Tag: perl

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Twitterbotting

I’ve been working on a project with Rick from Feed.Us involving a twitterbot which resulted in mkefood, and now nycfood and winetweets. He’s wrapped things into this little site called twitterbotting.com where you can learn more.

Rick originally asked me about some twitter coding a while back, and I mentioned what I had done with twitter for BarCampMilwaukee2, but then I got busy and nothing happened. Finally he bugged me again and pointed me to Anatomy of a Twitter Bot by Whitney McNamara and since I’m a Perl nerd, I was in…

Sadly, it took me way too long to go through the code and change what I wanted, and when I finally did, and had it all running on my home server, I tried to move it to a GoDaddy account which was total fail for so many reasons. GoDaddy’s cheap accounts are ok for simple web sites, but not for running more complex code.

So I ended up putting on my server, where it sits for now. It’s a Perl/MySQL application, which runs via cron every X minutes. There’s a table to allow you to add more accounts so it can run multiple twitterbots (so far we’ve got mkefood, nycfood, and winetweets.) I’m not 100% sure how it will scale, and I’ve found one bug already where it dies if an account has no replies (which is fixable by sending a reply to an account, but it should be fixed in the code as well.)

Next to do… clean up the code a bit, package it up, and release it. I’ll try to do that soon. If you don’t see it in a week or so, bug me and I’ll bump it up on my to do list…

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Hackathon: Summary…

Well, I myself didn’t do a ton of Perl hacking, at least in comparison to others in the room. (I did manage to fix up a bunch of my Perl-related bits and pieces for jEdit though.) Here’s a progress report from right before dinner.

Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon

Perl::Critic was worked on, they wrote new policies and also added two new committers to the project. The Perl::Critic guys also talked with Ken from Krugle quite a bit…

The folks working on Parrot fixed a lot of tests, and configure.pl, and did a lot of general code cleaning. They also improved the Tcl compiler, checked in Forth, and introduced a bunch of new people to the project.

Pete Krawczyk did some work on the long-neglected HTML::Tree, making many miscellaneous fixes and improving Unicode support.

Andy Lester made updates to ack. He said his goal is to introduce more of the general public to ack, and make it so that people don’t even realize it’s Perl-based. He wants it to be something people can just drop into their ~/bin directory and use.

There was some work done on Jifty to make it work without requiring a database. Jifty is a RoR-like framework written in Perl (even if they don’t like it described like that.)

That’s it for me… Plenty of Perl folks will be here until tomorrow working on moving their projects forward, but I’m outta here. Thanks to The Perl Foundation for making it happen.



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Hackathon: Krugle

Krugle is a search engine for code. Ken Krugler (the guy behind Krugle) gave a talk at the Chicago Perl Hackathon about about it, and was looking for feedback and suggestions on how to improve it.

Here are a few interesting points from his talk:

  • Krugle has 20 million source files, which is about 1 billion lines of code
  • Much of the code is sucked down from repositories and cached locally to allow for their browsing interface
  • Sponsored results will always be separate from search results
  • Krugle is not affiliated with Google (Yes, they got a letter…)
  • Krugle will always compliment existing communities, and not diminish the value of those communities
  • Krugle is build on open-source, the UI is theirs, eventually they will add API‘s to allow you to take you data with you

Ken Krugler And of course, there’s the question of the business model. Ken said they’ve gotten some money from VC‘s, they also show sponsored ads, they’ve got a developer programs, and are working on an enterprise product.

Oh, they’ve also got a blog, like any new company should…





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Hackathon: Parrot

What the heck is Parrot? Parrot is:

Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot will be the target for the final Perl 6 compiler…as well as variety of other languages.

I just talked to chromatic about Parrot. He’s just one of a whole bunch of Perl folks at the Chicago Perl Hackathon working on getting a Parrot release out.

Chicago Perl Hackathon Hacking the Parrot Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon



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Hackathon: Perl::Critic

Chris Dolan
I’m at the Chicago Perl Hackathon right now. I just talked to Chris Dolan about Perl::Critic, which is “an extensible framework for creating and applying coding standards to Perl source code…”

They’re working on writing policies right now, so you can choose what tests to run against your code.

It’s beyond my coding skills, but it looks like an interesting project. Hopefully they’ll make some good progress this weekend.