use Perl

"I do not know what crazy things people have done in code I cannot see. But people are creative in strange ways, and I cause them enough trouble already by incorporating changes with unintended behaviour changes." -- Nicholas Clark, on why it pays to be cautious.

Shibuya Perl Mongers will have its 7th technical meetup on October 20th at IIJ Tokyo office.

There will be lots of talks including Amazon EC2 and S3, Catalyst, DBIx::Class, MogileFS, Using Perl from JavaScript, svk etc. You need RSVP to join the meetup since there's a capacity limit of the venue.

I've been working on a Perl 6 FAQ for Programmer's Heaven, where I work. Today it has published and at the moment it answers over 100 questions; I'll be adding more in the future. There is also a step-by-step guide to writing your first Perl 6 program. Hope this is helpful, and comments, corrections and suggestions will be very welcome!

Kansai.pm will have its 7th meeting on October 17th, 6pm at Digital Hollywood Osaka. I'll be a guest there and will talk about Plagger in 90 minutes, from a brief introduction to how to write plugins.

Drop me a line if you're in Kansai area of Japan and interested to join.

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"When I first read 'Warnock applies' on things in p6 summaries a year or so ago, I thought it was some really energetic programmer who went around and applied patches as soon as people posed a question."

-- Carl Mäsak, on Warnock's Dilemma

"Well not since that time you thought that embedding perl was a good idea in the first place" -- Johnathon Stowe, commenting on Marc Lehmann saying that yes, he loved embedding perl in other applications and that no, he didn't do drugs.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 04 October 2006. Larry, Allison, Nicholas, Patrick, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

Search open source code. All of it.

For instance, but who the heck would change these anyway?

Who uses Net::SMTP::SSL?

Uses of sprintf in any Perl code.

philcrow writes "Bigtop is a language for describing and generating web applications. It is a jump starter for web apps. For instance, the long movie makes a two table web app and gives a tour of the generated code in under six minues.

Bigtop 0.18 is making the rounds to a CPAN mirror near you. Currently Bigtop targets the Gantry web framework also available from CPAN. Both projects have svn checkout, see the Gantry project.

We started Vlaanderen Perl Mongers last month! Geert installed a kwiki wiki on the vlaanderen.pm.org server. I did the rest of the configuration and installed a little homepage. Members (and others) are invited to send content.

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"And here I thought you were a responsible, law-abiding citizen... :P "

-- Jonathan Lang, commenting on Larry Wall's self.HOW does Hash

It's the start of the third year in print!

The Fall 2006 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. You can even buy TPR on the newsstand now if you shop at Powell's Technical Books in Portland.

In this issue (besides the cover showing the Larry Wall action figure by ArtCard Mike):

• Google's Summer of Code -- Jim Brandt
  
• pmtools -- Mark Leighton Fisher
  
• Parrot Magic Cookies -- Jonathan Scott Duff
  
• Agent-based Programming in Perl -- Guinevere Nell
  
• ETL Nightmares -- Thomas MacKenzie
  
• and other stuff
  

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 27 September 2006. Larry, Patrick, Allison, chromatic, and Nicholas attended. These are the minutes.

When DateTime::Cron::Simple was originally uploaded to the CPAN, it contained a copyright assertion, but no license of any kind was provided with it.

Following an enquiry from the Venezuelan Patents and Intellectual Property Office on it's licensing status, and conversations with the author, the module is being deleted from the CPAN as per the author's demands.

At least one major Perl product (WebGUI) is known to use this module, and so I'd like to make a request for volunteers to write an API-compatible replacement to allow for continuity of service.

Any interested parties should contact the DateTime mailing list to co-ordinate, and permissions to the namespace will be reassigned as needed.

If we fake times in our fake stat then fake futimes makes sense. But chown and chmod make little sense to me - only the current process can access the scalar so current UID is owner (and can't exec it).

We could accept the calls and set errno to nearest code that made sense, or perhaps just set the mode so that fake stat saw it.

Have we missed any more fd related calls? If there anything else that we can do to filehandles via perl interface that we missed?

-- Nick Ing-Simmons, discussing how to improve PerlIO::Scalar, September 1st, 2006.

The dates for YAPC::NA 2007 have finally been established! The Houston.pm group and YAPC::NA 2007 organizers are pleased to announce that next year's YAPC::NA will be Monday, June 25th through Wednesday, June 27th, at the University of Houston. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you may have. You can also visit the YAPC::NA homepage for updates and information. The site format and content should be changing soon so be sure to check back as often as you like. We'll try to post a schedule of when various things will be announced so that people know when to expect what (suggestion from this year's yapc wiki).

This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006. For more information, please see the Perl Foundation Blog entry.

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"my Yellow sub marine { @we.all.live }"

-- Larry Wall, concluding a series of Beatles references in the grep thread.

Larry Wall's State of the Onion 10 is now online on Perl.com. As most things Larry it makes an entertaining read.

"Now to move a huge pile of bugs out of my rt.cpan.org queue and into Randy's. THUD" -- Michael G. Schwern, making MakeMaker lighter.