use Perl

Skud writes "The Perl Survey is attempting to take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands. Whether you're a web developer, sysadmin, or using Perl for scientific research or finance or just tracking your DVD collection, we'd love to hear about it.

We're trying to answer questions like:

• Where do Perl programmers come from?
• What sort of fields do they work in?
• What languages — computer and spoken — do Perl programmers use?
• How many use Perl as their primary language?
• What proportion of Perl users participate in the Perl community through mailing lists, user groups, and conferences?

The survey's open til the end of September. After it closes, we'll be releasing the results in various forms, including a full data set for you to download and play with."

Random Logic writes "YAPC::Europe 2007 attendees dinner is getting full!

While that's great (really!), that also means you have to be fast to have your
seat committed for you! We are limited to 320 seats for the dinner so we have
to apply our "first come first serve" principle for the dinner. Seats will be
committed in order of incoming payments, so be sure the grab your seat and buy
your ticket in case you haven't done so! For those who have paid already (or
have sponsor tickets), consider your seat reserved for you.

Dave Adler presented the 2007 White Camel Awards to:

Allison Randal

Allison is at the center of the Perl community. She's been president of The Perl Foundation, a leader and manager of various parts of the Perl 6 and Parrot efforts, as well a Perl author and editor. Her latest contribution to Perl is version 2 of the Artistic License, under which most open source Perl code, and Perl itself, is licensesd "under the terms of Perl itself".

Tim O'Reilly

You may think of Tim as the guy who published Programming perl and Learning Perl, but he also kick-started the current form of the Perl community by giving it a place to come to together once a year. O'Reilly & Associates started The Perl Conference in 1997. Perl Mongers, the organization that helped start Perl users groups all over the world, started at that first Perl Conference. O'Reilly Media has been incredibly gracious and helpful to the Perl community.

Norbert E. Grüner

Norbert help start the German Perl Workshop in 1999 and now is involved in several of the Perl conferences and workshops that take place in Europe. He's the chair of the YAPC::Europe committee.

I finally got my hands on the hard-copy of Mastering Perl , which is on sell at the Powell's table. Get it at OSCON and you don't have to pay sales tax or shipping!

I'll be at the Powell's table with other authors at 1:30ish on Wednesday, July 25 if anyone want to stop by for me to sign any of my books. I will probably also be at Powell's Technical Books Wednesday evening for the Beautiful Code discussion, so you can catch up to me there.

fordmason writes "I have put together a PDF quick reference card for the Perl debugger. It is not yet finished, but there are floods near where I live in Gloucestershire (UK) and we may lose our power for several days, so I thought I would release it now.

There are now ten Perl-related quick reference cards on refcards.com with more in the pipeline."

particle writes "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.14 "Now, with Seat Belts!." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.4.14 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

rGeoffrey writes "Going to OSCON in Portland or YAPC::Europe in Vienna this conference season? Do you want one third of your "15 minutes of fame"? Then give a Lightning Talk on some topic that speaks to you. Submissions now being accepted for Portland and Vienna."

pepl writes "The organisers for the YAPC::Europe 2007 are pleased to announce the launch of the preliminary conference schedule.

Don't forget to register if you haven't done so yet and visit the conference homepage for regular updates!

Speakers please don't forget that papers/slides for the conference proceedings are due by next Sunday, 22nd July 2007!

Cheers,
Michael Kröll
On behalf of the YAPC::Europe 2007 organisers"

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 11 July 2007, after two weeks of hiatus due to YAPC::NA and American Independence Day. Damian, Allison, and Jesse attended; Patrick sent in a report beforehand. These are the minutes:

As we’ve been a bit lax with sending out updates to you, here’s a quick update on recent happenings regarding YAPC::Europe 2007

The schedule is still not done (this is *hard* work), but in the meantime you check out this page: http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007/talks In fact, we are busy working on it at this moment and expect the schedule to be ready in a few days maximum.

Damian Conway, one of the world's most renowned members of the Perl community (as a programmer, CPAN author, writer and speaker), is coming, once again, to Portugal, this August, 20th and 21st, to lecture his Intermediate Object Oriented Perl course, in an event organized and sponsored by log.

Apart from being one of the people pointing Perl 6 in the right direction, Damian is the author of the much appraised "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices" books. He is also the creator of some astounding CPAN modules, including Getopt::Euclid, IO::Prompt, Lingua::Romana::Perligata, Parse::RecDescent, Smart::Comments, Switch and Text::Autoformat.

More information on the event can be attained in log's webpage (in Portuguese) or by contacting eventos at log dot pt directly.

The deadline for submitting your venue bids for this year is approaching. I know there are some folks out there working on bids, so don't count on us going into overtime.

The due date is August 1.

You can find more details in this year's call and the previous call.

kmccombs writes "July's MadMongers meeting features Plain Black developer Doug Bell, who will be presenting Quick and Dirty Perl: What You Can Do With One Line. From data munging, to patch insertion, to application glue, to log parsing, Perl is so powerful that it can do in one line what most languages would have trouble doing in 100 lines.

Whether you're a Perl novice, a Perl expert, a system administrator or a programmer in another language, this talk will have something for everyone.

MadMongers is the Madison, WI chapter of Perl Mongers, and encourages anyone interested in Perl to attend.
Date: Thursday, July 12
Time: 7:00-9:00pm CDT
Place: Madison Public Library Room 202"

Lincoln Park Zoo will give a free, docent-guided, behind-the-scenes tour of the camel exhibit exclusively for Perl Mongers on Saturday August 11 at 11:00 am. That's when all the stars align for the docents, animals, and zookeepers.

If you're interested in coming, please RSVP with me (brian d foy, brian.d.foy@gmail.com). Children may come, although it will be a grown-up oriented event. Priority for the 20 slots goes to those who donated to the Chicago.pm's camel fund. After that we can open it up to spouses and friends. Even if people can't go into the camel enclosure, there's still plenty to do at the zoo during the half hour tour. There is no admission fee to the zoo for anyone.

If you're not in Chicago, check if your local zoo has a similar program. Most zoos are willing to do this sort of thing for groups that give them a lot of money. :)

It's over a year since I mentioned that it was happening, but the Perl Foundation has just announced that I've stepped down as chief Perl Monger and that José Castro (aka cog) has taken over.

Congratulations and good luck to José. And many thanks to all the people who made my years in the role so enjoyable.

The following groups have just been created:

• Szczecin.pm - leader is Robert Olejnik
• Kiev.pm - leader is Serg Gulko
• The Woodlands.pm - leader is Todd Rinaldo
• Ithaca.pm - leader is Beth Skwarecki
• Thames Valley.pm - leader is Rafiq Ismail

Remember, you can start a group too!

Perl 5.9.5, the latest development release of Perl, has been uploaded to the CPAN. For a list of what's new in this version since the 5.9.4 release, see the perldelta manpage.

grafman writes "Graphcomp, in recent collaboration with the ImageMagick team, has added new APIs to PerlMagick 6.3.5 — providing tight integration between Perl OpenGL (POGL) and IM's image cache.

Next Tuesday (July 10th) Lisbon.pm will be having yet another Tech Meeting, starting at around 21:30.

The talks:

• "7 Hábitos de um bom editor" (7 habits of a good editor), by Sebastião Barata
• "The Mason Framework", by Marco Neves
• "Adventures in Perl 6", by Nelson Ferraz
• "Wrap-up e Novidade do... Semestre!" (Wrap-up and the news of... the Semester!), by José Castro

Attendance is free.

If you want to join us, see our blog for more information on how to get there.

I'm pleased to announce three new Perl 6 Microgrants.

Flavio Glock will receive a travel microgrant to help him attend YAPC::EU and evangelize kp6 and the Perl 6 in Perl 6 effort.

Steve Pritchard will receive a microgrant to complete the RPM packaging of Parrot and Pugs for Fedora and to submit those packages for inclusion in the official Fedora distribution. Steve will be blogging his progress at http://blog.stevecoinc.com/

Juerd Waalboer is the maintainer of feather.perl6.nl, the primary host for Pugs development. Juerd will receive a microgrant to purchase upgraded hardware for feather.

If you're interested in submitting a Perl 6 microgrant, you can find more information about how to do so at http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2007/03/msg122448.html.