not - this is mostly so I can re-write slavorg on top of Bot::BasicBot, and bin slavorg2…

Had a bit of a release thing over the weekend, new versions of Bot::BasicBot, URI::Title, AudioFile::Identify::MusicBrainz were released, and I’ve also given the world URI::Find::Simple. Now I need a release of Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable to sync it up with Bot::BasicBot, and I have some german translations to integrate into CGI::Wiki::Kwiki. Insane, I tell you.

I’m releasing another Bot::BasicBot at the moment, to change the semantics of the tick() method. Instead of getting called every 5 seconds, you now need to return a value from the tick() method, and you will be called again in that many seconds. this is waaay more useful than before, but of course it’ll break anything that uses it. Oops. But 0.2 has only been out a short time, so I should get away with it.

More of a problem is what to do with Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable, because I now can’t just pass the tick method straight through. I have a new version in CVS that I’m very happy with, needs more tests, though, but the feature still stopping release is per-module tick events. I want every module to be able to have independant tick events, instead of sharing one global tick, but haven’t come up with an elegant way of doing it yet..

Hah, finally I bullied simon into releasing Bot::BasicBot 0.04, allowing me to release a version of Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable that actually installs and builds and works. Thanks, Simon. I’ve bumped the version number to keep in sync with BasicBot, not totally sure why, as I suspect I’ll rapidly overtake it, but I’d like to get >10E-1 at some point…

Anyway, read the docs, or download the code, send me feedback.

I was reading this article on m3u files and decided to scratch one of my long-term itches, building a decent windows playlist on the file server. It’s a.. large collection, so I don’t want to build things on the client end, you see, it takes bloody ages.

Up till now, I’ve just created a list of paths, and used that as the playlist. This had 3 disadvantages:

• it’s very hard to have it sorted by anything useful, using the filename is hopeless as there are several different naming conventions involved. blech’s fault.
• I’d quite like to have the track lengths already by the tracks when winamp starts, as opposed to have it add them whenever you see them.
• for some reason, winamp starts much faster when there are EXTINF tags in the playlist file. Don’t know why. Don’t care.

So now I search the server for files, read the id3 tags, sort by artist/album/tracknum/title and print out, along with the track length and name in an EXTINF tag. The whole process takes almost exactly 2 mins, but it’s not very memory-efficient. For various complicated reasons the server has almost a gig of memory in it (ok, they’re not complicated reasons - we just don’t own any other boxes that can use the stuff) so I don’t care about this.

code is here, if you care. It’s hard-coded for my server, but the only thing you’d really need to change is at the beginning, where $root and $remote are defined - $root needs to be where the music lives on the server, $remote is where it lives on the network. For my server, I samba share /music on the server cowboy as cowboymusic. Also, $playlist should be where you want the playlist to go.

ToyBox is my web browser. It’s written in perl, using Camelbones. At one point it was one of the smallest Camelbones apps in the world, but now the graphics for the buttons have bulked it up a bit.. Annoyingly, it’s not pure perl - I needed some ObjC to handle drag and drop and things - with the 0.3 CamelBones, this should be avoidable, I really should update it.

An IRC opbot written in perl.