[Cross-posted by invitation from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog.]

1960: The ALGOL 60 spec comes out. It specifies, for the first time, a block structured language. The ALGOL committee is well aware that nobody knows how to parse such a language. But they believe that, if they specify a block-structured language, a parser for it will be invented. Risky as this approach is, it pays off ...

Want to install Net::SSLeay on a Debian or Ubuntu system that you don't have root on, and doesn't have `libssl-dev` installed? Let me see if I can save you some time...

You are going to need to keep a compiled version of libssl around, and so you need to decide where that will live: I went for: `~/perl5/alien`...

mkdir ~/perl5/alien-src mkdir ~/perl5/alien

cd ~/perl5/alien-src

apt-get source lib64z1-dev # Or the 32 bit version
apt-get source libssl-dev

cd zlib-1.2.3.4.dfsg/ # Or whatever it is
./configure --prefix=~/perl5/alien
make
make install

cd ..

cd openssl-1.0.1/ # Or whatever it is
# These options took me approximately 15 years to figure out
./config shared -fPIC --prefix=~/perl5/alien
make

The Alps, Western region. Northern Switzerland. Halfway between Zurich and Basel. Here you can find Olten, a nice little city which these last few days had an unusually high concentration of Perl aficionados roaming its streets. I'm talking about this year's Swiss Perl Workshop, the second incantation ever, and a very successful one.

"There is more than one way to enjoy it" is a slogan of YAPC::ASIA 2014. This is also another way that you can enjoy my story from photo on My Photo Gallery

The YAPC::EU 2015 conference in Granada will officially begin on Wednesday Septermber 2nd and will end on Friday 4th.

We also encourage you to be in Granada by Tuesday September 1st: we will be having other interesting events to warm up before the conference. For instance, if you'd like to use the venue to organize a meeting, a hackathon or a workshop just drop us a line.

In any case, make sure you don't miss the pre-conference meeting on Tuesday evening.

Most of my recent blog posts about Mojolicious have revolved around its non-blocking capabilities. I like to write about those because I think that it is those capabilities that can bring new eyes to Perl from other languages, much like Node.js brought eyes to server-side javascript (for the same reason). That said, lately I have had excuses to show off Mojolicious and when I have done so, it has been some of the other cool features that have garnered the “Ooooh”s and “Aaaah”s from onlookers.

In this article I will show you some of those extras, like accessing your generated pages and even app itself direcly from the command line. I will also show how testing can be easy, powerful, expressive and yet still readably beautiful.

This year, the Swiss Perl Workshop was held at the Flörli Olten, an old Town Villa turned into a meeting house. The atmosphere at this place was just incredible. The beautifully renovated rooms and an on site catering team gave the whole event the feel of a big happy family gathering. A big thank you to Matthias and Roman and Daniela and her kitchen team. I am already looking forward to next years edition.

As I'm an awardee from the Sand-A-Newbie program to attend YAPC::ASIA in Tokyo, Japan. This is my blog about what I have got so far and would like to share:

A Newbie is Sent in YAPC::ASIA

Hope you enjoy it ! :)

Well another pleasant day here in Olten and we started off with a talk by Laurent Dami about a project he has been working on for the Swiss courts system that allows admins access to CRUD a database that should not really ever be changed. ‎The key tto with was a mod called App::AutoCRUD‎ that allows the admins to see and manipulate data via a simple web interface that allows the specialized grouping and sorting required by the data and allows single and bulk operations. I(f you want to see a simple and elegant design that uses Plack and an ORM that isn't DBIx::Class it is well worth the look.

Perl community has moved away from using special predefined Perl variables such as $(, $), $:, $!, $^H, $/ or many others without explicitly commenting their purpose. But why are we still using shift for sub params? i.e.:

sub foo {
    my $bar = shift;
}

Why is it still fine within the community to skip the @_ ? If we promote shift, then lets use pop as well? Why not? it looks nice:

sub foo {
    return pop, shift;
}

My focus is Perl used in web development. I am creating a "Perl Kata" (curriculum) for the CoderDojo project in an attempt to teach Perl the right way to younger programmers.

I’m pleased to announce the release of USPS::RateRequest 0.0100. We’ve been developing this module in-house at The Game Crafter for a couple years now. It’s much faster than Business::Shipping, because it submits multiple simultaneous requests to USPS rather than doing them in series. And it’s more accurate than your typical request because it uses the result of Box::Calc to determine the exact dimensions and weight of each parcel. I hope by releasing this to the greater Perl community, you can enjoy on your online shops some of the benefits we have enjoyed by using this module. 

[From my blog.]

Well we started out today with a key-note (if a workshop has a keynote??) talk by Brian d Foy, you can see the slides here, and from the first few you will think it is just a blurb on regexs etc but fortunately Brian quickly left that rather overdone (and in my case dreaded) subject on how we can build up the Perl community. What it breaks down to is that you will never gain any notoriety out there re-doing what was already done you have to take on something that is either 'Boring', 'Tedious', or 'Hard' and hopefully stick with it until it is done.

The Talk as a whole was interesting and Brian did a very good job
on what needs to be done to fill the whitespace of Perl and if we do fill it up the community will be better of it.

I'm about to present to the Swiss Perl Workshop this idea that David Farrell and I have been working on.

And, now it's published on PerlTricks.com

If you use DBIx::Class in a production setting and just happen to have a substantial test suite - this post is for you.

TL;DR: Recent development in DBIC required the introduction of a subsystem that turned out to be much more complex than initially envisioned. While it *seems* that all the kinks have been worked out, the failure modes are so un-graceful (dis-graceful?) that the latest trial is in need of extra testing before it can be deemed ready for production.

Therefore if you are in a position to validate that everything behaves as expected, without the risk of taking your production to the fjords (did I mention substantial test suites?) - please help those in less favorable situations and test the thing before it goes live.

You can install the trial by any of the following methods:

HARNESS_OPTIONS=j4 cpan R/RI/RIBASUSHI/DBIx-Class-0.082700_06.tar.gz
or
HARNESS_OPTIONS=j4 cpanm -v DBIx::Class@0.082700_06
or by grabbing the tarball and doing it old school
http://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/R/RI/RIBASUSHI/DBIx-Class-0.082700_06.tar.gz

While the current version is deemed safe, I am being extra cautious because of recent history. So what exactly happened (and what went wrong)?

As I talked during YAPC::EU with fellow Perl 6 fanboy mäsak about his (GOTO considered awesome) and mine (Perl 6 operators) recent talk I just summarized something I said and something he said and its just one little thought you might find nice too: Because normally as programmers we see it as as best practice from engineering point and so called best practices to have small manageable units (blocks, sub's classes,) and link them together as loosely as possible.

As we prepare to do a series of talks on Platform as a Service (PaaS) at the next MadMongers, I felt this article on Anti-Paterns for PaaS would be a nice share.

[From my blog.]

Yesterday I have written a post about searching a new sponsor for strawberry perl project.

And today I am pleased to announce that Enlightened Perl Organisation (EPO) has kindly provided our project with resources described in my previous post and is our new sponsor for the next 12 months. I would like to thank Mark Keating for arranging the funding.

If you are also considering supporting strawberry perl project you can still do it indirectly by becoming EPO member or via donating EPO.

I have a directory full of stuff that I've recorded off the radio. I'd like to listen to it on my phone on the way to work. And the most convenient way to do that is to create a podcast of that directory. That way, whenever I record more stuff, I just have to update the podcast and the files magically appear on my phone.

I am, of course, far too lazy to edit XML by hand, and I want something that will work in a terminal. I was surprised that I couldn't find anything like this. Well, I could. It was 1300 lines of PHP. I've not got anything against PHP, but 1300 lines of code for such a simple task? Really?

Here's my version. Tell it a source directory, a target directory, and the address of that directory in HTTP-land, and Bob's yer uncle.

SYNOPSIS

perl -d:Confess $( which dzil )  release

If you are using development tools like https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Confess or https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::cst, and are trying to figure out how to use them with applications with a shebang like dzil, plackup, etc, the 'which' command is your friend. Invoking those scripts with perl should be effectively the same thing, and you can pass whatever switches you want to pass to perl.

See the comments for other ways to achieve the same thing.