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The CPAN once-a-week has been running for more than three years now, with several active leaderboards. NEILB introduced the monthly and daily releases competitions, and the notion of NeoCPANisms. CPAN.io extended the game to seven different contests, over more release types and periodicities.

Note: The CPAN.io Pulse also has [a post about what follows]((http://cpan.io/pulse/2015/02/new-cpan-board-and-all-yearly-boards.html).

The task

In the second round of the Pull Request Challenge, I was assigned Olson::Abbreviations. At work, we've been bitten by the ambiguity of the EST timezone, so I liked the general idea of the module. Moreover, there were some test failures reported at CPAN Testers Reports, so the task was clear: Make all the tests pass!

One hears that __PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable is a must all your Moose classes. ( edit, ht ribusushi: never immutate your moo classes, it'll inflate them into Moose classes automatically thus defeating the point). Here's a stark reminder of why.

I was doing some benchmarks on a web application that I've been moving from mod_perl to plack. Here's the performance of 350 requests forking off in batches of 7 before I remembered to make_immutable:

$ time perl 002-hammer_lightly.t 
# Total number of requests = 350
real    1m11.095s
user    0m3.003s
sys 0m1.336s

And after:

It is very frustrating when there is a conference you want to attend and you can't get any information about it. It is even more frustrating when you are a conference organizer receiving complaints about no news despite all your efforts to keep people informed. Here is a guide to finding out what's going on inside YAPC.

Starting with the official channels:

The first and foremost way to find out what's happening with YAPC is yapcna.org. The home page of the conference site contains a news banner that will take you to recent announcements. It also has a list of links to places you might want to subscribe to receive information.

But wait, there's more...

Moved to a new blog

I needed a simple system to monitor events. I wanted to have a system where I can specify that object with some name is 'ok' or 'fail'. And I wanted the system to be able to expire statuses. In case there is no data for the object for a long time then the status should be automaticly changed to 'unknown' — to handle situations when script that sends data breaks.

I looked for several systems, but none suited me well, so I've written my own very simple solution with the name 'curry' (it is named after delicious indian dish, not after Haskell Curry =)

Here is the source code — https://github.com/bessarabov/curry

The system is a web server that is powered by Dancer and the system is bundled into an image with Docker.

I really like this way of creating web apps with Dancer & Docker. Every time there is a new commit in git report Docker Hub automatically builds new image.

use 5.010;
{
    package F;
    sub new { bless {}, shift }
    sub me { $_[0] = 'surprise!' }
}
my $f = F->new;
say $f;
$f->me;
say $f;

Output:

F=HASH(0x7f9daa025c80)
surprise!

Teehee…

I just wrote about a program I crafted some time ago... in Perl. Happy reading if you're interested into producing smarter tarballs! The article is here.

I was just alerted by haveibeenpwned.com that my email address was leaked, and the link given was this:
https://www.quickleak.org/QtPly6aE. "Islamic Cyber Resistance Hacked blogs.perl.org to Show Support Syrian People And SEA". I can't say I follow their logic, but there's a database dump there.

Spoiler alert: If you are participating in the DFW.pm February thought exercise, this post is about my solution :)

DFW.pm challenged its members with the following exercise:

Pivot a multi-row/multi-column table, 4X4 in size for example, containing name-value pairs. Code should account for larger table sizes with any number of name-value pairs. Numbering the pairs is optional but encouraged for readability. An example would be as follows:

This is a short look at some modules for generating combinations and permutations. There are likely more modules that aren't listed. RosettaCode has examples of writing the combinations and permutations functions by hand.

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

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.

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.

It seems that I'll never really be happy with blogging.