blogs.perl.org

The YAPC::NA 2012 Job Fair and Expo Hall has sold out! We have 20 exhibitors at our expo hall who will be looking for people to fill their Perl jobs. If you’re looking for a job, or are thinking that it might be time to make a switch, then the YAPC job fair is going to be an excellent place to gain some first-hand intel on some prospective employers. 

The YAPC Job Fair will be held at the Pyle Center on Thursday, June 14th from Noon to 4:30pm. It is free to both YAPC attendees and the general public. We hope to see you there!

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I'm giving a talk tonight at Houston.pm about Dist::Zilla . The slides from the presentation are after the cut. Also, there's a set of links about DistZilla here .

The guinea pig CPAN release for this talk is a Perl binding for the Cron.IO service. It uses Franck Cuny's cool Net::HTTP::API library. A complete binding in like 60 lines of code. Very cool.

January ended up being quite a productive month, with several issues with websites getting sorted finally.

A few people noticed that the leaderboards weren't producing the right numbers on the Statistics site. Due to it being January a rather deceptive bug came to light regarding the calculations of previous months. Thankfully I found and fixed the bug before the end of January, as for the remaining months of the year, the bug doesn't surface :)

Next up was the Preferences site. After several weeks trying to get the SSL certificate set up correctly, I left it to work on the Statistics site bug, only to return to look at it again a couple of weeks later to discover it all working! No idea what the problem was, but suspect something was caching somewhere with the wrong settings. Any road up, if you've been wanting to change any preference settings for emails, you can now login and update these for yourself again.

(The Hebrew text will be followed by an English one).

English Version

The Israeli Perl Workshop of 2012 will take place at 28 February, 2012. It will be a daily conference which will take place in Shenkar College in Ramat Gan. One can view the list of talks that will be given in the conference, where there are going to be two tracks.

The Zero to Perl Workshop at YAPC::NA 2012 is officially sold out! It joins the Perl Testing Workshop that sold out last week.

We still have a handful of seats left for the Hackathon / Hardware Hackathon if you’re looking for a pre-conference activity. Those will likely be gone by Monday, so if you’re interested in either the Hackathon or Hardware Hackathon then please get your badge soon.

We still have about 75 seats left for the conference itself also. Though with two months left to go, we expect to sell out of those as well. The moral of the story, get your badge now.

PS. If you are a speaker, you are not required to purchase a badge, as it will be provided for you. If you are a speaker and have already purchased a badge, your entire badge fee will be donated to The Perl Foundation to continue the development and maintenance of Perl.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

As I was doing some reading on Unicode, I had to sign up for a free account with ft.com site in order to read one of their articles. I normally use strong passwords, but this Web site presented me with the following error message:

Your password must be at least 6 characters long and include letters and numbers only

Ignoring the bad user interface — please tell me before I typed the damned password — it's also suggestive of security issues (ask Bobby for one reason why programmers have such bad password restrictions).

And that got me to thinking about Å, also known as U+212B.

I've just updated the review of modules for defining constants :

• Christian Walde (MITHALDU) pointed out I'd missed enum, which is used to define sets of constants with values in sequence, akin to C's enum type.
• As a result, I found enum::fields, which similarly is used to define sequences of constants. But it's aimed at defining names for accessing fields in class which uses an array ref under the hood, and supports extending the sequence of constants in a subclass.
• I mailed p5p with some questions that came out of the review, and Zefram pointed out his modules Lexical::Import and Lexical::Var, both of which can be used to define compile-time immutable variable style constants, which can be used in the constant folding conditional compilation idiom. I always learn things about Perl when I do a review.

The first review I wrote covered modules for generating passwords . I've moved it out of blogs.perl.org and added two more modules. Both Crypt::PW44 and Crypt::XkcdPassword were inspired by the same xkcd cartoon !

I'm in constant worry of unnecessary bloat because our perls have to run fast. "Bloat" means added dependencies, loading new files at startup, needing more time.
Generally little benefit for more cost.

With the perl compiler I can analyze code and dependencies at compile-time and strip unneeded packages.
My recent concerns have been:

Bradley Anderson will be giving a free workshop at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Part of my design goal for Tie::Array::CSV was to be an elegant blend of tied objects making hard things easy both at the user and author (me) levels.

A few months back I announced that Tie::Array::CSV is now more efficient on row ops. Since then I have had a nagging thought; this change cost me elegance and simplicity.

To implement the deferred row operations, I made my row objects wait until their destructor to update the file. Sounds nice until you realize that you now have race conditions all over the place. So you hunt them down and store/update more internal data, always keeping track of what has been changed. A simple change became a big undertaking. As the project finished I couldn’t help but yearn for the simplicity of the original design goal.

It all started with a question. Ain't it always the case? A question, a simple little question?

I was at my desk at work, hacking along as usual, when a message popped up. Suspicious, since I'm unlisted, I probed the lines carefully. The message was from a dear friend, who had been wondering about a special use case for a web framework. Not just any web framework, but the web framework that I loved. Dancer, her name.

He had been struck with the interesting requirement of writing a web application to upload files. These were no ordinary files, but rather very large ones. The question was whether it is possible, using Dancer, to upload just a header of the file, verify the type, and upon that verification allow or disallow further uploading.

After a short examination, it was clear that Dancer buffers the input files prior to giving you access to them, such as many other frameworks do. We had left it at that.

A new, late, new year's resolution for 2012: rate unsupported modules with 1 star. Two such examples. By unsupported, I mean tickets are not responded at all (let alone bugs fixed) for months or even years. Perhaps module-starter should emit this POD section template instead:

=head1 BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to
C<bug-foo-bar at rt.cpan.org>, or through the web interface at
L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Foo-Bar>.
I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of 
progress on your bug as I make changes.

BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT I MIGHT GO ON, HAVE A LIFE, AND FORGET 
COMPLETELY ABOUT THIS MODULE, THAT YOU SHOULD RELINQUISH 
ANY HOPE OF GETTING TIMELY RESPONSE FOR INQUIRIES ABOUT 
THIS MODULE, IF EVER.

No, I'm not bitter, really :)

With just over 2 months before the conference we’ve sold more than 300 tickets to YAPC::NA 2012 so far! That’s great news. The bad news is that the conference facility maxes out at 400 people, so if you are coming to YAPC, you need to get your badge sooner rather than later. 

Also, we only have a couple more tickets left to sell before the Zero to Perl Workshop is full. And we only have about 10 more spots left for the Hackathon that precedes the conference, which includes the Hardware Hackathon led by Robert Blackwell. 

I don’t want anybody to miss out on the great program we’ve got set for YAPC::NA 2012. So please don’t hesitate, sign up today!

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

The mojocasts have thus far used lite apps exclusively to demonstrate basic Mojolicious functionality. This has led some to believe that Mojolicious is a one-file micro-framework; however, that is not the case.

Mojolicious a full-featured framework, supporting what some would call Catalyst-level deployments, in addition to one-file simple applications.

Mojolicious::Lite is a thin layer on top of the full framework - literally a 68-line module that provides Sinatra-like syntax, including the ability to embed base64-encoded binary files.

Full apps are a good choice for teams, and for sanely separating concerns for large web apps.

I've uploaded a sample application to demonstrate the differences, and allow folks to see first hand how to translate from Full to Lite, and vice-versa.

The example application demonstrates DBIx::Class integration, how to test your web app with Test::Mojo, as well as how to use EP templates with and without tag helpers. For those unfamiliar with testing in general, there are even examples of DBIC schema tests.

First, a short introduction to the state of the Dancer community.

Dancer really is a community, in every sense. You can see it by pull requests from fresh developers, pull requests from people who've been there for a while now, and you can see it in the channel and on the mailing list. I can't explain in words how thrilling it is to this day to see someone on the list reply to someone else. Dancer clearly isn't mine, it's ours, all of us, including those who take a few minutes to actually reply and say "hey, I might not know what your problem is, but how about you try this and that and let me know if it works out. I'd like to help you fix it" or "hey, I know that one, it's..."

London Perl Workshop 2011 Survey Results

I'm please to say that the survey results from the London Perl Workshop 2011 are now online. Slightly delayed due to Christmas and my new job, but worth the wait I think. This is the first time we've had a survey for the London Perl Workshop, so I was interested to see how the results differed from YAPCs. The attendees for the workshop differ from YAPCs, as although around 40% of attendees are well know within the Perl community and have attended YAPCs, most of the sttendees, like attendees for many other workshops around the world, don't have the resources or availability to attend a 3-5 day conference event. However, a one-day event, and especially a free event, makes a workshop much more accessible.

Abigail will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Many people, specially developers, hate meetings. They have to invest a lot of time, for little reward. Meetings, however, can not be avoided completely. At work, I can easily have a dozen meetings in a week. In this presentation, I will share some ideas and tips we use to make meetings more efficient; so the participants get “more bang for the buck”.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

XING joins YAPC::Europe 2012 as a Platinum Sponsor! Thanks for your support.

XING is the social network for business professionals. More than 11 million members worldwide use XING to boost their business, job, and career. XING is a platform where professionals from all kinds of different industries can meet up, find jobs, colleagues, new assignments, cooperation partners, experts and generate business ideas. Members can meet and exchange views in over 50,000 specialist groups, while also getting together at networking events.

The platform is operated by XING AG, which was founded in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003, has been publicly listed since 2006, and listed on the TecDAX since September 2011. In December 2010, XING acquired amiando AG, a Munich-based company and Europe’s leading provider of online event management and ticketing. Please visit www.xing.com for more information.

I recently tried to set up an instance of Smolder, but failed. While installing the module and it's dependencies was rather easy (thanks to perlbrew, local::lib and cpanm), I couldn't figure out how to actually initialize the system.

Starting the server works fine (at least after I realized that the default hostname of "localhost.localdomain" doesn't work on my machine and I had to use "--host localhost"). Even the startpage loads perfect, but all following pages are broken, and I can't find any way to set up my users, projects, etc. And while there are some sql files lying around, there is no way to actually stuff them into a (which?) database.

The last time I installed Smolder, it came as some sort of pre-built package, which was rather horrible to install (but worked afterwards..)

So, does anybody know how to set up this beast? I couldn't find any up-to-date info, but I hereby volunteer to write a document explaining how to install and set up Smolder, if somebody points me to the right scripts/docs/whatever.

As Kephra gets prepared for its great day, there are some design decisions hat make me just happy and maybe you will benefit from it too.

The previous incarnation had also a command list. A central place where most calls are stored that end up in the menu a toolbar or the user can access otherwise. But it was not only the API into userland, it also helped to create menus and bars from very simple yaml files, that only listed command IDs. Because to every command belonged a label, icon, and key informations, the rest was almost trivial. This way you could very easily change the menus within the editor (with the line move functions) and the change was visible as soon you hit save (or autosave reacted).

One major flaw of this system was: informations that belonged into code were exposed inside of config files. Very bad and fragile. But more ugly for me, changes were troublesome because I had to go to several places.