use Perl

jonasbn writes "The dates for the annual YAPC::Europe conference to be held in Copenhagen in 2008 have been settled. The hosts, Copenhagen Perl Mongers, are happy to inform you that the event will take place across 3 days, from Wednesday the 13th to Friday the 15th of August 2008, at the magnificent venue of Copenhagen Business School.

The venue is a modern school in the heart of Copenhagen, which will provide a great frame for Yet Another Perl Conference in Europe with the theme of 'Beautiful Perl' in wonderful Copenhagen.

Informational wiki is available and future announcements will be published on the conference website, http://www.yapceurope2008.org/ and in other relevant fora.

Thank you for you attention — hoping to see you in Copenhagen in 2008 for YAPC::Europe,

Copenhagen Perl Mongers"

YAPC::Europe 2007 left Vienna.pm with quite a lot of money. We want to give part of this money back to the Perl community by hosting the Winter of Code (with apologies to Google...).

You can find detailed information in our new and shiny Wiki.

For those too lazy to follow links, here's the super-short summary:

• We have about €20,000 to spend.
• ~ €6,000 will go into various kinds of awards.
• ~ €5,000 will be paid for fixing TODO tests.
• we will pay for weekly p5p summaries.
• the rest will go either into more bounties or be donated to the grant programm of TPF.

Please check out the wiki for more information, and discussion. We may even set up a dedicated mailing list for Winter of Code... Stay tuned!

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 14 November 2007. Larry, Patrick, Nicholas, and Jesse attended.

So I went down to SF.pm meeting and gave two lightning talks about Web::Scraper and takesako-san's neat IMG tag hackery. These talks went well and other talks were interesting too. Photos uploaded to Flickr tagged sf.pm.

Lately, I've been having fun with GreaseMonkey. Net result: I've re-implemented my Perl-themed friends/foes icons (originally done using Stylish) and hacked RT to provide sorting of bugs by severity (I got the idea for that one from Schwern's journal). Both monkey scripts are available on userscript.org.

Also, a new version of Pod::Manual is out. The code to generate my unexpectedly wildly popular ad-hoc Catalyst manual was already included in the previous distributions, and in this one I added a similar manual for Rose::DB::Object. The order in which the modules are given is a little rough and need improvement, but it's a start. For those who care more about the end than the means, the pdf of both manuals are available here

.

Imager's tiff support has been greatly extended to:

• add support for large sample sizes, Imager can now read and write 16 and 32-bit/sample RGB and greyscale images and manipulate them.
• read and write bi-level images
• allow selection of the compression used for the image.
• work around some bugs in various versions of libtiff's RGBA image support, in particular alpha channel handling for grey and cmyk images.

This is a large change, so I've released Imager 0.61_02 as a test release. If you use Imager with TIFF much, please give it a go.

I'm planning on a 0.62 release in a week or so.

CPANdeps can now filter results by OS. Because people asked for it. Personally, I don't think it's very useful. The purpose of the site was originally to help module authors determine which modules are good to depend on because they're easy for your users to install. It's rare for a module author to have control over what OS his users are suffering from (the obvious exception being platform-specific modules like Solaris::Procfs, BSD::Resource, or Win32::DriveInfo) and so filtering by OS isn't helpful.

markov writes "In the past year, I hdeveloped a new XML module, named XML::Compile. It is a full implementation of XML Schemas. Namespaces, data validation, and formatting needs are hidden at the Perl side, but are strictly applied on the XML.

Now, the next hurdle has been taken: SOAP. Yes, there now is a good SOAP::Lite alternative. XML::Compile::SOAP currenlty supports WSDL1.1 and SOAP1.1 over HTTP, the usual combination. This includes support for header blocks and automatic handling of faults (both client and server side errors). Supported are Document-style, RPC-literal style, and RPC-encoded style SOAP messages.

In the design, no concessions were made to the intension of XML: the output of your program is strictly typed, producing predictable results. At the same time, the included examples will demonstrate that the Perl interface for SOAP is kept extremely simple: a working SOAP client within 5 lines of code.

In the forseeable future, a Net::Server based SOAP daemon will be released (with an WSDL file, you only need to add callbacks). Furthermore, WSDL1.2, SOAP1.2, and older schema version will get attention. For now, I would really like to invite early-adopters to give it a try."

nicholas writes "Perl 5 Porters have released a fix to the regexp engine, which Google researchers recently discovered had a buffer overflow when compiling very specific patterns. Note that the pattern is the risk, not the data it matches.

All Perl users should consider updating their Perl installation to address CVE-2007-5116:

This Saturday is the extravaganza that is the London Perl Workshop. I'm going to give my Scaling with memcached talk and then I'll be in charge of a lightning talk sesssion - I promise to be very mean with people who think they need slides for a five minute talk. See you there!

On Friday I wrote up a brief ROADMAP for Perl 6 on Parrot development, and rather than repeat it all as a journal post I'll just link to it. It really does describe where we've been, and where we're going in the next couple of months as far as Perl 6 development.

If you're wondering where this fits -- right now I'm aware of three Perl 6 implementations underway:

• Pugs - Haskell-based implementation (http://www.pugscode.org/)
• perl6 - Parrot-based implementation (http://www.parrotcode.org/)
• KindaPerl6 - Perl 5/6-based implementation (http://www.pugscode.org/)

So, the implementation I've been focusing on is the one for Parrot, and that's where my journal entries will tend to focus.

More soon...

Perl 5.10.0 Release Candidate 2 is out, ready to be downloaded from your nearest CPAN mirror. You are welcome to compile it, try it, and test your favorite modules with it. The perldelta page documents what's new in this major version.

It's always annoyed me that rt.cpan.org can no longer sort tickets by severity. This isn't such a big deal unless you have a lot of tickets, as I do. MakeMaker alone has over 90.

I found RT::Client::REST and hacked up their example to produce for me a list by severity. Yay! If one cared, you could encode the search results as JSON and make some sort of clever web interface with resortable columns.

I've released App::sync_cpantesters. Here is the manpage of bin/sync_cpantesters:

Fosdem, a major open source event, will be held in Brussels on 23-24 february 2008. Fosdem is known to be a major open source event with key people like Richard M Stallman and Jim Gettys. The conference is build around multiple interest "developers rooms" (There used to be a Python dev room for example)

The "developers room" assignment procedure starts with a call for interest and the organizers ask to send a request form before 26 November 2007. Before actually submitting the request I'd like to poll the Perl Community. Interested speakers and attendees: please send me a private mail mentioning your interest !

CPANdeps now cares about what version of perl you're running. It lets you restrict test results to just the specified version, or look at all versions.

It also now uses Parse::CPAN::Packages instead of CPAN.pm to figure out what distribution each module lives in. That means that I now no longer have the huge startup time of CPAN.pm to worry about, so can drop mod_perl. Phew!

BooK writes "The talks appearing in the main room (Booking.com) of the French Perl Workshop will be broadcast live (the videos will stay available afterwards), thanks to our sponsor CC-IN2P3. There is also a webchat linked on the videos page, and of course #fpw2007 on irc.perl.org will have the French crowd hand around."

Some days ago I finally uploaded to CPAN a first release of MMS::Parser, which is wandering in my PC since a long time. It's a library to parse binary MMS messages, for the moment supporting the two main "scenarios" regarding the outgoing message and the incoming one.

While it is more or less usable (my colleagues are using it in a demo application somewhere) it really lacks documentation, and test coverage is not complete.

Moreover, I'm planning to produce a real object hierarchy instead of a simple HoH, so I'll probably take a look somewhere around MIME::*.

Here's a fun bit of code that I didn't really expect to work. It flags a test as TODO only if client code indicates that it's designed for an older version of a test suite.

Background: I'm working on Test::Virtual::Filesystem, which is a collection of generic tests that exercise a filesystem with typical actions like open, read, write, stat, unlink, mkdir, etc. Users of this code will run it in a .t file to ensure that their filesystem works. But what if I change Test::Virtual::Filesystem to add a new test that breaks some filesystem published on CPAN that used to work with the old version of the test suite?

To solve this, Test::Virtual::Filesystem is written like so (trimmed heavily for readability):

I have a lot of programming niche interests -- video, VNC, static analysis, PDF, filesystems, Flash, SOAP, etc. Most of all, I love it when these interests intersect. For example, I wrote still-closed-source (sigh) library that converts a VNC stream to QuickTime. A prototype of that software was the basis for the YAPC::NA 2006 videos I produced.

Another convergence happened last week. Google released MacFUSE 1.x, a Mac port of the Linux user-mode filesystem code. I had tried an earlier version, but I never got the Perl bindings (Fuse.pm) to work right. What can this do? It lets you write your own mountable virtual filesystem in a couple hundred lines of code.

Back in 2002-2005, I did a ton of PDF work. A result of that was a base library, CAM::PDF. I got authority to release it to CPAN about the same time the business motivation for the library dried up. But in the process, I learned the PDF specification inside and out. PDF is basically a serialization of an arbitrary tree structure: strings, numbers, hashes, arrays, references and blobs, all in an almost-human-readable syntax.

You can store anything in PDF. Most of that tree is focused on storing pages, text and graphics, but the fascinating part is that's just convention. The underlying data structure is generic.

So why not put filesystem data and metadata inside a PDF? I mentioned the idea at the last Madison Perl Mongers meeting and they laughed at me! (LAUGHED! at ME!) Well, that was enough motivation! A weekend later, I released Fuse:PDF v0.01 to CPAN. It's still very worthy of the v0.01 label (no symlinks, no hardlinks, no large files) but it's usable.

What do you think? Inspired or daft? Should I have put it in the Acme:: namespace? :-)

[Along the way, I'm also writing Test::Virtual::Filesystem which is a collection of typical file I/O actions that should work on any mounted filesystem.]