I wrote a Perl script using utility features in Mojolicious to check all of the links in my Hugo site.

I have ignored my MacBook Pro for a few months. Now my iTunes and Rhythmbox music libraries are out of sync. The Rhythmbox library includes a handful of Ogg Vorbis files. Because iTunes does not support Ogg by default, I will use FFmpeg to convert those files to MP3. For the sake of novelty, Perl 6 is the glue language for the task.

The PerlDancer team's Dancer2 project is a Perl framework for writing Web applications with less boilerplate code than other Web frameworks. I am slowly exploring what it offers. Feel free to follow along.

I spent a little time this weekend creating yearly post archives for my Hugo site.

Thought I’d share TOKUHIROM’s cpan-outdated tool, which simplifies the task of keeping your installed Perl 5 modules up to date. It simply lists available updates to Perl modules you have installed. That functionality is available in the CPAN shell with the r command, but it is hard to beat the convenience of the cpan-outdated command line tool.

I had a clever idea a couple months ago: to write a blog post detailing how to find recursively find duplicate files in a folder. My technique was good enough: track file sizes, find files that had the same file size and MD5 hash, and display the resulting list. It wasn’t foolproof, but it showed some thought. After spending a little too much time on the post, I realized I had never checked CPAN. Of course there is already a module to handle that exact task.

TL;DR Install Vagrant & VirtualBox. mkdir my-box && cd my-box && vagrant init brianwisti/trusty-mongo-mojo. Be aware that this is my first packaged Vagrant box, and it is probably not great.

Perl 5.20 has experimental support for function signatures. That’s good news. I just thought to check if signatures can be used in subroutine references. They can.

YAPC::NA, the Yet Another Perl Conference for North America, just happened. I didn't go. Since I didn't go, I want to compile everything I can find about the conference in one place. Videos, slides, blog posts, whatever.

I have been dabbling a lot with Moose, a solid framework for object oriented programming in Perl. It is remarkably powerful and has transformed the way I look at Perl OO. It is also different enough from object oriented programming in other languages that I needed to create a section for it on coolnamehere.

I'm in the Perl phase of my language obsession rotation. I've created a handy language obsession table you can use to simulate the behavior for your favorite GURPS Geek campaign.

Roll 3d6 for the subject.

Parrot is more than just PIR and PASM. I’m not talking about the ability to use languages like Rakudo written for the Parrot virtual machine. I am also not talking about the ability to write your own language. Both of those are quite nifty, of course. It is fair to say that those two items are probably why you are experimenting with Parrot in the first place. However, the Parrot distribution also ships with an extra language: NQP.

This page shines a fresh light on specific hacks from the O’Reilly Perl Hacks book. It should be obvious from the tone and content that this is not intended to replace any of the original material or take credit for anything in the book.

Find it at perl.org. I can stop whining - for a little bit, at least.

Nice work! You have begun to learn Perl by writing a complete program which gets input from a user and prints output including a modified version of their input. Yes, there is much more to learn, but you have dipped your toes into the pool. Now you can go out there and start learning about the huge and wild world of Perl programming!

This page once contained many links to Perl 6 information as the design notes were being assembled for the newest revision of this language. Those links are painfully out of date now. I’ll streamline instead with a few core ideas:

Having a program that displays the exact same message every time you run is nice when it comes to being consistent, but not so entertaining as a program. “What does it do?” “It prints out my name.” “Oh.” Let’s make things a little more interesting. We could change the value of $name in the code, but it might be a little tiresome to do this before showing it to each new person. How about making the program ask for a name? User interaction - a neat idea.

I decided to install Perl 5.10 on all my machines after the thrill of installing ActivePerl 5.10 beta on my Windows VM last night. Yes yes, it is true that strange things will thrill me.

I have heard first-time Perl programmers complain about the lack of documentation. This is understandable. They don’t know all the nifty stuff that comes with the standard Perl distribution.

This is part 1 of my ongoing series of Perl Babysteps.

Let’s admit it. Perl is everywhere. It powers most of the Internet, in one form or another. What? Your site doesn’t use Perl and CGI? Well, what about the administrative scripts that keep it running smoothly when everyone is snug in their beds? Even a fair chunk of Microsoft IIS servers rely on Perl for administrative tasks. I’m not saying that Perl is being used on every site on the Internet, including yours. I’m saying that Perl is probably being used on any random site you happen to look at on the Internet, including yours.

This was originally a meditation I wrote at Perlmonks. Now I think you should go back to Perlmonks and look at the vast resources of Perl wisdom which are available at that site.

Life is weird when you start plagiarizing yourself.

What can I say about Perl? I’ve had very little to talk about it on this site over the years, despite the fact that I use Perl on an almost daily basis. It’s not as cute as Ruby, or as clean as Python, but it’s always there. There have been numerous projects that are just plain easier in Perl. I can’t explain it.