blogs.perl.org

It's a good idea to specify the minimum Perl version required by your distribution. It's useful information for people looking at your code, it's helpful for CPAN Testers (which will report NA for old perls, rather than failing), and it makes the requirement clear to people who are trying to install your module on an older Perl.

Don't you just hate it? You've finished reading, again, that blog entry about database design and you're feeling that you can design something reasonable, and then you see this table:

You can easily see that Customer1, Customer2, and Customer3 are wrong, but what about the rest? Try as you might, you can't quite put all of the rules together that easily to figure out what's wrong with the above table.

There's a shortcut, though, and it makes it very easy to start understanding database design.

Come hang out with us at Essen Haus tonight and participate in a series of mini-talks about where Perl can go. You might be surprised. 

[From my blog.]

Sawyer X, one of the most prolific Dancer core developer and excellent
presenter, is attending the Perl::Dancer conference.

He is going to be in charge of the first training day, with the help
of other presenters.

Also, Sawyer X will also give presentations on the main conference days
on Wednesday and Thursday. He'll be around to answer your questions
about Dancer during these days.

Thanks to Booking.com for sponsoring the event and Sawyer X being there.

Please register for the conference at http://act.perl.dance/eic2014/registration.html.

Call for Papers is still open at http://act.perl.dance/eic2014/cfp.html.

If you need more information, please contact us by email (2014@perl.dance).

If your CPAN distributions aren't already on github, then I think you should consider adding them. Github is the most popular code hosting service, so it's the first place many people will look for your code.

If your distributions are on github, it makes it a lot easier for people to submit changes (like bug fixes) via pull requests. And if it's easier, it's more likely that people will.

If you do add your dists to github, then you should make sure that you give the repo in the dist's metadata and the documentation too.

Recently brian d foy wrote about compensation for conference speakers. The term "dirty secret" prompted me to write about it as well.

Isn't it amazing! There are people in the community - true celebrities, international travelers, writers of several popular books, authors of bazillion modules, record holders on stack overflow - who not only want to come to your local or not-so-local Perl event but even want to work for their compensation.
And hey, sometimes they go as far as starting a Kickstarter campaign for you to fund that work.

For the Swiss Perl Workshop 2014, brian d foy does all the above, and more. He is giving a keynote, teaching his "Become a CPAN Author in 2 Hours", hanging out at the "Hack and Talk"-Track, and whatever we come up with in the next weeks.
The best though is that he stays for another few days. On September 9 and 10 he is going to teach "Mastering Perl" in Zürich. To make the class interesting and available to even more people, he started a Kickstarter campaign.
Only few hours into the campaign, it is already doing very well:

Premise : this is my first time using PDL

Lately i had the chance to put my hands on PDL, i was glad to discover that it's awesome! I come from a matlab/octave and Mathematica background, at first was a bit difficult to dig thru the PDL equivalents functions and i have to admit that PyMC has some fancy stuff that require a lot of code to implement in PDL and i wanted to borrow in that case.

Last week I encouraged y'all to fix a bug or two on CPAN Day, either in your distributions, or in someone else's. To help you, I listed the top 20 dists by bugs.

David "never satisfied" Golden pointed out that the table would be more useful / interesting if broken down by severity. So here it is. This also reveals that a lot of tickets don't have a severity set, so on CPAN Day we should sort that out too!

Question: do you want to hear more about my attempts to create an MMORPG in Perl, even if posts are not Perl-related? Also, are you interested in helping me develop its ideas further?

As many of you know, I'm trying to create an MMORPG running on Perl. It's codenamed veure. Though I've written about it a few times here, I've not written much because many of the entries are about game design and not strictly about Perl. As a result, I've tried to avoid spamming this blog. That being said, people constantly say "stop talking about how great Perl is and build great things with it!" So I'm trying to build something great with Perl, but as most experienced programmers know, it's not so much the programming language as the business rules which are important.

And damn, business rules in an MMORPG are hard.

I am pleased to announce the release of a Marpa::R2 parser for the latest OMG IDL, version 3.5: MarpaX::Languages::IDL::AST.

The source code of the parsing itself is very small, thanks to Marpa::R2::Scanless power, and produces an AST of any IDL source, so that everybody is free to adapt it.

As an example, this module provides an experimental translation from IDL to Moose, via the script idl2moose. Indeed, perl's Moose (and its friends -;) notion of roles fit perfectly what an IDL stands for: the definition of an interface..

I imagine this can be useful for those wanting to describe what they want, without having to write something that can be automa(gi)cally generated.

Please note that this module has intentionnally no link to any CORBA implementation, leaving room to any perl implementation behing the scene.

[From my blog.]

There's a well known saying, "it takes a village to raise a child". I think our equivalent is something like "it takes a community to raise a CPAN distribution". There are very few modules on CPAN that have been purely the work of one person. You get bug reports, pull requests, feature ideas, typos reported by D Steinbrunner, and so on.

All of these interactions nudge your distribution down the road, encourage you, inspire you, and sometimes annoy you. But they all help make your distributions what they are. So on CPAN day, maybe you could acknowledge them in your documentation?

We know that as well as hearing great talks many people attend YAPC so that they can meet others who contribute to Perl, whom they may never have met in person before, and to socialise with members of the Perl community.

This year we will be starting the conference with a meet and greet session. We want everyone to get the most out of their time at YAPC and we are hoping that by setting time aside specifically so that people can introduce themselves to people they don't know that our conference will get off to a fantastic start.

Looking forward to speaking to you soon!

(I was having problem of "session timeout" after submitting the following comment. So here it is instead being a reply at Need IO::Pty help with *BSD/OSX)

I had no problem with /usr/bin/bc test on FreeBSD (FreeBSD 8.4-STABLE #1 r267149). gvl, perhaps you were thinking of dc?

01-test did fail though, not ok 13 - eof_on_pty (perl 5.18.2 compiled from FreeBSD ports).

It's time to make a decision about hosting the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop this year. We've been on the fence for quite a while. Like I said at the end of PPW last year, if the community wants it, I'll make it happen. I also made a brief call for feedback during a lightning talk at YAPC::NA this year.

Certainly, we've received some feedback. People like PPW and want to see it continue. But is that enough? I'm not sure. So, it's time to convert this into numbers. We need people that want to show up and have a good time at PPW. And, we need them to commit.

It's all too easy to take CPAN for granted, particularly the modules and distributions that just work, and continue to do so year in, year out. Take a moment to thank the author or maintainer of one of your "go to" modules on CPAN Day (16th August).

I tried this: the recipient seemed to like it, and it made me feel good too.

This year the Send-A-Newbie fund will send an attendee to two different YAPCs. We were asked in early 2014 if we could sponsor an attendee to go to YAPC Asia this year instead of YAPC::EU as it made more sense for the attendee. We agreed so we have split the available funds across the two events.

For YAPC::EU in Sofia, Bulgaria we will be sending Upasana Shukla. Upasana is a Perl programmer who firmly believes in Open Source, she is sponsored by a number of organisations to do work within the community. Last year Upasana worked as part of the Gnome Outreach programme on Moose.

"YAPC::EU will not only be my first Perl conference, but technical conference as well, so I'm wildly excited about it. Thanks to Enlightened Perl Organization, The Perl Foundation and The GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travels."

cPanel uses now the new perl compiler B::C with -O3 and --staticxs with 5.14.4 in production, and I'm outlining the next steps.

In my previous blog post I mentioned the bottlenecks of DateTime and why I had to develop Time::Moment and it's underlying c library, c-dt.

In this blog post I'll talk a bit of the design decisions I made for Time::Moment.