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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dan Wright will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Perl events come in all shapes and sizes ranging from tiny hackathons to a full-fledged YAPC’s.
In this talk, I will cover various lessons learned from years of running Perl events. I’ll reveal some often hidden pitfalls and outline methods for success in running your event. I will also cover some of the resources that are available to help you run your event.
Audience: Perl experience isn’t really relevant to this talk. This talk is suited for anybody that has an interest, but little experience in event organizing.
Bio: As a founding organizer for The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, I know first-hand what it is like to run an event for the first time. Since 2006, I’ve organized 5 PPW’s and a YAPC. Currently, I am planning for PPW 2012 and also serving as Treasurer for The Perl Foundation.
It is time to talk about Booking.com. I hear many people ask about us and guess what it is like. I hear lies. I hear truths. No one will really tell you. I will tell you and I wish be fair. Booking.com may be very good for you, but you need to know before you take job if you want it. Booking will tell you the good stuff, not bad stuff.
I will not mention names. I don't want to cause people trouble, but I see good people being pushed out door. This makes me sad because there is no hope of getting better. First, I talk about code.
Before I talk about code: remember that Booking has become the number one in what they do. They are making piles of money and are still growing fast. They are doing something right. I will sound upset about some of this, but some of what they do is good. They are very smart people.
I may be the last person to do this, but I finally put all of my conference slides, and a few of my presentation notes, on slideshare.net.
It was fun going through my old slides. I started giving presentations at ApacheCon in 2000, where I gave a talk with Bill Hilf about our work building eToys with Perl and open source tools. The article version of that is online, and the slides add very little, so I skipped that one.
I also skipped my Perl ORM talk from 2005, because the tools I covered are not really relevant anymore. I would advise people to look at Rose::DB::Object and DBIx::Class now, not Class::DBI, SPOPS, and Tangram.
Unfortunately, I can't see a way to sort the presentations so that the newest ones are first. If anyone knows how to do that, I'd like to hear it.
One amusing thing I've discovered: putting the word "scalable" in your title seems to draw in a lot of viewers!
If you requested a payment from the Perl Foundation recently, you may have noticed a little bit of lag in receiving your check. Or, a very few of you were even unfortunate enough to have received a check and then asked not to cash it. Here's what happened...
"Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offense. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy." - Eric Raymond
Torsten Raudssus will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Talk about DuckDuckGo and Perl. The application and infrastructure of DuckDuckGo and about the Open Source and GreyPAN movement. Also giving an overview how to contribute to DuckDuckGo. Good for beginners to dive into Perl and contribute to a real world service directly.
Every time I use perldoc for any term slightly unusual, I struggle. Have you tried to use it to find UNITCHECK? Now you can. Instead of remembering which of these to use (and none of these will find UNITCHECK):
In the last case above, the --all is needed to do a brute force search. Ordinarily, you just do perlfindsearchterm, regardless of whether it's a module name, function, variable, or faq keyword and it will return the first result found (searched in the order I just mentioned). Otherwise, it will tell you to use --all if you really want a brute force search to find out where that term is used.
Here's a gist I tossed out there. Patches welcome. I should bundle this up and put it on the CPAN (and handle older perldoc versions).
I mean creepy in the sense that results slowly creeping in. People who follow my tweets know that 2 smaller milestones are achieved: predefined subrules and regex quantifier are now all in place (in Index A and B). This was of course a byproduct of my upcoming Perl 6 Regex and Grammar talk.
So we not far away from 700 items in Index A (50 more than last time). Some bits other were done.
Hope you guys are not to impatient but since im doing this thing for years and still on it, its not far fetched that one day im ready with it. It's also like writing a book, which, when taken seriously, needs constant improvement. The quality and consistency of the entries grew all the time. They also explain some of the terms like LTM, role, runtime and so on. if you think that doesn't have to be in an index, please let me know.
