July 2001 Archives

Interesting

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One of the intereresting things about writing a story on use Perl is that I don't necessarily have to "finish" it. People can just add to it if they want to. :-) use.perl.org

Trip to San Diego

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I'm flying at 30,000 feet from Pittsburgh to San Diego writing this. I got a power supply for my PowerBook in the armrest, and I have my sound-reduction headphones plugged into the armrest listening to Schoolhouse Rock, and I have some DVDs for later, and it's all great except that the US Airways lady lied to me and said this was an emergency exit seat. The jerk in front of me is leaning his seat back, so I can barely type on the laptop.

Which means I can do a lot but I can't really work. Oh well, I need a break anyway. While waiting in the TF Green Airport in Providence, RI I did a build of bleadperl on Mac OS. Matthias Neeracher identified a bug in perl 5.6.1's Perl_do_open9 where instead of using O_RDONLY, read-only is assumed to be 0.

Now the ass in front of me leaned back more, hit my computer, and didn't apologize. I am close to breaking his arm.

NP: Mother Necessity (where would we be?).

So anyway, when Nick Ing-Simmons did some PerlIO changes, he made Perl_do_openn, which inherited the bad code from Perl_do_open9, and I guess this code was now used in some more places than before, causing the problem to become evident where it wasn't before. Nifty.

I heard today that "air rage" was caused by people not being able to smoke. Yeah right. It is usually caused by a group of people who are inconsiderate, and another group of people who won't put up with it.

NP: p5p meeting. use.perl.org

OPJ

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I just typed up a big ol' journal entry and lost most of it when MSIE farted. Serves me right. So now I am typing this entry in BBEdit.

I was saying that ask mentioned that gnat mentioned that you have to, in the Open Source world, learn to do things yourself when your cohorts are volunteers. Agreed. Sometimes you find those golden people who help you out a lot, but they will not last, and you shouldn't expect them to. Most of the time, though, people will just talk about what they want to do. And beyond that, some people will help out some. And of those, some of them will give good help. And of these people, some of them will give good help, often. Out of all the people, a few of them will give good help. And then when they slack off, what are you supposed to do? They don't have to help at all. And even if they did have some obligation, if you come down hard on them, you risk losing them. And they are hard to find in the first place, and harder to replace.

Bah.

(Note: If I work with you on an Open Source project, don't think I am talking about you, even if I am. Which I'm not. Probably.)

So then there is sheriff_p's journal where he mentions that I think kids are clueless and parents are clueful. Not so. I do think kids are clueless, though. All of them. I think adults are, too, but to a much less degree. And since sheriff_p treated us to Jabberwocky, I will present a bit that I wrote (though I am hardly of Lewis Carroll's caliber).

You're no different from the rest of us
You got your great big plans
And baby just like the rest of us
You really just don't understand
No no no no no no no no

You're clueless, you're clueless, you don't know anything
You're clueless, you're clueless, you can't fly, you ain't got wings
You're clueless, you're clueless, I'll say it 'till my face turns blue
You're clueless, you're clueless, get help before it all falls through

Don't look to me for the answers
'Coz baby I am clueless too
I'm just as vacuous as the next guy
But I'm not as bad as you
I'm just kidding, baby, please, oh no, but
You're clueless, you're clueless, you don't know anything
You're clueless, you're clueless, you can't fly, you ain't got wings
You're clueless, you're clueless, I'll say it 'till my face turns blue
You're clueless, you're clueless, get help before it all falls through

Are you different from the rest of us?
Do you always get straight A's?
Do you always signal your lane change?
Did you find a cure for aids?
I don't think so, just admit it, baby

You're clueless, you're clueless, you don't know anything
You're clueless, you're clueless, you can't fly, you ain't got wings
You're clueless, you're clueless, I'll say it 'till my face-a turn-a blue-a
You're clueless, you're clueless, get help before it all falls through

Anyway. So am I saying all kids are clueless? Yes. So are all adults clueless? Yes. What about ... are all adults less clueless than all kids? No. The difference is that kids don't know how clueless they are. They can't begin to fathom it. They think they are pretty close to understanding things. They are wrong. They think there is only a little bit of difference between them and adults. They are wrong. They think adults know far less than adults actually know. They think kids know a lot more than kids actually know. Kids R Dum. But they grow out of it. Usually.

BTW, I can play that song at the conference, I'll have my guitar. But darnit, I am not sure if I can make the Jam BOF, since Gnat scheduled the Jam BOF opposite my Slash BOF. Bah, I say!

finger pudge@pudge.dyndns.org for my TPC schedule. use.perl.org

New Camera

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So we got the new camera, the Nikon Coolpix 995. First Chris Blanos suggested it after reading my journal entry; then my wife expressed a preference for it. We got it, despite the price, and I am fairly glad we did. It has just about ever feature we could need and will last us a long time. And when taking pictures in SXGA mode or whatever, we get pictures plenty big enough to fill my monitor, plus will look good on a standard-sized print. And we can fit about 380 of them on one 128MB card. Heh.

The software is pretty good, too. I can either just plug the camera (with card installed) directly into the computer and suck the files off a volume icon (and delete them too), which is really cool, or I can use their software to transfer them to an image database, which is also cool.

So now I get to take pictures of all the freaks^whackers at TPC. Should be fun! use.perl.org

Mac vs. Windows

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I just gotta say that Matthias Neeracher is way cool. GUSI is cool. MacPerl supports a lot of POSIX calls very well without much or any additional code, which is just great. Win32 seems to have worse POSIX support underneath, despite being a more POSIX-ish OS. GUSI is the difference: it is a very good POSIX library for Mac OS.

MacPerl, and the perl test suite, are a great GUSI test suite. We've found a lot of little GUSI bugs as MacPerl has moved forward. Each project makes the other better. :-) use.perl.org

Time::HiRes

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Problems solved ... I just needed to adjust for timezone and call newSVuv instead of newSViv. Yay! use.perl.org

Digest::MD5

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So this morning I decided to play with Digest::MD5 a bit, and lo, it was as Peter Prymmer (and then, this morning, Artur Bergman) suggested: a compiler optimization. D'oh. I thought that I had seen the same problem in MrC, but apparently I had not. So I tried setting MWCPPC to -O1, and it was fine. Heh. So now I just need to find a way to tell the build process to use -O1 for that file. use.perl.org

Mo' Modules

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I just added a whole bunch more modules to the MacPerl branch. All of them seem to work OK, except for some bug in Digest::MD5, and I haven't tried to build Time::HiRes or Time::Piece yet. use.perl.org

Digital Camera

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I am trying to find a good digital camera to buy. I know nothing about digital cameras. It is kinda frustrating. use.perl.org

BBEdit + QuickTime

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I love that BBEdit plays any QuickTime file. I can view images, play movies, listen to MP3s, all from BBEdit. QuickTime is so cool that it can do this. As new QuickTime media types are supported, they get automatically supported by other apps. YAY.

Of course, I don't use BBEdit as my media player / image viewer / whatever, but it is good if I just want to see/hear something quickly without loading in another app. use.perl.org

Week-end

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I think it is very imporant to stop working when the week ends. A day of rest is good. I tend to stretch my day of rest across two days, with interspersed work throughout each. Maybe I should work hard on Saturday and take all of Sunday off.

sky needs to slow down! Or channel more of that energy into MacPerl! :-)

I got a response back from MindVision about the MacPerl installer shareare/freeware license; hopefully it will go through soon.

I found that -d:DProf didn't work because setenv doesn't work, and that is how it tells toke.c to add "use Devel::DProf" to the beginning of a script. Heh. And I had trouble with getting setenv to work, so I have setenv set a global var is the env name is PERL5DB. And getenv returns same said global if that name is requested. Heh.

I found that xsubpp on MacPerl was putting typemaps in the wrong order, causing some problems in DB_File. Fixed! But some DB_File bugs remain. It fixed the problems in ndbm-file.t though, as well as db-btree.t.

I've added some more modules to the dist (List::Util and Scalar::Util, Memoize, NEXT) and might add a handful more (if I can get Time::HiRes working, that'd be good). I want to get another alpha out by the coming Friday, including all these modules, plus some bugfixes, plus more test files.

I love using nntp.perl.org ... check it out if you like news better than email for some things. use.perl.org

GREAT CRIMINY JEHOSOPHAT

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I have been going through perl with a debugger trying to find out what the heck is going on with ENV. I do know why I like Perl, and this is a big part of it. :-)

It seems to me that elements from ENV should be tainted, but they aren't in some cases, so I had to add that in one place, which is fine, but I thought I shouldn't have to, and I tried to figure out why. It was a learning experience, I suppose. Ugh. use.perl.org

test harness

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I got the test harness working on MacPerl, except that it still doesn't quite work. The problem is that normally when you run a perl script, you run it under MPW. Then if that script calls out to system() or qx//, it runs under ToolServer. This causes a few small problems for us anyway in testing, because %ENV does not carry over to ToolServer (in my experience, anyway :-).

So anyway, when you run under the test harness, now you run the harness script under MPW, and when it calls each individual script, that runs under ToolServer. And if that test script calls out to system() or qx// ... it cannot call out to ToolServer since ToolServer is already being used. So it fails. D'oh!

Anyway, so I wrote an MPW script to run all the tests. Then I realized that some tests don't print "not ok" if a test fails, but instead just print nothing. And sometimes, "ok" is printed more than once for a test. So, I wrote a perl script to parse the results from the MPW script. :-)

Anyway, the result is below. I found one test that was falsely reported as succeeding (lib/dprof.t).

:lib:db-btree.t
:lib:db-hash.t
:lib:db-recno.t
:lib:dosglob.t
:lib:dprof.t
:lib:ftmp-mktemp.t
:lib:ftmp-posix.t
:lib:ftmp-security.t
:lib:ftmp-tempfile.t
:lib:ndbm.t
:lib:posix.t
:op:die_exit.t
:op:magic.t
:op:misc.t
:op:sprintf.t
:pragma:warnings.t
use.perl.org

Back to Perforce

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OK, so I have all of my changes for MacPerl synced with CVS and in the maint-5.6/macperl branch on perforce. I got a bunch of tests fixed, I have a bunch of external libs linking statically or dynamically, and I will release a3 on Monday, I think.

I need to figure out what to do with the macperl/ and perl/macos/ directories. For now, they are not on perforce. They probably will be at some point. use.perl.org

jhi++ gisle++

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Jarkko gave me a quick tutorial on integrating/resolving/submitting to perforce, and got me write access to go with the maint-5.6/macperl branch, and tomorrow I am going to sync up that with what I have locally, sync that with CVS, and then integrate my changes back over to the maint-5.6/perl branch (although I should talk to Sarathy first about that ...). Once I get this set up (hopefully finishing it Friday), then I can put out the next alpha.

There's an odd bug in Digest::MD5 under MacPerl 5.6.1, and I will attempt to fix it. bytes_long should be 0, but it is much larger than 0. Gisle is being very helpful in helping me narrow it down. use.perl.org

New GUSI, New Alpha?

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I think I am about ready for a new alpha. I *might* even put one out tonight. I have a build working great, almost all of the test suite passing, a lot of new modules added (in macos/bundled_lib/ and macos/bundled_ext/), and Matthias' latest GUSI has fixed most of the major remaining bugs. My problem is that I need to get perforce and CVS synched up. I might just release anyway. I dunno.

Anyway, here are the only tests not fully working. I think about half need to be ported, and half represent real bugs. I haven't looked much into any of these.

# bugs?
:lib:db-btree.t
:lib:db-hash.t
:lib:db-recno.t
:lib:dosglob.t
:lib:ndbm.t
:op:die_exit.t
:op:sprintf.t

# porting needed
:pod:find.t
:pod:pod2usage.t
:pod:podselect.t

# don't know
:lib:ftmp-mktemp.t
:lib:ftmp-posix.t
:lib:ftmp-security.t
:lib:ftmp-tempfile.t
:lib:posix.t
:op:magic.t
:op:misc.t
:pragma:warnings.t

So I think maybe tonight I will just release, and then come back to CVS/Perforce later this week. Release early and often and all that. use.perl.org

<pudge/*> (pronounced "PudgeGlob") is thousands of posts over many years by Pudge.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

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