use Perl

After lefant (who has been working for us since a few months) showed me a few epsisodes, I finally learned how to use this strange new file transmission protocol everybody is talking about (bittorrent - yes, I'm oldfashioned and never downloaded anything from the net before..) to get all of the other episodes.

Very nice sitcom. And not only because several cast members also played in Roseanne (and Darlene clearly was my favorite character there).

A little bit of investigation revealed that the series will air in German private TV, but I very much fear synchronisation. They never get that right (cf The Simpsons).

Last weekend has seen the first Perl workshop held in two capital cities. Organising it was fun, though I have to admit that I slacked quite a lot and thus most of the work was done by Maros, Pepl (on the Viennese side) and Jozef, Emmanuel and Martin (the Bratislava team).

Things I learned:

• A/B Testing sound like a very good idea.
• I should take a look at NYTProf.
• Check if your laptop works with the projector! Especially if you have a new laptop (like me) that never was connected to a projector before...
• Check if your images are in the correct resolution. Some jokes of Maros' talk were killed by this ("Do you want to play thermonuclear war?")
• Another interesting thing to take a look at: D-Bus
• XML and XLST are still not dead (or as pepl said: "This is the first Perl conference where XLST is mentioned in more than two talks" (excluding his :-)
• I should try to build a GUI for some of my scripts. But should I use GTK2 or Wx?
• It's quite easy to find nasty bugs in Rakudo, but very hard to put them into a testcase that still fails...
• Cat-herding people gets easier the more often you do it.
• Buying 19 regular and 4 discount train tickets to Bratislava and handing them out to the right people (who all showed up on time) was easier than expected.
• I probably won't get nearer to "Indiana Jones"-like stuff than during Tara's talk.
• Do not recompile your kernel to get the projector to work (5 minutes before your talk..) (In fact I learned that years ago, but some people still like to mock me..)
• There were more Perl hackers in Bratislava than expected. Which is great!

Things I still have to learn

• Don't write your talk at the party before the conference.
• Set up wpa-supplicant WLAN on my laptop.
• How to host a proper auction.

So, to sum it up, Twin City Perl Workshop was a very nice event with great talks and interesting attendees. I'm very much looking forward to do something similar next year. To bad I couldn't make it to the hackathon at Jonathans place

You can find photos on flickr tagged as 'tcpw2008'. And we're currently trying to get links to all the presentations...

World of Goo is a very nice and smart computer game, recently released by two game developers. We gave it Josh as a birthday present, and both me and barb are addicted, too. I'm very much looking forward for the Linux version, so I don't have to use my kids windows based computer for playing. (I couldn't get it to work using VirtualBox...)

After an quick IRC-meeting yesterday, Vienna.pm and Bratislava.pm is proud to present you the schedule for the Twin City Perl Workshop in Vienna & Bratislava on 7th and 8th November.

Go check it out and register for the workshop!

Deep in one of the current threads on autobundling installers, someone (I think Jos) mentioned a hitherto unkown (to me) module called CPANPLUS::Shell::Default::Plugins::Prereqs, which is another very cool plugin for CPANPLUS.

It will give a very nice overview of what other dists a given dist (local or on CPAN) needs, and will even install them. While the last point isn't so revolutionary for regular CPAN stuff, I find it very comfortable for custom code that's not on CPAN. Yes, Module::Install can also do that, but I think it's evil and I really hate make (or rather Makefiles - using tabs for semantics is just fu̷cked)

Examples

~$ cpanp /prereqs show Moose
  Module                            Req Ver  Installed       CPAN  Satisfied
  Test::LongString                        0       0.11       0.11        Yes
  Scalar::Util                         1.18       1.19       1.19        Yes
  Test::Exception                      0.21       0.27       0.27        Yes
  Filter::Simple                          0       0.82       0.82        Yes
  Class::MOP                           0.66       0.65       0.66         No
  ExtUtils::MakeMaker                  6.44       6.44       6.46        Yes
  Sub::Exporter                       0.972      0.980      0.980        Yes
  Carp                                    0       1.08       1.08        Yes
  Test::More                           0.62       0.80       0.80        Yes
  List::MoreUtils                         0       0.22       0.22        Yes

It also works on stuff that's not on CPAN. You just need to chdir into the dir containing Build.PL (of course it also works with Makefile.PL, but no sane person is still using that...)

~$ cd revdev/RevDev-Schema
~/revdev/RevDev-Schema$ cpanp /prereqs show .
  Module                            Req Ver  Installed       CPAN  Satisfied
  DBIx::SchemaChecksum                 0.23       0.23       0.23        Yes
  DBIx::Class                             0    0.08010    0.08010        Yes
  Array::Diff                          0.04       0.04       0.04        Yes
  RevDev::Utils                        0.10       0.12       0.11        Yes
  DBD::Pg                            2.10.0     2.10.5   2.010007        Yes
  Sys::Hostname                           0       1.11       1.11        Yes
  DateTime::Format::Pg                    0    0.16002    0.16002        Yes

And of course it's totally easy to install the dependencies:

~$ cpanp /prereqs install Moose
  Module                            Req Ver  Installed       CPAN  Satisfied
  Test::LongString                        0       0.11       0.11        Yes
...
  Class::MOP                           0.66       0.65       0.66         No
Running [/opt/perl5.10/bin/perl /opt/perl5.10/bin/cpanp-run-perl /home/domm/.cpanplus/5.10.0/build/Class-MOP-0.66/Makefile.PL ]...
Testing if you have a C compiler
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
Writing Makefile for Class::MOP
...
Result: PASS
  ExtUtils::MakeMaker                  6.44       6.44       6.46        Yes
...

Another very sharp tool in my deployment toolbox. MGRIMES++

Call for Papers Deadline on Tue, 7th Oct

The deadline for submitting talks for the Twin City Perl Workshop 2008 is approaching fast! There's a little bit more than one week left to submit your proposals.

We are looking for talks on Perl or related issues (coding best practices, web developement, AJAX, project management, ..) in various lenghts (20, 40 or 60 minutes) and various levels (from beginner to master). To submit your talk, please use the website.

Vienna.pm has set aside a budget of 1000 Euro to invite speakers to the Twin City Perl Workshop. If you're not living in Bratislava or Vienna, won't be funded by your company, but want to attend & give a talk, please send e-mail to twincity[å†]rt.useperl.at describing why we should invite you and how much it will cost to transport you to Vienna and Bratislava! The deadline for proposals is Sunday 21th Sept. 2008, and we will decide whom to invite until Wed, 24th Sept.

Of course we're also looking for regular attendees, local speakers and sponsors! :-)

On behalf of Vienna.pm and Bratislava.pm I'm pleased to announce the Twin City Perl Workshop 2008 !

The Twin City Perl Workshop 2008 will not only be the 100th grassroot Perl event in history (according to BooK, at least), but also the first Perl event taking place in two national capitals.

On Friday, 7th November, Vienna.pm will welcome Perl Hackers from around the world to Vienna. The event will continue on Saturday, 8th November, in Bratislava, hosted by Bratislava.pm. Each day will feature talks in the local language (German and Slovak) in the morning, followed by English talks in the afternoon. The evenings will be spent at social events in restaurants near the venues. In case you're not so good in geography, the distance between Vienna and Bratislava is ~65km, so it's quite easy to travel from one city to the other (by car, train, bus or even boat).

We already accept talk proposals, and we're also happy if you might want to sponsor the event!

More information is available on our nice and shiny, ACT-powered website available here: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/tcpw2008/

Some of the reasons I really like git, all experienced in this week:

Prepare CHANGES file

Run git log --no-merges --pretty=format:' - %s (%an)' `git tag | tail -n 1`.. to get a nicely formatted list of changes (and who checked it in) since the last tag. OK, most other VCS can also do similar, but git let's me alias this in my .gitconfig so I don't have to remember the details and just say git last_changes.

Revert a repo to a few hours earlier

A colleague complains that the test suite for one modul is broken, and he can't fix it. I check out his head, and can't find the problem after a few minutes. But I experience strange behaviour during tests (if you run a single test, it works, if you run all tests, it fails). So, we assume it has to with the tests fu̸cking up the DB. To prove that his changes caused the problem, I do git co a_ref_befor_his_commit and magically travel back in time. The tests work now. So we do git co HEAD to travel back into the present, and after some cross-history-diffing, we find the bug & fix it.

No need to set up a server

I was fuzzing with our post-receive hooks, which run after somebody pushed something into the public repo. Our hooks do obvious things like sending out commit mail and IRC notifications, but also nice stuff like building a tarball and uploading it to our custom cpan when the commit was a tag. Only this wasn't working after we switched to another notify-script.

But because git doesn't care where you clone from, and what exactly is a public repo, it was easy to set up a local repo on my disk, clone from it, declare another repo on my disk to be the "remote" and thus test all of the scripts without a) network, b) spamming my colleagues and (most importanly) c) any complicated setup. All that was needed were some dirs on my laptop.

And that's it for todays git propaganda!

In no particular order, I learned...

• to love the new features in ACT, especially the "Personal Schedule" and the fact that the regular schedule now defaults to the current day. (act_hackers)++
• how to cheat^Wdeal with code that cannot be covered, by inserting special comments.
• that it's better to only do the one talk you really care about than to submit (and even hold) boring old talks.
• that the BBC has way too much money, so the need to spend it by blowing up cars after launching them a few hundred meters into the air on some rockets.
• that there are places in Copenhagen where the beer is even more expensive (and where oversized urinals are considered art (as seen in the courtyard of Den Tatoverede Enke))
• about load_namespaces and restrict with object in DBIx::Class
• how to set up the 3GB flat fee no roaming umts card koki lend me, to get network despite flaky wireless (and how get into the office vpn over umts)
• that other people are also suffering from updating database schemas
• how to smuggle a few bottles of coke into the attendees dinner
• that other people are also suffering from the fact that firefox 3 resets you zoom-level after opening a new page, which really sucks if you present HTML slides (BTW, because of this I had to use firefox 2, which is very broken on my laptop. Of course it crashed during one of my presentations. At least the resume-feature worked, so I hadn't have to click through hundreds of slides again..)
• Perl is used to (re)write history (at least the history of the ~11th century(?))
• that to set up a login system re-using PAUSE accounts is nothing more than a dirty little hack involving https and LWP (but why was I not surprised by that?)

And of course, I was again reminded that the Perl community is a bunch of lovley and brilliant people, and that YAPC is one of my favourite times of the year.

A big THANK YOU to the orgas, the sponsors, the speakers, the attendees, and to Larry Wall, how started it all!

P.S.:

If I was cog, here are a few more things I'd say during the opening talk, How to get the most out of a YAPC:

• Besides beer, another good way to make friends is by bringing an extension cord with multiple power plugs. Share electricity!
• Don't hang around (only) with your local pm group. You see them all the time, anyway. Meet new people!