use Perl

I've just come back from the London Python Meetup. There was an informal survey, and I was the person who had the least Python experience (although I have written a little app). Around 50 people turned up and there was free pizza and beer.

There were some lightning talks, including one on Google App Engine. Another talk was a relevation someone has bought a bunch of servers for platform testing. The lightning talks were a bit hit-and-miss and would have been much better if they hadn't tried to have slides.

The main talk was Jacob Kaplan-Moss giving details about the history of Django, mostly little anecdotes. I was surprised to hear that PyCon had almost 1,100 people this year and that in the Django talk, half of the attendees (200 people) had learnt Python in order to use Django. That's some killer app.

Perl people as are pretty pragmatic, using the best tool for the job and learning about everything. However almost every talk tonight contained a dig about Perl, it was really dishearting. Python people: grow up and pay attention to what other people are doing - you might learn something.

I've just released Data::UUID::Base64URLSafe:

Data::UUID creates wonderful Globally/Universally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs/UUIDs). This module is a subclass of that module which adds a method to get a URL-safe Base64-encoded version of the UUID using MIME::Base64::URLSafe. What that means is that you can get a 22-character UUID string which you can use safely in URLs.

Of course, only afterwards do I notice Data::GUID::URLSafe. What is the point of a Globally/Universally Unique Identifier if we don't have a unique name for the concept, eh?

I do love slides from conferences. Check out the MySQL Conference 2008 slides, videos and writeups.

Let's ignore the security aspects and have a fight. In one corner, clkao's Text::Password::Pronounceable. In the other corner, my String::Koremutake:

#!perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Perl6::Say;
use Text::Password::Pronounceable;
use String::Koremutake;

say "Text::Password::Pronounceable";
foreach ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    my $password = Text::Password::Pronounceable->generate( 6, 10 );
    say "  $password";
}

say "String::Koremutake";
my $k = String::Koremutake->new;
foreach ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    my $s = $k->integer_to_koremutake( int( rand(2_000_000) ) );
    say "  $s";
}

Laaadies and gentlement: the fight begins:

Text::Password::Pronounceable
  dtwlysoto
  bileoire
  metstari
  hisiner
  icaharwet
  thitilos
  hilerith
  ilyome
  weyhow
  ttovihith
String::Koremutake
  kigelu
  hestemi
  jimygy
  teliku
  jynegra
  prydryji
  sitimy
  bronesi
  vonipro
  litisi

And the winner is... I'm not sure. Who won?

We're pleased to announce that we've selected Jonathan Worthington as a recipient of a Perl 6 microgrant. Jonathan is one of the top contributors to Rakudo Perl 6 and has been contributing to Parrot since 2003. The grant will be for travel and accommodation to the French Perl Workshop and the Nordic Perl Workshop. Jonathan will speak at both workshops on topics including the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation, Perl and Perl 6 as languages for academic use and the Perl 6 type system.

Please join us in wishing him the best of luck with his project. We're really looking forward to seeing the details of his talks. If you're interested in submitting a Perl 6 microgrant proposal, you can find details here.

Léon and Jesse

"Bandwidth will get cheaper in the future". It's not a hard prediction to make, given bandwidth is cheaper this year than last year. I was always really annoyed as an Akamai customer that they never dropped their prices. Rather pleasantly, Amazon Web Services just did. Not by much, but it shows that they are based in reality. Thanks!

The projects for the Google Summer of Code 2008 have been released. Eric has mentioned the Perl projects, and I wish them all success.

What is quite staggering is the number of projects involved: 1,125. This is a lot of work for all the organisations involved. With a handy Perl script I can break the organisations down by number of projects:

47 KDE
34 Python Software Foundation
31 The Apache Software Foundation
30 GNOME
21 The FreeBSD Project
21 Drupal
20 The Eclipse Foundation
20 OSGeo - Open Source Geospatial Foundation
15 Mono Project
15 SIP Communicator
15 Joomla!
14 The NetBSD Project
14 MySQL
14 VideoLAN
13 Debian
12 The Fedora Project & JBoss.org
12 Moodle
11 The Mozilla Project
11 Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
11 OpenMRS
10 openSUSE
10 Tux4Kids
10 The Globus Alliance
10 XWiki
10 GNU Project
10 PHP
10 The Java PathFinder Team
10 OpenMoko Inc.
9 FFmpeg
9 Tcl/Tk Community
9 Sahana
9 GenMAPP
9 Ruby Central
8 The Enlightenment Project
8 OLAT, University of Zurich
8 WordPress
8 The Linux Foundation
8 Thousand Parsec
8 Boost C++
7 GCC
7 Portland State University
7 Codehaus
7 haskell.org
7 The DragonFly BSD Project
7 Computer Systems Research Group, Vrije Universiteit (MINIX)
7 Natural User Interface Group
7 atheme.org
7 Nmap Security Scanner
7 Center for the Study of Complex Systems, Univ. of Michigan
7 LispNYC
7 OpenNMS
7 The Electronic Frontier Foundation
6 Gentoo
6 BZFlag
6 Git Development Community
6 LLVM Compiler Infrastructure
6 Geeklog
6 The Perl Foundation
6 PostgreSQL project
6 OpenAFS
6 Dojo Foundation
6 Pidgin
6 OSSIM: Open Source Security Information Management
6 XMMS2 - X(cross)platform Music Multiplexing System
6 Blender Foundation
6 XMPP Standards Foundation
6 AbiSource
6 ScummVM
6 TurboGears
6 The Wine Project
6 MoinMoin Wiki Project
6 The WebKit Open Source Project
6 OMII-UK
5 ChristmasFuture
5 Pardus project
5 ArgoUML
5 Umit
5 Audacity
5 The Squeak Project
5 Crystal Space
5 Vim
5 BlueZ
5 NCSA - The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois
5 CLAM (at Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
5 Internet2
5 Inkscape
5 Zope Foundation, Inc
5 BBC Research
5 Creative Commons
5 Haiku
5 Ptolemy Project, University of California, Berkeley
5 The X.Org Foundation
5 Simple DirectMedia Layer
5 GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program
5 Plone Foundation
5 NESCent - National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
4 Etherboot Project
4 GStreamer
4 Internet Archive
4 Coppermine Photo Gallery
4 Pentaho
4 Mixxx
4 Django
4 One Laptop per Child
4 OpenStreetMap
4 Battle for Wesnoth
4 Neuros Technology
4 Open64
4 ES operating system
4 The gEDA Project
4 GNU Hurd
4 R Foundation for Statistical Computing
4 DSPACE FOUNDATION
4 Mercurial (a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy)
4 K-3D
4 PostNuke Application Framework
4 Wikimedia Foundation
4 NetSurf
4 OGRE
4 SWIG
4 MacPorts
4 Project Hackystat
4 BRL-CAD
4 Rockbox
4 hugin/panotools
4 RTEMS Project
3 Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL)
3 Ingres
3 Scribus Team
3 WorldForge
3 OpenInkpot
3 GNUstep
3 WinLibre
3 OSCAR
3 MetaBrainz Foundation Inc.
3 Adium
3 Jikes RVM
3 Google
3 Translate Toolkit & Pootle
3 Samba
3 Gnumeric
3 Open Security Foundation (OSVDB)
3 SCons next-generation build system
3 wxPython
3 TeX Users Group
3 Sakai Foundation and IMS Global Learning Consortium
3 The ns-3 Project
3 Cairo
2 XBMC
2 The Software Freedom Conservancy
2 Jato
2 PlanetMath.org, Ltd.
2 Plazi Verein
2 Zumastor
2 OAR
2 OpenChange (a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy)
2 Dirac Schrodinger
2 The SYSLINUX Project
2 Subclipse
2 International Components for Unicode
2 eXist
2 Linden Lab (Second Life)
2 coresystems GmbH
2 Gallery
2 The Free Software Initiative of Japan
2 OpenICC
2 Subversion
2 Ohio Supercomputer Center
2 wxWidgets
2 Xiph.org Foundation
2 Ohloh Corporation
2 Swarm Development Group (SDG)
2 Hypertriton, Inc.
1 Freenet Project Inc
1 Comprehensive C Archive Network (CCAN)
1 Open Source Applications Foundation
0 OpenQA