blogs.perl.org

I got a text at 8:00am:

"Hey, can you jump on a conference call?"

Groggy and disoriented, I blearily type the conference line and enter my passcode, followed by the pound or hash sign. At the tone, I would be the 6th person to enter the conference. Tone.

"The app is down, and trading has stopped."

As I mentioned in my last blog post it would be really great if we were to get into the Google Summer of Code for 2015. We had an extremely succesful 2014 and being a part of this event again would be good for the community and for Perl.

However to do that we need a stack of ideas of projects, modlues or code for the students to look at and then choose. We need mentors to volunteer and we need people looking for students. We have a week to really flesh out the ideas page.

Currently the ideas are on a wiki and you need to contact myself or Paul Johnson to be added as an editor. However if that seems to onerous, you can just add them to this Google Doc which has been set to freely edit.

So I need your help, I need people with ideas or plans to help improve Perl, a Perl project or library, a documentation project, or build a whole website for a project, tackle some fun features. Which means I need you.

Please spread the word, join the mailing list and get involved.

-mdk

We’re happy to announce that GFU Cyrus AG will sponsor the Perl QA Hackathon 2015.

Originally founded as GFU Cyrus + Rölke mbH in 1980, GFU Cyrus AG is now one of the best-known IT training companies in Germany.
Several thousand IT specialists from all over the Federal Republic of Germany visit seminars at GFU every year. The program includes more than 1000 different seminars.

We're happy to announce that STRATO has decided to sponsor this year's QA Hackathon.

If you live in certain parts of Europe then you will probably have heard of STRATO, but others might not. STRATO is an ISO 27001-certified hosting provider with its headquarters in Germany. STRATO offers domains, email and homepage packages, online storage, web shops and servers through to high-end solutions.

This evening at Sydney-PM, Nick Urbanik gave an excellent presentation about his work at a large well known Australian Internet provider, in automatically blocking malicious DNS requests in Bind based resolution servers.

His method uses Perl, Inotify and Bind.

If you have customers or external IP's making requests generating huge amounts of SERVFAIL's - his work will discover and block these requests which seem to simply waste CPU time on servers.

He has detailed his work and published his code at his personal website

Maybe you know the feeling… you go to add an option to that method or subroutine and… cue Jaws theme

sub update_shopping_cart {
    my $cart_id        = shift;
    my $item           = shift;
    my $quantity       = shift;

Argh. You don’t want your legacy code to break but you also don’t want to add a fourth unnamed parameter to the existing problem. And the solution is simple:

more

Following the recent announcement of the QA Hackathon, we're happy to announce that Infinity Interactive have signed up to sponsor this year's event. Their support means that we can invite more people to attend, and lets us focus on the work rather than the money.

You might have heard of Infinity Interactive, and you're even more likely to have heard of some of their employees. Just in case you haven't, we'd like to share some information about them.

Attention Speakers! You are invited to submit talks for the 2015 DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop, which will be held on Saturday April 11 2015, in Silver Spring, MD (same venue as last year).

As in previous years, by default talks are 20-25 minutes, which we've found is a sweet spot for most topics. We get a great variety -- enough to get a dose of newness and not overwhelm. We also welcome proposals for more tutorial-style talks of around 50 minutes. We'll take the talks and build out a two-track schedule.

Speakers of all levels are welcome! This regional meetup is great for getting your first taste of giving a community talk, sharing projects or topics that you have experience with, or even doing a first run for a talk you'll be presenting at a larger conference such as YAPC::NA 2015 in Salt Lake City! All Perl-related topics are welcome -- from beginner to advanced, from technical to social.