use Perl

The new and shiny oe1.orf.at is finally online!

As you might expect it's crafted using the finest ingredients of Modern Perl: Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose, HTML::FormHandler, KinoSearch. Relaunching the site was a nice project, even though there were some setbacks:

I was forced to switch from Postgres to MySQL (using - the horrors - MyISAM), so I couldn't use any real database features like transactions and referential integrity; the launch date was postponed a few times, so I couldn't help organising the QA Hackathon as much as I wanted (in fact I can also not attend all days, because I want to spend some time with my family before leaving for Berlin / Icleand).

Anyway, after fixing some last post-deployment glitches everything seems to work now. Yay!

• We have a new sponsor: 123people.com. Yay! pst++
• Unfortunately David Golden, Ricardo Signes and Barbie can not make it.
• We accepted two last-minute requests from Miyagawa and Gabor Szabo.
• There was a tiny problem with the hotel, which luckily got spotted by Ovid. We have fixed that problem now.
• We will meet next week (during the monthly Vienna.pm meeting which will from now on take place on the first Thursday each month) to discuss the agenda etc.

We're all very much looking forward to the event!

The phase for applications for sponsorship ends on Friday, 2010-02-12. We then shall deliberate over the weekend and announce the result afterwards so that travel arrangements can be made ASAP.

If you're considering coming to Vienna, and want to apply for sponsored travel/hotel, add yourself to the wiki now. The more you tell us about your plans, the better!

It came to my attention via brian d foy's blog post that the next Nordic Perl Workshop will take place in Iceland - which sounds very interesting. At the same time I decided that I need to take a longish break after working very hard for the last two years. So I will combine my holiday with NPW!

My current plan is bike from Vienna via Prague to Berlin, spend a few days there to visit some friends, take a plane to Rekjavik, attend NPW, and then either cycle a bit more through Iceland or treck a bit (probably combined with public transport). Then take the plane back to Berlin and a train back to Vienna.

The plan still has some issues:

• Is it totally insane to cycle through Iceland in May (if any Icelandic person could comment on this, I'd appreciate that..).
• Maybe cycling from Vienna to Berlin takes to long or is boring. Then I could take the train to Berlin, and cycle from there to Copenhagen, fly to Iceland, and go back to Berlin.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to this!

The Perl QA Hackathon 2010 will take place in the lovely MetaLab , a grass-root non-profit hack-space in the middle of Vienna (more on Wikipedia). There will be lots of space, workplaces, sofas, wireless and wired network and a big fridge full of drinks.

Vienna.pm has also proud to announce that we will sponsor the hackathon with 10.500 Euro. We will reserve a small part for catering during the event, but most of the money will go into paying for transport and hotel of invited guests.

If you want to hack on a QA / Toolchain project, please add yourself to the Attendees page of the wiki.

Thomas Klausner,
on behalf of Vienna.pm and the Perl QA Hackathon 2010 team

After typing ack 'sub foo' lib for the approximately thousandth time during some refactoring sessions, I couldn't be bothered anymore and added the following snippet to my realias (after some googling on how to get params into an alias, which does not work in bash, so I had to solve it via a bash function):

sack () {
   ack "sub $1" lib
}

To find a given method in some of our labyrinthine code, I now say

~/projects/Foo-Bar$ sack annoying_method

and get a list of all occurrences.

yay!

P.S.: The name sack has nothing do with subroutine ack, but of course comes from the Austrian saying "Gemma ned am sack, oida!"

During YAPC::Europe, Nicholas Clark mentioned a new util called perlthanks. It's basically perlbug, but for submitting thank-you-notes instead of bug reports. Nicholas said nobody had submitted a proper perlthank yet. So after installing 5.10.1 today, I said thanks.

It seems that I missed "first post" by two slots, but well...

Thanking p5p for the tremendous work they're doing for us, is now only a short perlthanks away!

For a lot of reasons I prefer vinyl to CDs as my primary medium for music. But I still want to carry my music around, and not only is vinyl rather heavy, the real killer is the lack of portable turntables that work while cycling...

A few days ago I packed one of my turntable and my old and crappy mixer into my bike trailer and hauled them and a selection of records to my office. Now I can listen to proper music while working, and convert it to mp3 at the same time.

As the setup is kind of interesting, here's a quick rundown through the hard- and software used:

The turntable connects to the mixer, which does the preamp needed to convert the weak signal from the turntable into something line-in can take. The mixer than connects to my USB sound device (rather ancient, I got it when we lived in Berlin in 2000). The USB thingy is plugged into my desktop machine (of course running Debian), where I use Audacity to record the audio signal.

After I recored a whole record, I have to do some manual fiddling to remove the gaps in the recording left when I had to switch records. I than add a 'label track' and add track marks at appropriate places (silence auto detecting just does not work good enough). Then I hit 'Export multiple' and let audacity convert the wavs to mp3.

Now I have a bunch of ugly-named mp3-files lacking proper meta data. I wrote several small scripts and tools to first rename the files to something like '01.mp3'. I fetch the CDDB data from freedb.org (or if I cannot find it there, I can write up a small file containing the meta data from hand or copy it from wikipedia). Another script then parses the meta data, finds the matching mp3 file, adds ID3 tags, moves it to my music archive and generates a proper filename (which of course is '02_guns_dont_kill_people_rappers_do.mp3').

And that's it!

If you've been at YAPC::Europe 2009 (or still are there...), I've probably shown you my still rather simple space invaders clone, which is totally boring besides the fact that it's written in Perl (and based on SDL). It's now on github: http://github.com/domm/Game-PerlInvaders. Please clone and patch!

BTW, if you want to try it out and have problems installing SDL from CPAN, try the most recent version from github, see http://wiki.github.com/cthulhuology/SDLPerl

As I can't get to my screen-session my irssi-session lives in, I'll have to announce this here:

The slide for my talk Writing Reusable Code are now available from here: http://domm.plix.at/talks/writing_reusable_code.html and also listed on the YAPC::Europe 2009 Wiki.

If you held or will hold a talk, please add links to your slides too!