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This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"I once saw an overfilled waterbed that was almost as tall as I am. I would have called it PHP, but it didn't explode and throw cold water all over the house."

-- chromatic

Congratulations to Houston and Vienna who have just been announced as the venues for YAPC::NA and YAPC::EU in 2007.

Update: Here's the official YAPC::EU announcement that kudra would have posted if I hadn't beaten her to it with my unofficial version:

YAPC::Europe Foundation is pleased to announce that Vienna, Austria has been chosen as the site for YAPC::Europe 2007, the eighth European YAPC.

Vienna faced tough competition from Lyon, France and Pisa, Italy, and we hope that these groups will give us the opportunity to consider their proposals again in the future.

We are confident that Vienna.pm's experienced team--which was responsible for several Austrian Perl Workshops--will put together a wonderful conference. The theme for the next YAPC::Europe will be 'Social Perl'.

We hope to see you in Vienna next summer!

After a long time, recently I had some spare time to work on CPAN::Forum.

There are many back stage changes (e.g. finally I wrote some tests). The change that might be the most important, especially for module authors is that from now one can subscirbe to e-mail alerts to any module based on your PAUSEID. That includes any future modules as well. This can be done on mypan

In addition there is a collection of all the posts made to modules by PAUSEID. In my case that would be CPAN::Forum of SZABGAB. While looking at that page with Firefox you get an RSS feed sign in the location bar. Clicking on it will let you add the rss feed of the given PAUSEID to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

I'm a trained shaved monkey. Take a look at FormValidator::Simple::ProfileManager::YAML. It allows one to load FVS profiles from YAML. That's a nice compliment to FormValidator::Simples ability to load error messages form a yaml file.

But apparently, some things can't be easy. Using the [REGEX, qr//] validator is one of those things.

Strawberry Perl 5.8.8 Alpha 2 for Win32 is out. Largely synchronizes with Vanilla Perl Build 7, but with updates to CPAN.pm and other toolchain modules.

• Download strawbery-perl-5.8.8-alpha-2.exe (24.0 MB) (Changelog)

Just a few things about the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. The Workshop is Saturday Sept 23. The Pittsburgh Steelers are playing the Bengals the next day. So you might want to go. Good luck getting tickets. http://news.steelers.com/ We have posters to promote the workshop. Please print some off and hang them up. http://www.robertblackwell.com/ppw/ppw-poster.pdf The schedule is out. http://pghpw.org/schedule.html

As of version 1.87_57, CPAN.pm has support for CPAN::Reporter. I wrote about this project in my last journal entry. At that time, one needed to install a subversion branch of CPAN.pm to use CPAN::Reporter. Now, it's easy to set up directly from the CPAN shell:

The Chicago Perl Mongers and The Perl Foundation are proud to announce the Fall 2006 Chicago Hackathon, the weekend of November 10-12, 2006 in suburban Crystal Lake, IL. It will be a round-the-clock weekend of programming on Perl-related projects with your colleagues in the open source community. Dozens of programmers from the open source community in the midwest, as well as others from around the US, will be getting together to share ideas, work on code, and move their Perl-related projects forward.

The participants set the agenda for what we'll be working on, but Perl 6 and Parrot are already on the roster of projects. Chip Salzenberg, pumpking for the Parrot project, will be on hand to help with Parrot and Perl 6. Andy Lester will also be driving some Parrot maintenance tasks, and other midwest programmers will be working on their own projects. There's sure to be something interesting for everyone!

Participation in the hackathon costs nothing. The Perl Foundation is even providing hotel rooms at a special rate if you want to spend the night. Even if you're in the area for just an hour, stop by, grab a snack or some pizza and talk with other people interested in Perl. You might contribute more than you think just by talking with other programmers.

To find out more, visit http://hackathon.info. If you'll be attending, please sign in on the Attendees wiki page, and/or email rsvp@hackathon.info . You can also send questions to Andy Lester at andy@hackathon.info

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"My school's punch card machines were in the same room as the TRS-80 Model I ("THE COMPUTER ROOM"). These kids today with their hula hoops and fax machines and intarwebs..."

-- Chip Salzenberg, arguing in favor of lines in excess of 80-characters.

ehdonhon writes "The schedule of speakers for the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is now available.

The Workshop's talks are divided into two tracks. The Basic track, which takes place in the pair Networks Room, features our special speakers brian d foy and Peter Scott and offers eight talks filled with practical advice and ready-to-use Perl-programming ideas. The Advanced track, which takes place in the Socialtext Room, features seven longer, heavy-duty talks that cover a fascinating spectrum of deep Perl wizardry.

Whether you are new to Perl or an old hand, you will find a ton of great talks waiting for you at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop.

There is still time to register. Two good reasons to register now:

1. The "Early bird" discount registration period will soon be closing. Register now to come to the workshop at half price!
2. All participants that register prior to Wednesday, August 30, will have free wireless access for the day of the event.

Don't delay. Register now!"

I've made enough progress in experimenting with Perl6 for module management that I've created the pmtools-perl6 SourceForge project, which will give pmtools-perl6 developers access to mailing lists and bug tracking among other tools. The pmtools-perl6 sources will live on CPAN, just like the sources for Perl5's pmtools – I just didn't want to host my own mailing lists, bug tracker, etc. Since you request the SourceForge humans to create your mailing lists as well as your project (as I understand the SourceForge setup process), it will be a week or two yet before I have the pmtools-perl6 mailing lists fired up.

An initial note to pmtools-perl6 developers: Perl6 exception handling in Pugs (as of v6.2.11) in my experimentation does not give you the new Perl6 exception info yet, so likely you will want to use the Perl5 $! to figure out what exception was just thrown when you try to load a module (pun intended).

Perlcast is here with the first of many podcasts recorded at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2006. This first interview was with Patrick Michaud. Patrick is the author of PGE, the parrot/Perl6 Grammar engine and is also the Perl 6 compiler pumpking.

jesse writes "Over the past several years, one key aspect of the migration plan to Perl 6 has been the Ponie project, a fusion of the Perl 5 runtime with Parrot. Sponsored by Fotango, Artur Bergman and Nicholas Clark did a heroic job cleaning up Perl's internals to make it possible to replace some components of Perl 5 with Parrot, one piece at a time, while still keeping the core of the Perl 5 runtime intact with 100% bug-for-bug compatibility. Along the way, Nicholas ported several significant Perl core improvements from Ponie back to the Perl 5.9 tree.

titivillus writes "I am glad to announce the re-formation of Purdue PM, Perl Mongers for Purdue, and, well, the only PM group in Indiana. If you're a Perl user who isn't a Boiler, you're welcome, too.

Our first social meeting will be held at Cafe Royale, tonight (August 22nd) at 7pm, and are planned for the fourth Tuesday of every month. Our first technical meeting is planned for September 11 and will be repeated the second week of each month.

If you're interested in Perl and live in northern Indiana, please come and check us out. Check our website for more information."

Anybody interested in playing with TAPx::Parser and going to YAPC::EU might want to stick their name down on TapHackathon

The latest round of grant voting has ended and I've informed all of the applicants of the status of their grant application. Two grants were approved this quarter Porting PyYAML to Perl and Mango, a Web 2.0 ecommerce application built using the Handel and Catalyst frameworks.

The PyYAML port is to be done by Ingy (Brian Ingerson) and was approved because frankly, YAML support in Perl ain't all that great and there are few better qualified that Ingy to get this done right.

The Mango application will be put together by Christopher Laco. The committee really liked this proposal in large part because it will be a great app that could have widespread potential outside of the Perl community. Many folks were initially drawn to Perl because they found useful code written in Perl and naturally turned toward the language. We'd like to continue that.

As usual, TPF would love to hear your feedback on these.

Summary updates

This is the final installment of the older summaries. After this week, I plan to post weekly summaries on Sundays.

The Chicago Perl Mongers are adopting a camel in the Lincoln Park Zoo. All the details are in my original message to the Chicago.pm chatter list.

This isn't an original idea. In 2000, Dave Cross posted to use.perl that the London Perl Mongers adopted the camel in the London Zoo.

As Dave also noted, others zoo probably have similar programs (and they tend not to argue when you're giving them money), so Perl Mongers could probably adopt a herd of camels. Some groups may even be able to buy a camel out-right. :)

Larry, Allison, Patrick, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended the Perl 6 design meeting on 16 August 2006. Here are the minutes.

Damian Conway, one of the world's most renowned members of the Perl community (as a programmer, CPAN author, writer and speaker), is coming to Portugal, this September, to lecture his Perl Best Practices course, in an event organized and sponsored by log.

Apart from being one of the people pointing Perl 6 in the right direction, Damian is the author of the much appraised "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices" books. He is also the creator of some astounding CPAN modules, including Getopt::Euclid, IO::Prompt, Lingua::Romana::Perligata, Parse::RecDescent, Smart::Comments, Switch and Text::Autoformat.

More information on the event can be attained in log's webpage (in Portuguese) or by contacting jose dot castro at log dot pt directly.