use Perl

MIME::Lite is, in my opinion, the worst of the popular email object modules. It's buggy, has a lousy interface, and just does awful things. I'd go so far as to say that the number one mistake I see in new email modules is a reliance on MIME::Lite instead of Mail::Message or Email::MIME.

That said, I've just released the first non-developer release of MIME::Lite in over four years!

The YAPC Europe Foundation, in their infinite wisdom, have selected the bid from Copenhagen to hold next year's YAPC::EU. The organisers are currently worried about what the auction will turn up...

The YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna is quite happy to announce that almost all the announced people registered succesfuly this morning (Funny batch processing of quite some peoples). We could give away some goodies by various sponors. All the orga team members came in this morning with orange tomahawk!?!

The talks are on going, schedule got some last minute updates. Cog gave us a fun keynote on how to socialize in order to get most out of a YAPC. Larry Wall gave his current vision on scripting languages. Matt Trout had a full audience for an enthusiatic talk about the community around DBIx::Class. Hackathons are ongoing and domm is preparing videos of the welcome night. So the first day looks like a win and we are happy to see how it will go on.. :)

titivillus writes "Purdue Perl Mongers is having a social meeting at 7pm on Tuesday, August 28, at Cafe Royale in Chauncey Village in West Lafayette, IN.

Social Meetings are unstructured get-togethers where members talk about what they're doing with Perl, what it can do, plan future meetings, or just talk. All are welcome."

Sydney Perl Mongers - This Tuesday
I'm up in Sydney until the end of Thursday teaching our Programming Perl course. Tomorrow night (Tuesday 28th August 2007) I'll be presenting an illustrated history of failure at Sydney Perl Mongers I'd love to see you there, even if you have absolutely no interest in Perl.

And the cool module of the day is Graph::Easy (live demo) by Tels++.

It's kinda like GraphViz, but it also supports various text-mode output formats.

That's very cool if you want to render a graph of, let's say an inheritance hierarchy in, let's say Emacs. Which I do.

Widen your browser window and take a look at this fairly complicated graph that it managed to deal with (ancestors of the class CatalystX::FeedMe::View::Atom (found at the bottom)).

ggoebel writes "There's a story on Slashdot about a recent court decision concerning the Artistic License. The decision interprets the violation of the Artistic License as breach of contract instead of copyright infringement, I.e., the licensor in this case was not granted an injunction on the licensee to prevent them from continuing to redistribute their code.

The slashdot article references Law & Life and the JMRI project page

Looks like we may all be thanking Allison Randal and her efforts developing the Artistic 2.0.

• Could the same thing happen under the Artistic 2.0 or Will further revisions to the Artistic license be required?
• Should adoption of Artistic 2.0 wait until Perl 5.10?

"

I've been playing with the additions to the regex engine in 5.9.5, mostly as a last minute article on named captures for The Perl Review . A lot of this is really cool stuff, as in "Why wasn't it always this way?!" and "How did I ever live without this?!". Check out perldelta for 5.9.5.

I've now also run into Yves Orton's (demerphq's) Perl 5.10 Advanced Regular Expressions slides, first dated from the 2006 London Perl Workshop. Not only does he show the new features, but he goes into some of the motivations and internals for them.

And, after talking to Randal for a few minutes about this, we realized that a lot of this should be in Learning Perl, and that a lot of the stuff in perlfaq6 might get a lot easier. I'll have to practice these recursive regexes to update those answers.

Want to let people suggest that your wonderful blog entry should be a story on use.Perl, giving it some good Google juice? Use.perl has a bit of javascript to make that work:

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The submitter doesn't need to have an account, but people with an account can add a description of the story they'd like to submit.

brian_d_foy writes "You may have read chromatic's latest Perl 6 Design Meeting notes and wondered what NQP was (although Patrick brought it up in the Meeting notes for June 20). Over in the Pugs blog, Mark Strosberg talks a little about this new implementation of "Not Quite Perl 6" on parrot. It's not everything, but it's enough to whet your appetite. It doesn't do fancy DWIMery like leaving the parentheses off and the method call syntax. NQP gives the Parrot developers to work on the compilation phase of the process without dealing with all the complexity of a full Perl 6.

Mark explains building NQP—it's just another language in parrot. Have you looked in the languages directory recently? There's quite a number of languages in there (which you can also see on at parrotcode.org):

APL                     cola                    pheme
BASIC                   dotnet                  plumhead
HQ9plus                 ecmascript              pugs
LANGUAGES.STATUS.pod    forth                   punie
Makefile                jako                    pynie
PIR                     lazy-k                  regex
WMLScript               lisp                    scheme
Zcode                   lua                     t
abc                     m4                      tap
amber                   nqp                     tcl
befunge                 ook                     unlambda
bf                      parrot_compiler         urm
c99                     perl5
cardinal                perl6

That Makefile builds all of the languages, or I can build them separately by using the Makefile in their directories. Once I have the .pbc file, I can tell parrot to use it to parse my script:

./parrot languages/nqp/nqp.pbc hello.nqp

The t/ directory contains examples of what I can do with NQP, and adding to those tests is a good way to get started in the Perl 6 effort."

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 22 August 2007. Larry, Patrick, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

rblackwe writes "The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is happy to announce "From Zero To Perl," a special course for programmers new to the Perl programming language, to be taught by returning PPW speaker, Daniel Klein. There is an additional registration fee of $65 to take this course. Please select either the "Regular + From Zero To Perl" or "Student + From Zero To Perl" options when registering. Seating in this course is limited.

I'm going through a codebase that's got a ton of unused files that have never been pruned. I use ack to look to see if a given file is used, and if not, svn rm the sucker. Then the domino effect starts. Removing that file means that there may well be others, both HTML and graphic, that are no longer used, too. Here's my handy tool to make that easier:

svn diff | grep ^- | ack '(href|src)="(.+?)"' --output='$2' | sort -u

Get the diff, only look at the lines where something's been removed, then find href= or src=, and only show what's in the parens, then sort and dedupe. Voila!

Bruxelles.pm is proud to announce the first Belgian Perl Workshop. The workshop takes place in the building of the ESI in Brussels on the 27 octobre 2007. More details will follow on our website and meanwhile you can contact us via bruxelles.pm AT gmail.com.

Chicago.pm has stepped up to be first group in recent years to bid for a repeat YAPC, and in close voting they nudged out Columbus for the opportunity to do it. Jonathan Rockway will be the head organizer, with support from previous Chicago organizers Josh McAdams and Pete Krawczyk. Both groups submitted strong bids and it was a tough choice.

Watch for more announcements with final dates and other details. See you in Chicago!

ehdonhon writes "One last chance! If you have anything to say or share about Perl, don't wait. Submit a talk proposal NOW to the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. It's fun, it's easy, and it's your LAST chance.

Come Monday, August 27, at 08:00 EDT, we are closing the doors. If you haven't submitted a talk proposal by then, you WILL deny yourself the fun and glory that only PPW speakers can know.

But you need not suffer that grim fate! Victory is at hand! Just go to pghpw.org and submit a proposal for your talk.

Can't think of an idea for a talk? No problem! We have a wiki full of great ideas. Pick an idea, and submit a talk. Or add an idea for somebody else to use. Either way, you win! But you must act now.

Seize the day! Own the fun! Submit a talk proposal for PPW 2007 now!"

For many people, search.cpan.org is CPAN. It is very easy to take it for granted. It's always there and it just works. It allows us to find modules, read their documentation, track version histories and even just plain read the source - with ease. Through links to other sites in the perl.org stable, it also allows us to easily check test results for a distribution, report and review bugs and patches, share ratings and reviews, annotate the documentation and all the other things I've forgotten.

I was reminded of the awesome coolness of search.cpan.org as I was wading through RubyForge for a project I'm currently working on. The contrast was stark. And it's not that RubyForge is terrible, in fact it does a reasonable job. But it's not awesomely cool.

Thanks Graham and everyone else involved

Less than a week to go and I think I'm mostly prepared. However, I hadn't quite prepared for getting myself involved in so many BOFs!

• The CPAN Testers BOF
• The Perl Mongers BOF
• The Perl Events BOF
• The Board Games BOF

Thankfully my two talks are well prepared and I don't have to worry about them too much. I was thinking about a possible Lightning Talk, but I'm really not going to have time.

I think I'm suppose to sleep at some point, but that may have to wait until I'm back in the UK. Though having said that I'll be at The Irish Centre in Birmingham to see Hard-Fi on Saturday night so maybe I'll just cancel Sunday :)

According to the stats, there are currently 324 people attending next week. I'm pretty sure that's the highest attendance for a YAPC::Europe we've ever had. I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone next week.

use.perl.org technorati and digg enabler
Skud recently commented that use.perl.org is getting a bit long in the tooth, and doesn't have all the swishy swishness that we'd expect in a modern web 2.0 site.

Well, if you're using Firefox and Greasemonkey then you can upgrade use.perl to web 1.01 with the use.perl.org technorati and digg enabler.

Put very simply, the enabler adds a technorati favourite link to the user info box, and a digg it link to each post. A screenshot is available for the curious. If you've already got Greasemonkey installed, you can install the enabler now.

Right now the script is just something I hacked together quite quickly, so suggestions, comments, bug reports, test cases, and patches are all very welcome.

If you're feeling so inclined, you can even digg this.

Fritz Zaucker writes "There are still some free places in the seminar on Perl 6 by Damian Conway held on August 25th 2007 from 9:00 to 16:30 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. Register to reserve a seat or just come to the ETH main building at Rämistrasse 101, room F33.1 and see if there is still space."