use Perl

So, to follow the trend, I'll post my YAPC::NA itinerary here.

Monday:

• I'm arriving overly late on Monday, so the only thing I'll 'potentially' be able to do is attend some after-hours BOF or something.

Tuesday:

• 8:15a (so early) Clayton Scott's Social Perl
• 8:40a Dave Rolsky's Fey(::ORM), YA(F)ORM
• 9:05a Perrin Harkins' Scaling Databases with DBIx::Router
• 10:05a Dave Rolsky's Introduction to Mason (because I keep seeing job postings on Perl Jobs listing Mason)
• 10:55a Jim Krajewski's HTML::App -- a Framework for Writing Web Applications (I'm curious)
• 1:00p Kent Cowgill's Testing Code and Assuring Quality (I'd really like to get addicted to testing)
• 2:15p Leonard Miller's Perl::Critic and Perl::Tidy, Your guide to better programming practices (because I need this)
• 2:50p Undecided
• 4:05p Michael Peters' Buildbot and Smolder - distributed build and testing (again, I'm curious)

Wednesday

• If you thought I was arriving late on Monday, that's nothing in comparison to how early I'm leaving on Wednesday. I may not even need to sleep before the flight!

That's my story and I'm sticking to it, unless I change my mind.

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.

Sponsorship hasn't come in like I had anticipated for the Open Source Symposium. If something doesn't happen soon, it looks like I'll be sponsoring the conference out of my own pocket. It's not too bad, only a couple thousand $$, but that's not how I'd like to spend that money.

I took a gamble on making the cost free for attendees with the expectation of getting enough sponsorship money to cover the costs. So far it's a bad move. I'll likely mark the 'free' price as early bird, and change it to $10 to recover at least some of the costs. I have a $100 'Advocate' sponsorship level that attendees (or anyone for that matter) can buy. It was suggested that I put some wording up next to the 'Cost: FREE', encouraging people to donate to the conference in lieu of a registration fee. Hopefully that will generate a little more sponsorship, as well

I wanted to make the attendee cost free since San Angelo is a somewhat remote, small 100,000 population town in West Texas. I thought making it free would get a larger crowd. That part has paid off somewhat like expected. Now if I can just find a few thousand dollars burning holes in sponsors pockets :-)

Welcome, once again, to the Yet Another Perl Conference, North America Call For Venue! The 2009 YAPC::NA marks the 10th anniversary for YAPC. Wow, 10 years of YAPC! This year we've decided to try something a little different. After some discussion and feedback, we've decided to take an approach similar to YAPC::EU. We're putting out the request for bids now, with a June 1 deadline. This gives the Conferences Committee time to review the bids and make a decision to be announced at this year's YAPC::NA in Chicago.

Some of the main reasons for making the change include:

• giving the organizers more time
• they can gain some exposure and experience with the current year's group
• easier to publicize and start spreading the word with everyone in the same room

How do you get started? Please review the bidding details at yapc.org. While there, you'll also find links to the venue requirements and the review criteria. Previous bids and announcements can be found with the 'yapc' tag at The Perl Foundation blog.

When making your proposal, in addition to venue information and possible dates, please make sure to include details on airport locations, local public transit (as well as transit to the venue from the airport!), local cultural attractions, and accommodation information. The more information you provide, within reason, the better. Also, please include contact information for the members of your team.

With a June 1st deadline, you have 10 weeks to get your bid completed and submitted to the Conferences Committee. It's a good idea to get your bid submitted early so that we can provide some feedback and allow you to make changes if needed.

Hosting YAPC is a rewarding experience and provides a great opportunity to give back to the Perl community. Good luck and we look forward to receiving your bid!

Send any questions and completed bids to the TPF conferences group: tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org

I've finally opened the Call For Participation for the Open Source Symposium taking place April 25-26, 2008. If anyone would like to submit a talk, please do so. I really hope to have Perl properly represented.

Now that I'm done with this year's YAPC::NA, I finally have some free time again! Of course, I can't NOT stay busy. During the post-yapc hackathon, I spoke with a particular person about a possible hackathon or Perl workshop in the near future. It would either be in Dallas or Austin. I'm not sure of the level of involvement that I'll get to have with helping organize, but I'm hoping it's at least some.

Now that I have some free time, I'm able to re-focus efforts on getting the PM group going here in San Angelo. I have things setup, I just need to get a meeting together and start generating more interest. I'm also trying to get back into some hobby web development. My current job role doesn't involve much Perl, other than tools I may write to help do my job, so I'm looking for something that I can work on to keep me writing Perl. I keep going back to jobs.perl.org to peruse the part-time jobs, but I'm not really looking for the extra money. I don't know if I would want that kind of commitment. Before bidding to host YAPC::NA, I was trying to volunteer to help Robert and Ask with some of their stuff, but after winning the bid, all of my energy and time focused on organizing yapc. Since starting my new job in January, I've decided that I miss doing web development. I had hoped that I would have more time at yapc to talk with people and get ideas for (or get involved with) a project, but my time was spread thin. I had more time during the hackathon, but several people had already headed back home. Hopefully, I'll come across a need or find a project with which to get involved. Until then, I'll keep doing what I'm doing. :-)

I was installing Test::Pod::Coverage this morning and found it a little funny that one of the missing prerequisites skipped a test because it needed Test::Pod::Coverage. Here's a snippet of the log:

C:\>perl -MCPAN -e"install Test::Pod::Coverage"
....
Running install for module Test::Pod::Coverage
....
Warning: prerequisite Pod::Coverage 0 not found.
....
Running install for module Pod::Coverage
....
Warning: prerequisite Devel::Symdump 2.01 not found.
....
Running install for module Devel::Symdump
....
t/podcover....skipped
        all skipped: Test::Pod::Coverage required for testing pod coverage
....

It's official. Ubuntu is my distribution of choice. I installed Fedora Core 6 on my laptop yesterday, but had to fight with drivers and firmware to get the wireless card working. I hate having to screw around with that. I decided to go back with Ubuntu and try it on the laptop. After installing, everything just worked. It's GREAT!

I converted my laptop's previous Windows install to a VM on our ESX server. I plan on either installing Xen and converting the VM or installing VMware Player so that I can run the VM on my laptop and have the same config as before if I end up needing it.

Once I blew away the Windows install, I had to get something up and running on it since this laptop is what I use to work on all of the YAPC::NA stuff.