One of the nasty things about the recent OpenSSH vulnerability is that it affects non-debian systems, too.

Thankfully the script to find the bad keys was written in Perl. With a bit of back-porting, I managed to get it to work with perl 5.6.1, and thanks to the magic of Module::Install, I have made a tarball which includes the dependencies of the debian-published script and uploaded to CPAN as Dowse::BadSSH.

Unlike the published script, the updated dowkd.pl is capable of removing bad keys and checks more places on the system, such as known_hosts files and the system host key.

Portability patches more than welcomed.

Yes, I realise I probably should have based my work off the upstream sources

Also available from utsl.gen.nz

This Week on perl5-porters - 4-10 May 2008

Today, I was doing some mucking about with class data, generated packages, and Class::ISA, and I started to wail and gnash my teeth. I cried, "Why can't I just replace the darn object system?" -- Ricardo Signes, a man with a method.

YAPC::Asia 2008 just started and is in its full swing.

For those who cannot make it, we have a stream available on http://live.yapcasia.org/ thanks to our streaming sponsors.

Enjoy!

So tonight I got to speak to the Orlando Perl Mongers’ group on Moose. The group for only having two meetings was surprisingly well organized and seemed to have some very good people involved with it. They are however trying to expand (like any good group), and I thought perhaps people in the echo chamber would be able to come out of the woodwork and support the Orlando group. We have a talk on board for next month, but are looking for speakers for the month(s) after.

For the first time in the USA, I am going to teach a condensed version of my Test automation using Perl course. It will take place alongside the other master classes on June 19-20, 2008, on the two days right after YAPC::NA.

Thanks to brian d foy you can already register for the class.

At the user's request, CPANdeps has sprouted another tentacle. There's now a ticky box which, if enabled, makes it also fetch MANIFEST files for the entire dependency tree, and highlight any modules (actually distributions) that don't look like they're pure perl. The heuristic is simple. We assume that a distribution is pure perl unless it contains a file that ends in .xs, .c or .h, or it depends on Inline::*. But if there is any file in the distro whose name contains the string 'pureperl' (case-insensitive, naturally), then we assume that the distribution contains a pure perl version as well as the C-ish version.

If there's any other things I should look for, please use the "report bugs" link on the website.

Birmingham.pm World Tour 2008 - Birmingham LUG - 15th May 2008

The next date on the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour gets a bit more local, with the crew visiting our friends at Birmingham LUG. Barbie and JJ will be along to present a couple of talks that seem to have gone down very well with previous tour attendees. Talk schedule looks as follows:

As promised a couple of weeks ago, I've sent a census email to all registered leaders of Perl Mongers groups. If you are the leader of a group and you haven't received the mail, then please contact me at census[at]pm.org.

Results should follow in a few weeks (dependent on how soon the group leaders respond).

YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen is fast approaching, and the deadline for proposals for next year's conference is not too far away (June 30th), but I've been thinking of events even further in the future. With the Perl Monger census that Dave Cross is organising, I'm hoping it might identify some of the groups that could potentially host the event, given that their membership would be big enough to help out. I then hope to get to know some of the leaders and members that are attending YAPC::Europe themselves, and see if I can encourage a few to at least think about hosting a YAPC::Europe. Seeing as we've now had 3 in the UK, there's no reason why we can't hold it in Germany, France or Portugal again. So I won't just be trying to persuade those in countries who have never hosted before ;)

Just a quick reminder, the YAPC::NA 2009 Call for Venue will be closing in less than a month. If you plan on trying to host YAPC::NA 2009 and you haven't started on your bid, you'd better get to it! The deadline for submissions this year is June 1st (as we would like to announce the 2009 venue at this year's YAPC::NA). You can get all of the details and see the Call for Venue posting on The Perl Foundation's blog.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

I've been playing around with MAD this morning [...] The current state of the tests for MAD is a bit sad, though I hope to have something that will make interested porters glad in the near future. -- Jesse Vincent, not a bad lad to spend a tad on MAD. (gad, Dad! it's not a fad).

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 07 May 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended.