use Perl

José Castro tells me there's another Perl-related LinkedIn group. Besides the Perl Mongers group he created last week, there's now one for CPAN authors.

Maybe someday LinkedIn will decide to let the users search for groups, or let group managers categorize them, so people can find all of the Perl groups easily. LinkedIn is a bit wary of people collecting groups like merit badges though, so I think this is a social control. You actually have to know the group people to into the group.

What's the next step? Maybe someone will hook up CPAN Ratings (or Testers or Testing Service) to LinkedIn so Perl hackers can have recommendations. Being an open source programmer tends to suck in the corporate resume world since recommendations don't come from bosses and such. :(

Recent changes to CPANPLUS and the dependencies that it now has for test reporting mean that I thought it was a good time to revisit my previous journal regarding smoke testing with blead.

We've published a preliminary schedule for the Frozen Perl workshop. I think the schedule looks great, and I'm quite excited about it.

A few days before our call for speakers ended, I was feeling a bit panicked that we wouldn't have enough talks, so I harassed everyone I could to submit talks. We ended up with way more submissions than we could schedule, which is great for us, but I feel a bit guilty now.

I've also opened up registration for the workshop. The early-bird rate is $10 for students and $20 for everyone else. That rate will double on January 12. To register for the conference, you must first log in to an existing conference account (from YAPC 2007, for example), or create a new account. Once you are logged in you can pay for the conference online.

While trying to scratch a recent itch I have setup the Perl Community AdServer. It allows any web site owner to easily add a few advertisements to his site to promote the Perl related events, the Perl Mongers and various Perl sites.

The server provides the ads based on the country of the visitor. So we can easily advertise the French Perl workshop to visitors from France, the London Perl Workshop to visitors from Great Britain and the Israeli Perl Workshop to visitors from Israel.

I think it would be great if many people would add these ads to their respective web sites. See the AdServer for instructions on how to add it to your site.

José Castro tells me there's another Perl-related LinkedIn group. Besides the Perl Mongers group he created last week, there's now one for CPAN authors.

Maybe someday LinkedIn will decide to let the users search for groups, or let group managers categorize them, so people can find all of the Perl groups easily. LinkedIn is a bit wary of people collecting groups like merit badges though, so I think this is a social control. You actually have to know the group people to into the group.

What's the next step? Maybe someone will hook up CPAN Ratings (or Testers or Testing Service) to LinkedIn so Perl hackers can have recommendations. Being an open source programmer tends to suck in the corporate resume world since recommendations don't come from bosses and such. :(

We are happy to announce that we're going to have a Perl Workshop in Israel still this year! In order to give you the most time to prepare for it, it is scheduled to be on 31st December, 2007.

It is going to be a one day workshop with either one or two rooms. We are going to have talks, and we plan to have a job fair during the day. We'll also allocate time for BOFs and project showcases and we would be glad to receive ideas for other things to do.

The conference is managed using Act, the tool used by the YAPCs and the various Perl Workshops throughout Europe and the US. On the web site it is already possible to register for the site, and to pay for attending the conference (Registration for the site is free and it is not a commitment in itself, so even if you still need company approval you can already do that.)

Josh McAdams created a wiki for the Windy City Hackathon, going on Dec 14-16 in downtown Chicago. Meet other Perlers in an informal, work-on-anything-you-like atmosphere. Get help working on someone else's project, get other people to help with your project, or just hang out.

If you want hostel accomodations, don't wait until the last minute. Ensure your spot by paying $115 for Thursday night through Sunday morning (a much better deal than even a single night in a downtown hotel) through The Perl Review or arranging alternate payment methods with me.

The week before the hackathon Stonehenge is offering open-enrollment Perl classes at the same location. These are the full Stonehenge courses in a compressed-time format that we offer to the public only a couple times a year:

• Learning Perl with brian d foy, Dec 10-12, 9am to 5pm, $750
• Intermediate Perl with brian d foy, Dec 13-14, 9am to 5pm, $500
• Beginning Catalyst with Jon Rockway, Dec 10-12, 6pm to 9pm, $375
• Test Driven Development with Josh McAdams, Dec 13-14, 6pm to 9pm, $250

We can also take purchase orders and alternate payment methods for any of there. We can also offer team discounts for people from the same group paying at the same time. Write to me (brian@stonehenge.com) with any questions about the classes.

I've released Carp::Source. It exports a function, source_cluck(), that does pretty much the same as Carp's cluck()except it also displays the source code context of all call frames, with threelines before and after each call being shown, and the call being highlighted. Enjoy.

I forced the architecture to be x86_64 by setting it as an environment variable:

export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

This seemed to have worked for compiling mod_perl2 and DBI but I'm still struggling with Apache2::Request.

It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6 Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud, the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar. The grant will provide Patrick with four months of support for this work beginning November 1, 2007. Patrick will receive US$15,000 over this time, with $10,000 of the funding coming from Mozilla Foundation and $5,000 from The Perl Foundation.

The goals for this development grant are:

1. To have a Perl 6 on Parrot implementation that supports commonly-used Perl 6 constructs;
2. Improvements to the Perl 6 test suite;
3. To substantially complete the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, including documentation;
4. Increased community participation in Perl 6 and Parrot development, including development efforts on other languages utilizing Parrot and the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.

In order to ensure the proper management and progress for this grant TPF asked Jesse Vincent to be the Grant Manager. Jesse has graciously accepted this volunteer position. Jesse is a noted Perl community member and he has worked as the Perl 6 project manager for the past several years. Additionally, he (through his company, Best Practical Solutions) has supported the Perl 6 effort through a series of microgrants.

Patrick Michaud and The Perl Foundation will provide grant progress updates and summaries at http://news.perlfoundation.org.

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2007/11/patrick_michaud_awarded_perl_6.html

At least on LinkedIn, for now. We just created a LinkedIn group for Perl Mongers. Enjoy and join the group!

The San Diego Perl Mongers group will be having their regularly scheduled meeting at 7:00pm on Monday, November 12, 2007. Not so regular, however, is what we'll be doing. We have a presentation this month! David Moore will be joining us to talk about the different Perl/C interfaces, SWIG and XS. It should be interesting, so come on out and join us.

We'll be meeting at in Qualcomm's building Q auditorium.

6455 Lusk Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92121

Google Map (This is not quite right. The building is on the west side of Pacific Center Blvd. It's the building with the colorful roof.)

I'm one or two test runs away from completing the image-generation elements of the new Perl::Dist implementation.

This means I will be able to do distribution releases in .zip form for people to test (they won't have the .exe or .msi installer).

While I continue onwards to finish the re-implementation of the .exe install generation, I'd like to get some feedback from people on any modules that they would like to come pre-installed with Strawberry Perl.

Up to this point, I've wanted to limit the extra modules in Strawberry to just toolchain modules, and create a separate "Chocolate Perl" that bundles a whole ton of extras.

But feedback from Strawberry users seems to show there's a preferred middle group, with some small set of modules bundled that are otherwise very difficult to install (Expat and libxml are the biggest two requested).

I'd add SQLite to that list, but unfortunately DBD::SQLite is currently broken on Win32 due to a forking (and thus failing) test.

What else would people like to come pre-installed with Strawberry, other than toolchain modules like PAR::Dist.

After re-implementing this by hand about a dozen times now, I've created a package to deal with it in a single method call. Win32::WebBrowser exports a single method, open_browser(), that pops open the default browser in a detached process and points it at a URL.

Who knows, maybe it'll make the Strawberry Perl dist...

We've just released Test::Harness 3.00. It's a complete rewrite of Test::Harness with a more modular architecture that should make it easier to write custom testing tools.

The list of accepted talks for the Perl Workshop in Israel is available on our web site.

I recently had a few spare tuits and ran out of books to read, so the Moose object system popped to the top of my stack.

Like many new and cool projects, features are accellerating away from documentation, and often what a new starter wants is a low-down, which isn't there (yet). Catalyst and DBIx::Class were each like this at one point in time.

To help myself and others I have created a PDF Moose Quick-Ref Card with most of the functions and syntactic sugar consructs of the system.

Thanks go to folks in the #moose IRC channel, and the Programming With Moose WikiBook written by EvanCarroll. The ref card will work best if you can print it 2-up on one A4 sheet, cut that in half, then laminate the two A5 parts back-to-back.

Comments and suggestions for the ref-card will be gratefully received :-)

Sending mail is too hard. You have to know what kind of machine you are on and what the sysadmins might have set up. It's even more of a pain if your code might run in a few places. That's why I've written Email::Send::Gmail so you can send email programmatically using a Gmail account. Simple but good.

ack, my replacement for grep for 95% of the times programmers use grep, just got released to CPAN with version 1.70.

At long last, you can now get contextual lines before and after matched lines, just like GNU grep's -A, -B and -C options. You can also match on a specific line number or range of line numbers with the new --line option. For example, if you want to see the first line of every Perl file in a tree, you'd just do ack --line=1 --perl. Thanks very much to Torsten Biix for putting both these features together for me.

Finally, Elliot Shank pointed out that one of my favorite features, the -1 option, was never documented. Now it is. The -1 option says "stop after the first match of any type." If you find yourself acking for lines, or searching for a specific file with ack -g and then having to Ctrl-C to stop the search process, just add a -1 and Ctrl-C no longer.

ack is available in the ack distribution on CPAN, or by installing the module App::Ack from the CPAN shell. You can also download the single-file version direct from Subversion and drop it right into your ~/bin directory.

The Perl 6 design team met on 31 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended.