use Perl

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!

YAPC::Europe in Vienna was totally amazing. I'll post more soon but for now you can enjoy the slides to my talk Scaling with memcached:

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system used by LiveJournal, Facebook, Bloglines and others. Find out how memcached works, how to it set up and how you can scale your website.

Enjoy!

I saw the new perlconsole-0.3 distribution today on CPAN Recent Uploads and that reminded me something. Some months ago you had to look a lot to find out some Perl REPL, but now this thing is "fashionable". You actually may choose among:

Short Videos of Day 0 to Day 2 are available on youtube:

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=4gXSXBiXVb4
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=dXmKDkAAamc
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=dXmKDkAAamc

More will follow!

I have just uploaded the slides from the Moose talk I gave yesterday at YAPC::EU. They are a revised version of a talk I gave at the Perl Seminiar NY earlier this year, I think this version flows a little better and I was pretty happy with how the talk went. I was hoping to include more information about roles into this talk, but there was not time. Maybe the next talk.

I just released new versions of Maypole (2.121) and Autodia (2.04) yesterday.

Maypole 2.121 contains minor fixes to 2.12, hence the name.

Autodia 2.04 adds some fixes to dynamicly named perl attributes/methods, C# support, and the ability to use a list of packages (or patterns) to ignore.

Both uploaded to CPAN yesterday.

So it is finally public, next year's YAPC::Europe will be in Copenhagen/Denmark - I am eagerly awaiting the return of my fellow mongers who are in Vienna.

I am green with envy and I have seen the movie of the pre-conference meet up and I am hanging out in the IRC channel, but is not quite the same.

Well when they come back we will have a lot of work to do and only a year to do it, so lets get started...

Mucking around with Devel::Leak::Object at work on Monday, I managed with very little effort to locate an object "leak" (we were loading a bunch of stuff in Apache child init handlers, instead of at startup time in the parent like we should have).

Immediately memory savings across 25 children? 600 meg! Multiplied by 5 boxes in the cluster. At the very least that should delay the need to add a new server to the cluster for a few months.

Inspired by the quick win, I've been trying to hook D:L:Object in deeper to the Apache server, to look for more leaking cases (our web app uses enormous amounts of ram, and despite it legitimately needing a lot for certain tasks, I'm thinking there's probably much more that isn't necesary).