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Edits to the Perl 5 wiki have fallen off recently. Taking a page from a well run Wiki, the Wookiepedia, I've started a semi-weekly wiki topic improvement drive. Each week or so a topic will be chosen (you should suggest some) and folks will focus effort improving the pages on that topic on the wiki.

This week its POD!

YAPC::Europe in Vienna was totally amazing. I'll post more soon but for now you can enjoy the slides to my talk Scaling with memcached:

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system used by LiveJournal, Facebook, Bloglines and others. Find out how memcached works, how to it set up and how you can scale your website.

Enjoy!

I saw the new perlconsole-0.3 distribution today on CPAN Recent Uploads and that reminded me something. Some months ago you had to look a lot to find out some Perl REPL, but now this thing is "fashionable". You actually may choose among:

Short Videos of Day 0 to Day 2 are available on youtube:

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=4gXSXBiXVb4
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=dXmKDkAAamc
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=dXmKDkAAamc

More will follow!

I have just uploaded the slides from the Moose talk I gave yesterday at YAPC::EU. They are a revised version of a talk I gave at the Perl Seminiar NY earlier this year, I think this version flows a little better and I was pretty happy with how the talk went. I was hoping to include more information about roles into this talk, but there was not time. Maybe the next talk.

I just released new versions of Maypole (2.121) and Autodia (2.04) yesterday.

Maypole 2.121 contains minor fixes to 2.12, hence the name.

Autodia 2.04 adds some fixes to dynamicly named perl attributes/methods, C# support, and the ability to use a list of packages (or patterns) to ignore.

Both uploaded to CPAN yesterday.

So it is finally public, next year's YAPC::Europe will be in Copenhagen/Denmark - I am eagerly awaiting the return of my fellow mongers who are in Vienna.

I am green with envy and I have seen the movie of the pre-conference meet up and I am hanging out in the IRC channel, but is not quite the same.

Well when they come back we will have a lot of work to do and only a year to do it, so lets get started...

Mucking around with Devel::Leak::Object at work on Monday, I managed with very little effort to locate an object "leak" (we were loading a bunch of stuff in Apache child init handlers, instead of at startup time in the parent like we should have).

Immediately memory savings across 25 children? 600 meg! Multiplied by 5 boxes in the cluster. At the very least that should delay the need to add a new server to the cluster for a few months.

Inspired by the quick win, I've been trying to hook D:L:Object in deeper to the Apache server, to look for more leaking cases (our web app uses enormous amounts of ram, and despite it legitimately needing a lot for certain tasks, I'm thinking there's probably much more that isn't necesary).

The talk went really well, with positive feedbacks from lots of people. The only problem is that I spent too much time (10 minutes) introducing the problem and had only 3 minutes to do the demonstration. Should have done the reharsal :/

The slides is available at http://www.slideshare.net/miyagawa/webscraper

I realize that the code snippet is displayed in funny fonts because I use Consolas with my powerpoint. Trying to reupload the file with Courier New. UPDATE: Now re-uploaded!

MIME::Lite is, in my opinion, the worst of the popular email object modules. It's buggy, has a lousy interface, and just does awful things. I'd go so far as to say that the number one mistake I see in new email modules is a reliance on MIME::Lite instead of Mail::Message or Email::MIME.

That said, I've just released the first non-developer release of MIME::Lite in over four years!

The YAPC Europe Foundation, in their infinite wisdom, have selected the bid from Copenhagen to hold next year's YAPC::EU. The organisers are currently worried about what the auction will turn up...

The YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna is quite happy to announce that almost all the announced people registered succesfuly this morning (Funny batch processing of quite some peoples). We could give away some goodies by various sponors. All the orga team members came in this morning with orange tomahawk!?!

The talks are on going, schedule got some last minute updates. Cog gave us a fun keynote on how to socialize in order to get most out of a YAPC. Larry Wall gave his current vision on scripting languages. Matt Trout had a full audience for an enthusiatic talk about the community around DBIx::Class. Hackathons are ongoing and domm is preparing videos of the welcome night. So the first day looks like a win and we are happy to see how it will go on.. :)

titivillus writes "Purdue Perl Mongers is having a social meeting at 7pm on Tuesday, August 28, at Cafe Royale in Chauncey Village in West Lafayette, IN.

Social Meetings are unstructured get-togethers where members talk about what they're doing with Perl, what it can do, plan future meetings, or just talk. All are welcome."

Sydney Perl Mongers - This Tuesday
I'm up in Sydney until the end of Thursday teaching our Programming Perl course. Tomorrow night (Tuesday 28th August 2007) I'll be presenting an illustrated history of failure at Sydney Perl Mongers I'd love to see you there, even if you have absolutely no interest in Perl.

And the cool module of the day is Graph::Easy (live demo) by Tels++.

It's kinda like GraphViz, but it also supports various text-mode output formats.

That's very cool if you want to render a graph of, let's say an inheritance hierarchy in, let's say Emacs. Which I do.

Widen your browser window and take a look at this fairly complicated graph that it managed to deal with (ancestors of the class CatalystX::FeedMe::View::Atom (found at the bottom)).

ggoebel writes "There's a story on Slashdot about a recent court decision concerning the Artistic License. The decision interprets the violation of the Artistic License as breach of contract instead of copyright infringement, I.e., the licensor in this case was not granted an injunction on the licensee to prevent them from continuing to redistribute their code.

The slashdot article references Law & Life and the JMRI project page

Looks like we may all be thanking Allison Randal and her efforts developing the Artistic 2.0.

• Could the same thing happen under the Artistic 2.0 or Will further revisions to the Artistic license be required?
• Should adoption of Artistic 2.0 wait until Perl 5.10?

"

I've been playing with the additions to the regex engine in 5.9.5, mostly as a last minute article on named captures for The Perl Review . A lot of this is really cool stuff, as in "Why wasn't it always this way?!" and "How did I ever live without this?!". Check out perldelta for 5.9.5.

I've now also run into Yves Orton's (demerphq's) Perl 5.10 Advanced Regular Expressions slides, first dated from the 2006 London Perl Workshop. Not only does he show the new features, but he goes into some of the motivations and internals for them.

And, after talking to Randal for a few minutes about this, we realized that a lot of this should be in Learning Perl, and that a lot of the stuff in perlfaq6 might get a lot easier. I'll have to practice these recursive regexes to update those answers.

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brian_d_foy writes "You may have read chromatic's latest Perl 6 Design Meeting notes and wondered what NQP was (although Patrick brought it up in the Meeting notes for June 20). Over in the Pugs blog, Mark Strosberg talks a little about this new implementation of "Not Quite Perl 6" on parrot. It's not everything, but it's enough to whet your appetite. It doesn't do fancy DWIMery like leaving the parentheses off and the method call syntax. NQP gives the Parrot developers to work on the compilation phase of the process without dealing with all the complexity of a full Perl 6.

Mark explains building NQP—it's just another language in parrot. Have you looked in the languages directory recently? There's quite a number of languages in there (which you can also see on at parrotcode.org):

APL                     cola                    pheme
BASIC                   dotnet                  plumhead
HQ9plus                 ecmascript              pugs
LANGUAGES.STATUS.pod    forth                   punie
Makefile                jako                    pynie
PIR                     lazy-k                  regex
WMLScript               lisp                    scheme
Zcode                   lua                     t
abc                     m4                      tap
amber                   nqp                     tcl
befunge                 ook                     unlambda
bf                      parrot_compiler         urm
c99                     perl5
cardinal                perl6

That Makefile builds all of the languages, or I can build them separately by using the Makefile in their directories. Once I have the .pbc file, I can tell parrot to use it to parse my script:

./parrot languages/nqp/nqp.pbc hello.nqp

The t/ directory contains examples of what I can do with NQP, and adding to those tests is a good way to get started in the Perl 6 effort."

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 22 August 2007. Larry, Patrick, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.