bulknews.typepad.com

30boxes.pl: how I can end up living in the shell

Even in the web 2.0 world, geeks like me still tend to do lots of tasks on the UNIX shell. Recently Best Pracital released their command line tool todo.pl for their awesome task management service Hiveminder. Jesse gave me a preview release for it a couple of weeks before the public announcement and I've been finding it practically useful.

So I created a similar command line tool for my favorite calendar service 30boxes. There you go, 30boxes.pl. The usage of the command is quite similar to todo.pl (or the original todo.sh):

30boxes.pl list

List all events in your calendar starting from today to 3 months later

30boxes.pl --from "2 weeks ago" -to today

List all events in your calendar starting from 2 weeks ago to today

30boxes.pl --month "October 2006"

List all events in your calendar scheduled on October 2006

30boxes.pl --date tomorrow

List all events scheduled tomorrow.

30boxes.pl add meeting with Brad tomorrow 3pm

Add new event title "meeting with Brad" on 3pm tomorrow, using 30boxes One box input.

30boxes.pl del 100

Delete the event with id 100.

That's it. Pretty simple and usable. You need some Perl modules installed from CPAN, and most of them are quite popular and easy to install.

I like to add 'update' command to this shell, to add the ability to change title or starting date from command line also, but looks like 30boxes events.Update API is kind of borked, or just unfriendly to use. When you call method=events.Update&summary=foo, it'll clear out all the fields other than summary, which to me is very intuitive.

I'll update the code to retrieve the original data and send back if there're popular demands for it. But for now you can just use web interface to update.

Enjoy!

Turn your ThinkPad into lightsaber

Recent IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad models have HDAPS (Hard Drive Active Protection System) support. HDAP's ShockMgr API is accessible to developers, by reverse engineering. For scripting languages like Perl, it's pretty straightforward to read the Accelerometer data from ShockMgr device.

So here it comes: ThinkPad Saber. It would be familiar as a ThinkPad clone of MacSaber if you're a Mac Geek.

The code is written in Perl, and is available at my public svn repository. You can also download the self executable package (of course for Win32) from releases directory.

Going to YAPC::NA

So YAPC::NA schedule is out. I'll give two talks there: one for Plagger and one for Trickster (Hacking iTunes and PSP). The schedule apparently looks okay, however the only problem I can see is, my two talks were both scheduled at the end of the day.

OMG. The conference will start on 8:30 and my talks are 4:30 pm, when everybody I'm afraid will be damn tired :-)

YAPC::Asia 2006 Registration opened

Link: YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo: YAPC::Asia 2006 Registration comes here!.

We're happy to announce that the registratin for YAPC::Asia 2006 (March 29-30th, Tokyo) has now opened!

The registration for YAPC::Asia 2006 has just opened. Go signup!

Hackathon day 4 (Last Day)

So it's the last day. I woke up on 11 and started with my Gmail inbox. Found a good reponse from Douglas Crockford and why the luckystiff about JSON and Unicode stuff.

I got a report from Yoshimatsu-san @ SAKK saying he has a problem with My Documents path on his machine because he changed his username after the account creation. I added kind of crufty patch to try real hard to detect the My Document path using Win32 API. Meanwhile I got a similar report from Victor Ruiz @ Six Apart EMEA saying his My Music directory is Mi Musica because his OS is Windows XP Spanish version. Ick.

I went to a nearby cafe called XD which had a funky Wi-Fi SSID character. Hscchien joined us there. The Wi-Fi network also has 192.168.0.1 as a DHCP gateway and my coLinux NAT TAP had a conflict :/

Anyway at the cafe I pair coded with gugod on the Kwiki::Emoticon plugin. We just started by simle regexp s/:\)/foobar/ and gradually integrated the plugin with (imaginary) new Text::Emoticon API. During the session gugod downloaded the new Google Earth Mac OSX version and we made a KML file for YAPC::Asia venue, party place and other important places in Tokyo. We'll put up the KML file later on YAPC::Asia website.

I came back to gugod's place and continued the Emoticon hack, then released whole new Text::Emoticon 0.03 and its subclass modules MSN and Yahoo. Then I released Kwiki::Emoticon to CPAN as well. Someone willing to write iChat, Skype, Google Talk and AIM emoticon, I'd be happy to hear that. They don't have an img base URL but have a bundle of image files in System resource directory (or embedded in .exe file), so it might need another level of abstraction in the Text::Emoticon base class.

Audrey Tang tackled a little with Unicode string problems on her YAML module and she also added a support of implicit Unicode conversion on JSON side. I found a bug again and pushed her to fix it. Then I released JSON::Syck 0.02 which handles UTF-8 bytes transparently. (No Unicode flag)

We went to the very spicy and hot nabe place, which was really nice. Lots of beef there. I'll put the pics up to my Flickr later.

We came back home and Sekimura-san started hacking Trickster. As a start he created Rendezvous Publisher backend for Bonjour Win32 SDK and with that I was able to make my PSP/iPod as an iTunes share, browsable from Ingy's Mac. Yay! Apparently Net::Rendezvous::Publish has a bug that it can't correctly detect its non-Null backend (because of Module::Pluggable load order) and I sent a patch to Richard Clamp to fix that.

I imported Movable Type plugin mt-emoticon into my svn and updated the plugin to use the new Text::Emoticon API.

I added a functionality to reload the Music Library.xml to my iTunes RSS Server thingy, so you don't have to restart the server whenever you update the iTunes music library itself.

At the restaurant we talked a lot about the funny Sushi instruction video on Google Video (which disapeared now) and I came up with an idea of "automatic Google Video to PSP downloader". Coincidentally, Google added downloads for PSP yesterday and all we have to do is just synchronizing MP4 files and rename files based on PSP's funky directory structure. Hence I wrote a quickie google-video-psp synchr. Just execute this script when you connect PSP as an USB device, then it'll scan Google Video download folder and syncs to PSP by renaming them.

16 svn commits. 7 CPAN uploads.

Overall, this hack-a-vacation has been really awesome and fun. Friends here are all real friendly. Let me summarize my pet project status now.

• Clear some small CPAN module ideas and patches: DONE
• Class::Trigger overhaul: Not yet. Still brainstorming
• Write Perl Hack: Not yet. Maybe this weekend in San Francisco
• Trickster 2.0 Hack: Ongoing and in a good shape. I'll do another hackathon with David when I'm in San Fran.

Hackathon day 3

Since on day 2 I stayed awake until 6am, I woke up on 1pm, a little late.

Ingy wasn't sleeping at all (at least it looked like), he was about to release his new YAML and I helped him testing them on Win32 systems. Apparently it was broken, as it's supposed to be. But the breakage is really small (just 1 test of thousands of tests is failing) and we found that even Test::More is broken on my Windows + ActivePerl. heh.

Updated Catalyst::View::JSON to support Safari utf-8 problems and Opera MIME-type gotcha.

Meanwhile I threw a question on #catalyst IRC channel about the possibility to include charset/encoding handling on Catalyst core, so all the plugins can use the information sanely. I quickly brainstoemed with nothingmuch about the real world use cases, etc.

I released Text::Emoticon which is just a few lines of code. It correctly dispatches MSN and Yahoo subclass and provide the same interface for it. I tried to create Kwiki::Emoticon plugin to hook Emoticon format into Kwiki's wiki format. But obviously adding new Wiki format was not the easiest thing to do in the world. I'll hack with gugod and Ingy on the 4th day.

I bugged Audrey about the weird test failure and JSON incompatiblities of her YAML::Syck module and we finally released JSON::Syck module! Well, this is under my CPAN directory but all I did was just to bug Audrey and made some test cases :) Currently JSON::Syck doesn't handle non-ASCII characters very well. I've been talking with Douglas Crockford (the JSON guy) and why the lucky stiff asking what's the right thing to do, to encode/decode Unicode strings bewtween javascript and Perl (UTF-8 bytes or "\uXXXX"?)

Updated Catalyst::View::JSON so that you can use JSON::Syck as a backend converter. I'll make Data::Serializer driver (plugin) to absorb the API difference between JSON and JSON::Syck.

Audrey came back to her home @ Taipei since she'll have $work on Wednesday. After she went back we (Ingy, gugod and I) went to the nice Cafe called "Dali". We had a nice coffee/tea there and off course hacked together. I took a quick look on Sekimura-san's Template::Provider::Encode and came along with a better module Template::Provider::Encoding (I know it's a little confusing). Template::Provider::Encoding forces a small convention on template files like [% USE encoding 'euc-jp' %] at the top of the tempalte (otherwise it's assumed in UTF-8) and it's a good convention I think.

17 svn commits, 7 CPAN uploads.

Hackathon day 2

Day 2 of the hackathon.

I woke up on 10am and started hacking on JSON-Syck but my weak XS/perlgut-fu isn't enough to get me more than just walking around Audrey's YAML::Syck code, so I gave it up just for now. Audrey and Ingy are still working on making Syck based Ruby <-> Perl object roundtrip stuff, so adding JSON support in Pugs will probably be done.

After a very nice & cheap lunch, I started coding XML::Liberal framework and released its 0.01 to CPAN and svn. Right now it's LibXML only and fixes XML parser level breakage (like unescaped &) but eventually I'd like to add a document-type aware remedy plugins, like "Fix invalid RSS 2.0 pubDate format".

To figure out the timeline what I've been doing, I re-installed Trac on my server. After some real experience with trac on Trickster 2.0 project, it turns out to be a really nice combination of Wiki + Bug Tracking and nice subversion integration. Much love for Trac.

I added an Album Cover Artwork extraction into iTunes RSS Server for PSP, but somehow PSP doesn't recognize the fetched image. I don't know why (hint: you can test it, fix it and send patches to me if you want).

Ingy gets back from his sick and now tackles with his new YAML with Audrey. clkao says "I hate software" all the time. hlb joined our hackathon and played with S5 + Takahashi-style.

I updated all my OpenSearch modules on CPAN to support A9's OpenSearch 1.1 spec by really quick-n-dirtry patch. I released quick WWW-Blog-Metadata plugin as well, to do auto-discovery of OpenSearch Description document XML.

Just before the sleep, I added a very nice tight TypeKey integration to Kwiki::TypeKey plugin. Namely, when you're logged in the Kwiki screen shows your picture, taken from your TypeKey profile. For now it uses screen scraping rather than WWW::Blog::Metadata, because it's much faster and doesn't require dozens of modules to be loaded. It's a big win for non mod_perl environment. With Ingy's help I added an userpic integration on Recent Changes page as well.

5 CPAN uploads, 14 svn commits. Not so bad. 

Hackathon day 1

Link: Pugs: Chupei #1: A Syck night.

I arrived at Taipei CSK airport on 8 pm, clkao kindly picked me up at the airport. He has a 3G unlimited internet connection on his laptop and was chatting on IRC channels while walking down to the car parking.

gugod's place we are staying is really big and comfortable. we have 350+ cpan modules authors in the same room and this shouldn't be boring.

Yesterday, I

• looked through ActiveRecord's Observer and Callbacks to see if I can steal something into Class::Trigger overhaul
• Updated Catalyst::View::JSON to support single key expose of stash, rather than exposing all the stash, and added callback parameter sanitization to avoid XSS hole.
• Released PoCoCl::AirTunes to see if I could get some feedbacks from Airport Express users.
• Started working on JSON::Syck to have yet another JSON parser/generator, based on very fast YAML::Syck and its backend libsyck.

I have more plans during this hackathon:

• Writing XML::Feed::Liberal to parse broken RSS/Atom feeds
• Build web interface prototype for Trickster 2.0
• Email interface for updating iCal data file (I want to add schedule using cellphone email interface)
• Pluggin framework for my Bloglines-to-Gmail hack
• Writing hacks to Perl Hacks book

YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo

  Link: YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo.

Shibuya Perl Mongers are pleased to announce that YAPC::Asia 2006 is now scheduled on March 29th - 30th in Tokyo. The conference is to be held at Ota City PiO, Tokyo with $25 (approx.) registration fee, including a conference T-shirt.

I'm an organizer of this event. If you have a chance (or would like to create a chance) to visit Tokyo in March, we're looking forward to seeing you there. Actually the end of March is, I believe, a pretty nice time for a visit to Tokyo.

Shibuya.pm -- the largest Perl Mongers in the world

Dave's Perl Census presentation shows that Shibuya.pm is the biggest Perl user community in the world, as far as we talk about the number of people attending the Technical meeting.

Link: use Perl | Perl Monger Census 2005.

During the Perl Lightning talks at EuroOSCON I presented some early results from the 2005 Perl Mongers Census. There will be more details appearing at some point soon, but in the meantime I've made my slides available for download.

We had our 6th Technical Talks meeting last Wednesday and we had 120+ attendees most of who registered to attend online within 24 hours after the announcement. We had some talks about Catalyst web application framework, Ajax with Prototype.js, Six Apart, Pugs and ICFP.

CPAN 10th anniversary

Happy 10th birthday, CPAN.

Interview with Damian Conway

Link: perlcast.com ? Interview with Damian Conway.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with Damian Conway and record an interview about his involvement with Perl and about his new book Perl Best Practices.

There's an interview Podcast with Damian Conway on PerlCast. It has to be must-listen.

Class::DBI list and Wiki closure

I don't deny feeling a little sympathy to Tony about being flamed by people for his software (Class::DBI) and its development style these days. However, taking down the list and its archive along with Wiki content created by folks seems sort of insane to me.

As one of the biggest contributors to Class::DBI in the very early days and as an author of some Class::DBI plugin modules on CPAN, I wish Tony getting cool down and get things done nicely again as he just has been doing.

new XML::Atom with Atom 1.0 support!

Link: search.cpan.org: Tatsuhiko Miyagawa / XML-Atom-0.12_01.

I uploaded a new release of XML::Atom, with

• Atom 1.0 support! (I tested parsing only)
• $entry->content->body returns UTF-8 bytes now
• newly added $entry->contributor return XML::Atom::Person list in list context
• made sure $feed->as_xml doesn't return Unicode flagged string

As version number implies, this is a developer release. If you find some nasty stuff while development, let me know.

Perl Best Practices

Link: O'Reilly Radar > Perl Best Practices - Lovely Book.

Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices is a fun read, even if you're not actively programming in Perl, like me. Lots of programming wisdom here for developers in any language, but for Perl programmers, this book would be a huge help in the step from journeyman to master

I had a quick read on the book at YAPC::NA and it looks like an awesome book.

JSAN: JavaScript Archive Network

Link: JavaScript Archive Network - JavaScript Archive Network.

"CPAN".replace(/CP/, "JS")

Casey announced that JSAN just launched at YAPC::NA. It looks potentially awesome. Looking forward to have a lot of modules created by Perl / JavaScript hackers.

YAPC::NA is almost over

So, YAPC::NA is almost over now.

It was one of the greatest conference I've ever had. A very good accomodation, a very good hospitality from Toronto.pm folks, a very good talks and speakers.

One thing I feel very comfortable is, even though I didn't give any talk on this conference, everytime I talk to someone, they can recognize me by my name plate saying "Oh, you're miyagawa! I'm using your module, thanks!" or something like that. This is very exciting.

Well, here's a random list of people I met in this YAPC: Jesse Vincent (RT), Brian Ingerson (evil Ingy), Autrijus Tang (Pugs), Mark Fowler (Fotango / Perl Advent Calendar), Josh McAdams (Perlcast guy), Abigail, Dave Rolsky (DateTime / SocialText), Chris Dent (Kwiki / SocialText), Andy Lester (WWW::Mechanize), Casey West (Email:: project), Perrin Harkins (Class::DBI and MVC stuff), Geoffrey Young (mod_perl2), Matt Sergeant (AxKit, qpsmtpd), Meng Weng Wong (SPF) and a lot of people, by any reason I cannot remeber the name of. Oh, and Larry Wall.

Tomorrow, I'll fly to San Francisco.

Registered for YAPC::NA

Link: use Perl | YAPC North America schedule is released.

I've made a registration for YAPC::NA along with the Hotel reservation. I'll stay just during the conference and an extra day for a tourist activity around Toronto. See you there if you come!

YAPC::NA Schedule

Link: use Perl | YAPC North America schedule is released.

The conference schedule for YAPC North America has been released:

YAPC::NA schedule now powsted, which seems interesting. Now planning which to join, YAPC::NA or O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference ...

Symbian port of Perl

Link: [PATCH] Symbian port of Perl.

Please find attached the port of Perl 5.8.x and 5.9.x to the Symbian smartphone platform. The port is known to work in the Nokia Series 60 phones, but there is no reason other Series 60 or Symbian devices shouldn't work.

Jarkko, the former 5.7 pumpking in Nokia has released a Perl port on Nokia 60 Series. It's cool to use Perl rather than Python to create an app that runs on Nokia.

YAPC::Taipei Day 2

Now I'm safely back to Japan, rainy and still cold.

On the 2nd and final day of the conference, I started the day by giving Random Hacks talk. I talked some fun stuff using Weblogging APIs (XML-RPC, AtomAPI) and Web 2.0 APIs (e.g. Flickr and Yahoo!) as well as iTunes hacking, originally planned as a lightning talk on Day 1.

And the talk was I think, a great success thanks to the Wi-Fi connection and a great English-to-Chinese live interpreter (Thanks lukhnos!). The picture was taken by Jesse originally.

After my talk, we had SpamAssassin tutorial and Acme's very impressive (and entertaining) Web Services talk, along with Jesse's RT future talk. As a finalle, we had a scary Autrijus's Pugs talk, which was done in Chinese and I could parse only 20% of kanjis there. Their work has been to create a Perl6 working compiler using Haskell GHC in 50 days. So amazing!

The conference was a great fun to me thanks to a great organizer hcchien. All the slides are now available at YAPC::Taipei website.

After the conference we had a party at a Thai-ish Chinese food restaurant near the university campus. We had a silly talk about what we would do next month. Keep your eyes open!

P.S. Now my talk is covered at Web 2.0 weblog! So nice to see this happen.

YAPC::Taipei Day 1

Woke up 7AM and now we have a conference at National Taiwan University campus. Details of the sessions are available on acme's Journal. I did a Lightning Talk about gonzui's Perl support with PPI, along with demonstration of CPAN Code Search. I had also an announcement for YAPC::Asia 2006 March in Tokyo. Details TBA.

After the LT, we had a crazy Ingy's talk. He's entertaining us too much. His talk was mostly about Kwiki, and he said that during the talk Leon should upload a new Kwiki plugin onto CPAN. Since now I'm a new Acme, I just wrote up a new Kwiki plugin Kwiki::OpenSearch and pushed onto CPAN in the end of his talk. Few minutes after that, Leon also uploaded his HTTP::Server::Simple::Kwiki. This is one of the most interesting things we have in YAPCs: Everybody is hacking inspired by others' talks.

After the conference we went to kind of Japanese-style Chinese food restaurant, where I felt a lot comfortable about the food. We got back to the room in 10PM and I just started writing a slide for the 45 mins talk at last, which I finished up on 3AM again.

YAPC::Taipei Day 0

Now I'm actually off to Taiwan to join YAPC::Taipei conference.

Since it was a Friday before the holidays, there were so many cloud in Narita Airport. I've got a lot of sleep during the 3.5 hours flight to Taipei.

I arrived Taiwan CSK Airport safely and took a bus to go to the city, then I've got a hangout with folks like clkao, Jesse and SamV. We've got a ride to SVK author clkao's house to do BBQ. He told us that he'll start working for Fotango in London from the next month, April. His house is a 30 mins drive away from the city, but the great point was that you can feel a lot of nature, which I was very impressed with.

We've got back to the city to join Ingy's 25th (with base 18) Birthday Party, in a cool pub called morelax. Leon (Acme) joined us during the party, who flied through Europe, US and across the ocean in the plane for 3 days long.

After the party, we took an hour MRT ride to Autrijus's father place. The room is like 3DK, where I shared with Ingy, Leon and SamV. I started slides for the next day's Lightning Talk and got to bed in 3 AM. Just a little bit tired...

Off to Taipei

Link: YAPC::Taipei.

Tomorrow early morning, I'll fly to Taipei to attend YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) Taipei. I'm excited to meet with Perl geeks all over the world.

Now I should prepare my presentation now, which is still 0 bytes.

CPAN code search

I've just released a perl plugin for gonzui, a source code search engine (open source koders.com) and made a commit to SF.net CVS.

With support for Perl, now I've mirrored mini-cpan on my server and run a gonzui server instance for CPAN code search. You can search source code from 10000+ CPAN contributed perl modules!

I used PPI to tokenize perl code (Thanks to Autrijus) and my code based on PPI::Tokenizer is not functinal enough, so as it doesn't support function definition and method calls (They're just recognized as "words"). Anybody can volunteer on this, as it's open-source stuff.

RFC: HTML::RelExtor

I've made a tiny Perl module named HTML::RelExtor that scrapes A and LINK tags from HTML with 'rel' attributes. It'd be useful when you want to, say, aggregate URLs with rel="tag" (Technorati) or rel="friend met" (XHTML Friend Network).

The module is now going to CPAN, and can be also fetched from http://bulknews.net/lib/archives/HTML-RelExtor-0.01.tar.gz. Suggestions and feedbacks are always welcome.

Net::Amazon::SimpleQueue

Link: search.cpan.org: Leon Brocard / Net-Amazon-SimpleQueue-0.29.

Leon has put up a CPAN module for Amazon's Simple Queue service. It seems like a handy way for each components to connect toger using remote queue service.

Extreme Perl is online

Link: Extreme Perl - Home.

Extreme Perl is now available freely in HTML, PDF and other formats. Praise to the authors!

POE-Component-Client-MSN

Link: search.cpan.org: David Davis / POE-Component-Client-MSN-0.03.

David Davis has finished up POE client for MSN Messenger and released it to CPAN. I started this project about a year ago, but never finished it because of my laziness. Thanks to your nice work, David.

TopCoders to add Perl

Link: Member Surveys.

Which most closely resembles your opinion on adding Perl as a supported TopCoder Algorithm Competition language? (choose one)

TopCoders.com is doing a poll whether to add Perl to their supported languages. It reminds me of Google CodeJam uses TopCoders system, so will Perl hackers be able tp apply Google's Contest?

"Practical mod_perl" Book Goes Open Source

Link: use Perl | "Practical mod_perl" Book Goes Open Source.

stas writes : "The complete "Practical mod_perl" book is now available online under the terms of the CreativeCommons "Attribution Share-Alike License".

Excellent mod_perl developer's handbook "Practical mod_perl" from O'Reilly is now open-source, with CC licensed. You should definitely read through its performance tuning section if you're seriously engaged in operating Apache with mod_perl as a server side implementation.

YAPC::Taipei 2005

Link: Taipei Perl Monger: YAPCTaiepi2005.

I've decided to attend YAPC::Taipei 2005 as a speaker. The topic for the conference is "Perl in the Enterprise". Now I plan to talk something about blogging and RSS stuff there. Contact me and hang out there if you come!

In Akiba with Nathan Torkington

Link: Flickr: Photos tagged with akiba.

I've been to Akiba city, to guide the city for Nathan Torkington who came back from Australia for Open Source Developer's Conference, and is now in Tokyo for a transit in the way back to U.S. He's got a lot of gadgets like USB memory inside Watch, MP3 alarm clock and a bunch of Mac/iPod books in Japanese, as a souvenir for his family and friends.

Perl 2004 Advent Calendar

Link: Perl 2004 Advent Calendar.

There comes Perl advent Calendar, the site which explains a CPAN module every day.

CGI::Prototype

Link: Journal of merlyn (47).

After much gnashing of teeth, and getting copyright permission, I've now added CGI::Prototype to my CPAN releases. This is the module alluded to by my column on using Class::Prototyped for "classless classes".

It seems like Yet another MVC framwork in Perl, using CGI.pm, Template-Toolkit and Class::DBI (as default).

ApacheCon slides

Link: Journal of geoff (2013).

As usual, ApacheCon was a blast this year. I wish I had the time to do a proper write up today, but I probably won't get around to it - I had too many great talks with too many great people to do it justice anyway.

Geoffrey Young, the author of mod_perl developer's cookbook has put up his great ApacheCon slides about Test-based Apache Module development and testing PHP with Perl stuff.

WebService::Technorati

search.cpan.org: Ian Kallen / WebService-Technorati-0.02

a Perl interface to the Technorati web services interface

Ｔechnorati guys have released easy-to-use Perl binding for their Web Service API.

Podcasting support in XML::RSS

I've made a patch against XML::RSS 1.05, to support enclosures when parsing RSS 2.0.

Module Updates

Today I've uploaded new versions of Class::DBI::SQLite and Apache::Singleton. Both release are bug fix, to be compatible with newer SQLite and Apache2.

PHP::Session array issue

Someone has requested me to add a new feature to get PHP array back as a Perl array, in PHP::Session.

I think it can be done if we have a new method get_array(), to implicitly get array variables as Perl arrray ref:

sub get_array {
    my($self, $key) = @_;
    my $hashref = $self->get($key);
    return [ map $hashref->{$_}, sort { $a <=> $b } keys %$hashref ];
}

Additionaly, we can allow an object option (like auto_interpolate_array) to allow automatic conversion from PHP array to Perl array.

Suggestions are welcome.

rss2audiobook

rss2audiobook is a Perl script that converts your RSS feed into iPod playable audible audiobook format.

It uses Microsoft Speech SDK via Win32::SAPI5 to make wav file from text content, then encodes the wav file into AAC (m4a) using Apple iTunes COM and finally renames .m4a to .m4b so that it can be recognized as an audiobook file by iPod. Pretty nice collaboration of Microsoft and Apple, glued by Perl Win32 magic!

It'll be an interesting hack to make RSS 2.0 enclosure from your RSS feed automaticaly, to enable Podcasting without speaking your Blog entry by yourself ;)

XS on Win32 hassle

I'm working on Apple's Rendezvous Windows SDK port to Perl on win32 using XS. Currently, DNSRegisterService seems to work, but it has a problem with select() which works in usual C program, but breaks in XS module.

Here's a sample C program rendezvous.c that works. It produces an output like:

C:> rendezvous.exe
fd: 1992
got result: 1
Got a reply for Astoria._daap._tcp.local.: Name now registered and active

While simply converted XS module Rendezvous.zip that is broken. It produces:

> perl -Mblib -MRendezvous -w -e "Rendezvous::main()"
fd: 1960
got result: -1
select() returned -1 errno 0 No error

the difference is select() that returns -1 on XS version... I'm afraid it's due to something around win32 libraries like winsock. (I've built both of them using cl.exe which comes from Microsoft .NET Framework SDK, and Microsoft Platform SDK header files)

If you are familiar with Win32 things and take your time to look into the code, it'll be greatly appreciated.

Bloglines module

Again, long time no blogging on use Perl (My own blog is at http://blog.bulknews.net/mt/ if you can read Japanese).

These days I've been playing with new Bloglines Web Services API and iTunes/iPod stuff on Windows. WebService-Bloglines is an easy-to-use Bloglines CPAN module. bloglines2ipod is a tiny script that fetches Bloglines unread items and syncs them into iPod Notes folder. You can read Bloglines new articles on iPod ;)

Module for sale! (Net::YahooMessenger maintainer wanted)

I've taken over Net::YahooMessenger module from Oyama-san, but I neither have no time to hack this module for Y! Messenger recent protocol updates.

Anyone interested in maintaining or takeing over this module? If you want to, feel free to write me at miyagawa#bulknews.net

Perl 5.8 and Unicode problems

Below is what I asked to autrijus, but if you have any suggestions on this issue, I'm open to them.

1. It's widely known that Jcode.pm has Unicode map problem that Full-Width-Tilde (U+FF5E) doesn't map well to euc-jp. It's due to the mistake of Unicode.org's own mapping table.

But with the recent Encode.pm, it still has problem:

% perl -MEncode -e 'print encode("euc-jp" "\x{ff5e}", Encode::FB_CROAK)'
"\x{ff5e}" does not map to euc-jp at /usr/lib/perl/5.8.2/Encode.pm line 149.

What does it mean? grepping ucm files shows:

% grep -i FF5E ucm/euc-jp.ucm
<UFF5E> \xA2\xB2 |3 # 1-2-18

Doesn't it mean that UFF5E maps to \xA2\xB2 in euc-jp?

2. What's the best practice in develop application in multi-encoding environment, like web+db+xml applications? It'd make me a mess while developing in such enviroment that:

1. TT Template is written in euc-jp or utf-8
2. one data is fetched via XML (RSS) in utf-8 or euc-jp
3. another data is stored to and fetched from MySQL in utf-8
4. HTTP requests come from mobile phones in Shift_JIS

Concatinating non-Unicode strings with Unicode strings raise UTF-8 Auto Upgrading and thus raw UTF-8 Strings get corrupted.

For example at least, how do I tell Template-Toolkit that template is written in euc-jp? It calls open() in its own modules, so binmode or encoding.pm, unless you open template files and pass its filehandle explicitly, which is not the case of mine.

I tend to think there should be encoding layers to all data-stream-handling modules like DBI, Template-Toolkit, CGI.pm (or Apache::Request) etc. Am I thinking right here?

Working on new module: Requests for Suggestions to API

Long time no blogging on use.perl journals ...

Now I'm working on a module called "WWW::GooglishQuery" that parses Googlish query parameters like XML url:foobar.com title:-"XSLT" and packs it into appropriate data structure. What's the best API for it? Maybe something like this:

use WWW::GooglishQuery;
use CGI;

my $query = CGI->new();
my $text = $query->param('q');

my $q = WWW::GooglishQuery->new();
$q->parse_query($text);

# ...

Then, how do I extract query parameters? Currently I think of returning query as hashref, that is fully compatible with SQL::Abstract module. Then we can search database with Class::DBI::AbstractSearch by passing that hashref.

Any ideas?

PHP::Session bug revealed

well, PHP::Session fails to decode session data when a string includes '";' (fixed in 0.16) or "}" (not fixed yet).

Now I should say good-bye to regexp + Text::Balanced parser...

Device::KeyStroke::Mobile

I' made a new module entry on CPAN: Device::KeyStroke::Module

NAME
    Device::KeyStroke::Mobile - Calculate key stroke times with mobile phone
    keypads

SYNOPSIS
      use Device::KeyStroke::Mobile;
      my $typing_times = calc_keystroke('example.com');

DESCRIPTION
    Device::KeyStroke::Mobile is a module to calculate how many times you
    need to type keypads in mobile phone to build a word. For example, when
    you type "example.com" with a mobile keypad,

      e: 3 3
      x: 9 9
      a: 2
      m: 6
      p: 7
      l: 5 5 5
      e: 3 3
      .: *
      c: 2 2 2
      o: 6 6 6 >
      m: 6

    you need to type keys 21 times.

    This module would be useful when you conider taking a new domain name
    which is easy to type with mobile phones.

Class::DBI::View

Finally I've made this, which we've wanted for long ;)

Class::DBI::View (tarball)

But its implementation sucks. any feedbacks welcome to cdbi-talk mailing list.

new module: Class::DBI::AbstractSearch

10 minutes hack: Class::DBI::AbstractSearch.

This module glues SQL::Abstract into Class::DBI, which allows you to do:

package CD::Music;
use Class::DBI::AbstractSearch;

package main;
my @music = CD::Music->search_where(artists => ['Ozzy', 'Kelly']);

This would generate SELECT * FROM music WHERE artist = 'Ozzy' OR artist = 'Kelly', thanks to SQL::Abstract magic.