A new distribution is now on its way to your nearest CPAN mirror. Devel-Platform-Info provides the code framework to return metadata regarding the currently running operating system. The intention is to eventually use this metadata within CPAN Testers reports. However, the first step is to provide the means to extract the information from the operating system and return it in a consistent form (a hash) to the calling code, regardless of the operating system. There have been a few attempts on CPAN to provide 1 or 2 items of this…

On Wednesday, Birmingham.pm had their monthly technical meeting. This year we have started a different trend, in that the technical meetings now alternate between technical presentations, and hands-on discussions. While the former is the more traditional talks, slides and projectors, the latter is basically a hacking session. Wednesday night's meeting was a further hacking session, hoping to follow on the success of our April session, which resulted in identifying problems with Test-Database and SQL-Statement.

The meeting was our first at the new…

This year the YAPC Surveys have had a few updates. Every attendee now gets an email beforehand containing their personal keycode, so they can prepare the bookmarks before they get to the conference. The announcements are now part of the administration on the site, so I don't have to run everything manually, and can send repeat announcements to users who confirm late, even during the conference.

The survey will be open for 4 weeks, a…