use Perl

YAPC is, among other things, a wonderful opportunity to meet and talk face-to-face about things that concern us. This YAPC, one topic was how to get Parrot development on track to make it the VM we all believe it can be. One outcome of these discussions is a bit of a personnel shuffle, to wit:

I'm pleased to announce that Allison Randal is taking over as architect of Parrot, and I'm being promoted to pumpking.

Allison, of course, needs no introduction; as architect, she will flesh out the vision of a virtual machine for dynamic languages, that's been her primary interest from the beginning.

I, on the other hand, am very happy to be diving back into the code where I've learned I'm the happiest. Writing specs and writing code are similar; but when you're done with code, there's a "go" button, and lights flash and wheels turn. It's the best toy set in the world. :-) So, to me, this is a promotion.

Both Allison and I thank Leo for his service as pumpking. He's done a yeoman's job getting parrot releases regular and stable. We're very pleased that Leo is staying on to continue improving parrot internals. Now that I'm going to carry the release cycle burden, he'll have more opportunity to respond to language implementors' issues, making Parrot better for all.

Onward & upward! Squawk!

I am happy to announce that OSDC::Israel::2007 will be held between 20-22 February 2007 in the Netanya Academic Collage (The same place we had OSDC::Israel::2006). The web site of OSDC will be updated later on and we will have a more official looking Call for Papers along with milestones.

barbie writes "Welcome the ninth official bulletin for the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference in Birmingham, UK.

Call For Participation

We've got a venue, scheduled speakers and now have so much momentum, we don't think we could stop this thing if we tried! The next step is to get you lot as excited as we are. As such we are pleased to open up the website and conference registration to everyone.

Allison writes "The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the Artistic License version 2.0 and the Contributor License Agreement. Thanks to all who have contributed to the development of the license over the years. The final versions of the license and CLA are posted on the Perl Foundation website. At YAPC::NA this week we'll start collecting signed contributor agreements from contributors to Perl, Parrot, and Pugs. You can also download the CLA in text format or PDF format and mail it to the Perl Foundation."

"I'm still a big fan of partial solutions. But to get a good partial solution, you can't just rush into it without thinking about what the tradeoffs really are." -- Mark-Jason Dominus, on reversible debugging

As difficult as it is to believe, YAPC::NA 2006 is now less than one week away. Most likely many of you will be starting your journeys to the Windy City soon. Of course some of you will be blogging about it and some will be snapping photos and uploading to flickr along the way. In order to catch all of the talk about YAPC, we are asking that you use the tag 'yapcna2006' when tagging your entries and that you add your blog or website to our list of attendee blogs. Also, let us know where you are putting your tags, be it flickr, del.icio.us, or whatever.

There are a few YAPC photo projects that are being worked on, so if you are willing to license your content under a creative commons license that allows for reuse, please remember to note that when posting.

leo writes "On behalf of the Parrot team I'm proud to announce another monthly release of Parrot.

I'd like to thank all involved people as well as our sponsors for supporting us.

What is Parrot?

Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running Perl6 and other dynamic languages, see parrotcode.org for more information.

Parrot 0.4.5 changes and news

• unicode subroutine names
• hierarchical class names finished including MMD support
• new dotnet CLI to PIR translator
• improved TGE code and compiler
• APL: vector handling
• new STM branch in the svn repository
• the usual bugfixes and enhancements

After some pause you can grab it from CPAN.

As parrot is still in steady development we recommend that you just get the latest and best from SVN by following the directions at source.html.

Turn your web browser towards parrotcode.org for more information about Parrot, get involved, and:

Have fun!
leo"

barbie writes "The organisers for the YAPC::Europe::2006 are pleased to announce the launch of their preliminary schedule.

We have been blessed with a wealth of quality talks and over the last week we have been having a hard time trying to schedule everything and avoiding conflicts for speakers and themes. It's not been easy, but we think we have got a schedule we can let you see. So here it is....

• YAPC::Europe::2006 Schedule

Please bear in mind everything is subject to change.

For the full press release (including details of some of our sponsors), please see the official site.

YAPC::Europe::2006 - 30th August - 1st September 2006 - Birmingham, UK"

"Perl has always been very good about builds. Lets me spend my time fighting other software issues." -- Alan Olsen

After my CPAN-compatible Win32 Perl competition earlier this year, and my nursing of the bug-fixing efforts for the new Vanilla Perl, to my amusement people keep asking me when I plan to create win32.perl.org.

So after an entire hour of development, I'm happy to announce the creation of http://win32.perl.org/, a community website that will act as a central location for everything Perl and Windows, with initial hosting donated by Phase N (i.e. my corporate and tax-deductable incarnation)

In the spirit of community, and because I'm not sure yet exactly what people are looking for in a Win32 Perl website, I have started by redirecting the front page straight into a wiki. As the site expands, I'll be adding more functionality beyond the raw wiki to add whatever additional functionality the community demands.

If anyone would like to get involved, I'd be more than happy for your help. Please see the Request For Volunteers page on the wiki for things that need doing. And being a wiki, of course you are encouraged to be bold with your edits.

Perlcast interviews brian d foy about The Perl Review version 2.3.

• Interview Audio

"Funnily enough I developed a patch for this exact problem a few days ago." -- Dave Mitchell, commenting bug #39252

Best Practical Solutions Announces SVK Acquisition - Total World Domination Plan Proceeding Apace.

"This isn't supposed to happen, obviously. It's unusual for Configure to pick up libraries that it can't, in fact, use." -- Andy Dougherty, commenting bug #39195

jonasbn writes "Copenhagen Perl Mongers is having a technical meeting on the 7th. of June, at 18:00 at Sifira (Fredericiagade 16, 4.,1310 Kbh K) Since we are going to NPW 2006, jonasbn will test his presentation at the meeting. Everybody is welcome and we can squeeze in some lightning-talks if you have something on your mind. If you want to attend please inform us via the mailing list."

Allison writes "The first release candidate for the Artistic License 2.0 and the Contributor License Agreement are now up for review. Thanks to all who contributed questions and suggestions. Please post any comments to artistic2 at perl dot org."

jmcada writes "Well, it's June so the countdown to YAPC::NA is on. There are just over three weeks left until the conference begins. If you were thinking about waiting to the last minute to register, that time has come. Though we will officially take registrations up until the weekend before the conference, I'd advise you to register as early as possible. It just makes things easier on all of us ;)"

tomhukins writes "Milton Keynes Perl Mongers will hold our second technical meeting at 7pm on Tuesday 13th June, featuring the following talks:

• Writing a perl/swig interface to the C++ CLucene search engine (Peter Edwards)
• Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes (Matt Trout)

We also have a couple of lightning talks planned:

• Better Living Through Perl (Michael Lush)
• Tracing Code with Aspect.pm (Tom Hukins)

If you're anywhere near Milton Keynes, please come along. If you need help with transport, please ask. Please see our Web site for more details."

Chicago.pm are getting together on June 6th at 7:00 PM for an evening of lightning talks and YAPC volunteer recruitment.

The meeting will be held at Performics at 180 N. La Salle, 12th Floor, Chicago, IL

If you are planning on attending this meeting, please RSVP to joshua.mcadams-at-gmail-dot-com

What are lightning talks? They are five minute presentations on just about any Perlish topic that you can imagine. Feel free to rant, rave, instruct, whatever! Just have it done in five minutes are get heckled off stage :) No rush to think of a talk either because topics and order will be hashed out at the start of the meeting.

Don't forget that we are still taking applications for lightning talks at YAPC, so you could always use this as an opportunity to test your talk in front of a smaller crowd.

On June 05, 2006, the Israeli Perl Mongers will hold their regular monthly meeting. The program:

• 18:00-18:30 -- Assembly and very light refreshments
• 18:30-19:30 -- Gabor Szabo: Test::Live - live testing of a CPAN module
• 19:40-20:10 -- Doron Abraham: Stupid things your boss will always say and how to completely misunderstand them
• As usual after the meeting we will go out to a nearby pub/coffee-shop/etc. for a post-meeting social gathering.

The meeting will take place in the offices of F5 located in Habarzel 24 B, Ramat Hachayal, Tel Aviv.