I generally like MetaCPAN better than search.cpan.org, but as fREW mentioned in Using search.cpan.org AND metacpan, the latter’s search result ranking algorithm is far superior to the former’s. So fREW’s idea was to use GreaseMonkey – or actually not GreaseMonkey – to rewrite the links in search.cpan.org search results so that he could use that site for searching, but go to MetaCPAN for everything else. In fact though, he used dotjs and took advantage of the built-in jQuery it ships with. Thus his script does not work with vanilla GreaseMonkey.
Here is a version that does. As a bonus, above and beyond fREW’s version, it also only rewrites the distribution and author links rather than just the module links.
We read on Twitter etc. that many attendees were on their way to
Frankfurt. Now we knew that YAPC::EU arrived ;-) Our crew met at the venue to prepare the event: check the rooms, build the paper seats, prepare registration desk, print a lot of stuff like the name badges, hang the signs and banners, prepare conference bags with proceedings and the eGENTIC flyers and much more.
After the preparations we headed to the pre-conference meeting at Café Extrablatt where we enjoyed the weather and cool drinks. We assume that there were about 200 Perl people at the meeting. Those pre-conf meetings are always a good chance to chat with old friends and conference newbies ;-)
Some of you may have noticed that the blogs.perl.org front page recently acquired a new “Page 2” link. This is a feature we’ve been wanting for quite some time, to help readers scan back through the thousands of entries our users have posted in the nearly three years we’ve been running.
As ever, we’d be delighted to hear about any problems you find with this (or any other aspect of the site), as well as your ideas for making the site better. Please get in touch with us, or raise an issue on GitHub.
A couple days ago, a comic strip was posted to Perlmonks that really got up my nose. For those of you who don’t want to bother linking through, the strip compares Perl with Moose to Perl having a “boob job”, then wanders off into creepy territory because sexualization and creepiness are really, really funny, right?
This bothers me, as it’s not friendly to the women in our community – and I said so. You can read the response I’ve gotten so far. They’re all pretty much ignoring the fact that sexualizing a computer program (with the added implication of large breasts being equivalent to personal value) is exactly the kind of thing that makes women feel unwelcome by focusing on “well, ‘boob job’ is a perfectly fine term” and “I bet you do feel uncomfortable imagining you’re female!”. (By the way, no, I don’t. This is that funny thing called “empathy”.)
This is an idea I've discussed with Gabor (szabgab++) during the last conferences - we could use perlito as a tool to write educational pages about perl, that would embed executable code that can be modified by the reader.
There is a possible alternate implementation, use remote execution in the server. But I like the idea of running the code in the browser.
This perl in the browser would be a "full" perl implementation (not necessarily fast), with I/O redirected to local variables or even local storage. Modules would be loaded from a remote "lib" using HTTP requests.
Here is an older article that shows the basic idea. This is in portuguese, it was written for Sao_Paulo.pm using perlito6.
It all started with the Cluj.pm summer meeting on the 9th of August. I happened to be around there, so popped in. Cluj.pm is a refreshingly young perl monger group (I might even have been older than the average age there, that's a first for me). At first I didn't know anyone, other than the guest speaker Mark Keating, but after my presentation I had lots of people approaching me and I had a brilliant evening.
A short week later I flew to Germany, for the Perl Reunification Summit in Perl. Like Schwern I arrived a day earlier than most, so I had a calm start of the meetup. It was mostly a gathering of familiar to me faces, though a significant number I hadn't really spoken to before, specially the Perl 6 guys, -Ofun attracts awesome people. I spent most of the PRS talking to people, and doing a little coding (both related and unrelated). It was a very enlightening meetup.
I think some people did not interpret my last post correctly, I think I hated YAPC::EU::2012 (or at least, that is what I understand from Gabor comment on his Perl Weekly). Well, no, the post points three things I did not like, meaning that everything else was fun.
But I would like to point some details. First, congratulations to the organizers for the courage to prepare proceedings. Of course I was angry because the article I took some time to write was not there. Also, because although I mailed the organizers, they did not answer or said anything. Nevertheless, I like the idea of having proceedings for YAPC::EU. Not like the mojolicious article with screenshots of the slides, but like mostly all the others articles. And the proceedings are with great quality, both in printing, paper and design. I hope they make the final PDF available as well (paper is hard to find after some months).
Perlybook.org serves you all the docs available on CPAN as a handy ebook. For the Kindle Reader it achieves this with the help of the module EBook::MOBI.
This module now got an update (v0.5). Before it was just useful for translating POD into an ebook (which is awesome). But now its even better... you can write plugins for any input format.
So is there anybody interested in the ability for converting e.g. Markdown directly into an ebook? If you feel like such a feature would be cool, you are very welcome to contribute a plugin (for what ever format you like).
For now there is just a plugin for POD. More would be great.
Please see the modules documentation for more information or directly join the project at github. Feel free to contact the modules author (me) if you have questions.
At some point in YAPC::Europe I was showing the perlito5 compiler to stevan++, and we discussed how it could be used to prototype grammar extensions to Perl5.
Perlito grammar is mostly written in simple perl, without extensions (in some places there are still remains of the original perl6 grammar, but these are being cleaned up.)
I've shown stevan++ how named arguments were implemented in perlito6, and how to port the feature to perlito5. We also discussed how to run perlito5 over perl5 using a source filter, in the same way that "v6.pm" works.
Later, leont++ on #p6p5 was investigating how to add macros to perl5, and we discussed briefly how macros could be added to perlito5. The compiler already uses macros internally, so it should be a matter of exposing this as a language feature.
For now let's start with the latest release. It actually happened in May 2012 but we had some polishing cycles to get the CPANTESTERS matrix green. Thanks to the CPAN testers people for helping us there. The rest was quite the usual amount of work thet made me forget the announcement.
Here we go:
She's mad at everybody. She's even mad at the ice cream man.
"Why does the ice cream truck have to come just before lunch
or just before dinner, spoil the children's appetite?"
I have to listen to that. I hear that 3 time a week, you know
that's 12 times a month.
I'm now back in Paris after a week in Germany. I was attending YAPC::Europe 2012 and the only negative thing I can say is that it was hot. Sitting in stuffy rooms on a hot day with no air conditioning is not fun, but obviously this is not something the organizers had any control over.
Corion did a fantastic job of organizing the conference and when the main hotel wasn't available for me, he found a hotel close to a zoo so that my wife and daughter could have something to do. I wish I could have joined them, but skipping conference days wouldn't have been very respectful given the work the conference did to have me there.
As some of you may know, my partner Wendy van Dijk and me organized a Perl Reunification Summit on the Friday and Saturday before the YAPC::Europe. Organizing this started in May already, when I tried to contact as many people face to face to discuss this, before finalizing the plan. When the plans more or less got final, I basically sent this email to the people I had not been able to contact personally yet. Since it explains a lot of my reasoning for having the Perl Reunification Summit, I thought I’d share this mail with you.
As of April this year, I’m on indefinite sabbatical. So I have time to worry about other things than $work. And I worry about the future of Perl.
I’ve participated in some discussions about running perl on small devices during the Perl Reunification Summit and YAPC::Europe.
The targets would be java/dalvik, objective-c/ios, and arduino. There is some work going on by Martin Berends (mberends++) on arduino, and Claes Jakobsson (claes++) on the jvm. Claes is working on reading and writing .class files.
We’ve discussed how they could use one of the Perlito parsers to implement a prototype, using either the ast-perl5 or ast-perl6 output:
I uploaded a new module to CPAN, because none of the existing options were right to me, and then I subsequently found a good few more modules.
While working on my review of modules for getting dependency information, I came across a few modules which take the path to a module and parse the source to extract information. In writing my synopsis style scripts, it would be much easier to pass a module name. So I started hacking on one of the modules (Module::Used). I needed a function to take a module name and return the path for the first module found in @INC. Previously I've written such a thing, using File::Util::SL to get the right directory path separator. Time to look on CPAN.
First I searched metacpan for 'module path', but didn't immediately find anything. After a bit more digging I found Module::Filename:
It was officially announced a few days ago that the next YAPC::Europe will be held in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Have you also heard that Kiev is the best city in the world? :-)
Let me share some basic information we've got today about the conference, almost a year before it.
There are three main persons behind the conference: Yaroslav Korshak, Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi and me. Together (in different combinations) we've organised about 30 Perl workshops and conferences in 7 countries. In 2007, I started the YAPC::Russia series and in 2011 I received the White Camel Award because of doing that. The recent conferences in Kiev, including YAPC::Russia codenamed Perl Mova and the Black Perl are the ones organised by these two guys, Yaroslav and Viacheslav. They did an excellent job this year gathering ~200 attendees and inviting a few foreign speakers.
So, why don't you write a blog? A question I have been asked many a time in the past years.
I guess I mainly felt that I didn't have to tell the world much. And I was busy with $work.
Then you stop $work and start with $sabbatical. And start acting on the strange ideas that you developed over the years. Then you're asked to really start a blog this time. Really. And then you commit to that.
So here's my first post on blogs.perl.org. Not a lot of content yet. But it's a start. And more will be coming shortly.
I've just released new versions of my use.perl distributions, WWW-UsePerl-Journal and WWW-UsePerl-Journal-Thread. As use.perl became decommisioned at the end of 2010, the distrubutions had been getting a lot of failure reports, as they used screen-scraping to get the content. As such, I had planned to put them out to pasture in BackPAN. That was until recently I discovered that Léon Brocard had not only released WWW-UsePerl-Server, but also provided a complete SQL archive of the use.perl database (see the POD for a link). Then combining the two, he put up a read-only version of the website.
Accounts of a Perl Reunification Summit surfaced on #perl6 and then later in tweets (1, 2) and blogs (1, 2). For more, tune in to the #p6p5 twitter hashtag and/or the #p6p5 IRC channel on irc.perl.org. #p6p5 #news
masak said "TimToady is now working actively on STD_P5.pm6". (TimToady is Larry Wall, the author of all versions of Perl, including 5 and 6. STD_P5.pm6 is a Perl 5 parser written in Perl 6.) #p5 #news
Disclaimer: This list is no ways complete. It does not mean that I didn't like what I forgot to mention. :-)
The Streuselkuchen. The coffee. The snacks. The drinks. THE ICECREAMS.
How the essential things worked like charm. The Germans are winners. :-) This is no news to the fans of the English Football Team. Thank you very much, organizers. (bow)
The lunch break in the city park.
The Talks. The broad range of interesting topics. The "informativeness" of the talks. (I have not attended one single talk where I had the impression that the speaker gave the talk to hear himself speak.) I used the feedback forms for individual feedback, and so should you, I think. It's about talking to people rather than about them (publicly). Nice things can always be said, so again: Thank you, speakers! ;-)
The cool air in the Frankfurt.pm auditorium which escaped from a bunch of holes in your front neighbour's seat. Put your fingers inside and feel the cool breeze!
