Matt Trout (mst) will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

A tale of systems introspection, service inference and parallel computing - how we used the Tak systems automation framework to help track a customer’s infrastructure.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

File::LinkDir 1.02 is on its way to a CPAN mirror near you.

Two changes went into this release.
- The link-file script will be installed now. (Hinrik)
- The --add-ignore option works properly now. (Matt)

I'd like to thank Philip Durbin for pointing out that --add-ignore wasn't working properly.

So you know what YAPC is? If you're reading this, you probably do.

However, there are myriad of people out there who don't know what it is. Especially people who are new. Since our company also hosts meetups and conferences on other topics, we thought it would be grrrreat marketing to let people know that we have a superb conference going on.

And so here it is: our new shiny leaflets for YAPC::Asia!

It says in the middle: "YAPC::Asia Is a Perl 'Festival'!". It explains a bit about what YAPC is, and on the backside there's a bit about what kind of people come to the conference -- especially, that you don't need to be a pro/expert Perl hacker. We have lots of interesting material even if you don't speak our lingua franca.

Oh, and we're still looking for YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 sponsors!

This might be the last entry about the perl 6 tablets for a longer time. (lot of projects and articles have to be written soon and the moose article for heise sits on the brink and no article from me in this issue of perlzeitung). The work is now gradual and you surely don't want to hear same stuff every week. Just one thought on strategy.

I still work on the appendix (F and G now) rather on the actual tablets for several reasons:

A) work for the beginner

The appedices are more structured toward questions starters might have and maybe the answers there are also easier to find. This helps to bring more people to Perl 6 and for more sophisticated musings are still the specs there, which are much easier to read, once you have every term there explained in the glossary of the tablets.

B) have to learn myself

MediaMath is sponsoring YAPC::NA 2012, and best of all, they’re hiring!

Folks used to refer to perl as 'the duct tape of the internet'. It still totally is.

I've started posting perl (and other) portland and/or telecommute jobs on twitter. I thought I'd also include these tweets in the 2pdx.com LinkedIn group. LI supports rss feed inclusion in the news for their groups, so it should simply be a matter of pasting in the rss url

https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/this_job.rss

into their UI. Nope. LI claims that this is not a valid rss feed. Hmm... The validator disagrees, but it does point out some warnings. Maybe LI's code just isn't up to handling that. Even if this was only an issue with twitter's feeds, "just twitter" is a rather large set of rss feeds to exclude based on an overly-strict parser. I advised them of the issue via their feedback form.

Because YAML isn't hip and trendy enough, at some point recently the toolchain started using META.json files as well as META.yml. Some foolish module authors only use META.json. Because CPANdeps didn't know about this file, their dependency graphs weren't being generated. Well, now they are. I just now pushed the updated code to the site, and you should start to see dependencies for things like DBIx::Class::Helpers, which has no META.yml.

The reverse dependencies - that is, the list of what modules depend on a particular module - will update over the next few hours.

I noticed that on the module review pages linked from search.cpan.org and metacpan.org that 'unhelpful' reviews are inaccessible. The text is contained in a div as such:

< div data-dist="module_name" id="show_unhelpful">

3 hidden unhelpful reviews

< /div>

Does anyone know if that link is expected to expand and show the unhelpful review text? I'm always interested in opinions of others, whether they be good, bad, or ugly.

Many of you are packing right now, or will be packing shortly to come to YAPC::NA 2012. Here’s a list of things that you might want to bring with you to YAPC:

From an Interview With Ward Cunningham in Dr Dobb's Journal published May 15, 2012:

I claimed a while ago that I maintained a list of pdx and telecommute jobs of potential interest to folks I know who are looking for new gigs. Well, I suck at maintaining that list. I'm going to try to make it easier to maintain by re-inventing the page as a twitter feed. The idea is that it is easier to post a couple tweets each day than to edit an html document. If it is sufficiently easier, then I might actually do it regularly.

If you use twitter, follow @this_job. If you use rss, subscribe to https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/this_job.rss. If you prefer email updates, well I'm sure there is some service out there which will turn twitter streams or rss feeds into email. Actually, I think twitter started doing that themselves.

We'll see if this experiment works any better.

Hi Folks

After an email discussion with Kim Ryan, author of Locale::SubCountry, and a recent exchange on this very blog, about removing Locale::Country::SubCountry from CPAN, I've released WWW::Scraper::Wikipedia::ISO3166 V 1.01.

It's main purpose is to ship a SQLite database of countries and subcountries, and an interface to that db.

The db can be used directly, or exported as CSV or HTML.

Pre-exported files are shipped in the distro as data/*.csv and data/*.html.

The HTML looks like this.

The Wikipedia files I downloaded are also shipped in the distro under data/*.html, to encourage you to access them locally if playing with the code, rather than hitting Wikipedia itself repeatedly.

If you think this makes the distro too big (4Mb) let me know. I can easily drop the those files.

Your first opportunity to meet everyone at YAPC::NA 2012, if you aren’t coming to the pre-conference activities like the Hackathon, will be at the Arrival Dinner on Tuesday, June 11th. If you wish to attend, you need to either add your name to the wiki page, or email Uri Guttman and let him know you’re coming. 

Hope to see you there!

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I use Perl for years, but there are some details that I still am unable to use correctly in Perl. I think they should be my fault. And probably, if I rtfm I would get an answer. Nevertheless, and although this is not perlmonks, I'll post my problem anyway.

I use local $/ = "\n\n" as record separator to read a file. The code that processes that file, uses a module, that decides to open a config file, and that expects that the record separator is a single new line. That library fails.

My main doubt is if all modules shout set the record separator explicitly, as we never know if someone changed it, or if there is any way I can change my own copy of it without messing with other modules.

Many modern browsers (including recent versions of Firefox and Opera) support the W3C's geolocation API. This is a standardised mechanism for Javascript to ask your browser where it geographically is in the world. Typically the browser will then pop up a message asking you if you wish to reveal this information, giving you the opportunity to opt out.

But how does your browser know where it is? The method that Firefox and Opera both seem to use is this:

1. They sniff data on your Wifi to figure out the local hotspots;
2. They submit the details of these hotspots to a web service run by Google;
3. Google tells them where you are.

How is Google able to figure out where you are based on local wifi hotspots? The answer is their Street View cars. At the same time that they drive around photographing streets for Street View, they also take a survey of wifi hot spots.

We’re only one week away from YAPC::NA 2012 so tonights meeting will be our last before the main event. We’ll be handing out final assignments and running down the check list.  If you’re in the Madison area, or don’t mind a drive meet us at the Essen Haus at 7pm. 

I’m not sure how much we’ll have to discuss so I can’t hazard a guess as to when the meeting will end. Getting exciting now.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

A Look At Arrays

Perl's built-in datatype, array, is a multi-purpose tool which can be used for many things. It's primary purpose is to preserve the order of data. But it comes with a powerful set of tools to make manipulating it easy. This article is to show how to use these tools by implementing a linked list.

Linked lists were originally created for languages like C which only had simple datatypes. They are a technique for using the system's memory allocation to create a data structure that allows unlimited expansion, that is, until it runs out of memory. They use a simple datatype called a pointer that records a position in memory. Without pointers, linked list would be impossible.

Perl has a datatype similar to pointers, the reference. Like pointers, it records a memory location and it can be used link them. But using references to implement a linked list the same way one would do in C, needlessly complicates the code. Linked lists can be implemented using just arrays. Here's how.

Although I'm an advocate of configuring and installing your own perl while leaving the system perl alone, I'd like to have a list of the various ways particular distros and package managers do it for the system perl.

1. The package manager program (e.g. yum, apt-get)
2. The package name(s) to get the standard distribution, including the docs, ExtUtils::MakeMaker, and everything else
3. Does that package manager allows you to configure, per-package, the installation location.
4. Discovering module packages (what is the name, version of the module, etc)
5. Your distro version, if it matters (do some distros change package managers)?

I can make a chart here if people chime in with what they know about their system. I've seen scattered hints, but no where that pulls this all together for the various major distros.

use.perl.org was a Perl-specific blogging website created by Chris Nandor and hosted at Geeknet. It was up from early 2001 until late 2010. A little over a month ago I started a project along the lines of Archive Team to save historical Perl websites and keep the content going.

I've just released WWW::UsePerl::Server to the CPAN. Using this module you can host your own use.perl.org mirror:

It comes with a MySQL database dump containing all the stories, journals and comments on use.perl.org. That way you can gain control of your content and import old journal entries into your current blog.

The useperl repository is up on GitHub.

Enjoy! Leon.