The sculpture shapes the sculptor.

Parenting aint easy. Certainly it is often something your kids teach you. Even worse, it often starts with ”<INSERT_KIDS_FRIENDS_NAME>’s dad lets him do <INSERT_CURRENTLY_PROHIBITED_ACTIVITY>”. In this constant battle to shape your offspring into a model citizen, with the values you value, and turning him/her into a self-sustaining organism, one applies tools that enhance particular features, remove the superfluous or the undesirable.

Announce: Perl Wiki V 1.26

Here we go: Download me

This week in PSC (188) | 2025-04-24

All of us showed up for a long meeting of identifying release blockers. First we went over the issues and PRs submitted since last week, none of which turned out to be new potential blockers. Then we examined all of the issues and PRs of interest we had previously identified. We applied the “Release Blocker” label where necessary, left comments, and merged a few of the PRs. Out of 20 issues and 11 PRs on our list, we identified 5 issues and 1 PR as blockers, of which the PR and several of the issues all pertain to the same problem with retention of errors on filehandles across I/O operations. This issue needs an informed decision, which we did not have the time for in this meeting, but will pursue next.

Our next meeting will be in person at the PTS.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Map::Tube Unicode


Map::Tube now supports Unicode character in station names.
Please check out the link below for more information.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/map-tube-unicode

Julia in cruiser mode

threeheads.png

Yes, this is a Mandelbrot fractal with three heads. No cloning needed, just multiply z to the power of four and proceed as usual. Well all this and so much more contains the latest release of Juliagraph 0.7. Intro here. All I wrote about the Cellgraph and Harmonograph applies again, more features, better controls and ... you can cruise the fractal by mouse.

Tree::DAG_Node V 1.34 uploaded to CPAN

Many thanx to Shawn Laffan for testing this version on Strawberry Perl.
I test it on my Debian machine first of course.
It took Shawn and myself a number of attempts to make all the test pass under the 2 types of OSes.

This week in PSC (187) | 2025-04-17

We were all present.

  • CVE-2024-56406 is published and has been addressed by new point releases. Please upgrade or patch your perl promptly if affected. We thank Steve Hay, Andreas König and Stig Palmquist for doing the heavy lifting, as well as Nathan Mills for discovering the problem, and Karl Williams for providing the fix. We re-/learned a number of old and new lessons about the handling of security issues, which we will write up as new process for the PSC, the Perl Security Team, and the CPANSec group, to be jointly reviewed and agreed at the looming PTS.

  • We started winnowing this release cycle’s pull requests for potential release blockers. We briefly reviewed all 72 pull requests and identified 11 of interest for a closer look.

  • We reviewed the 2 new issues filed since last week for release blocker potential and put one of them on our list for closer review. We then started a closer examination of the 20 issues we identified as candidate blockers. We got through 5 issues, none of which we considered blockers.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Map::Tube - experimental


Couple of experimental features added to Map::Tube.
Please check out the link below for more information.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/map-tube-experimental

Writing a 1GB file in perl

One of my pleasures in perl is learning the C language again. Something about the perl language makes it easier to write C, but while sharing the same space in my brain.

So how can I write a trivial program to write exactly one GB (2^30) of data to disk?

first in perl- (Of course you prototype in perl!)

But since my c program is cleaner, here’s the C program

Reaching 1.0

With the Harmonograph you can create beautiful and individual images within a few clicks. It's painting by pendulum. I already gave here an introduction. So let me just explain what is new:

farbrad.png