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peknet is Peter E Karman musing on technology, politics, religion, books, beer and frequent references to my beautiful sons.

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Frozen Perl 2010

It's been a long week, culminating today in Frozen Perl 2010, a Perl conference for and by Perl hackers, here in the Twin Cities. I gave two talks at today's conference, one on Swish3 and the other on Devel::NYTProf and Search::Tools. Both talks seemed well-received.

In the process of preparing the talks I also released a few new, related modules to CPAN this week:
Search::OpenSearch
OpenSearch server glue for KinoSearch and Swish-e 2.x via SWISH::Prog. There's a demo Plack app and ExtJS, using both search engines as part of the slides for my Swish3 talk.

I think OpenSearch is very cool and look forward to doing more with that spec, including adding more features (e.g. facets) to Search::OpenSearch.
Search::Query
Search::Query now has support for SQL and SWISH Dialects. I hope to add KinoSearch and Xapian dialects soon. The Search::Query::Parser now has (undocumented and experimental) support for range queries, so that you can say:
foo=( 1..4 )
and that'll be expanded to
foo=( 1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4 )
when the Dialect query object is stringified. Handy for things like ranges of dates, which is how I am using it as $work.
Search::Tools, SWISH::API::*
New releases of these older modules as well, with some bug fixes and refactoring to support the Search::Query.
So, yes. A busy week.

I enjoyed hearing other folks' talks today at Frozen Perl. There was a good variety: pack/unpack, Unicode, i18n and best practice-related presentations. I met some new people, renewed friendships with folks I already knew, and drank lots of free coffee. The cookies were good too.

File under projects/swish Sat Feb 6 23:27:19 CT 2010

Dave Rawlings on NPR

You can watch/listen here.

File under music/ Thu Feb 4 20:35:33 CT 2010

The Vendor-Client Relationship

So I don't surf youtube very much. Or rather, only when my kids are wanting to watch Wallace and Gromit trailers. So I'm always waaaay behind the times. That said, this video is a riot.

File under projects/ Sat Jan 30 21:42:00 CT 2010

Terminal Color

For the last ten years I have used the color #E3BF70#fddc8e (hex) as my terminal background color. It's a darkish amber color that is very easy on the eyes. I'm recording it here because every year or so I have to set up a new system and always have to eyeball the settings till I get something close to what I am used to.

Update: 26 Jan 2009 Here's my .Xdefaults file for my xterm under X11 on OS X.
XTerm*background: #fddc8e
XTerm*foreground: black
XTerm*faceName: monaco
XTerm*faceSize: 10
XTerm*saveLines: 10000
XTerm*scrollBar: true
XTerm*rightScrollBar: true
XTerm*jumpScroll: true
XTerm*geometry:100x40+0+0

File under projects/ Tue Jan 26 20:13:41 CT 2010

I like Plack

Plack is a Perl Web Server written by miyagawa.

File under projects/ Tue Jan 19 10:56:20 CT 2010

CQL

Contextual Query Language is defined by the Library of Congress. I discovered it via CQL::Parser. Brian Cassidy is involved, so it must be good.

I immediately thought "oh shit. Now my new Search::Query module feels late-to-the-party." But on further reading, I think a CQL dialect in Search::Query makes some sense.

Search::Query is a SQL::Translator-like module for free-text search. I coded it up this week after brewing the idea for some many months. I'm imagining it now as a next-generation Search::QueryParser::SQL, for contexts beyond SQL. Example: I have a query string that works with Xapian and want to convert it to one that works with Swish-e 2.x or KinoSearch. Just parse it with Search::Query::Parser and assign it a target dialect and then call $query->stringify to get the translated version out.

File under projects/ Thu Jan 14 22:46:01 CT 2010

A Friend of a Friend

Saw David Rawlings and Gillian Welch in concert just before Christmas. Heard this interview just now. I like the record even more after hearing Dave talk about it.

File under music/ Sat Jan 9 23:29:40 CT 2010

Perl6 and Perl5

I know the people who read this blog generally do not care about Perl at all (hi Mom!) but I spend a great deal of time writing code in the language and talking with other members of the Perl community about our common projects, and so like anyone who has lived in the Perl world for any length of time, I have an opinion about Perl6. For those not in the know, Perl5 is the current version of Perl and has been around for over 10 years. Perl6 is the next major version evolution, but it has been in development for nearly the same length of time. The problem is that 10 years is a long time for a computer language release to gestate and many folks whose opinions count (i.e. managers) see that lack of a release as a sign that Perl Is Dead and not a good choice for their next programming project. So (the argument goes) Perl6's vaporware status makes it hard for Perl5 programmers to find jobs, because the "if it ain't new it ain't sexy" ethos of technology counts for more than it should with those making the money decisions.

The real problem isn't that Perl6 hasn't been released. The real problem is the name Perl6. Perl6 is not a single executable "thing" like Perl5 is; it's an umbrella for several different projects. Right now I can sit down at just about any modern Unix-like computer and type 'perl' and write some code that runs. Perl6 doesn't work quite that way. It's a whole new language, not just a major revision to an existing language. So the version number 5 vs 6 is misleading. That's the problem. Perl is alive and well. Perl5 continues to be maintained and developed. I get lots of work done every day using it.

Matt Trout writes a nice piece about this topic, aimed at the Perl community. I applaud it.

File under projects/ Mon Dec 7 10:03:13 CT 2009

Question as Patch

Reading through Matt Trout's blog just now I found this wonderful quote:
Because in free software a question in the form of a well thought out patch is one that almost always gets a constructive answer.


Yes. That's just it. A patch -- real, applicable code -- indicates genuine forethought and effort and I will reward that kind of conversation every time with equal effort.

File under projects/ Mon Dec 7 10:01:06 CT 2009

Great American Hackathon

Just found out about this.

File under projects/ Mon Dec 7 10:00:24 CT 2009

SWISH::Prog::KSx and SWISH::Prog::Xapian on CPAN

Uploaded first pass at both implementations this last week. The announcement to the Swish-e list just went out.

File under projects/swish Mon Nov 30 22:19:26 CT 2009

You've Got a Friend

My sister put this little jazz quartet together a couple months ago. We played one song. Here it is.

File under music/ Sun Nov 22 22:30:09 CT 2009

The Beguine Brothers

So I've been playing in this country band for the last several years, purely for fun. Our cardinal rule as a band is "do not overprepare" which means we might practice for an hour or so ahead of a gig, but rarely more than that. The second rule is "you may not sing a song you wrote" which sounds funny till you realize that nearly everyone in the band is a songwriter. It's a fun bunch of folks and the vibe is definitely low key.

But after .... years, we finally made some recordings. Here's the first couple tunes, My Bucket's Got a Hole In It and To Love Somebody.

Thanks to Dave for the technical work.

File under music/ Sun Nov 22 22:21:55 CT 2009

SWISH::3 on CPAN

After 4 years of learning how to glue Perl and C together with XS and many sleepless nights, I have released SWISH::3 to the CPAN.

<cue the sound of scattered applause>

Mostly this is a triumph of longevity rather than quality code. It's taken me this long to get something workable.

File under projects/swish Fri Nov 20 22:02:44 CT 2009

Netflix prize

I'm always late to the game, but the Netflix prize was awarded back in September. I wrote about it before.

Anyway, an interesting article at wired.com looking at how the winning teams' combined disparate algorithms to help them reach the goal.

File under general/ Fri Nov 20 13:14:05 CT 2009

swish_xapian

The Xapian backend for Swish3 has been getting some love lately. The swish_xapian command line tool has most of the features now that swish-e v2.x does.

I've posted about it on the Swish-e wiki.

File under projects/swish Wed Nov 18 23:22:11 CT 2009

perl dot org

And just on the heels of my last post! A new look for the perl.org site.

Looks very nice. Good work folks.

File under general/ Sat Nov 14 00:32:46 CT 2009

yahoo mail

I recently reactivated my free yahoo.com email account so that I could test something for $work. I signed up for it 12 years ago, but stopped using it a couple of years later when I got my own domain @peknet.com. So yahoo finally deactivated it. All I had to do was click a couple of buttons to reactivate account, so that was painless. All my mail was, understandably, deleted.

Within 60 seconds of reactivating it, while I watched, I got one new message. In my Spam bucket. Hilarious.

File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Nov 12 12:37:34 CT 2009

Perl websites? As a rule, not attractive.

I'd been keeping an email with a link to Ovid's journal article about reviewing Perl Training websites. Now I've deleted the email. But the link was worth keeping here.

File under projects/ Mon Nov 9 23:07:03 CT 2009

RESPOND IF YOU ARE STILL ALIVE

What a dramatic subject line. These spam scams are getting more desperate.

File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Oct 9 08:22:55 CT 2009


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