Hi there,

Did you know FOSDEM happened last week?

FOSDEM, Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, is still a mystery for me. Few years ago a fellow member of LPW organising team introduced me to FOSDEM for the first time. Ever since, I always wanted to attend at least once just to experience the gatherings. I found out familiar faces attending this year FOSDEM like Curtis Poe, Paul Evans and Salve J. Nilsen. Although the location wasn't far from my place but timing wasn't ideal. I wish I was mentally prepared to attend this year FOSDEM. I even saw a post by Theo van Hoesel with regard to TPRF sponsored Dinner at FOSDEM. It would have been a great opportunity to meet good old friends. Paul shared the live video link from the event. I was able to watch the fun luckily thanks to the organiser. I am hoping the video recordings of the event would be made public soon. Here is the schedule of Perl and Raku Programming devroom.

Have you tried ChatGPT?

I have and I find it fun playing with it. Recently I asked "How do I check if memcached server is running locally and listening to default port?". Like always, I got instant response with few lines of Perl to get the desired result. Guess what, it didn't do what I asked it to do. I went back and asked again. This time, I got another variation. I tried that too but no luck. By now, I was too tired to repeat the question. I then used CPAN module IO::Socket::INET to see if I can create socket. I know it is not ideal but does the job. Time to move on to next thing in the long TODO list.

Does a programmer need to know system admin task also?

I have been a programmer and only programmer all my life. I remember in the past, I was sent to a week long training to learn sysadmin tasks. It was fresh for a week after the training then I was back to my programmer life. I did enjoy the training and learnt few tricks. As some of you know about my CPAN module, Map::Tube, I published in 2010. I decided to create REST API interface to play with it. Luckily I had another CPAN module, Map::Tube::Server. With this, I was able to setup the server in no time on my local box. Now comes the difficult task, create service to manage the server. Being a programmer doesn't help the cause, also when your box is running WSL and not real linux. With the limitation of WSL, I had only one option to create service based on init.d. It wasn't hard to create service file for the map server. I could even use the service to start the server but termination didn't work for some strange reason. I didn't have the energy to ask ChatGPT for help. It has to wait for now.

I am thinking of writing a blog post about the whole process, if I can find spare moment.

Enjoy rest of the newsletter and do share your Perl story with us.

Mohammad Sajid Anwar