use Perl

naterajj writes "Announcing LA.pm's next meeting!

What:
brian d foy will present "Making your own CPAN"

When:
Thursday the 20th of September, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Where:
Rent.com
2425 Olympic Blvd, Suite 400E
Santa Monica, CA

LA.pm is very glad to welcome back renowned Perl author brian d foy,
for his presentation about "Making your own CPAN", discover how CPAN
works and how to create your own local mirrors, it's CPAN to go!.
The meeting will be held at the Rent.com offices in Santa Monica
on Thursday the 20th of September, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm

So, I had already created a channel on IRC for reporting CPAN Testers reports as they happened, but it has become a little hard to have a conversation in there with all the smoke reports

So DrHyde suggested a discussion channel

Both channels are on irc.perl.org and are called:

• #cpantesters
• #cpantesters-discuss

barbie writes "The YAPC::Europe Foundation is pleased to announce that Copenhagen, Denmark has been chosen as the site for YAPC::Europe 2008, the ninth European YAPC.

Copenhagen faced stiff competition from Braga, Portugal, which hosted a memorable YAPC::Europe in 2005. This year also marked the first submission from a group unaffiliated with Perlmongers: the Informatics department of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. We hope that both these groups will give us the opportunity to consider their proposals again in the future.

We are confident that Copenhagen.pm's experienced team — which was responsible for several Nordic Perl Workshops — will put together a wonderful conference. "

OK, I'll bite. Here is a first rough draft for discussion and brain-storming, please post suggestions for add'l hash keys. Basic format of Changes.yml should be a stream of hashes, each hash defining one release.

You know, I should really start making a list of quick security fixes for people.

$ ack -al '(?<!#)\s*use.+CGI::Carp\s.*fatalsToBrowser' | wc -l

Or to make it even easier :)

$ vim $(ack -al '(?<!#)\s*use.+CGI::Carp\s.*fatalsToBrowser' | wc -l)

You could also do that with perl -pi.bak, but I don't care to automate fixing security issues. You want to look at those directly The above, for example, won't recognize POD. Of course, it also won't recognize CGI::Carp->import('fatalsToBrowser').

The Fall 2007 issue of The Perl Review comes out next Monday. We're starting of our fourth year of the print version (and close to seventh overall!). This time around we have a spiffy, new design that packs in more Perl into the same number of pages, keeping the costs the same but giving you more Perl for it. Subscribe to get access to all past issues as PDFs and to have The Perl Review show up in your mailbox.

In this issue:

• Templating My Output -- Alberto Simões
  
• Making My Own CPAN -- brian d foy
  
• Programming Parrot: NCI -- Jonathan Scott Duff
  
• Komodo Test Drive -- Jim Brandt
  
• Named Captures in Perl 5.10 -- brian d foy
  
• and other stuff
  

We're always looking for people with good Perl stories to tell to, and you can submit an article idea.

autarch writes "Frozen Perl 2008 will be a one-day workshop in sunny Minneapolis on Saturday, February 16, 2008. We've officially opened up our Call for Speakers, and we're looking forward to your submissions. Our workshop theme is "Perl in Practice", so practical submissions are encouraged."

I meant to mention this a few weeks ago, but I've been off gallivanting around New Zealand.

Jonathan Tweed from the BBC has finished putting together videos from all of the Teach-In sessions. You can get them (in various formats) from his Blip.tv account.

One small caveat. The batteries on the radio mike ran out about fifteen minutes before the end of the last session, so we have no usable audio for that time. We'll know better next time.

Thanks to Jonathan for all the work he's put in on this. I'm not sure I'd want to spend as long as he has listening to my voice!

IPC::System::Simple v0.06
IPC::System::Simple v0.06 has been released, and should be hitting a CPAN mirror new you shortly. The new release includes:

• No more spurious warnings when we can't find commands (all systems).
• Multi-arg calls to run() never use the shell under Win32, even though multi-arg calls to system() sometimes do.
• Native 16-bit exit values are available on Win32 systems, provided the multi-arg form of run() is used.
• Better support on older Perl distributions, particular 5.6.1 under Win32.

I was browsing through the solr-ruby project svn directory when i can across CHANGES.yml (sample below):

Various things went wrong with my attempt to set up PM group(s) in the north of England. But a trip to Vienna has my enthusiasm all fired up again, so it's time for another attempt.

There is a new mailing list is at

The plan is to restart Leeds.pm, and have an inaugural meeting on (tentative) 7th December. Interested? Join the mailing list.

In what I'm sure he meant to be a throwaway rhetorical question, Jonathon asks:

OH IT'S SO ON! :)

As most of you know, Andy Armstrong, Eric Wilhelm, Leif Eriksen and myself have been working hard to get the new version of Test::Harness out there (Michael Peters, also, but that's for TAP archives for Smolder). You can now download Test::Harness 2.99_01 from the CPAN.

Florian Ragwitz, a Perl guy and Debian developer, brought to my attention a really cool new feature in recent versions of CPAN.pm, called "Distroprefs". It allows you to configure CPAN.pm to do various custom "things" when installing a distro. One major use case is automating interactive installers with Expect, which is obviously useful.

The Gecko isn't just for Windows anymore.

I must have missed the news from ActiveState that ActivePerl now runs on Mac OS X. Actually, it's now on Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX too. I guess I should have figured ActivePerl had made it to the Mac when Komodo did, but I never thought to actually use it.

I've now installed it, and I see that it comes with the Mac::Carbon and Mac::Glue module, along with a lot of other Mac::* stuff. Very cool. I'll have to wait to play with it. I was just checking some facts for a Komodo article in the next issue of The Perl Review , so I can't get too distracted right now.

And hey, AIX but no FreeBSD? :)

Now that YAPC::EU in Vienna is over, I went looking for all the presentations and other things I missed:

• The YAPC::EU Vienna website, complete with wiki
  
• Some slides are on Slideshare, tagged with yapceu07. This is a cool site: embed your presentation in a web page without all that goofy HTML stuff.
  
• Most talks uploaded their slides somewhere and posted link in the YAPC::EU Vienna Wiki
  
• There's a YouTube video of Topless arm wrestling between Damian Conway and domm .
  
• There are some other YouTube videos for yapceu07
  
• Many people uploaded their photos to Flickr with the yapceu07 tag
  
• A YAPC::EU RSS feed from Google Blogsearch.
  

CPAN Testers Statistics

The heat is on for Chris Williams, he only thought Dave Cantrell was chasing his heels, but Andreas König has also stepped up his game too. It has been a staggering month for the sheer volume of reports. In fact halfway through the month I did a quick check to see the current state of testing, and discovered that after only 15 days of testing in August, there nearly as many reports as there were for the whole of July! Andreas was less than 1000 reports behind Chris and Dave was less than 1500 behind Chris. However, Chris certainly rose to the challenge.

My last couple blogs, I mentioned that I'm wrapping Ogre and OIS C++ libraries. Here's a couple screenshots, to show how cool it is. :)

• robot.pl
• ninja.pl

Those are screenshots from scripts in the examples directory.

The Minneapolis Perl Mongers have pulled the trigger. They're hosting a one day Perl workshop on February 16th, 2008 at the home of Gopher, the thing that was Web -1. This "Frozen Perl" event might not be as bad as it sounds. I was in Minneapolis this February and didn't even need a coat. You hardly even have to go outside in that town.

There's not much information yet, and no CFP just yet. It's Labor Day weekend, so I imagine they are just slowly pushing stuff out. The theme is "Perl in Practice", which is my favorite sort of topic, so maybe I can pull something out of Mastering Perl for this.

The conference is using ACT, so if you've registered for another conference using ACT, you already have an account, can log in, and futz with your profile. You can register for the conference, which really just means addign your name to a list of interested people. There isn't any information on pricing yet.

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!