use Perl

Birmingham.pm World Tour 2008 - Birmingham LUG - 15th May 2008

The next date on the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour gets a bit more local, with the crew visiting our friends at Birmingham LUG. Barbie and JJ will be along to present a couple of talks that seem to have gone down very well with previous tour attendees. Talk schedule looks as follows:

• Photo Tools (Perl scripts for digital photography) [JJ]
• Understanding Malware [Barbie]

Attendance is free, and will be held in Seminar room G40 of the School of Computer Science at The Univeristy of Birmingham (B15 2TT), which is just outside of the city centre, a short walk from University station and several bus routes. For further directions see also the LUG's own directions page. The event starts at 7.30pm.

Feel free to come along and support and/or heckle.

Venue

School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT

Future Tour Dates

Thu 15 May - Birmingham LUG
Wed 28 May - Birmingham.pm
Mon 9 Jun - Rugby LUG
16-18 Jun - YAPC::NA, Chicago, USA
Wed 25 Jun - Birmingham.pm
19-20 Jul - LUGRadio Live, Wolverhampton
Wed 23 Jul - Birmingham.pm
13-15 Jun - YAPC::Europe, Copenhagen, Denmark
Wed 27 Aug - Birmingham.pm

We're hoping to arrange more dates with Edingburgh.pm, London.pm, Leeds.pm on the list, as well as return trips to MiltonKeynes.pm and Coventry LUG. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like us to visit your group, and whether you would like us to present a few talks, or just share a drink.

See the website for more details.

Background

In early 2006 Birmingham Perl Mongers took to the road to promote the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference, which we hosted at the end of August 2006. We took it upon ourselves to visit several Perl Monger groups around the UK, and proved extremely popular, with several groups asked to come back again, and others asking us to visit them too. In 2007 we visited both Perl Monger and Linux user groups, this time presenting at each groups technical meeting. For 2008 we hope to include several groups we never previous got to as well visiting some old friends.

YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen is fast approaching, and the deadline for proposals for next year's conference is not too far away (June 30th), but I've been thinking of events even further in the future. With the Perl Monger census that Dave Cross is organising, I'm hoping it might identify some of the groups that could potentially host the event, given that their membership would be big enough to help out. I then hope to get to know some of the leaders and members that are attending YAPC::Europe themselves, and see if I can encourage a few to at least think about hosting a YAPC::Europe. Seeing as we've now had 3 in the UK, there's no reason why we can't hold it in Germany, France or Portugal again. So I won't just be trying to persuade those in countries who have never hosted before ;)

I'm organising a Perl Mongers BOF in Copenhagen, so if you're interested in organising a conference, workshop or just want to get your group more active, please come along and ask questions. Even if you think that you might not be ready to host a conference or workshop just yet, but would like to know what's involved so you can perhaps think about it for the future, it would be an ideal opportunity to meet previous organisers.

With all the tools, resources and previous organisers now available, there is certainly a lot for future organisers to build on, so theoretically it should be easier to organise a YAPC conference these days. However, I think we might not be getting that message across very well. Organisers joke about the event afterwards, saying that they would never do it again, but we do get involved in other similar events, so it really can't have been that bad. The Tokyo folks are outdoing themselves every year with YAPC::Asia, and by all accounts YAPC::SA is too. Chicago is taking on YAPC::NA again, and many of the previous European organisers are involved with workshops.

As next year will be the 10th YAPC::Europe, it will be interesting to see what sort of party^Wcelebration we can manage. If you're thinking that you (whether that's a Perl Monger group or other Perl related group of people) would like to host a YAPC::Europe, then please come along to the Perl Mongers BOF or get in touch with the Venue Committee, as we'd all be delighted to give you all the encouragement you need. And if you think you could put on a good show for the 10th YAPC::Europe, please read the Call for Venue, and submit a proposal.

Not to be out done after last month, Chris has once again stepped up his testing, with Andreas closely following his heels. Slaven has also dramatically ramped up his testing, and the top 3 testers are now producing over 20,000 reports more than their nearest rivals. The totals didn't quite beat last month's records, but it was still a phenomenal month nonetheless.

After suggestions from several people, I revised the graphs of the Graphs page. Using the Google Chart API (as suggested by simonm), I managed to generate some better graphs, however, with the extreme values in the data and the large amount of data, the first attempts resulted in errors. As such the main graph is now only for the uploads, reports and passes, while the last graph now lists all the non-pass results. The presentation is much better than the previous attempts with GD and I've been quite impressed with the Chart API. I might start looking at some other forms of the charts in the coming months.

Earle also suggested I sort out the numbering in the matrices, which seemed a reasonable requested, so I've also fixed that too :)

Following my half yearly request to unknown testers, I received 8 responses, which have been added to the addresses list, together with 20 further address additions, 3 of which are from new testers. There are still a large number of testers who are unknown, so hopefully they'll get around to responding in the next month.

In other news my talk submission for YAPC::NA has been accepted. Once again I'll be talking about How To Be A CPAN Tester, which will be based on last year's talk, but with all the updates happening over the last few months, should include quite a lot of news for future changes.

Birmingham.pm World Tour 2008 - Wolves LUG - 23rd April 2008

The next date on The 2008 World Tour sees us once again visiting our friends over at Wolves LUG. Barbie and JJ will be along to present a couple of talks that seem to have gone down very well with previous tour attendees. Talk schedule looks as follows:

• Perl At the Microsoft Scripting Games [JJ]
• Understanding Malware [Barbie]

Attendance is free, and will be held at Lincoln House Community Centre (WV10 0JB), which is just outside of the city centre. If arriving by train, rather than trying to navigate your way across the ring road, it may be worth spending a couple of quid on a taxi. The event starts at 7.30pm.

Feel free to come along and support and/or heckle.

Venue

Lincoln House Community Centre,
Lincoln House, Tremont Street,
Wolverhampton, WV10 0JB.

Future Tour Dates

Wed 23 Apr - Wolves LUG
Wed 30 Apr - Birmingham.pm
Thu 15 May - Birmingham LUG
Wed 28 May - Birmingham.pm
Mon 9 Jun - Rugby LUG
Wed 25 Jun - Birmingham.pm

More dates to be added, with Edingburgh.pm, London.pm, Leeds.pm to be schedule, together with return trips to MiltonKeynes.pm and Coventry LUG. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like us to visit your group, and whether you would like us to present a few talks, or just share a drink.

See the website for more details.

Background

In early 2006 Birmingham Perl Mongers took to the road to promote the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference, which we hosted at the end of August 2006. We took it upon ourselves to visit several Perl Monger groups around the UK, and proved extremely popular, with several groups asked to come back again, and others asking us to visit them too. In 2007 we visited both Perl Monger and Linux user groups, this time presenting at each groups technical meeting. For 2008 we hope to include several groups we never previous got to as well visiting some old friends.

Following some good suggestions for improving the graphs on the CPAN Testers Statistics site, I looked into the Google Chart API. I was looking for something that was fairly simple to drop into what I already had with GD::Graph, and although a slight code edit was required, pretty much everything just worked. However, it wasn't without it's frustration. The data set that I pass is quite large with 6 sets of 100+ points each, such that the GET request fails, I assume because it gets truncated. As such I've had to reorganise the graphs, reducing the characters in the URL, and simplifying the presentation, although I wonder whether there is a way to POST the data. I didn't see anything on the site, but seeing as it's a free service, they may not want to be overloaded with complex graphing requirements.

On the plus side there is so much more I feel I can do with the API and the quality is heads and shoulders above anything I did with GD::Graph. There was a suggestion that I use SVG, and on searching CPAN I see Leo has SVG-TT-Graph, which might be good for local graph generation. The only downside at the moment for me with the Google API, is that I need to be connected to the internet. When generating the stats I'm sometimes offline, so Leo's distribution might be a better solution in the long run. Though, if you're looking to produce some nice fancy graphs and don't get too a high hit rate on your site, you would do well to investigate the Google Chart API.

It's been such a good experience I'm thinking of creating a talk about it now for the Perl dates on our World Tour. I've done the Selenium talk to death, so it would be fun to have something else in my repetoire :)

Birmingham.pm World Tour 2008 - Gloucestershire LUG - 15th April 2008

Following in quick succession from last week's date, The 2008 World Tour continues on as the Birmingham Perl Mongers once again visit Gloucestershire LUG. This time around talks featured will be:

• Why my iPhone sucks! [Simon Lewis]
• Testing With Perl [Barbie]
• Perl at The MS Scripting Games [JJ]

The event will take place at MessageLabs and the Gloucestershire LUG guys have details of how to get there on their meeting page. The talks are expected to begin around 7pm, with an expected debrief session afterwards from about 9pm.

Feel free to come along and support and/or heckle.

Future Tour Dates

Dates so far confirmed:

Tue 15 Apr - Gloucester LUG
Wed 23 Apr - Wolves LUG
Wed 30 Apr - Birmingham.pm
Thu 15 May - Birmingham LUG
Wed 28 May - Birmingham.pm
Mon 9 Jun - Rugby LUG
Wed 25 Jun - Birmingham.pm

More dates to be added, with Edingburgh.pm, London.pm, Leeds.pm to be schedule, together with return trips to MiltonKeynes.pm and Coventry LUG. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like us to visit your group, and whether you would like us to present a few talks, or just share a drink.

See the website for more details.

Background

In early 2006 Birmingham Perl Mongers took to the road to promote the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference, which we hosted at the end of August 2006. We took it upon ourselves to visit several Perl Monger groups around the UK, and proved extremely popular, with several groups asked to come back again, and others asking us to visit them too. In 2007 we visited both Perl Monger and Linux user groups, this time presenting at each groups technical meeting. For 2008 we hope to include several groups we never previous got to as well visiting some old friends.

CPAN Testers Statistics

Well someone has finally blown Chris Williams out of the water. Chris was steadfastly producing his 30,000+ reports as he's been doing for the past 5 months, but after tipping him off a while back about Andreas catching him, Andreas decided to out do himself this month. Thankfully the cpan-testers mailing list has been turned off for outbound, otherwise Andreas' 50683 reports would have probably wiped out the servers at perl.org. In fact I suspect he may have only ramped up because the outbound mail was turned off. As a consequence the total number of reports submitted last month, far exceeded anything we've seen before, topping 150858 reports! With Slaven Rezic, Imacat and Daniel Bosold also stepping up their testing, I'm expected to see this level of report submissions to continue.

Despite all the testing currently being performed, it is perhaps interesting to note that Perl 5.8.8, 5.10.0 and 5.11.0 are the 3 most tested versions of the perl interpreter. While these are likely to be the 3 versions of most interest to many developers, it would be good to keep the prescence of earlier perls, especially 5.005, 5.6.1, 5.6.2 and a selection of 5.8.*. I know some of the testers are certainly trying to cover some of the tradional platforms, but if you have any machines that don't get regularly tested, and can spare the clock cycles, please see if getting involved in CPAN Testers is something that you could do. At the moment NetBSD seems to have the best coverage of testings, so if you have a Darwin, Solaris, Win32 or other unusual platform, all test reports will be gratefully received.

16 more addresses mappings, including 9 new testers. As of this morning, my 6 monthly tester clarification mail has been sent out to 60 addresses used in the last 6 months that haven't been correctly mapped. If you receive one of these mails, please take the time to complete it and send it back to me.

The Oslo QA Workshop seems to have been a worthwhile experience for CPAN Testers, particularly David Golden, Ricardo J Signes and Jonas B Nielson, who between them have helped to generate the HTTP transporter layer for updating a central CPAN Testers database into shape. Ask Bjørn Hansen is already working on the central store, so this is a very welcome piece of the solution towards moving towards removing the email transport layer altogether. The final solution is still a while off yet, but things are moving, which is great. So thanks guys for taking the time out to work on the code.

I recently attended the UKUUG 2008 Spring Conference, during which a discussion arose around CPAN Testers, and how other dynamic language repositories handle their testing. It would seem that Perl is head and shoulders above every other language repository, never mind dynamic laguages. There were several developers of other languages that were truly amazed at the voluntary effort being put into ensuring CPAN is as well tested as possible. So a hearty pat on the back to all the CPAN Testers, you're setting a standard for others to aspire to. And to quote Mike Whitaker ... Perl is SO not dead :)

Birmingham.pm World Tour 2008 - Leicester LUG - 8th April 2008

Following a brief rest last month The 2008 World Tour continues on as the Birmingham Perl Mongers once again visit Leicester LUG. This time around talks featured will be:

• Lightweight Ajax with OpenThought [JJ]
• Testing With Selenium [Barbie]

The event will take place at University Of Leicester and the Leicester LUG guys have details of how to get their on their next meeting page. The talks are expected to begin between 7.30pm and 8pm, with an expected debrief session afterwards from about 9pm.

Feel free to come along and support and/or heckle.

Future Tour Dates

Dates so far confirmed:

Tue 8 Apr - Leicester LUG
Tue 15 Apr - Gloucester LUG
Wed 23 Apr - Wolves LUG
Wed 30 Apr - Birmingham.pm
Thu 15 May - Birmingham LUG
Wed 28 May - Birmingham.pm
Mon 9 Jun - Rugby LUG
Wed 25 Jun - Birmingham.pm

More dates to be added, with Edingburgh.pm, London.pm, Leeds.pm to be schedule, together with return trips to MiltonKeynes.pm and Coventry LUG. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like us to visit your group, and whether you would like us to present a few talks, or just share a drink.

See the website for more details.

Background

In early 2006 Birmingham Perl Mongers took to the road to promote the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference, which we hosted at the end of August 2006. We took it upon ourselves to visit several Perl Monger groups around the UK, and proved extremely popular, with several groups asked to come back again, and others asking us to visit them too. In 2007 we visited both Perl Monger and Linux user groups, this time presenting at each groups technical meeting. For 2008 we hope to include several groups we never previous got to as well visiting some old friends.

• Community Meets Cartography [Andy Robinson]
• Perl at The MS Scripting Games [Jon Allen]

Details

We're fortunate enough to have another special guest night this month, with Andy Robinson coming along to talk about OpenStreetMap, the open mapping intiative that is growing at a phenonmenal rate. Following will be JJ, who is going to give us a run down of the recent Microsoft Scripting Games, where a number of Perl programmers, including himself, submitted entries for Perl.

As per usual we'll be at The Victoria. The pub is on the corner of John Bright Street and Beak Street, between the old entrance to the Alexandra Theatre and the backstage entrance. If in doubt, the main entrance to the Theatre is on the inner ring road, near the Pagoda roundabout. The pub is on the road immediately behind the main entrance. See the map link on the website if you're stuck.

As always entry is free, with no knowledge of Perl required. We'd be delighted to have you along, so feel free to invite family, friends and colleagues ;)

We'll be in the venue from about 6.30pm, and have booked The Boardroom for the night. Order food as you get there, and we'll aim to begin talks at about 8pm. I expect talks to finish about 9.30pm, with plenty of time for discussion and planning for meetups over the weekend in London.

Venue & Directions:

The Victoria, 48 John Bright Street, Birmingham, B1 1BN
- Pub Details
- Picture
- Google Map

The venue is approximately 5-10 minutes walk from New Street station, and about the same from the city centre. On street car parking is available see full details and directions on the website.

Times:

These are the rough times for the evening:

• food available until 7.30pm
• talks: 8.00-10.00pm
• pub closes: 11.00pm

Please note that beer will be consumed during all the above sessions ;)

Following an email about missing licences in Test-CPAN-Meta, I reviewed the spec and realised I'd made a slight error. The spec suggests some of the valid licences out there, but the text for the field 'license' need only contain a string. It doesn't have to be a known licence. As such I tidied up the code a bit and while I was at it, add some functionality that Adam asked me for a couple of months ago.

So yesterday I fixed up both Test-CPAN-Meta and Test-YAML-Meta to include the following:

• the 'license' field only requires a string,
• the licence validating code now returns 1 for a known licence, 2 for an unknown licence and 0 for fail,
• meta_yaml_ok() and meta_spec_ok() now return the loaded hashref, if you need it.

Regards the latter, Adam wanted to specifically check that a value in the hash was there. Previously there were no additional tests he could perform without loading the file himself. So now it's there if you need it.