meta is the “meta” blog for blogs.perl.org. It deals with issues surrounding this blog and not about Perl itself.
Recently we’ve seen some strong comments from a few people and we (Dave Cross, Aaron Crane, Aristotle and Ovid) have discussed what to do about it. We’re pretty much in firm agreement that the right answer is to do nothing. For now.
All of us agree that censorship is not something we care for but there have been some comments that are teetering over the line and are making blogs.perl.org a less pleasant place to be. So we refer you to the Blogger’s Code of Conduct
Responsibility for our own words
Nothing we wouldn’t say in person
Connect privately first
Take action against attacks
a) No anonymous comments OR b) No pseudonymous comments
Due to a cancellation by someone else using the building, we’ve been able to add an additional 40 seats to the Hackathon on June 11th and 12th before YAPC::NA 2012. So if you can make it into town early, and want to stop by, then by all means do so. We’ll officially have room for you.
I'm not begging for money so much as begging other people to beg for money. Well, I'm not even doing that. I just noticed one way that people can give money to a charity.
This one goes to Yet Another Society, better known as The Perl Foundation
I just started using a Capital One credit card. If you don't travel internationally, you probably don't care about a card that has no foreign transaction fees. My particular version came with cash back instead of airline miles, so I looked into what rewards I could get. The rewards are lame, but there was a button to donate my "cash" to a charity without the redemption fees and so on. They even let me make a widget so other people could donate to that charity, including Yet Another Society, even though I don't represent that charity in any way.
I imagine similar credit cards do the same sort of thing, so maybe you have a bit of "cash" sitting there doing nothing. It's not enough to get something good, so it languishes. Meanwhile, there's a bug in Perl feeling really lonely because nobody will play with him.
I recently had to develop a small parser for some coworkers and I turned to Parse::RecDescent for handling it. The grammar was not particularly difficult to address, but it had some fields that behave like arrays whose number of elements is declared dynamically, so it's not generally possible to use the repetition facilities provided by Parse::RecDescent, because they require the number of repetitions to be known beforehand.
I'm currently working on a Real Time Bidding system. Basically, when someone visits a Web page, that page may cause a bid request to be sent out to multiple ad bidders and they bid on who gets to place the ad. For my system, I have to respond withing 100 milliseconds to be eligible to participate in the auction. That's when life gets interesting.
As many of you know, cPanel is sponsoring a game night at YAPC::NA 2012 with food and drinks for all.
To ensure that everyone has something to play The Perl Foundation, LiquidWeb, and The Game Crafter have teamed up to make custom Perl & YAPC themed playing cards that will be yours to take home as a keepsake of the event. The Game Crafter will also be providing a small amount of mini-poker chips in case any of you wish to start an impromptu poker tournament.
All that said, we’d like to encourage you to bring your own games for YAPC Game Night. We know some people will be running the Pathfinder Role Playing Game. Others have said they’d like to do a LAN party perhaps playing Diablo III, Team Fortress 2, Left4Dead 2, or Portal 2. And others still have brought up the idea of various board games like Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, Carcassonne, Trivial Pursuit, Pandemic, Bang!, and more. Whatever your flavor, bring a game to YAPC!
That works great, and I like the fasct that posting a blog entry is just a regular git push.
My blog is aggregated in some places, but it doesn't appear on
blogs.perl.org, because it's not an aggregator (and that's
cool, it's not its purpose). But, blogs.perl.org audience is big, and I'm
missing all these potential readers (in improbable case people would actually
be interested in what I have to say :) )
Anyway, so I decided to bite the bullet and write a script that would cross
post my entry to blogs.perl.org. I made the script generic enough to work with
different type of blogs, but here I'm going to explain only the blogs.perl.org
specific case.
Robert Blackwell will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
This talk will explain how to have your doorbell do do more. By separating the chime and the button you can do more. I will show how to send a text mesasge and pause your TV when the button pressed. I will also show you how to ring your chime when some sends you a tweet. That will be enough to get you started to do even more cool things.
While I am still working out the bugs from Alien::Base I have released a little scientific side project named Physics::RayTransfer.
Calling all laser physicists! Does modeling your cavity using Ray Transfer (ABCD) matrices bore you? Do you regularly forget to include one of the matrices on the reversed arm on the round trip? Do you hate using that symbolic mathematical language? Try Physics::RayTranser!
It slices, dices, makes julienne fries and of course is a totally object oriented way to model your laser cavities (or other optical systems). No round trip matrices needed!
I have been most fortunate to have been able to visit Zurich every year since 2008, to teach classes at the ETH.
Zurich is one of my favorite cities in the world: there’s something undefinably “civilized” about it. It’s elegant, but vibrant, and yet strangely tranquil too. From the glorious lake-front to the sylvan Zurichberg, its natural beauties always draw me back. Not to mention the wonderful food.
And yet, the reason I keep returning to Zurich is not any of those undeniable attractions. It’s the people I meet and work with there. Smart, serious, witty, genuine, and generous people. Developers, academics, and scientists, who are always a pleasure to teach…and a joy to learn from as well.
This year we’re going to try something a little different in Zurich. My previous visits have always been later in the year, but in 2012 we’re experimenting with a Spring schedule with four completely new classes.
For the past 2.5 months I mostly worked on converting my old Sub::Spec::* modules to the new Perinci::*. Sub::Spec is a mix of specification, convention, and tools to let you decorate functions with documentation as well as everything else, but most commonly argument specification and feature description. This decoration can in turn be used to do various things, from generating POD, to validating arguments, to shell completion.
The reason I picked a new name for the modules is because I want to decorate other code entities too, like variables and packages, thus the prefix "Sub::" is no longer apt. I also took advantage of this opportunity by introducing some backwards-incompatible changes like the change to schema of arguments specification. The specification is now separated more formally into Rinci (a la PSGI vs Plack) where the Perl implementation is called Perinci, short for "Perl Rinci". I envision Pyrinci, Rubinci, and Phinci seeing the light of day someday, though that would most likely be due to the effort of others.
If you haven’t already made your final travel arrangements for YAPC::NA 2012, what are you waiting for? It’s only one month to the conference, get on it already.
Remember, YAPC::NA 2012 is June 13-15 in Madison, WI. See you there. And bring your spouse!
After asking several times, Andreas thought he finally understood what the dates mean on the Status page for the CPAN Testers Reports. He started watching and making page requests to see whether his requests were actioned. On Day 3 he pointed out that the date went backwards! Once he'd shown me, I understand now why the first date is confusing. And for anyone else who has been confused by it, you can blame Amazon. SimpleDB sucks. It's why the Metabase is moving to another NoSQL DB.
Some time ago I was invited to write a Perl article to Software Developers Journal. It is (as far as I could gather) a magazine based on Poland. Their website is at http://en.sdjournal.org/. It is a paid magazine, so to read it you should buy the magazine.
Although the magazine doesn’t have good procedures for publication (there isn’t a review phase where the authors can check if everything is fine) we think (yes, I co-authored the article with Nuno “smash” Carvalho) that the article is interesting. Probably with some English errors written by us, and probably with some others introduces by the editors. And yes, it is not our fault that they write Pearl instead of Perl… oh shame…
We are working the permission to post the article in the web. Probably we can in some time. For now, buy the magazine.
This email slipped through Gmail's spam filter just now:
Subject: Hello
My name is Grace, i saw your profile at (www.cpan.org) today and became interested in you, i will also like to know you more, and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my pictures for you to know whom i am. Here is my email address (gracejobe16@yahoo.de) I believe we can move from here. I am waiting for your reply in my mail. Remember the distance or color does not matter but love matters allot in life.
Yours Grace.
I don't know whether I should be sad or glad. Glad for the fact that cpan.org is considered popular enough to be worthy to be phished, or sad that no sites go unphished these days?
Perrin Harkins will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Your new viral marketing campaign is working a little too well? Servers are melting? Step right up.
This talk will show you how to use CPAN tools to find and fix performance problems in your web application. The focus will be on using modules to simulate visitors and analyze performance, with some practical advice about possible fixes for different kinds of problems.
Since updating to the latest XCode on OS X Lion, we've been unable to build or use mod_perl 2 on our development machines. If we ignore the test failures and make install anyhow, we get this error message when trying to start Apache:
Cannot load /opt/local/apache2/modules/mod_perl.so into server: dlopen(/opt/local/apache2/modules/mod_perl.so, 10): Symbol not found: _modperl_handler_anon_add
One of our developers discovered this morning that llvm/clang on OS X defaults to C99, but mod_perl expects the 89 "standard". As a result of this thread, we compiled mod_perl in the following manner:
perl Makefile.PL MP_APXS=/path/to/apache/bin/apxs MP_CCOPTS=-std=gnu89
make
make test
make install
And voila, we have a working mod_perl 2 on Lion.
Come to find out, while researching this blog post, the macports people have already run into this:
We welcome booking.com as a Platinum Sponsor of this years' YAPC::Europe. It's amazing to get so much support from companies using Perl. Thanks!
Due to the growth of Booking.com's IT department we are now hiring 30 Perl Developers!
Booking.com is part of Priceline.com and is the World’s #1 Online Hotel Reservations Company, offering over 200,000 hotels worldwide.
We use Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Memcache, Mason, JavaScript, Git, Linux & more!
Our software development basis is SCRUM = Agile.
Are you ready to relocate to Amsterdam to an international, result driven, fun & dynamic work environment? Join us! Go to htttp://www.booking.com/jobs to apply.
