I see periodically people handling errors in deferred calls like this: func Do() (r Result, err error) { // ... defer func() { err = multierr.Append(err, f.Close()) }() // ... } or another variant: func Do() (err error) { // ... defer func() { err1 = f.Close(… read more

As Russia invaded Ukraine I had a thought about blocking access to my pages from Russia altogether, not as I think that anybody will notice, but just as a symbolic gesture. Today though, as Russia blocked access to BBC and DW sites among some others to its hopelessly brainwashed population I decided… read more

<p>Recently we decided to localize country selection list at work and there was some confusion about how to sort Chinese characters. I asked my wife and she told me that sorting by pinyin is seems most reasonable to her. So here's how to do it in Perl read more

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Today deployed at work a new service that based on zeromq. I never liked zeromq because it does not provide any feedback about what is going on, and this is exactly what caused problems. After deployment service worked as expected on all servers except one. Daemon was starting, creating zeromq sock… read more

We spent four days in Cameron Highlands in December. Here are some photos of a sunset I took from the balcony of our hotel room. read more

Recently I got a lot of failures from CPAN Testers for RedisDB on NetBSD i386. After investigating a bit I've found that NetBSD 6.0 comes now with 64-bit time_t on all architectures. It means that the way I used to pack struct timeval value to set timeout on socket, didn't work anymore. Previously i… read more

<p>Spent the whole day looking for sources of memory leaks. One of them was because I decided to use named captures. It so happened that perl leaks some memory if named capture doesn't match. read more

Uploaded RedisDB 2.00 to CPAN yesterday. It features XS parser which improves performance about 25%. It still loses to Redis::hiredis in pipelining mode, but in synchronous mode it is faster. read more

Three and a half years ago while playing with maps on my then new Nokia 5800 I marked McDonald's somewhere on another side of the planet. Last month I ate double quarter pounder there, it wasn't that far after all. I don't use Nokia anymore, it was replaced by HTC Desire with Android. Google maps … read more

Installed CyanogenMod onto my HTC Desire. It feels like a new phone now, and it takes less memory, so I was able to install some additional applications. The only problem so far is that I have lost handwritten Chinese input, which was a very useful feature. read more

Just uploaded RedisDB-1.03 to CPAN. In this version I extracted parser code into a separate module and cleaned it up a bit, I have in plans writing XS version of the parser. Another significant change is that I dropped Module::Install and switched to plain ExtUtils::MakeMaker. The size of the distri… read more

As practice shows, it takes about a week to deliver letter from Singapore to Singapore. Today I got long awaited one from ICA -- about half an hour on bus from my home, don't know why it took it so long. Yellow envelope with &quot;PLEASE DO NOT BEND&quot; written in big bold letters on the front sid… read more

Today got results of my IELTS test. Overall 7.5 which is not bad, though I got just 5.5 for speaking. I think I could do speaking better, but it was next day after my wife gave birth to our son, so I didn't concentrate much on the test. Maybe I will take it again a couple of months later. read more

Made an attempt to cook Solyanka for dinner today, but got something completely different due to peculiarities of locally available components. Pickled cucumbers and Chinese sausages were sweet. The broth wasn't thick enough. On a positive side, I had two types of chillies. As a result I created ver… read more

We bought a steamboat couple of weeks ago and it immediately became an irreplaceable attribute of weekend lunches. read more

Today I finally got a new passport. I applied first in the end of April while still living in Malaysia. By the end of August, when I was moving to Singapore, it wasn't yet ready, so I had to apply again here. It seems Russian state institutes when hiring giving preferences to retards, it took them a… read more

Today for lunch we had delicious and spicy Sichuan food: read more

Just upgraded Ubuntu to 11.10. First impression very disappointing. Unity looks like completely unusable, and installation of gnome-panel doesn't really saves situation -- it's ugly. Currently looking for solution with gnome, or maybe will upgrade to Xubuntu. This version IMO is a big step back in u… read more

Just uploaded RedisDB 0.16 to CPAN. Hopefully now it will work on Windows. The problem is that Windows don't support MSG_DONTWAIT flag for recv, so I have to switch socket into non-blocking mode before checking for data. And I got just a single test report for MSWin32 for three months, apparently it… read more

Modern Perl book by chromatic is out. You can download free PDF version of the book right now, read it, and transfer some sum to the author later if you like the book and have money. Isn't this how all books should be distributed? If you learning Perl, or switching to Perl from the other language, t… read more

Just a couple of weeks before I moved to Malaysia my Dell XPS M1330 broke down because of faulty Nvidia chip in it. It was very unpleasant surprise, but fortunately I had Lenovo IdeaPad S9 as temporary solution. So I disassembled Dell and saved some space in my luggage. IdeaPad S9 did its work well,… read more

Gabor Szabo started the poll for Perl developers What are the 8 most important features of an employer or a job opportunity for you?. Here are my answers with comments sorted by priority: The company allows and encourages the contribution to open source projects That's the question of personal fr… read more

I've got new 500G HDD for my Dell M1330 and reinstalled Ubuntu. After installation I experienced several freezes -- notebook blinked with caps and scroll lock leds and didn't respond to any keys but power off. Every time this happened while wireless was actively used. As I discovered, the source of … read more

After upgrading Perl to 5.10.1 at Friday I found that POE::Component::Server::PreforkTCP, which we use in one of our products, doesn't pass its tests anymore. Perhaps it's possible to fix, I don't know yet (it was Friday evening...), but as the module hasn't been updated since 2002 I decided to chec… read more

Watched today Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control in Avrora. Quite nice. Maybe it's not the best his film, but still it's better than usual boring stuff. I found that sometimes in Avrora you can see original versions of the films without dubbing. read more

Look what a beautiful mould has grown in my teapot. read more

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As you may know there is such a thing as a leap second, and Dec 31 2008 is a day with a leap second. A couple of hours before New Year I got an idea to catch this leap second. The problem is that Linux uses Unix time and thus ignores leap seconds. Hence if you use time(2) or gettimeofday(2), the lea… read more

Today finished watching M*A*S*H. All episodes from all eleven seasons, and it's took me less than a year. M*A*S*H on IMDB read more

Now suppose you want to rid string of malformed utf-8 characters. Here is an example that checks an utf-8 string and replaces all malformed characters with '?'. The same idea as in the previous post. Note, that it checks only encoding, it is possible that encoding is correct, but the symbol doesn't … read more

<p>Suppose you need to put UTF-8 string into a fixed length buffer. Actually I was in need to do this. Problem is that the last symbol may be incomplete, so here is the example how to do this read more