use Perl

Despite loving programming, I don't find much opportunity to do much of it at the moment. Sure there are short-term consulting contracts and endless re-writes of our course answers, but that hardly counts. I'm also finding it a challenge to be inspired by a few things that I kind of should do but which aren't essential. For example how we handle bookings could be better automated, but until we quadruple the number of courses we run, the parts which are manual aren't really much of a problem.

I used to love debugging, but I don't have a lot of real world experience writing tests. I can teach how to write simple tests for simple cases, but I haven't really gotten my hands dirty writing lots of tests on an interesting system.

So this is what I want. I want a module that has some tests, but needs a whole bunch more. It would make me especially happy if it came with a spec' but that seems kind of rare in the real world, so I'll settle for enough documentation that I understand what's going on. I don't want to have to read a bunch of RFCs and all the code before I understand things enough to write some tests; but I'm willing to read an RFC and some code. I don't want to randomly pick a module from CPAN, I'd rather work with someone who actively wants help adding tests to their module. I'm very happy to use CVS or git; I'm very happy to join a mailing list; I'm very happy to write tests for bugs in RT; I'm very happy to provide patches if you don't use CVS or git. I will ask lots of questions and I will want feedback on my tests including areas you think I've missed or a nod to a job well done.

Anyone got a module of which you've been meaning to improve the test suite? I'm especially happy to help with anything in alias's top 100 lists.

I'm also only going to pick one module, for the time being, and it might not be one that gets requested here. If there's lots of interest, I might take this list along to the next Melbourne PM bug-finding night, but this request is not a promise that I'll work on your module. Sorry.

Those who know me will know that I'm not a stranger to conferences. I've been to all of the OSDCs, a few LCAs, a few SAGE-AU conferences and now an OSCON and YAPC::EU. Until YAPC::EU; the OSDCs and OSCON were my favourites as I identify myself far more with being a developer than a free software geek or system administrator. But I'd never been to a conference specifically aimed just at Perl developers.

I loved YAPC::EU. It was great to be able to attend a huge variety of talks at all levels on a topic I know well. It was awesome to meet people in person I've only known through mailing lists or on IRC. It was grand to find out that Perl people are my kind of people, no matter where in the world they're from. I fully intend to try to get to both YAPC::NA next year and YAPC::EU (in Pisa!).

Perl developers appear to be exceedingly wonderful people all across the globe. We've been invited to meetings, bought drinks, and even had Perl Mongers fight over who got to host Paul and I at their house on our travels! (Well okay, it didn't come down to violence, but it was amazing to see so many eager to open their houses to Paul and I and give us somewhere to stay.) Our hosts have been uniformly wonderful, and we've slept well, eaten well, and got to see all sorts of amazing sites in our trips around the place. Much of this would have been harder and in some cases impossible without the generousity we've experienced.

I want to give especial thanks to: Drew Taylor and his wife Kimberlee who hosted us in Dublin, drove us around the place. Also their daughter Samantha who showed tremendous patience while we were being driven around the place even though that was delaying her trip to the pet shop to get another goldfish.

To Murray and Becky who gave us a bed in Edinburgh, and then made room for Andy as well, so that we could more easily get going the next day. Also Aaron who offered us a bed, 5 minutes after we'd accepted Murray's offer.

To Andy Armstrong who took Wednesday and part of Thursday off to drive us around Northern England, showing us castles, Hadrian's wall, the remains of a Roman fort and after giving us his bed for the night; drove us through to Darlington.

To Smylers who met us at the train in Leeds, helped us find dinner rather late at night and gave us a bed, as well as taking off much of Friday to hang out with us and see us off on the train.

We really do have an awesome community.

I agree with chromatic that it would be really nice to get a whole bunch of "Modern" features turned on in later versions of Perl by default. However, I also accept that this is probably a bad idea.

I run a Perl training business. It would make me overjoyed to not have to remind the students to add use strict; use warnings; use autodie; to the top of each script. The students aren't being lazy or difficult when they forget to add these things, they're just forgetful because I'm teaching them so many things all at once.

On the other hand, I do consulting too. There are many, many Perl systems out there in the real world; systems which must work for the business to function; but which are not well written. Systems without test suites. Systems without even version control. Systems without development or testing environments (yes, everything is done in production). It's terrifying. Not just to me, but also to their developers, so these system are left alone, and only touched if absolutely necessary. This is the DarkPAN.

Many of the owners of these systems are already afraid to upgrade, so they don't. Whether they're still using Perl 5.5.3 or 5.6.1, it's "good enough". But these are not the people we're worried about.

The ones we need to worry about are the ones with active Perl developers who are pushing and pushing for a newer version of Perl, so they can use new features in their new projects (without thought for existing systems). If Perl is backwards compatible, then most of the time they should be able to get those new features and the monolith that no one wants to touch should still work. I've seen an organisation jump from 5.5.3 to 5.8.8 and there was about 4 hours work for one developer needed to fix things (mostly related to changes in some module APIs, I don't remember which). This was considered a good bargain.

I don't think it's reasonable to make the 5.10 branch the last upgrade that such organisations can reach without having to massively edit their scary monoliths. I don't think they should have such scary monoliths, but that's another story. As such, I would be unhappy if all the new modern stuff I want in Perl was turned on by default. People should be able to write Perl 5.5.3-like code and have it work in Perl 5.10. To illustrate this, consider the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Very bad code!

open FILE, "test2.pl";

while(<FILE>) {
        print;
}

Under Perl 5.5.3 through to 5.10 (and probably earlier versions as well), that prints out the contents of "test2.pl" if the file could be opened, and doesn't print out anything otherwise. This is presumably the desired behaviour. Moving this code to a version of Perl that turns on strict, warnings and autodie automatically would require this snippet of code to be completely rewritten or to have warnings and autodie manually turned off:

#!/usr/bin/modernperl
# Very bad code!

no autodie;
no warnings;

open FILE, "test2.pl";

while(<FILE>) {
        print;
}

Of course, that these things need to be turned off should itself be a warning that the code is badly written, but strangely enough badly written code does exist. The next obvious way to achieve the same effect is with file test operators.

#!/usr/bin/modernperl
# Only slightly better code

# Hope we don't get a race condition
if(-r "test2.pl") {

        open my $fh, "<", "test2.pl";
        while(<$fh>) {
                print;
        }
}

Fortunately, we seem to already have a good solution to the modern Perl problem. Perl 5.10 had the right idea with use feature qw(...); and Perl 6 has the right idea with use v6;. As others have suggested, we should be able to make most people happy with a pragma that does the right thing. So instead of starting every program with chromatic's boilerplate:

use 5.010;

use strict;
use warnings;

use utf8;
use Carp;
use Want;
use CLASS;
use SUPER;
use autodie;
use autobox;
use signatures;

use mro 'c3';

use IO::Handle;
use File::stat;
use autobox::Core;
use UNIVERSAL::ref;

Perhaps as of 5.12 we can just say:

use 5.012;

To turn on all the appropriate modules and features. Failing to specify such a version means we're in classic mode, and we provide the same interface as we did before. This has the logical advantage that scripts written for 5.12 are clearly marked, so that someone with Perl 5.8 knows that there may be features in use that aren't available to them.

This shouldn't be problematic, because we're already doing this magic when we write use 5.010.

It should be noted that this means that specifying the version stops meaning the minimum version of Perl we want to use and instead becomes an instruction about exactly what we're expecting to get. So whereas anything which says use 5.010 should work with Perl 5.12 and 5.14; it is also saying that it does not want to inherit any new and shiny defaults from either of those versions.

When one of our own, foolishly, showed porn at a conference, and then apologised on use.perl for doing it; some of the commenters asked whether it would have been better if more female-focussed porn had been included. That was back in 2006.

Less than a month ago Matt Aimonetti gave a talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference entitled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star." which apparently started off well, with a few porn-related but funny gags, but when he moved into the topic proper "the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides..."

The commenters to the above linked blog showed the same obliviousness to the issue at hand with suggestions such as "Maybe people would have felt better with some gay porn stars mixed in?" and "there was really only one risque image of a naked man ... if there had been a better balance would it have been just as alienating?"

I am stunned that this could possibly still be an issue. Matt Aimonetti defends himself by saying his wife approved of the talk and that there were only 5/82 risque images (presumably all the rest were just scantily clad women); other men say that they didn't find it offensive. A commenter says he showed the presentation to his wife who also just thought it was in good humour and claims that they are open minded, presumably suggesting that the original poster is not. All of them fail to grasp that the conference should be a professional setting, not a locker room.

Porn does not belong at conferences, or in user group talks, or in the board room. Porn, although a wonderful and fun thing, should be private; or at most - shared with close friends in an intimate setting. Neither of these conditions are what you have at a conference, user group or (generally) in the board room. Porn doesn't help keep your audience's attention, instead it distracts them. Those who appreciate the images are distracted by their hormonal reactions. Everyone else is alienated. If it's male, heterosexual porn; then the straight women, queer men and anyone who just doesn't like porn get the very clear message that they're different and not included. It's not nice to be made to feel like a sexual object in a room where it seems everyone else has just been turned on. It's uncomfortable and possibly threatening.

Women, in particular, are rare at FOSS conferences. The Golden Gate Ruby Conference had only 6 out of 200 female attendees. The highest percentage at a conference I've been to was 10%. We know we're minorities, yet most of the time everyone is awesome and clearly we belong, so we often ignore the fact that we're rare and go along thinking it's a meritocracy of ideas and code. Usually it is. But talks like these drag you back into realising that you are different and you are in the minority, and that ruins it for a while.

Including more porn to "cater" to the women and queer men is not the answer. Not only would it be impossible to cater to the wide tastes of the audience, but what appeals to some would be off-putting to others. More importantly, unless you're at a conference specifically about porn; then surely you want your audience to be paying attention to what you're saying and your main topic rather than being distracted by what's going on in their pants? It's not about hard-core or soft-core porn; or what you can or cannot show on TV at 8pm. It's not about whether you can see the same style of picture on a billboard on a major road. It's about being inclusive and respectful of your audience who have often chosen to listen to your talk instead of the other talks scheduled at the same time (or being part of the hallway track). It's always a bad idea to distract your audience's attention away from the topic at hand, but porn is an even worse way than usual, as it's almost impossible to get their attention back again and you've almost certainly upset some of them. Don't alienate your audience. The only correct solution is to include no porn.

Porn does not belong in an professional setting. It's a professional setting if a decent proportion of the attendees have their employers paying for them to be there (whether or not there's an entrance cost) or if attendees expect to gain employment-relevant knowledge from the event. If it's okay for you to have pin-ups in your office and include porn in your presentations at work then you are seriously in the minority. If you would think twice about giving your presentation to a technical audience which happened to consist of 50% women, attendees fairly evenly spanning the ages of 20 - 70, and where any one them could cause you to lose your job; then perhaps there are parts of your talk which need to be cleaned up. Just because most of your attendees are your age and gender is not an excuse to ignore everyone else. I don't care if your technology conferences are anti-professional, or volunteer run; if it's a technical conference, it should discuss technical (and related) topics; none of which need include pictures of scantily clad women or risque soft-core porn. Showing porn at conferences does make employers unwilling to send their staff to future events; and makes sponsors less willing to be associated with it also; so you've just made it harder to organise next year's event too.

Getting more women to come to a conference is a hard job; I've been doing my best (with some success) to achieve this for the Open Source Developers' Conference since 2004. Stupid talks which alienate parts of the audience make that much harder; in fact I'm not sure OSDC has recovered in that sense from 2006. :( But we're working on it. If you ever think it would be nice to have more than 2-3% of women being involved in FOSS (keeping in mind that studies suggest there's 25% women involvement in proprietary systems) then don't use porn metaphors in your talks, and don't let your friends do it either.

I try not to see many ads online. Generally they irritate me, and it's been extremely rare that the ads on non-search results have been selling something I'm interested in. (Those few times it's been because the ads were advertising a competitor to the site and product I was already looking at!)

I don't object to site owners using ads. I fully understand that many site owners provide services (such as this blog site) for free even though they incur costs such as hosting and machine maintenance. I just don't like to see them.

Regardless of the ethics in this debate, I was shocked to find out that not only does use.perl.org have ads, but that my last journal entry had a very inappropriate ad showing. My entry was about the challenges of getting more women into Perl and IT in general; not about picking up women from a dating site. I hear this is a common problem with Google Ads and feminist websites/blogs/content; as if the terms "female" and "women" can only be associated with dating. :( This is of course not the site-owner's fault, it's a failure with Google Ad-word's attempts to be relevant. It's just rather disappointing.

I've complained about the ad being inappropriate (which you can do by following the "Ads by Google" link and choosing to give feedback about that ad).

This, more than any other thing is prompting me to get around to installing some blogging software on our server and moving my primary blog there. I expect to still cross-post here, as pjf does, but probably only my Perl specific writings.

So mst has launched the Iron Man competition and really I think it's an absolutely great idea. Us Perl folk should be blogging more about Perl, and these blogs should be more easily found. The idea of a simple reward (trophy image) for blogging consistently is a great one.

However, I'm not going to get involved. I think having an incentive like the above would be great for getting me to write more regularly; but I can't get past my issue with the title. I realise that mst has every intention of including women but I don't view that as enough.

As a woman in IT, I am regularly reminded that I'm an odd-one out because of my gender. I turn up to Perl Monger meetings throughout Australia and I'm usually the only woman there. Just as with many other smallish (less than 30 attendee) user group meetings. I get reminded that I'm different because well-meaning guys say to me "It's good to have some gender diversity here". Although I don't get hassled in online forums, on mailing lists and at conferences as some of the women I know have been; it's tiring to always be made to feel different, abnormal.

The issue here is pervasive in our society. It's the perception that male is general and that female is a specific case. I suspect this is partially because in the past we used male gendered words, in some contexts, to express gender neutral concepts. "Mankind". "The patient should advise the doctor whether he may have any contra-indicating factors such as pregnancy". "God is not male, he is spirit". However, despite your intention, I (and many other people - male and female) understand these male gendered words to refer to the male gender most of the time, and not to both genders. At least in sport they're honest about it. It's "300 metre sprint" for men, and "Women's 300 metre sprint" for women. Look through your event listing next time and you'll see that the general case assumes male and the women's events are special.

So even though there are "paper women" trophies and will probably eventually be "iron women" trophies (although you'll note that there are many levels of the male versions already created); I'm not participating. I don't want yet another endeavour to constantly remind me that I'm an aberration. Maybe I'll change my mind later.

A more inclusive name might be "Iron Perl" or "Iron Bloggers" or "Iron Perl Bloggers" with the planet renamed to something equivalent. I agree with mst that "Iron Person" sounds lame. I am particularly fond of "Iron Perl Bloggers" as I feel that it's important for someone first visiting the site to have at least a hint about the site's focus.

Update:

Matt's apologised for comparing me to Paul; for swearing at me and for the fact that his response was disproportionate. It took a while, but we finally are having the productive discussion he wanted.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

Every week I deal with awesome technical women. You might not find their profiles on wikipedia, they may all not be so notable that their names are common on the other side of the globe, but these women are busy making technology work and also working in the communities around those technologies. I'm going to mention a few of them here.

Donna Ashelford is the current president of The System Administrators' Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) and has been on the exec committee for many years. She does a tremendous amount of work for the Guild as well as providing vision and forward planning. In her day-job Donna is a Information Services Manager at the University of Queensland where she still dabbles in tech but mostly manages people and resources. If these weren't enough, Donna generously gives of her time to assist in fostering pets for the RSPCA and thus has a household menagerie to come home to every night.

Donna Benjamin is the president of Linux Users Victoria (LUV) and the proud founder of monthly Linux Beginner workshops for the benefit of all. She is tireless in her promotion of Linux and Open Source; jumping in to be the head organiser of linux.conf.au 2008, being involved with the yearly Software Freedom Day events in Melbourne, working closely with the Victorian Information Technology Teacher's Association (VITTA) running workshops to showcase open source, a committee member of the Open Source Industry of Australia (OSIA), organiser of the Melbourne OSIA meetings, and is now looking at writing a book! Donna is a regular speaker at all sorts of events and has even keynoted internationally. Together with her husband, Peter, Donna runs a small business Creative Contingencies providing FOSS solutions to a wide range of businesses.

Mary Gardiner, in conjunction with a small team, nutures AussieChix (which she founded) the Australian chapter of LinuxChix. She arranges AussieChix events in Sydney, has meet-ups before Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG) to increase the number of women attending the meetings and pioneered the LinuxChix mini-conferences at linux.conf.au which have dramatically increased the number of women attending that conference. Mary is an excellent presenter and has spoken at a variety of events including both academic and non-academic conferences. When she's not promoting women in FOSS, programming in Python, or helping with code analysis, Mary is busy working to finish her PhD as a computational linguistics researcher.

Pia Waugh is probably Australia's most famous female FOSS geek. I expect she's in the top 10 famous Australian FOSS geeks. It's well deserved. Pia works tirelessly in the promotion of open source, women in open source and accessibility. She runs workshops to show teachers how to use FOSS such as Ubuntu, is the director for One Laptop Per Child Australia where she's been involved in sharing this vision with our more disadvantaged communities, is the president of Software Freedom International (who oversee the Software Freedom Day events), and was the Vice President of Linux Australia for 5 years, stepping down a year ago. Pia is a superb and entertaining speaker. Pia, together with her husband Jeff, runs a small business Waugh Partners, which provides both high level ICT planning advice as well as customised FOSS-focussed solutions.

I've only met Alice Boxhall relatively recently. Alice works for Google and is encouraged in that work to participate in events which encourage more participation and interest in IT, particularly from those of school age. This means Alice has been involved in events such as Go Girl Go for IT and also in running a 1 day micro-conf for the AussieChix held simultaneously in Melbourne and Sydney with video-teleconferencing.

There are more women I'd love to add, but I need to get some work done.

As I write this list I realise that I would struggle to compile a similar list out of my many male colleagues. All of these women are technically brilliant, but it's their passion for sharing that makes them especially wonderful. Rather that just being inspiring programmers and technologists, these women are also making a big difference to the communities they participate in by taking active roles to make things happen. This is a precious gift to these communities and one which deserves more kudos than are often given out. These women are an inspiration to me, every week.

For more write-ups of inspiring women, check out:

• Geek Feminism
• The Ada Lovelace Collection
• Google's blog search

9 months ago, brian_d_foy reported that YAPC::NA 2009 was to be held in Pittsburgh. Their bid certainly sounded convincing. So where's the hype for this conference that's supposed to be running 4 months from now?

A search for YAPC::NA::2009 Pittsburgh PA gives the Google calendar event but it points at http://yapc10.com. Oddly that seems to belong to the "Paris Perl Mongueu(r|se)s". The Perl Foundation YAPC page is bare on details and just references the Google calendar event (as above).

Where can I find out more about this conference? I want to go, and if I could find a CFP (and it was still open) I'd submit. Any suggestions? Perhaps YAPCs are run in a shorter timeframe than I'm used to?

Update:

Unless the list has changed its address since November, it appears that there hasn't been much chatter on the YAPC::NA Organisers list.

On the other hand, going deeper into search results suggests that Casey West just yesterday (February 22nd) promises the website launch tomorrow (Tuesday 24th February 2009) with the CFP "mid-week" so presumably Wednesday. His promised website http://yapc10.org/ is also in use by the Paris Perl folk, but perhaps that's just temporary. I guess YAPC::NAs are run to a shorter time-frame than we do in Australia.

Last November, I went to Canberra for a week. That would be unremarkable, but it looks to start the busiest 3.5 months of travel so far in my life. I think this will be the busiest 12 months too.

So week of training in Canberra, week home working on my OSDC talk. Then first week of December in Sydney for OSDC. Week home to recover. Week in Perth for training. 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Years. Another week in Perth for more training (different client). Week home to prepare for LCA. This week and half of next in Hobart for LCA. Home for a week and a half (in time for my birthday). Then off to New Zealand for a week and a half (Wellington, Rotorua, Auckland, Warkworth), home for a day, then to Newcastle/Maitland for a week and a day. I think that gets me back to Melbourne by the 25th February. That's 6.5 weeks home and just over 8 away.

If everything goes well, we'll be off to Sydney for the second week of March too, and so on for at least one week a month until June. From mid-June to late August/early September I hope to be off overseas for more conferences, holiday etc. In particular I hope to get to:

• YAPC::NA
• OSCON
• YAPC::EU
• Any European Perl mini-confs/workshops which are proximate to YAPC::EU

Wow.

If you will be running something in North America between mid-June and the end of July, and you might like Paul and/or I to speak at it; please contact us. If you will be running something in Europe between early August to early September etc, please contact us.

If you want to host us any nights on our journey, that could be awesome too.

As a bit of background Bernadette McMenamin (chief executive of child protection group Child Wise) seems to be a big supporter of the Australian Senator Conroy's plans for mandatory internet filtering. Back in January this year, McMenamin suggested that no decent person would oppose Conroy's filters to protect the children. A couple of weeks ago she said:

"[T]hose who are aware [of all the facts] are, in effect, advocating child pornography."

I am not advocating child pornography. This is my response.

G'day Bernadette,

I am an IT professional and have been for almost 10 years now. Understanding how computers work, how networks work, how ISPs work and in particular understanding what is and is not possible is an important part of my job. I'm also a member, and an executive member of the System Administrators' Guild of Australia. This guild exists to cater to the needs of the people who manage everything from their company's machines, through to networks, through to ISPs. The members of this guild, collectively, know pretty much all there is to know about how networks, computers and ISPs work in Australia; and are very able to identify what is and is not possible.

I object to Senator Conroy's internet filtering proposals on the following grounds:

1. It cannot work. It really can't. It's not technologically feasible. If there was some magic way to only filter out the bad stuff and not accidentally filter out good stuff (or instead accidentally let through bad stuff) that magic way would be usable to avoid spam. Filtering will make it harder for innocent people to accidentally find the bad stuff (although I'd contend that it's pretty hard to "accidentally" find it in the first place). On the other hand, those who want to find it, will still find a way. They'll use Tor, or a VPN hosted overseas or some other method not being blocked.
2. Even if it could work, what would be blocked? Those serving illegal content move their content around. Today it might be on www.illegalporn.com and tomorrow it'll have moved to www.i113g41pr0n.com and the next day it'll be somewhere else. How can a black list possibly keep up?
3. If we know the sites which need to be blocked, why can't we just spend the money on a) having them taken down and b) prosecuting the people who created them in the first place? Don't we have international treaties for this purpose? Preventing people from seeing child porn doesn't reduce the abuse to the child, although I concede that it might (hopefully) discourage such an interest in the first place.

Having these objections does not mean I'm advocating child pornography and I'm really sick of you and Senator Conroy saying that it does. I understand the technological issues very well and if there was a good, workable solution, I'd be putting it forward. Anyone can see that there's a lot of money in coming up with a good, workable solution, but instead of throwing up hundreds of ideas to solve the issue; the IT community at large is a) asking for more details because what we have so far doesn't look workable or b) criticising the plan because what we've been told so far doesn't look workable. The IT community at large, the ISPs, the systems and network administrators aren't advocating child pornography; they're not arguing for a free internet at any cost; they are giving a consistent message: this cannot work. Any attempt to go ahead with the plan will result in a slower internet for everyone without preventing anyone with any access to a technical professional from obtaining the material they want.

All the best,

Jacinta Richardson