use Perl

I have been continually frustrated by XML modules. They were all either hard to use, had ridiculous dependencies, took too much memory, or some horrible Lovecraftian combination of those. So, when Adam Kennedy recently muttered on the datetime mailing list about his *::Tiny modules, I decided to do XML right. The result is XML::Tiny, which (according to its documentation) implements a useful subset of XML. Secretly, I think it implements the useful subset. The core parser is less than 20 lines of code and is sufficient to parse an RSS feed or the responses from Amazon's web services. It should be compatible with perl 5.004_05 and with XML::Parser with the XML::Parser::EasyTree style, has no dependencies outside the core, and consumes as near as damnit no memory.

The Perl 6 Design team met via phone on 07 February 2007. Larry, Damian, Allison, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the notes.

YAPC::Asia 2007 (4/4-5 in Tokyo, Japan) was again a huge success: lots of attendees (approx. 450) and interesting talks. Even if you didn't make it, you can enjoy the conference online now that Video and Audio recordings are available.

All video files are now uploaded on Google Video so you can browse all the talks with Flash player or download as DivX or MP4 movie file. They are also integrated in YAPC::Asia 2007 Sessions detail pages using Google Video embed Flash player.

For people going mobile, Podcast feed (mp3 audio) and Videocast feed (iPod/PSP ready mp4 video) files are both available.

Enjoy!

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 May 2007. Larry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

In what I'm sure he meant to be a throwaway rhetorical question, Jonathon asks:

OH IT'S SO ON! :)

schwern writes "Some of you may have heard me talking about geek2geek communications lately. One of the biggest issues is the problem of empathy in electronic communications. It's really easy to be an ass to a piece of ASCII and forget there's a human whom you're writing to.

One way to solve this problem is to attach a face to the text, either in your head or in reality. Unfortunately, we can't meet everyone face to face in real life. Fortunately there's already technology to do this and its really simple. Gravatars.

schwern writes "Graham added Gravatars to author pages on search! Have a look!

Because of performance issues with gravatar.com, they're cached and the cache is still being populated. If yours isn't there, just give it a bit of time.

Here's the FAQ entry I've proposed.

Where do the author's pictures come from and how do I set mine?

They come from the Gravatar associated with that author's cpan.org email address. To set yours, simply sign up with gravatar using your cpan.org address. We cache the gravatars so give it a day or so to catch up."

Yeah, me too. But I'm a capitalist, so I like to see what people are writing checks for. As I'm fed up with the various unsubstantiated claims, I've whipped up a little graphic of job posts on Dice that will hopefully cheer you up. I'll try to keep it updated regularly. If nothing else, it'll give us all something to watch as we're overtaken by our Ruby and Python overlords.

My friend Jeff woke me up today because I IM'd him late last night saying "I have this great idea and I need to talk with someone about it!" This isn't that idea, but another one Jeff suggested.

We got to talking about the problem of CPAN dependencies. He mentioned that Python modules don't really have many dependencies, but they're not very complex either. CPAN modules can do some really complex things because they can let some other module do the work, but that leads to a long, and fragile, dependency chain.

We talked about some of the attempts to solve that and why they suck. They mostly revolve around depending on a fixed version. Debian packages can depend on a major version of another package (say, 3.x) and won't use a newer major version. Module::Install tries to solve it by shipping a fixed version of itself and any dependencies. only.pm tries to solve it by coding in specific versions. The problem with these approaches is they try to freeze the upgrade process.

Several binary packaging systems (notably RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux and ActiveState ActivePerl) have a recurring problem with "dual-life" modules. These are modules that come with the Perl core, but are also distributed via CPAN.

The primary problem seems to be that binary packaging systems consider files to be inviolate. They freak out and can't handle the idea that there might be two packages which contain the same file, where the file from one of the packages can be legitimately installed over the top of the other.