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Someone over on the web figured out how to view the streams without Silverlight: http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/vienna-pm/2012-June/003125.html

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

So I'm in Madison, Wisconsin for YAPC::NA 2012. Yesterday, I was supposed to meet up at one of the hackathons. I went to the Pyle building and searched the rooms and even accidentally went into brian's workshop (sorry brian!).

When I got to the hackathon room, it was pretty quiet but active. I had met Robert Blackwell two days prior at a dinner and had a lovely conversation and fun time with him. Robert had brought a ton of hardware (11 hours drive!!) and set up an entire room just so we could hack on hardware. Wait. Hardware?

At this point, I should probably mention I'm not a hardware guy. I can hook up the computer, change memory sticks, and I even replaced a CPU once - but that's pretty much it. Hardware is totally out of my league. I really don't understand it, nor was I ever really interested in it.

So I'm there and I just wanna sit and work on pointless boring stuff when Robert says "hey, how about trying Arduino?"

Thanks to tinita! She started a Wiki page where you can find a list of restaurants that offer vegan / vegetarian food:

http://act.yapc.eu/ye2012/wiki?node=Food

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce a new sponsor for the CPAN Testers Project. Webfusion have provided us with Managed Hosting, for us to use with some of the supporting websites. As such, we will be using it for the Analytics and Matrix websites, as well as a secondary failover site for the Static Reports site.

Webfusion are the latest corporate sponsor to support CPAN Testers. If your company would like to support CPAN Testers, please get in touch. You can also donate to the project via the CPAN Testers Fund, managed by the Enlightened Perl Organisation.

For further details, please see the CPAN Testers Blog.

Day 2 of YAPC::NA 2012 talks begin today at 9am sharp. The banquet was a huge success last night, and yesterday’s talks had the audience buzzing. Can’t wait to see what today brings. Hopefully you’re not all hung over from The Linode Beer Garden and the Perl Foundation party last night.

Don’t forget that you can watch live on the web for free:

• Lowell Dining Room (Main Hall / Perl in the Wild)
• Pyle 325 (Perl 101 / Beginners Track)
• Pyle 313 (Anything Goes)
• Pyle Vandenburg Auditorium (Anything Goes)

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I cannot decide if I was too harsh. I try not to let the usual drone of noobs on SO to get to me. My problem was that the OP is being both ignorant AND demanding. Read the post and let me know, I'm back and forth between being enraged and contrite.

Matt S Trout will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as

Moose is one of my favourite things to happen to perl in the last five years, but the startup overhead and additional dependencies can be hard to justify for very small projects.

So I asked myself ... "what's the smallest portion of Moose that I could
get by with, that would be easy to build so that when I load Moose my
classes can transparently upgrade themselves?".

The result is Moo - which provides most of the basic syntax of Moose -
and rather than trying to reinvent the MOP part, remembers enough to
make you a Moose::Meta::Class if you decide you need one later.

In this talk, I'll go over exactly which bits of Moose it provides, which
bits it doesn't (this list is longer :), why, and how it's built from
the ground up to be the right answer to "I want something smaller than Moose".

From guest contributor brian d foy for YAPC::NA 2012: 

I’m setting up a decidedly low tech way to give newcomers special
access to Perl celebrities without the risk that their conversation
will be hijacked by all the other conference attendees who already
know that person. So far, I’ve convinced Sinan Ünür, Randal Schwartz
(merlyn), Ricardo Signes (rjbs), Karen Pauley, and Dave Rolsky to
participate. If you’d like to be one of the Celebrities for these
lunches, add your name to posterboard.

There will be a posterboard in the conference registration area
starting Wednesday morning. For each day, there will be some slots
where someone with the Celebrity’s name and a meeting time (and maybe
a food preference). Four people can put their name under the slot
they’d like to attend (and maybe we’ll add a waiting list). Meet back
at the posterboard at the chosen time and go to lunch at a place your
group chooses. That group gets an exclusive lunch and conversation with
the Perl Celebrity. Although I’m not requiring that the group cover
the lunch tab, it might be a nice gesture.

My only rule is that you should not have ever interacted with that
person, online, offline, IRL, or in any other way.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I'm pleased to announce the release of mod_perl 2.0.7, available at
the following apache.org URL, along with a CPAN mirror near you
shortly, as well as http://perl.apache.org.

This release of mod_perl contains an update for perl 5.16, see the
change log below. Thanks to the code contributor and mod_perl dev team
members who made this quick release possible!

http://apache.org/dist/perl/mod_perl-2.0.7.tar.gz
http://apache.org/dist/perl/mod_perl-2.0.7.tar.gz.asc (pgp sig)

MD5 (mod_perl-2.0.7.tar.gz) = e8b3d7b6d67505a8e3050cb9042b944b

=item 2.0.7 June 5, 2012

Fix breakage caused by removal of PL_uid et al from perl 5.16.0. Patch from
rt.cpan.org #77129. [Zefram]

I was tweaking my procmailrc today. My procmailrc recognizes a number of common pattern-based spam items and logs those into logs that I rotate on a regular basis. Anything else gets fed into a Mail::Audit-based "Sortmail" script. As I was testing a minor tweak, I noticed that the logfile for Sortmail (driven by the Mail::Audit object) wasn't getting any messages.

Long story short... I had opened the Mail::Audit logfile as "-", because I wanted it to use stdout, which in my procmailrc I had directed to the proper log.

But RJBS recently changed Mail::Audit from using the two-arg open for this name to the three-arg open for this name, and this was only apparent once I had used the CPAN diff tools (only in the source, and not documented, sadly).

Yes, I had created a 30MB logfile named "-" in my home directory. After carefully removing that file, and using an explicit filename for logfile, all was good.

But this is a heads-up for anyone else who might have presumed that "-" means stdout in Mail::Audit... you might be logging somewhere odd right now. :)

I am not sure whose fault is, but Test::Pod now verifies for characters outside ASCII, and complains a missing =encoding directive. I like this check to be done, but I do not think that breaking half of the CPAN is a good idea. It would be better to just carp for the error, but not make it fail. This would give time to authors to fix their modules. In a later release, this could be a fatal error.

Now, we have Dancer, DBI and a lot of other modules broken, not installing cleanly from CPAN.

Hi Folks

Back in 2005 I offered to host HTML and text versions of the BNF syntax for various SQL dialects, prepared by Jonathan Leffler.

He has just sent me updated versions of those docs, which are available on this page.

Cheers
Ron

You're going to go to the Moose Hackathon? You arrive in Frankfurt a few days before the event? Then you might want to do something in Frankfurt. We've set up a wiki page with some suggestions...

Unicode is getting ready to release their next version, 6.2 (likely in September). It includes only a single new character, for the new Turkish currency symbol. But there are changes to the properties of existing characters, and some of these may be of concern to Perl programmers.

A comment period on the changes has just started, closing in July. Unicode calls these PRI's, or Public Review Issues. This is a link to the page describing the changes and procedures for commenting.

The issues I think are of most interest to Perlers are the proposed changes of the Unicode General Category for a number of ASCII characters. Follow this link for a list of them. An example is U+0040 ( @ ) COMMERCIAL AT. Unicode proposes to change this to be a Symbol, instead of Punctuation. Perl code is somewhat shielded from this change, as qr/[[:punct:]]/ matches both Symbols and Punctuation in the ASCII range. However, what qr/\p{Punct}/ and qr/\p{Symbol}/ match would change, as would qr//[:punct:]]/ for non-ASCII characters.

There are other changes proposed as well. Use the first link above to get the details.

Hold on to your hats, this is going to be a wild ride! See you all at the Lowell Center for the kick off this morning at 9am sharp! Registration opens at 7am.

Don’t forget that you can watch the streams live on the web for free:

• Lowell Dining Room (Main Hall / Perl in the Wild)
• Pyle 325 (Perl 101 / Beginners Track)
• Pyle 313 (Anything Goes)
• Pyle Vandenburg Auditorium (Anything Goes)

Also, the videos are being recorded. We will be posting them somewhere, but we don’t have details yet. We’ll do another blog post after the conference to let you know where you can watch them.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I just have released the latest version of MooseX-App - a command line-app helper framework - on CPAN (see my last blog post if you want to learn more about MooseX-App). This release incorporates the feedback I have got from fellow perl mongers.

The most notable change is that not all attributes will be exposed to the CLI, but only those defined with the new 'option' keyword.

The 'option' keyword is basically just syntactic sugar for adding an attribute with a special trait which marks attributes as command-line options. The main advantage for this approach is that you don't have to explicitly prevent internal attributes - possibly originating from consumed roles deep down in your code - from being exposed to the command line.

Furthermore I have cleaned up the meta classes, making it easier to write custom plugins which can modify almost every part of MooseX-App's behaviour, and fixed a couple of bugs I have discovered while switching App::iTan from MooseX::App::Cmd to MooseX::App.

App::iTan is a little command-line application - written a couple of years ago - which helps me to manage indexed transaction authentication numbers (iTAN) for my online-banking account. Hope you like it.

We welcome urbia.com AG as a Silver Sponsor of this years' YAPC::Europe.

urbia.com AG (a company of Gruner + Jahr AG & Co KG) operates the web community www.urbia.de targeting young families with topics like pregnancy, birth, baby and parenting at its core. www.urbia.de attracts 6,5 million visits and 2,3 million unique users per month which makes us the market leader in the parenting segment in Germany.

Perl has been proudly powering our platform since 1998. In the meantime we migrated our code base to Modern Perl making use of the Catalyst MVC framework, DBIx::Class, Template::Toolkit, Moose and tons of other wonderful CPAN modules without which we would have never been so successful. To thank the excellent community and show our continuing support, we decided to sponsor this year's YAPC::EU in Frankfurt. If you're interested in joining our team in Cologne, go to http://www.urbia.de/allgemein/jobs to check out our open positions and/or contact us at jobs@urbia.com.

Part of the reason I love Perl is that it has full closures. It makes it really easy for my scientist brain to think of code references as equations. This is why I try to make my scientific software think this way too; PerlGSL is built on this concept. Its especially fun when this allows me to nest functionality to get even more complex behavior.

In this following example I find the Gaussian width needed so that the integral over it on a certain range has a particular value. Yes this is an easier example, but if the function f were more complex, this code would be no worse.

Hopefully this shows some of that power, and some of the reason I am working on PerlGSL.

I will be going into more detail on similar concepts at one of my talks at YAPC::NA later this month. See some of you there?