Graham Knop will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
In this talk I’ll talk about the massively multi-player video game written in Perl known as The Lacuna Expanse. I’ll talk about how and why it was built (some Perl internals). And I’ll also tell you a little bit about Lacuna’s achievements.
I also hope to unveil a big surprise.
[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]
Test::Builder2 is now down to two issues.
The former is complicated, but suffice it to say TB2 cannot rely on Mouse or Moose or Moo. It's being solved by writing an OO compiler, something which will generate accessor methods and roles at build time rather than relying on a runtime compiler. This should also solve TB2's less than ideal startup time. It might be Mite or it might be Moo, but the problem is being taken care of.
The second is harder and is what I call "Test::Builder2 vs CPAN". Because Test::Builder has been around or so long, and so much depends on it indirectly, there's a lot of not entirely documented behavior being relied on. We've been using CPAN modules as a broad test suite right along for this reason. TB2 has the potential to seriously break a lot of module's test suites, so it's best to get it as right as possible before stable release.
How many faces do you count in this image?
Perl counts 44:
Calling whatever happens to be lying around on a particular date a "stable release" is a laughably bad idea (the "rhythm method" is also lousy birth control). A "release" is something you want lots of people to use; "the stuff in version control on the first of the month" is something else entirely.
Perl releases used to take awhile -- so do releases of POSIX, HTML, C, and C++ -- and that was not a bad thing. It's the difference between a platform and a fad.
Nathan Gray will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Some of the benefits of working with other programmers are being able to absorb best practices, avoid pitfalls, have more fun, and write better, more consistent code.
We will discuss what works and what to avoid, and how to interface with brilliant, introverted people who want to get their own work done.
[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]
CPANDB is a pretty awesome tool, in my humble opinion.
It takes a whole variety of different data sets from the CPAN group of services, and cooks them down into a single unified SQLite schema that you can access via a convenient ORLite wrapper (or access directly if you wish).
This single database file can then be used both as a convenience for simple tasks, or to build deep and complex analysis metrics of the kind I used in the creation of the CPAN Top 100 website.
The biggest problem with this module has always been the problem of server resources. To generate the database originally required downloading the CPAN Testers database. Even today in it's updated form it needs the CPAN Testers summary database, and that doesn't necessarily calculate it's metrics the way that CPANDB likes them.
To make CPANDB a truly useful tool that other parts of the CPAN ecosystem can rely on it needs to become much more stable and be updated regularly.
The de facto standard way of constructing portable filesystem paths in Perl is through the use of File::Spec's catfile and catdir functions. Example:
my $path = File::Spec->catfile('dir', 'subdir', 'file.txt');
This method, or a similar one involving Path::Class, is the most recommended approach and has been adopted by application development frameworks like Dancer (which has a wrapper method for it, named path) and Catalyst (with its path_to method).
The slight problem that I see with this method is that it makes code a bit more complicated, and thus a bit less readable. Paths become lists of parameters and no longer look like paths.
I wrote a simple module that tries to address this by allowing you to write paths the traditional way -- as strings, using a directory separator of your choice (/ being the default), while the catfile stuff happens behind the scenes. You can just say:
my $path = path 'dir/subdir/file.txt';
What it does is it splits the path string on each occurrence of the forward slash and feeds the resulting list of path components to File::Spec->catfile, which reassembles them using the appropriate OS-specific directory separator, and constructs the OS-specific path that you want.
The module is up on Github, and should also be available on CPAN shortly.
An article written by brian d foy What if we could drop archives into @INC? got me thinking. Indeed, I've been burned myself by PAR, which is a great instrument, but I don't like that it does a huge unzip every time the application made with it starts. And I don't like even more so that some times PAR forgets to clean up these huge perl trees, eating space in my /tmp.
The problem why it is not that easy to override "use" and "require", is that these are semantic constructs, and are using perl's own file open/close operations, which neither are overridable even with *CORE::GLOBAL:: hack.
Nevertheless, after a couple of days learning about implementation of PerlIO layers and hacking them, the following module was born: File::Redirect. It's basically hacks into open() which is used by perl, and then emulates unix mount semantics.
Juan Natera will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Attending a live entertainment event is a social experience, but at Ticketmaster we decided to take it to the next level by integrating with Facebook on our Interactive Seat Map. This Allows fans to see where their friends are seating, helping them to get seats close to their friends. In this presentation I will discuss some of the challenges we faced with this project, what we did to overcome them, as well as a live demonstration of the product.
[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]
Most of my effort over the past weeks has gone into a paper on the math behind Marpa. I have just uploaded a revised version. I've fixed several typos, including a few nasty ones, for which I apologize. I've also improved the typography and smoothed out the presentation in many places. The basic structure and results of the paper are unchanged. The paper contains pseudocode, a correctness proof, and proofs of my complexity claims.
I plan to remove official releases of the various Marpa distributions (Marpa, Marpa::XS, Marpa::PP) that are more than one or two versions old. My guess is that this will release some disk space, and inconvenience nobody.
I've created a new blog at http://perlservices.at, a site which I intend to use to pimp offer my services, and will use that blog from now on. The design is not quite there yet. :)
London Perl Mongers organises technical meetings every two months. The technical meetings are a chance to find out what has been going on in the Perl community, what techniques people are using and how Perl integrates with other software.
The next technical meeting will be on the 11th April 2012 from 7pm to 9pm (you may arrive earlier, please sign in at the reception). You have to sign up to attend, see below.
This meeting is sponsored by Venda who are inviting the world-renowned Damian Conway to amuse us for one evening and will appropriately be held at the Conway Hall. Many thanks to Anthony Webster, Venda and everyone involved for allowing us to use this wonderful venue.
Venda is a SaaS eCommerce provider with offices in London as well as the US and Asia. The platform is built predominantly in Perl, and powers over 100 sites for clients including Tesco and the BBC.
Damian will be presenting:
Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple
Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes... Made
Easy!
Jan Dubois will give a free workshop at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
Stackato is a private cloud platform from ActiveState
In this workshop you will:
- get a very brief summary of the Stackato architecture
- install the Stackato Micro Cloud on your laptop
- deploy sample Perl applications (e.g. Bugzilla) to Stackato in minutes
- convert your own Perl web applications to Stackato
Preparation
We will have some USB sticks with VirtualBox and Stackato installers available, but to save some time you can also download and install the software ahead of time:
- a hypervisor (VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, VMWare Player)
- a corresponding Stackato VM
A good starting point for pushing your own application to Stackato will be to have it already running locally on your laptop.
This workshop will be given by Jan Dubois and Ingy döt Net. Ingy is also presenting a talk about Stackato.
[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]
As a non native English speaker, writing good documentation is a hard task for me and often grammatical and spelling errors slip into my modules pod causing me great embarrassment.
I could use the spell checker more often*, but writing documentation is already a time consuming task, no fun, and well, I am lazy. In any case, that would not solve the grammatical errors.
The thing is that from time to time somebody sends me a patch correcting some of these errors and I want to say publicly how much I appreciate that kind of contribution.
A special mention goes to the Debian QA team, who seems to systematically revise the documentation of everything packed for Debian. That can't be much fun, but they keep doing it.
So, to all of you who have sent me documentation patches over the years, thank you very much, really.
Maybe this is legitimate and I just don't know why, but I have seen the following in a couple of projects where I have taken over after the original programmer left:
use Moose;
has [qw/foo bar baz/], is => 'rw';
no Moose;
sub something {}
sub somethingelse {}You can read about my latest module that helps you archive coverage reports generated with Devel::Cover in this post about App::ArchiveDevelCover on my blog. There is even a screen shot!
Tomas Doran will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:
ORLite is a light weight SQLite-specific ORM which is particularly handy for working with ad-hoc SQLite database and creating internal database APIs for large applications, most prominently the database API inside of Padre.
Aligning so closely with the features of a single database engine keeps the implementation size down to a minimum, at less than 1000 lines of code, and allows ORLite to do things that would be completely impossible in more general ORMs.
This is particularly true in the upcoming 2.0 release, a preview of which is available now.
http://svn.ali.as/cpan/releases/ORLite-1.90.tar.gz
This new major revision embraces SQLite's slightly unique rowid mechanism, allowing it to accurately distinguish between different copies of identical data.
Lets start with the following database in the file adam.sqlite
At least that's the goal. I've split Catalyst::Model::REST in two, so there's a new Role::REST::Client as well as the original distribution.
Originally I started CMR because I needed to access some REST services from a Catalyst application. There was nothing useful around, so I wrote a simple Catalyst Model and wrapped it up on CPAN.
It's been further developed to when there has been new requirements, and a couple of days ago the nice people on #catalyst suggested to split the functionality into a distribution of its own. The use case being that a role can be applied to an already existing Catalyst Model. Or to any other class that needs to connect to a REST server.
So here it is. Use Role::REST::Client to access REST services from your Moose based Class.
Use Catalyst::Model::REST if you just want to start a new Catalyst Model Class,
Thinking about the epigraph of my Perl release started about 10 days before the release. Certainly, I had been unconsciously mulling back and forth about killer quotes from books or other media for longer than that. About 10 days ago, I made the short list of two books that could give interesting quotes.
One was "Friday" by R.A. Heinlein. I've always liked the book, and it opens with the introduction of the protagonist as she kills a pursuer and stuffs him into a cabinet, reacting only on a hunch. Heinleins way of laconic writing should have made for an interesting quote from that scene.
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