Do you remember when I stood up in front of the entire audience at YAPC::NA 2011 and told the whole room that I was going to post a blog entry about YAPC every single day between YAPC::NA 2011 and 2012? And the whole crowd broke out into laughter? Heh. Yeah that was funny, but I made it! Now you know that when I tell you I’m going to do something, it gets done! Woot!

Seriously though, thank you for laughing. It strengthened my resolve and pushed me to follow through with the claim. Also, thank you for choosing me and the MadMongers to run YAPC::NA 2012. We’ve had an absolute blast planning it.

In other news, YAPC::NA 2012 starts tomorrow! Holy cow being eaten by a raptor! I can’t believe it’s finally here. Can’t wait to see you all tomorrow. Safe travels.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

To better fit CPAN's naming conventions, Reddit::API has been renamed to Reddit::Client. As there are no dependencies in the reverse lookup graph, Reddit::API is scheduled for deletion.

Reddit::Client begins its life at 0.02 with mostly complete unit tests (thanks for the footnote, Gabor), some refactoring, and a few bug fixes. Enjoy!

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012 is now accepting talk proposals!

If you would like to participate in the World's Largest YAPC, now is your chance!

This image is from http://www.thersa.org/events/video/animate/rsa-animate-the-power-of-networks

See also my tweet and Google+ post about this video.

Update for Sun May 27 10am-ish EDT. . . Whoops, I should have included Stevan Little in the title of this post:

He's unnamed Perl contributor in the first image I posted. I'm listening to the original audio of the lecture from which the RSA Animate video is based and was able to find http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=685 which links to http://cpan-explorer.org/category/authors/ which is where I found this second image. See also slide 29 from the slides of the talk. The first image is obviously an illustration of the second image. Very cool. I love this stuff. And I had never heard about http://cpan-explorer.org which is just fabulous.

Also a made a second Google+ post that links back to this one.

The Testing Workshop is underway.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I've been opening quite a few bugs lately for distributions failing these 2 criteria, so, I figured I'd save everyone some effort and unify it cohesively.

Reason

While it may seem a trivial squabble, ABSTRACT and LICENSE components of your meta-data are reasonably important for communicating what your dist is to the world, for both human and automated consumers.

The ABSTRACT field manifests itself in quite a few places:

• Search Results
• Author Module listings
  • https://metacpan.org/author/DCONWAY # All the empty lines are due to the lack of an abstract
• Data from MetaCPAN::API
  • http://api.metacpan.org/release/Acme-Bleach # abstract exists
  • http://api.metacpan.org/release/DCONWAY/Attribute-Types-0.10 # No Abstract

And the LICENSE field appears in a few places as well:

Moritz++ helped me implement a proof of concept eval-perl5 that works in rakudo, and uses Perlito5 (a perl5 compiler written in perl5).

This snippet could be used to implement a perl5 compatibility layer that works both in rakudo and niecza (and maybe pugs).

multi eval($str, :$lang! where 'perl5') {
    my $inp_file = "tmp.p5";
    my $out_file = "tmp.p6";
    my $fh = open($inp_file, :w);
    $fh.print($str);
    $fh.close;
    shell "perl perlito5.pl -Isrc5/lib -Cperl6 $inp_file > $out_file";
    my $p6_str = slurp $out_file;
    $p6_str.eval;
}

Al Newkirk asked me to take a look at his Validation::Class module, and I did.

But instead of asking for the directions or watching the screencast, I tried to figure it out from docs.
And I took notes of my thought process.

The result is this gist: https://gist.github.com/2791412
And here's Al's answer: https://gist.github.com/2791581

So I think it was an interesting experience, and I wish more people did this kind of thing.
Because author can't enter the same river twice; once you're familiar with your project's concepts, you tend to lose the perspective on what will confuse a new user.

You don't have to be a good writer or an experienced developer to provide this kind of feedback. On the contrary, seeing the docs for the first time is what's important to make this process work.
And the author probably won't blame you for being unreasonable -- how can he if you're admitting that you don't understand what's going on and you're just dumping your thought process?

Zero to Perl is rocking and rolling.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

In case you haven't noticed, Assaf Gordon has picked a sort of flavor of Dancer, which he finds as a useful base for his applications. It includes updated jQuery, Twitter's Bootstrap library and Font-Awesome's awesome font.

You can see an example right here and the repository which you can fork and hack on is over here.

Great job, Assaf!

I have recently installed perl-5.16.0 using perlbrew and have begun adding CPAN modules. Here is some of them that I find most useful. Would you add any to the list?

• JSON
• YAML
• List::MoreUtils
• Readonly
• Regexp::Common
• Data::Alias
• Text::CSV
• Text::CSV_XS

If you're fortunate to get stuck working on IPv6 stuff you're going to find that things are not always as they seem.

In my job where I'm tasked with testing scripts using SNMP to verify that they work with IPv6 addresses as well as IPv4 addresses I've found that the SNMP and Net::SNMP perl docs aren't necessarily correct on some things. Fortunately you can use Net::SNMP to create a session where it returns an error message if it doesn't create a session unlike SNMP which doesn't. SNMP appears to be more of a quick wrapper

This will help you overcome any shortcomings you have with networking and get you on your merry way.

Here's an excerpt from the Net::SNMP perl doc from CPAN:
     ($session, $error) = Net::SNMP->session(
                                                           -hostname => $hostname, # works
                                                           Hostname => $hostname, # doesn't
                                                            . . .
     );

How’s that for a view from the hackathon?

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

As some of you may be aware, the last few months have seen a dramatic change to my life.

Since I've been largely incommunicado over this period and have only just started to get in control of these changes, I thought I should take the time to explain my new situation and the impact on my Perl projects.

Firstly, my employment situation has changed dramatically.

For the last 3-4 years I've been at Corporate Express Australia (now Staples Australia) working full time on a large 250k line Perl code base for their main sales channel, and I'd like to take a moment to thank them for their support of Open Source Perl over that time.

First, here's a one-liner:

    perl -de 'BEGIN {@DB::typeahead=("V ::","q")};1'

If you have a sense of what might be happening, you're probably an experienced Perl user. If you can accurately describe what's happening, you're an advanced user. If you can completely describe the output before you see it, you need psychiatric help.

I thought I would see how long my new 8 core box would take to compile 5.16.0.

It took about 18 minutes 25 seconds if stat on the build log is accurate.

So now I have the new shiny...just need to reload all the CPAN modules I use now.

Huzzah!

YAPC::NA 2012 is almost upon us. The workshops and hackathon begin today! Go to the second floor in the Pyle Center if you’re one of the attendees for the early activities.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

This month’s work on Alien::Base started really exciting. I had tracked down several bugs and was honing in on full Linux compatibiliy. Turns out much of my testing problems had been in the test suite, wherein I mimiced make/Makefile with a perl script (in the name of Xplatform) but made some incorrect assumptions.

I'm happy to announce that iCPAN 2.0.0 is now in the app store. If you're not familiar with it, iCPAN is a free iOS app which allows you to browse CPAN Pod on your iPhone/iPod/iPad. The previous version of iCPAN was released in November of 2010, so this has been a long time in coming.

If only CPAN had a web service...

The good part:

LLVM 3.1 has been released, and AddressSanitizer is now officially a part of it.

llvm.org/releases/3.1/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

The bad parts:

There are still several issues (= security bugs) with perl-5.16.0 and important modules.

• heap-overflow threaded-only in swash_init - Carp - caller - gv_stashpvn call perl #113060 cx corruption
• DBI use-after-free cpan #75614
• List::Util 1.24 cpan #72700 (be sure to upgrade it from CPAN if you need to use 5.16.0 plain. Fixed in 1.25)
• clone_with_stack heap-use-after-free on PL_curcop perl #111610

My asan talk at YAPC is on the waiting list. If someone is interested I'll do a hallway meeting. parrot is happy to use it.

asan unrelated:

• B::COP::stashlen was missing from B perl #113034

See my other blog posts about AddressSanitizer:

1. adventures-with-clang-and-asan
2. address-sanitizer-round-2