use Perl

Now that some of us have added our Gravatars to CPAN I thought it'd be fun (and perhaps a little scary) to collect all the available mugshots in one place.

The Faces of CPAN

We're disappointingly white and male - but who knew how damn fine we'd look as a group? Somebody should organise a naked calendar photo shoot next. People would pay lots of money not to see that.

Alex Gough, Perl hacker^W researcher in Halley Research Station in Antartica, writes about hacking Perl:

It also probably makes Perl the only programming language to have been developed on all seven continents.

I follow his blog as we hacked on ICFPC a few years ago. I like his penguin photos too.

I've been dreaming (with a couple of folks like clkao) about having a YAPC in Hawaii. Hawaii is a great place for everyone to come, from the west/mid coast of USA, East Asia (Japan, Taiwan) and Oceania (Australia, NZ). It's gonna be a great place for attendees to bring their spouses and SOs. The conference would begin early morning and should finish like 3pm so we can get to the beach.

Since Hawaii is not part of the North America continent, it shouldn't be YAPC::NA. YAPC::Pacific.

I don't know where to start. Is there a Perl monger in Hawaii? Hawaii.pm.org is there but the site seems way outdated.

David Golden recently alerted me to his Strawberry Perl distribution for Win32. It bundles GCC, dmake and a slew of useful modules and for my money provides a better out of the box experience than ActiveState. The default for installing modules is cpan rather than ppd and the bundled GCC means that XS modules build just fine. It also bundles David's excellent CPAN::Reporter which means you'll be giving module authors helpful Win32 feedback every time you install.

It's currently alpha but I found it completely stable. It manages to work pretty much like Perl on other platforms without having to pretend that Windows is another platform (à la Cygwin).

Saturday, 13 October, is the monthly Parrot Bug Day. Parrot hackers will be in #parrot on irc.perl.org all day to answer questions, apply patches, fix bugs, and clean up the bird for the upcoming release on Tuesday, 16 October. If you've ever wanted to contribute to Parrot but don't know how, join us in IRC. There are tasks for everyone from Perl novices to hardcore C hackers; many require little more than a Subversion client, a development environment, and a couple of hours of your time.

The next bug day will be 17 November 2007, in preparation for the release of Parrot 0.5.0.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

APPP is organizing a Catalyst training event in Braga, Portugal, November the 2nd and 3rd.

Catalyst Days is a two day training event for Perl programmers who don't know much (or nothing at all) about Catalyst or even MVC frameworks in general, with lectures in the mornings and exercises in the afternoons.

Novis, Optimus, Clix, log, excentric and the Department of Informatics of the University of Minho are sponsoring, making the venue available and even going as far as providing lunch for the attendees during the two days.

I'm pleased at announce that CPAN::Reporter 1.00 has been released and should soon be appearing on a CPAN mirror near you. Now, anyone with CPAN and a relatively modern version of Perl can contribute to CPAN Testers.

Our VMS guy for Test::Harness 3 appears to have gone AWOL. Can anyone VMS-savvy explain how to at least run tests in VMS? We're kind of stuck here and we can't even think about TH3 without some confidence that we don't break VMS.

Melbourne Perl Mongers
Melbourne Perl Mongers is meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) night, and both Rick Measham and myself will be presenting.

6:30pm Wednesday 8th August
Editure
Level 8
14 Blackwood St
North Melbourne

Effective Procrastination with HiveMinder
If you're like most people, you've got dozens of things that need doing. Work, shopping, chores, programming, hobbies, tax, holidays, bills, and so on. You may have tried to keep a to-do list, but found it rapidly grew to the point of being unmanageable.

Paul Fenwick will demonstrate the use of the free HiveMinder.com to-do service to both manage tasks and to procrastinate effectively, allowing you to focus only on the tasks that really need to be done. We'll see how to manage tasks via the web, via-email, and how to be really efficient via instant messenger.

To conclude, we'll see how it's possible to add new features to HiveMinder and some tricks and tips for doing so.

Microblogging with Jaiku and Net::Jaiku (Rick Measham)
Net::Jaiku - an introduction to microblogging and lifestreaming, plus a bonus: Using microblogging as a development tool.

YAPC::Europe 2007 Final Report

About the Conference

YAPC::Europe 2007 was held in Vienna, Austria from 28-30 August. It was the largest attended YAPC::Europe ever so far! So a big thank you goes out to all the attendees, speakers and sponsors for making this happen!

The conference website: http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007

Now, just over a month after the conference, we can say that YAPCE07 was a big success in technical, social and financial terms. Read on to get all the scary details.

I just uploaded the latest developer release for WebService::Google::Reader. This is the first version that contains all the planned functionality and is mostly documented. I mainly use it to keep my desktop client synched after being offline for a while.

I have included a few example scripts as well- the most useful being reset-account.pl. It will remove all subscriptions and tags, and remove any tracking information- such as which entries were read, clicked, emailed. Google's backend may still store this information, but Google Reader no longer has access to any of it.

Please take it for a spin and let me know if anything's missing or needs changing. I'm planning on making an official release in the next few days.

As I announced earlier there is going to be a Perl Workshop in Israel on 31 December 2007. Aafter the workshop is over we plan to celebrate the new year in a pub somwhere in Tel Aviv, just to warm us up for the Hackathon between 1-5 January, 2008. It would be really cool to see some of the overseas Perl Hackers on these events.

The weather can be warmish those days, flight tickets are relatively cheap and beer is served cold in the pubs of Tel Aviv.

Greg McCarroll writes "London Perl Workshop 2007

So it's that time of year again, the nights are growing long, the mornings are growing cold and people who should know better once again decide to organize a conference. That's right it's time for this year's London Perl Workshop. So let's get down to the details, because we haven't much time ...

The long comatose Vlaanderen.pm website just received an adrenaline shot right in the heart and is now back alive. Now we get busy reviving the community itself, which no doubt will be helped a lot by the upcoming Belgium Perl Workshop.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

A developer release of Web::Scraper is pushed to CPAN, with "filters" support. Let me explain how this filters stuff is useful for a bit.

Since an early version, Web::Scraper has been having a callback mechanism which is pretty neat, so you can extract "data" out of HTML, not limited to the string.

For instance, if you have an HTML

<span class=".entry-date">2007-10-04T01:09:44-0800</span>

you can get the DateTime object that the string represents, like:

  process ".entry-date", "date" => sub {
    DateTime::Format::W3CDTF->parse_string(shift->as_text);
  };

Next year, the UKUUG Spring Conference (aka Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) Conference) will be returning to Birmingham. Birmingham Perl Mongers will be lending their support and experience to the organisers, together with the Python West Midlands user group and several of the midlands Linux User Groups. The conference will focus on dynamic languages, with several topics up for discussion.

If you wish to submit a paper, the Call for Papers is out with a submission deadline of 16th November 2007. Send a title, summary and decription to spring2008@ukuug.org, and you'll be contacted by 30th November 2007 as to whether your talk is accepted or not.

The conference will be followed by the 2-day E-Mail Systems Conference 2008, with the possibility of something Perl specific happening the weekend before, if you wanted to plan a longer stay in Birmingham. Visit the UKUUG Spring 2008 Conference website for more details on the conference itself and I will announce more as it becomes available.

I personally would be delighted to see a notable number of Perl talks and tutorials, so if you're in the UK around the end of March and would be willing to head to Birmingham for the week, please consider submitting a talk. Hope to see you there.

Thursday, 4 October 2007, 7:00pm

Damian Conway is coming to town, and the San Diego Perl Mongers are pleased to be hosting him for an evening seminar. Damian will be presenting something we're all sure to fine extremely interesting.

Sex and Violence: Social and Technical Lessons from the Perl 6 Project

For details and directions, see the SanDiego.pm web site.

Last night I released Devel::CheckOS and Devel::AssertOS. They are a wrapper around $^O with some extra functionality. For example, where you can check $^O's value to see if you're running on a Linux system, you can use these modules to check for OS 'families' as well, such as whether you're running on a Unix system.