Nearly a year ago, Mark Jason Dominus blogged about runN, a program he’d written. I’ve stol– uh, I mean, adapted his version for my own ends, with a couple of differences. This is a rationale for my changes.

I’ve just released version 1.00 of my Text::Match::FastAlternatives Perl module. Since I’m apparently declaring it stable, I thought it was worth writing up a description of what it does, and how it does it.

Suppose you have a large list of strings, and a set of keys, and you need to determine, for each of the strings, whether any of the keys occur in it. For example, the list of strings might be a list of user-agent headers sent to a web server, and the keys a set of strings that are good indicators of robots accessing your site; you want to calculate some server statistics, but disregard any robotic traffic.

How do you go about doing that?

Today I read an article by Zed Shaw about the strengths and weaknesses of Ruby, part of a series of similar articles about several dynamic languages, each written by an appropriate expert.

Most of it was just as you’d expect: a description of the Ruby landscape, and the places it works well. But buried here are there are one or two comments that just make no sense whatsoever.

A colleague approached me today regarding a unit test he was writing. He was constructing a series of test cases from a data structure; his code at the time used a multi-line string of which each line had several fields which together described a test to run.

I seem to have accidentally written a CPAN module, and by remote control at that.

There’s been some discussion on p5p about perhaps making the next stable version of Perl (version 5.12) automatically enable strictures (and maybe even warnings).

Here’s a MySQL query issued by some Perl code:

$db->do(q{
    CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE byline_age (
        byline_id int PRIMARY KEY,
        last_used int not null
    )
    SELECT byline_id, MAX(IfNull(published_at, ?)) AS last_used
    FROM article
    GROUP BY byline_id
}, undef, time());

Spot the bug? No, nor did I.

[Also published here.]

Mastering Regular Expressions has been around for a long time — this is the third edition of a book originally published a decade ago. Does that actually reflect justified popularity, or is it just that this is the only book-length treatment of the various regex engines, how they differ, and how to get the most out of them? I’m glad to say that doesn’t seem to be case: if you use regexes in any depth at all, you should probably read this book.