use Perl

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

APPP is organizing a Catalyst training event in Braga, Portugal, November the 2nd and 3rd.

Catalyst Days is a two day training event for Perl programmers who don't know much (or nothing at all) about Catalyst or even MVC frameworks in general, with lectures in the mornings and exercises in the afternoons.

Novis, Optimus, Clix, log, excentric and the Department of Informatics of the University of Minho are sponsoring, making the venue available and even going as far as providing lunch for the attendees during the two days.

I'm pleased at announce that CPAN::Reporter 1.00 has been released and should soon be appearing on a CPAN mirror near you. Now, anyone with CPAN and a relatively modern version of Perl can contribute to CPAN Testers.

Our VMS guy for Test::Harness 3 appears to have gone AWOL. Can anyone VMS-savvy explain how to at least run tests in VMS? We're kind of stuck here and we can't even think about TH3 without some confidence that we don't break VMS.

Melbourne Perl Mongers
Melbourne Perl Mongers is meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) night, and both Rick Measham and myself will be presenting.

6:30pm Wednesday 8th August
Editure
Level 8
14 Blackwood St
North Melbourne

Effective Procrastination with HiveMinder
If you're like most people, you've got dozens of things that need doing. Work, shopping, chores, programming, hobbies, tax, holidays, bills, and so on. You may have tried to keep a to-do list, but found it rapidly grew to the point of being unmanageable.

Paul Fenwick will demonstrate the use of the free HiveMinder.com to-do service to both manage tasks and to procrastinate effectively, allowing you to focus only on the tasks that really need to be done. We'll see how to manage tasks via the web, via-email, and how to be really efficient via instant messenger.

To conclude, we'll see how it's possible to add new features to HiveMinder and some tricks and tips for doing so.

Microblogging with Jaiku and Net::Jaiku (Rick Measham)
Net::Jaiku - an introduction to microblogging and lifestreaming, plus a bonus: Using microblogging as a development tool.

YAPC::Europe 2007 Final Report

About the Conference

YAPC::Europe 2007 was held in Vienna, Austria from 28-30 August. It was the largest attended YAPC::Europe ever so far! So a big thank you goes out to all the attendees, speakers and sponsors for making this happen!

The conference website: http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007

Now, just over a month after the conference, we can say that YAPCE07 was a big success in technical, social and financial terms. Read on to get all the scary details.

I just uploaded the latest developer release for WebService::Google::Reader. This is the first version that contains all the planned functionality and is mostly documented. I mainly use it to keep my desktop client synched after being offline for a while.

I have included a few example scripts as well- the most useful being reset-account.pl. It will remove all subscriptions and tags, and remove any tracking information- such as which entries were read, clicked, emailed. Google's backend may still store this information, but Google Reader no longer has access to any of it.

Please take it for a spin and let me know if anything's missing or needs changing. I'm planning on making an official release in the next few days.

As I announced earlier there is going to be a Perl Workshop in Israel on 31 December 2007. Aafter the workshop is over we plan to celebrate the new year in a pub somwhere in Tel Aviv, just to warm us up for the Hackathon between 1-5 January, 2008. It would be really cool to see some of the overseas Perl Hackers on these events.

The weather can be warmish those days, flight tickets are relatively cheap and beer is served cold in the pubs of Tel Aviv.

Greg McCarroll writes "London Perl Workshop 2007

So it's that time of year again, the nights are growing long, the mornings are growing cold and people who should know better once again decide to organize a conference. That's right it's time for this year's London Perl Workshop. So let's get down to the details, because we haven't much time ...

The long comatose Vlaanderen.pm website just received an adrenaline shot right in the heart and is now back alive. Now we get busy reviving the community itself, which no doubt will be helped a lot by the upcoming Belgium Perl Workshop.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

A developer release of Web::Scraper is pushed to CPAN, with "filters" support. Let me explain how this filters stuff is useful for a bit.

Since an early version, Web::Scraper has been having a callback mechanism which is pretty neat, so you can extract "data" out of HTML, not limited to the string.

For instance, if you have an HTML

<span class=".entry-date">2007-10-04T01:09:44-0800</span>

you can get the DateTime object that the string represents, like:

  process ".entry-date", "date" => sub {
    DateTime::Format::W3CDTF->parse_string(shift->as_text);
  };

Next year, the UKUUG Spring Conference (aka Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) Conference) will be returning to Birmingham. Birmingham Perl Mongers will be lending their support and experience to the organisers, together with the Python West Midlands user group and several of the midlands Linux User Groups. The conference will focus on dynamic languages, with several topics up for discussion.

If you wish to submit a paper, the Call for Papers is out with a submission deadline of 16th November 2007. Send a title, summary and decription to spring2008@ukuug.org, and you'll be contacted by 30th November 2007 as to whether your talk is accepted or not.

The conference will be followed by the 2-day E-Mail Systems Conference 2008, with the possibility of something Perl specific happening the weekend before, if you wanted to plan a longer stay in Birmingham. Visit the UKUUG Spring 2008 Conference website for more details on the conference itself and I will announce more as it becomes available.

I personally would be delighted to see a notable number of Perl talks and tutorials, so if you're in the UK around the end of March and would be willing to head to Birmingham for the week, please consider submitting a talk. Hope to see you there.

Thursday, 4 October 2007, 7:00pm

Damian Conway is coming to town, and the San Diego Perl Mongers are pleased to be hosting him for an evening seminar. Damian will be presenting something we're all sure to fine extremely interesting.

Sex and Violence: Social and Technical Lessons from the Perl 6 Project

For details and directions, see the SanDiego.pm web site.

Last night I released Devel::CheckOS and Devel::AssertOS. They are a wrapper around $^O with some extra functionality. For example, where you can check $^O's value to see if you're running on a Linux system, you can use these modules to check for OS 'families' as well, such as whether you're running on a Unix system.

I've finally managed to transfer perladvent.org from Mark Fowler, so historic links should work (soon). However, the modern monger address will continue to work as well. While it may seem a little early to begin thinking about the calendar, it's very stressful to write & edit things Just In Time, so I'm putting the call out for contributors and assistant editors. I just entered a graduate program and will not be able to devote much time to the calendar until the third week of December; this also means I can't really write things in advance. If you're interested, please see the FAQ s and contact me ASAP. Do not worry if you have no ideas of what to write, we've got a fairly large backlog of possibilities, although we certainly welcome other suggestions. In addition, we need some artwork for the calendar splash page in keeping with general perlish and X-mas themes. Prod artsy coworkers, submit your own open-licensed masterpieces, or request clarification and inspiring suggestions. Finally, keep in mind that the more people who participate, the less stress and effort each must bear ;-)

At the last LA Perl Mongers meeting, I talked about making custom versions of CPAN (perlcast and slides). You already know about MiniCPAN, but what about even smaller versions (possible with CPAN::Mini's filters), a not-so-current CPAN with just the distributions you know work with your application, or even adding your private or patched modules instead? I wrote about this in the latest issue of The Perl Review (Fall 2007), too.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 26 September 2007. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

brian_d_foy writes "The Russian Perl Workshop 2007 will be held in Moscow on October 26, 2007 along with InfoCom 2007. The official langauge of the workshop is Russian, and its theme is "Perl Today". So far, there are tracks on Perl 6, Perl and XSLT, and Perl for beginners.

There is no charge for the workshop and anyone is invited to attend, but there is a 100 person limit. A financial donation can buy you a spot in the queue (although there is no word on auctions!), and giving a talk automatically gets you a spot in the queue.

This is a real workshop, too. The sessions will be held in a room with 40 computers, which means you either have to pair up or bring your own. If you don't bring your own version of Pugs, you'll certainly leave with one."

Just a quick update - I have decided to re-shape the messy proof-of-concept raw importer into a tool which is more useful, allowing access to the information which the previous version just embedded with queries as it needed to. I'd love it if current Perl perforce committers and pumpkins would check the specification out and provide feedback. In particular, if there's a perforce command you'd like explained or think should be catered for by the tool, go ahead and ask ...