use Perl

Yesterday we had our monthly Vienna.pm TechSocial Meeting. I talked about 45 minutes about the Olso QA Hackathon (here are my slides). Then we watched the App::Asciio screencasts.

For the social part we went to Tin-Tan for cheap cocktails (happy hour all night on Monday, yay!) and good mexican food. And lots of discussions / chatting.

Oh, and I really do hate mobile devices with internet connection. Imagine you're sitting in a nice place drinking some cocktails, when suddenly somebody pulls out some gadget and shows you an RT ticket that has been open for 10 months :-). On the other hand, that's a good method to make me fix it. Which I just did...

At the Oslo QA Hackathon 2008, during one evening meal, it became evident that Jonathan Worthington would be able to spend even more time hacking on Rakudo Perl if he would get paid a little money for it. As Vienna.pm still has some money earmarked for Perl development, we encouraged Jonathan to send us a proposal for funding him. Which he did. And which we accepted.

So starting next week, Jonathan will work on Rakudo one full day a week (minimum of 8 hours of work), post about the work on the rakudo.org blog / use.perl.org. He will recieve € 150 per day spend working on Rakudo. We estimate that on average he will work 4 days per month. We agreed on funding three months (~ €1,800) and evalute the grant after that time. If everybody is happy, we will continue the grant until the end of 2008, where we will evaluate again (and check if we still have money left).

More info available in the WoC Wiki

... was very nice, as expected. Not only where there cocktails (combined with an extended happy hour), but lots of international guests (Nicholas, Tara, nothingmuch). In fact, there where 5 Austrians, and 5 non-Austrians (UK, US/UK, Israel/Austria, Germany, Italy (hm, I now know at least 4 Perl people with dual citizenship, and AFAIK dual citizenship is rather rare...))

Topics included how to avoid beeing drafted, London airports, Israel "fences", reproduction rates of members of various religions, dogs as liveguards for empty plastic bottles, Italian vote results, and even perlish stuff like Moose (I just love oose.pm, which lets you say perl -Moose) and App::Asciio. And that's only the stuff I remember now...

After a very unpleasant journey (we had a 4 hour delay because of some disfunctional oil pump in the plain) I arrived in Oslo just in time to meet a big grouop of attendees in the lobby of the Anker hotel. After dumping my stuff into my room, we went to some irish pub for food (expensive!!), cider (expensive!!!) and lots of interesting and funny chatting. A very nice fact about norwegian pubs is that they are completly smoke free.

On saturday, we all went to the linpro office where the hackathon took place. The office was great, with a nice view over Oslo, comfortable chairs, free drinks, fruits, cookies and several large and small rooms. The perfect hacking environment. After a short plenum we started hacking / discussing.

While a lot of the "discussion track" seemed very interesting, I started working on various CPANTS releated things. I tried to make the installation of ProcessCPAN easier, but basically failed, because I couldn't come up with a good way to install various assets & a database, query for some information (like db user & pwd) and store this info plus the asset base path somewhere meaningfull. Any hints on how to do this are highly welcome!.

So, after wasting an hour on that I wrote CPAN::Mini::FromList which lets you generate a fake CPAN mirror consisting only of those dist you want. This proved to be very handy for further testing of Module::CPANTS::ProcessCPAN. Speaking of which. I spend most Saturday and Sunday hacking on the internals of ProcessCPAN, which I hated. Because I knew beforehand that this was going to be painful, I never did it, even though I should have done it since half a year. But the QA hackathon was the right setting, and even though it might have been more fun to participate in the metabase discussions, I sticked to ProcessCPAN. With the result that CPANTS now works much more stable. Especially all the prereq stuff is now greatly improved and should report much better data then before.

Monday was spend by doing frontend work on Module::CPANTS::Site, and helping Gabor integrate all of the new metrics he added to Module::CPANTS::Analyse into ProcessCPAN and Site. I also watched Michael Peters presentation on Smolder, and we had some discussions on how to make Smolder more CPAN-distributable.

Adam Kennedy led a discussion on Testing Best Practices, and we were able to decide on a few things. More details on this and the other results are available at the Achievements page in the Oslo QA Hackathon 2008 wiki.

Gabor, Nadim and me stayed at Linpro until they kicked us out around 21:00. We wandered through Oslo in search for food, and finally found a Chinese restaurant where we had a small dinner. Back in the hotel, we joined the Hotel Lobby Hacking Session, where we straightend out some of the problems of the latest CPANTS run. And we had some fun with Acme::ReturnValues.

I would like to again say a very big THANK YOU to Linpro and Salve for beeing such great hosts and sponsors, to all the other sponsors who made this great and productive event possible, and especially to Vienna.pm, who sponsored my trip and hotel costs.

It took a bit (ok, a lot) longer than planned, but Vienna.pm is proud to annouce the first working prototype of the Management System for TODO Test Bounties (aka Todo Tracker) as part of the Vienna.pm Winter^WSpring of Code:

If you're a maintainer of a Perl project and have something that needs doing head to the the Todo Tracker and enter a TODO test for your project. Vienna.pm will review all submitted Todo tests. Accepted Todos will be published so that people willing to implement the features / fix the bugs can apply to do them. Providing the project maintainers agree, the implementor gets some time to do his/her work and will hopefully come back with a result that fulfils the test stated with the project. When this is done and the project maintainers verify that their Todo is fixed, Vienna.pm pays the specified amount into the implementor's bank account.

The TODO Tracker was implemented by Matt S Trout, who donated the €1,000 earmarked for the development back into the TODO Budget for Catalyst and DBIC related projects. It is still a bit work in progress, but we want to go ahead before this turns into a Summer of Code...

Vienna.pm plans to spend up to €4,000, plus €1,000 more for Catalyst / DBIx::Class projects. We would again like to thank all Sponsors and Attendees of YAPC::Europe 2007 who made this project possible by making the YAPC such a big success.

You can find more information on how this project works in our wiki.

If you have any questions, suggestions or bug-reports, please send them to todo-tracker@rt.useperl.at, where a friendly RT will record them.

After quite some time, we (that is, Andrea) finally found some time to take a close look at the feedback we got via the survey from all attendees. We got back 205 replies (60.3% - very impressiv, thanks!) and some very good suggestions for future YAPC organisers.

• http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007/ye2007-survey.pdf
• http://vienna.yapceurope.org/ye2007/ye2007-feedback.pdf

A big THANK YOU also goes to Birmingham.pm / Barbie, who set up the survey for us!

While we are all looking forward to YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, it's time for the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee to consider suitable hosts for the 2009 conference. Any dedicated group interested in hosting YAPC::Europe::2009 should send a brief statement of intent to venue@yapceurope.org as soon as possible. For this first statement of intent a few lines like "City.pm is interested in hosting YAPC::Europe 2009" will be enough.

A full and complete application should then be sent to the same address prior to the deadline for applications, which is June 30, 2008. The YAPC::Europe Venue Committee will inform applicants by July 31, 2008 if their proposal was chosen. The public announcement of the location for the 2009 conference will be announced during the 2008 conference in Copenhagen.

For more information about the requirements for hosting a conference, you may want to refer to the YAPC organiser's documentation (administered by TPF) on Google code, or look at the examples of previous European conferences.

Please direct any questions to venue@yapceurope.org, and a member of the committee will endeavour to respond as soon as possible.

Looking forward to your submissions,
  Thomas Klausner
  on behalf of the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee

As just seen on IRC:

11:18 <htoug> The CFP for YAPC::EU 2008 is out:
              http://www.yapceurope2008.org/ye2008/cfp.html

Yay!

PS: I think I managed to be the first submitter!

I'm currently sitting in a hospital in Vienna, recovering from a nasal septum operation. Currently, I can not breath at all through my nose (due to dressings in my nose), but in a few days I should be finally able to get enough air through my nose. Until now, if I was kidnapped and gagged, I would have suffocated after a few minutes because of my skewd nasal septum and some other obstacles in my nose, which now have been removed.

Anyway, regarding the subject: I'm typing this in my laptop (yes, I'm such a geek that I brought by laptop into hospital, though I do not take it with me when I shower...), I'm connected to the net via a cardbus UMTS card (thanks to koki for lending it to me). Magic!

But the doctors also do some nice magic. A few minutes before my operation, I had a short conversation with the anesthesiologist. I asked him if he was going to put me to sleep now, he said: "Yes, choose a nice dream", opened a ventil on my infusion thingy, and pooof, I was gone. More Magic.

I've put up a quick site with the results of Acme::ReturnValue:

http://returnvalues.useperl.at

This page shows that Acme::ReturnValue is far from perfect because it contains a whole lot of false positives. But there are also some very funny things to be found.

I'm not sure if I'll spend much more time on Acme::ReturnValue, so I doubt that the website will see any improvements (filters, sorting, links to source code, ..). But I do plan to look at Perl::Critic::Policy::Modules::RequireEndWithOne, as suggested by Chris Dolan.

And I will set up a cronjob to generate the site (but probably only once a week - I want to spare those cycles for cpants...)