[Quick note: This is mostly a Git story, although there’s plenty of links to Perl code and Perl discussions.  It also turned out to be quite a bit longer story than I originally intended.  But, even though it gets pretty deep into Git features, I think it should be interesting enough for anyone who has a CPAN module and uses Git.  I hope.]

The Backstory: So, a couple months back, I look in my email and spy a message from Damian Conway.  Now, some of you fine readers probably know Damian personally, and I’m sure I’ll get several comments pointing out how he’s just an ordinary bloke and all, but to you I say: hush!  You may be all jaded and world-weary, but I’m still just a regular Perl schmoe, and when I see an email from The Damian addressed personally to me, I get all goosebumpy.  So hush up and allow me my fanboy gushes.

Would a site like vworker but perl-specific, where freelancers could pick up (small bits of) work from others in the community, have any legs?

Whoa, it's already 9/29, which is Day 2 for YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012.

This year's YAPC is going extremely well. I don't know, as an organizer I'm finding myself not having to hassle much. Something tells me we've passed a glass ceiling of sorts: I think we've reached the point where our reputation and our brand recognition is enough for the event to take life on its own. The speakers roll the show. The hallway tracks bring up the excitement. The attendees are finding more ways to enjoy the show.

I'm just going from room to room where the speakers non-Japanese, translating questions/answers, taking care of extra, unforeseen costs, checking out on our guests from abroad, and organizing the lightning talks - which may sound like a lot, but compared to previous years that I have been involved in this event, is a lot less stressful stuff.

I think that with only the minimal effort, YAPC::Asia Tokyo (or wherever in Japan) will probably be able to stand on its own.

Here's an idea (actually, Michael Schwern's idea): Custom CPAN-like repositories hosted in the cloud. Imagine if you could put all the CPAN modules that you depend on (including any proprietary modules of your own) into a private (or public) repository up in the cloud. You just send your tar.gz files into the cloud where they are stored and indexed so you can build, test, and install them with the standard Perl toolchain. Every time you build your application, you'll get exactly the same versions of those modules.

Now imagine this repository in the cloud has a version control system, so you can review changes and roll back your module dependencies like you do with source code. You can also branch and merge your dependencies to experiment with upgrades or alternative modules. You can search & read the documentation for all the modules in the repository (including your proprietary modules). And you can do all this through your web browser or right at the command line!

I must admit that I rarely feel comfortable with (web application) frameworks - each system facilitates a certain type of task but it complicates the missing parts. Good frameworks support extension via plugins, but each framework has its own plugin architecture to learn. That's why I like PSGI so much - it only specifies how to connect things. This is how PSGI looks like to me (image CC-BY-SA by CMG Lee):

This month's technical presentation at Chicago Perl Mongers was about Sean Blanton's project called App::Services. It's an interesting project that uses Bread::Board to access resources like databases, logging, ssh, and others.

Along the way, we discussed logging practices (most of us are using Log::Log4perl), and the best way to get a Perl module ready for CPAN (I suggested using Module::Build directly, but Dist::Zilla outvoted me).

Sean mentioned in passing the Salt stack for executing commands across multiple machines, which looks like a very interesting alternative to more detailed tools like Puppet or Chef. Salt seems to be just a simple way to execute commands on multiple machines. Those commands could be administrative (restart httpd), or they could be the application.

Hi all i had tried to execute the following perl script to plot tha data but i am getting ocate object method add_chart via package Spreadsheet::WriteExcel error can u help this ...!!!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Workbook;

my $workbook = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new( 'chart.xls' );
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();

my $chart = $worksheet->add_chart_ext( type => 'column' );

# Configure the chart.
$chart->add_series(
categories => '=Sheet1!$A$2:$A$7',
values => '=Sheet1!$B$2:$B$7',
);

# Add the worksheet data the chart refers to.
my $data = [
[ 'Category', 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ],
[ 'Value', 1, 4, 5, 2, 1, 5 ],
];

$worksheet->write( 'A1', $data );

test begin~

I am trying to fix some issues in Term::ReadPassword and to unite it with Term::ReadPassword::Win32.

A few weeks ago I tried to contact Tom Phoenix at his CPAN e-mail address but no response so far.

Can anyone help me get in touch with him?

I'm not a Unicode Guru, but working with third parties, I often find that a lot of people consistently fail to get the basics right about Unicode and encoding. So here's yet another set of slides about unicode/utf8 in Perl.

It's not meant to be a comprehensive presentation of all Unicode things in Perl. It's meant to insist on a couple of guidelines and give some pointers to get a good start writing a unicode compliant application and avoiding common issues.

View them here.

Hi

A couple of weeks ago I emailed the author of Tree::DAG_Node,
offering to take over maintenance, to help stop the bitrot.

I've had no response, so if anyone can contact David Hand,
or Sean M. Burke, please do so, so we can discuss this.

Alternately, in a few days I'll get the CPAN maintainers to let
me have co-maint.

Cheers
Ron

I'm quite happy to say that Beginning Perl has now been released. You can buy it on Amazon or a number of other online bookstores, and I'm guessing a few local bookstores, too. There are also a couple of translation deals, too, but they're not finalized, so I'm unsure if I can talk about them.

If you're interested in Perl but worried about the title, the book actually takes you all the way through OO programming and even has introductory sections on Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Plack, and other tools. It's fairly comprehensive.

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 is almost upon us!

Tomorrow, 9/27, is Day 0, where we will hear a few talks and have some snacks and socialize. Doors open at 17:30. Anyone with a ticket can attend this event. See the timetable here.

9/28 is Day 1. This is when YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 really starts! Doors open at 9:00, and goes all the way until 19:00. Free dinner is available starting at 19:00, at the area right next to the main hall. See the timetable here.

9/29 is Day 2. Doors open at 9:30, and we have talks all the way until 19:00! See the timetable here.

Don't forget to bring your QR codes! You can't check-in without it!

Oh, and some bad news. Apparently a tropic typhoon is on its way to hit Tokyo area right on 9/28. Bring your rainwear and/or keep checking the weather news!

If you have problems (especially with English/Japanese) please find me (@lestrrat)

I'm pleased and excited to announce that Yanick Champoux has joined the Dancer core team.

Below is a formal list of possible optimizations, which most would agree on. We had these discussion in 2001 with damian were perl6 and perl5i took off. I'd like to work on these for perl5 core and need decisions. Most p5p hackers seem to be informed about the general possibilities and directions, but not all. We'd need this to improve general perl5 performance, and also help static compilation.[1]

We had this before, so I'd like to keep it formal. So each proposal gets a perl6-like name, and replies should change the subject to that name. I choose PDD for "Perl Design Draft".

Beforehand: "compiler" means op.c not B::C. compile-time and run-time should be obvious.

PDD01 const / readonly lexicals

The CONST op currently is a SVOP, holding a global gvsv. A CONST op might hold lexicals also, a PADOP type. The more constants the compiler knows at compile-time the better it can optimize. The following datatypes need to be represented as const:

As some of you may know, I gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 about Agile Companies. Due to some miscommunication, the video is not online (yet), but I'm trying to get that sorted.

Today I checked an email folder I don't read frequently and discovered that the survey feedback on my talk came in:

• Q1: Your prior knowledge of subject?
• Q2: Speaker's knowledge of subject?
• Q3: Speaker's presentation of subject?
• Q4: Quality of presentation materials?
• Q5: Overall presentation rating?

SocialFlow is a leading social media marketing company offering businesses and brands a solutions-based approach to connecting paid, owned and earned social media strategies.
/about

2012 has been a great year for us, thanks to the hard work and collaboration of incredibly smart people on the development as well as the business side.

We launched socialflow.com in February , and have built up an unbelievable list of clients ( Pepsi, The Economist, National Geographic, The Washington Post to name a few ) who use and love the product.

We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff geared up for 2013 and we need some good developers to help us build it.

This position is for someone who enjoys solving real problems for real clients across a wide spectrum of web development, from schema design to client side mobile browser optimization.

We're about 70% a perl shop, 30% python.

Some of the many open source projects we use:
perl: Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose, App::Cmd, Dist::ZIlla
python: cherrypy, fabric, pycassa, thrift, psycopg2

It's going to happen!

Stay tuned. Updates follow!

Cheers,
Maettu & Roman

[cross posted from its original blog]

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl5-porters email list. Once again subroutine signatures dominated the list. I'll put all of the discussion about them at the end of this summary. I've added an "official" license to these summaries. It's Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0. You can find the summary of rights granted by that license by following that link. The full license text is available in the github repo. Obviously, the content of emails quoted here are owned by their respective authors.

This week's dusty thread is CALL FOR DOCS: how to dual life? from the week of August 6, 2012. Rik was looking for a volunteer to document the process of dual-lifing core code. He specifically called out Tie::Scalar and Time::local. Anyone have any insight into this? Contact Ricardo Signes.

This week's quote of the week is about an epic csh behavior relating to getcwd. As if you needed more reasons to avoid csh.

How often have I told myself, "I'll kludge this now and rewrite it later"? And how many times did I actually go back and rewrite that kludgy bit? "Too often" and "not enough". Many job postings include the phrase "update legacy applications," as a euphemism for "rewrite poorly-designed spaghetti." The Y2K problem was a huge exercise in code out-living the developer's plan, with a healthy dose of cargo-culting thrown in. Lately, I've been learning to plan for a likely possibility: My code will survive to haunt my bug lists and my resume for a long time.