blogs.perl.org

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

YAPC::NA’s talks for Day 3 begin at 9am, with the plenary starting at 8:40am. Yesterday was a big success, but now it’s sort of sad that we’re already to day 3. Oh well, there’s always next year! Here’s to hoping that we go out with a bang in day 3.

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.]

HTML-Tree has long been a source of memory leaks for programmers who weren’t very careful with it. Because it uses circular references, Perl’s reference-counting garbage collector can’t clean it up if you forget to call $tree->delete when you’re done. Perl added weak references (a.k.a. “weakrefs”) to resolve this problem, but HTML-Tree has never taken advantage of them. Until now.

HTML-Tree 5.00 (just released to CPAN) uses weak references by default. This means that when a tree goes out of scope, it gets deleted whether you called $tree->delete or not. This should eliminate memory leaks caused by HTML-Tree.

Unfortunately, it can also break code that was working. Even though that code probably leaked memory, that’s not a big problem with a short-running script. The one real-world example I’ve found so far is pQuery’s dom.t. In pQuery 0.08, it does:

Inspired by http://www.slideshare.net/c9s/perlhacksonvim I wrote (well ... copied for the larger part) a script to open the Module currently under the cursor in vim.

Typing \fm will lookup the first Module found in available Perl library paths (plus current working directoy . '/lib')

I did search for some time and read a bit about ctags and pltags but ended up confused. add this to your vimrc

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
" find module in perl INC and edit "
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
function! GetCursorModuleName()
    let cw = substitute( expand(""), '.\{-}\(\(\w\+\)\(::\w\+\)*\).*$', '\1', '' )
    return cw
endfunction

function! TranslateModuleName(n)
    return substitute( a:n, '::', '/', 'g' ) . '.pm'
endfunction

function! GetPerlLibPaths()
    let out = system('perl -e ''print join "\n", @INC''')
    let paths = split( out, "\n" )
    return paths
endfunction

function! FindModuleFileInPaths()
    let paths = [ 'lib' ] + GetPerlLibPaths()
    let fname = TranslateModuleName( GetCursorModuleName() )

    for p in paths
        let f = p . '/' . fname
        if filereadable(f)
            exec "edit " . f
            return 1
        endif
    endfor

    echo "File not found: " . fname
endfunction

nmap fm :call FindModuleFileInPaths()

CAVEATS

• returns only the first found module
• "local" modules not found unless current working directory has the lib/ dir as child

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.

Apparently the receipt that dorm dwellers receive from the University doesn’t tell them they need to go to Chadbourne Hall. So I wanted to announce it far and wide in case anybody else gets hung up by that. 

Chadbourne Hall

420 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706-1489
Chadbourne Desk: (608) 262-2688

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

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.

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.

We welcome Net-A-Porter.com as a Gold Sponsor of this years' YAPC::Europe. Without the help of all our sponsors, the event would be almost impossible... Thanks!

Kip Hampton will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Developing for the Web shouldn’t be hard. Yet, many smart developers make it more difficult than it needs to be by choosing tools and frameworks that do not fully take advantage of all that HTTP has to offer. This talk demonstrates how projects at all levels— from the simplest brochureware site to the most advanced Hypermedia APIs—can be made simpler by getting back to the basics of HTTP. We introduce Tamarou’s internal application development and publishing framework, Magpie (scheduled for public release to coincide with YAPC::NA) and step through a series of real-world examples to show how its resource-oriented approach to development keeps simple things simple and makes hard things easier. 

Topics include:

* Why MVC is the wrong way to think about Web development.

* Why most frameworks that claim to be RESTful aren’t (and how that makes life harder)

* An brief introduction to Resource-oriented development.

* A series of production-tested Magpie recipes covering the gamut of Web-dev from simple templated sites through advanced Hypermedia applications.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

May proved quite an interesting month. Firstly, I got several confused emails relating to the Status page on The CPAN Testers Reports site. Secondly, we ran out of slots in the namespace for Amazon. And then thirdly a very involved discussion on versions on the mailing list.

This is just a reminder for you if you plan to submit a talk
to YAPC::Europe 2012 in Frankfurt.

The Talk submission deadline is 15th July 2012 (four weeks before the conference).

The latest approval notification is on 31st of July.

We will evaluate talk submissions every three weeks and accept a handful proposals. This doesn't mean that if your talk isn't approved right away, it won't be. However, the sooner you get your talk proposals in, the better chance you have of getting a talk approved and placed on the schedule.

Please also remember
that we'd like to print the proceedings, so talk handouts are important too! We think that proceedings are a good way to call back the talks you have heard and to get more information about topics you were unable to attend.

As people also had asked, the Early Bird offer will exprire early in July.

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'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.

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 just noticed in my own code that even though I am comfortable with this expression:

$a //= 123;

when the right-hand side is some function call, especially one with side-effects or big performance penalty, I tend to write:

unless (defined $a) { $a = foo() }

which is silly because // and //= short-circuits. The same case for || and ||=, et al. It's just irrational fear.

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".