Noirin Plunkett will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Based on the recent “Open Advice” book, as well as many years of working and mentoring in Open Source projects, this talk will provide bite-sized introductions for newbies on how to go from consumer to developer, advocate, and participant.
Aimed at the Next Generation of Perl contributors, this talk will give every listener the tools and confidence to take the next steps!
In previous posts,
I've talked about
Marpa
as an alternative to other parsers.
In this one,
I want to talk
about Marpa as an alternative
for problems where
parsing has been avoided.
Because parsing HAS been avoided in the past.
And for good reason.
If you were drawn by the allure of domain-specific languages,
or yielded to the siren call of language-oriented programming,
you plunged headlong toward two pitfalls:
Your parser might not parse your grammar.
Which you might discover at any point in incremental development.
Or when a vital maintenance change came along.
Your input might not parse,
and your parse engine might leave you
with no easy way to find out
what the problem is.
Maybe your input was wrong,
maybe your grammar was wrong,
or maybe you've simply
hit the limits of that parse engine.
When it came to debugging, taking a language-based
approach was a bit like deciding to write your problem up in
P''.
I have some news coming soon about Alien::Base but to avoid burnout, I’ve spent some time in the last few days playing with some things that are new to me. I enjoy doing this any time I’ve spent too much time on one project.
While I have spent some time using Mojolicious it has always been to hack together a quick UI for some code, rather than pulling out Tk. I never have really taken the time for pretty-fication, nor for any kind of interface logic.
I have a friend who thinks highly of my programming abilities and has recommended me to another of his friends to put together a website for a startup company. While I could put together a Joomla or Drupal site in no time, I thought I would investigate a Perl solution. I know that there are a few Perl CMSes out there (WebGUI 8 sounds interesting), but I wondered if I could hack something together myself.
Sawyer X will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
I’m assuming you’ve heard of Moose, right? That kickass object oriented framework that has taken the Perl world by storm. You know the one!
In case you’ve ever wondered “what is Moose?” or “how could I harness its powers to make my life easier and/or rule the world”, this talk is for you.
I’ll go over the basic functionality of Moose (with a few nifty tricks to keep you excited) and even sprinkle a bit of community extensions. At the end you’ll hopefully be drunk off the Koolaid! :)
(hint: if you ask nicely, I’ll even touch base on Mouse/Moo/Mo)
Just for the record, i (Mark Leighton Fisher) did not write "Spring Integration in Action". And the Mark Fisher who wrote "Spring Integration in Action" does not work at Regenstrief Institute and doesn't maintain the Perl Module Tools suite pmtools.
(Funnily enough, I have used Spring.NET, though...)
Although YAPC::Europe::2012 preparations are well underway in Frankfurt,
it is time for the venue committee of the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF)
to think about the location of the 2013 conference. YAPC::Europe
wouldn't exist without dedicated teams of volunteers, and we are always
excited to see the enthusiasm and learn about the new ideas the
community has to offer.
Further information about preparing a complete application can be
found at http://www.yapceurope.org/organizers/index.html .
Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public
repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit
future organizers.
The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:
* Saturday, 7 April: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This
letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides
contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two
organizers.
This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the
venue committee of your proposal.
* Thursday, 5 July: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe
2013.
If you do not receive a confirmation for your letter of intent or proposal
within a couple of days, please personally contact a member of the venue
committee.
Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to
venue@yapceurope.org.
I’ve run into this problem every time I’ve set-up a new computer recently, so — in the interest of remembering where to look for the solution next time — here’s a quick “note to future self” post on installing MySQL and DBD::mysql on Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion.”
First, the binary installers for MySQL and PostgreSQL for OS X have gotten so good that I don’t bother compiling either from source anymore. In fact, the new PostgreSQL installer comes with a nifty “Application Stack Builder” tool that does 1-click post-installation installation of helpful PostgreSQL add-ons like PostGIS (previously, one of my least favourite things to install). The same goes for the MySQL binary installer: installing MySQL, a preference pane for starting/stopping the server, and a startup item to ensure that it’s always running after a reboot is all included.
I am rather delighted to be able to announce that on 22nd February 2012, CPAN Testers reached a very significant milestone in our history. We reached and have now surpassed 20 million test reports, as can be seen via the Interesting Stats page. That's approximately 14 million via the HTTP API.
For the past few months this has been nearly 1 million reports each month. Expectations are now that we could reach 30 million by the end of the year. This is a phenomenal number of reports, and I did notice a little while ago, that a certain other test report repository have now removed their claim of having the biggest database of test reports. It's going to be a long while before any other code repository has anything like the number of test reports available for authors and users to analyse. In part that is also thanks to the 24588 distributions now on CPAN and the 5576 active CPAN authors, but is also thanks to the 1,000+ testers (even those who've only submitted one report), who keep making CPAN Testers a worthwhile project to be involved with.
Congratulations to Andreas J. König for posting the 20 millionth report. It was an UNKNOWN report for Makerelease-0.1.
For the upcoming 5.16 I decided to check our code again with address-sanitizer, google's open-source memory checker.
At the first round address-sanitizer was still a bit immature, I had to use a black list for false positives. With the current versions all the false positives has been fixed and clang 3.1 has address-sanitizer included.
address-sanitizer is a memory checker similar to mudflap, but superior to valgrind or coverity and others.
It catches more error types, esp. invalid access to globals and to stack addresses, and use after free and use after return. It does so by using shadow memory maps for all pointers and instrumenting the accesses. This is fast, but needs more memory. ASan (short for address-sanitizer) hashes the pointer maps, so it needs much less memory than a full old-style fence checker, which use insane amounts of memory.
valgrind can be used to catch memory leaks (i.e. if you are writing daemons) but should not be used to catch pointer errors.
Mark Keating will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
How can you benefit from free software in business? How can you run a business in which most of what you work with and produce isn’t charged for? What is the value in engaging with a non-profit orientated community? Why would you want to engage with a community that can critically be described as a social exercise in collaborative one-upmanship?
In this talk Mark will use the experience gained from several years managing a free software consultancy to discuss the benefits to business of working with free software and engaging with the community. Using Shadowcat Systems, the Perl language and associated community as a basis for that talk.
This year we decided not to disturb our speakers on the german perl workshop during their talks to tell them the time remaining. Instead, we printed simple tags in different colors with a short meaningful text on it. As far as we got feedback from our speakers, they liked it.
GraphViz2 V 2.01 is now on CPAN. The 2 changes (all noted in the CHANGES file) are:
Demos of using non-ASCII chars in node and edge labels.
See scripts/utf8.pl and scripts/utf8.test.pl.
Sample output is at the end of the demo page. Scroll w-a-y down.
The API for GraphViz2::Parse::ISA has changed significantly, to support putting several class hierarchies on the same graph.
Sample output is on the page above. Just search for isa.
Below is *a* solution using Mojolicous. I am sure there are other frameworks that can do the same thing. Benchmarks showed that the AnyEvent program is faster anywhere from fractions of a ms to one entire second depending on the iteration. In this simple case, AnyEvent::HTTP may be the correct solution, however I think as part of a larger project you are still better off going with an async web framework like Mojolicious.
We have a ticket to the YAPC::NA 2012Testing Workshop that we held in reserve, but no longer need. If you would like a free ticket to get in to the Testing Workshop all you have to do is send an email to admin[at]yapcna[dot]org expressing your interest. The person who includes the most interesting picture of something Perl related (people from the Perl community, onions or camels, Perl ascii art, or whatever) will get the free ticket.
I hate to do it but I've coded a kludge in Set::Array to stop segfaults with Want V 0.20 when using sub difference(), which can also be triggered by using '-' between sets.
Updated docs discuss this issue, and offer 3 ways to code diffs which return the expected result.
Ah, yeah, I didn't say anything yet about I'm not with Booking.com anymore since this year. I would like to thank them for sponsoring YAPC::Europe in Riga last summer but now I'm going to move further and being an employee of that company would only stop my passion, ideas and desires. I wish I would not meet all the weird corporate issues anymore.
