use Perl

This week I participated in the Test Automation Conference hosted by Google in London. They are based just by Victoria Station and have pretty shiny offices indeed with a pool table, table football and lots of little perks like fridges full of Innocent smoothies. This two-day conference really interested me as I'm really interested in large scale testing - as the tshirt we got pointed out: "because life is too short for manual testing".

It's with great pride that the AxKit development team announce AxKit2 version 1.1. We've ironed out all those rough edges. We've built production ready apps with it. We've tested it with bullets (and not just blanks).

So go forth, download, and enjoy. Available in the usual places. May take 24 hours to mirror everywhere (CPAN and Apache mirrors).

"Insistent rumors claim that we used to have Perl compilable with C++ -- I doubt it a bit, given the kind of problems I found when doing this latest cleanup work." -- Jarkko Hietaniemi, having now found a new wall against which to bang his head.

Mark Overmeer gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2006 about cpan6, the design so far is the result of a collaboration between Mark and myself. The talk was generally well received, and during the conference we have heard many more peoples' concerns. The good news is that there were no new requirements that didn't fit cleanly in the design, in fact it gave some people lots of ideas. I think I can say that we have support for the general direction of things, and now we can open up the debate widely, and start implementing pieces.

I invite people to join either the pause6 mailing list (for infrastructure discussions) or the cpan6 tools list (for client-side installers and upload tools).

The earliest task will be looking at the big picture, and seeing which pieces are the low-hanging fruit that we can write tests for straight away. I'll start the ball rolling after we have a few subscriptions.

Damian Conway will be in Portugal next week, lecturing his Perl Best Practices training class.

However, those not lucky enough to attend the event will still have a chance to see Damian in person, and speaking.

Life, the Universe and Everything, a wonderful talk by Damian, September the 13th! Read the page (in Portuguese) and send the requested email if you plan on attending.

"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!

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.

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

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