If you want to a reserve a hotel room at the YAPC::NA 2012 conference facilities then you need to do so now. Reservations close on May 1. 

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I have just uploaded a late stage draft of a Theory of Computation paper on Marpa to github. The paper contains pseudocode, a correctness proof, and proofs of my complexity claims. (Marpa, for those unfamiliar, is a new, powerful and fast parser and parsing algorithm. To learn more, check out its web page.)

Progress in software follows two avenues -- implementation (aka "running code") and theory. With Marpa, it was my intention to pursue both. This is not the usual practice, but it's a natural choice in Marpa's case, because the two feed each other. It would have been simply impossible to write the code for Marpa without a theory of WHY the code worked, what kind of speed I expected in which cases, and WHY the code I was writing would be able to deliver that kind of speed.

Lately I've been having weird sleeping hours. I sleep for 5 hours here, then 2 hours there, I stay up till 4am. I know, it sounds like I'm back in school, but really, I'm not.

Yesterday at 1:50am I had the opportunity to actually go to sleep. Should I? Yes! Will I? Hmm... well... maybe I'll just watch another episode of a TV series and hack a bit.

I recently read the "about" page of xkcd and saw there is now (or has been for a while?) a proper JSON output for the comics. This means you don't have to scrape the website to get the comics. This also means you can get a lot of data right away that you might not necessarily get by scrapping. Definitely not as easy, at least.

What if I didn't have to install distributions, but instead just dropped the entire archive into a directory, much like a Java JAR file? I don't have a complete idea for this, but I have enough that I want to have public notes on it.

This is something that I think about when I can't do anything else. I'm on a bus or train in Chicago where any sign of Apple technology will get you jacked (the CTA even has signs telling people to be careful with their iPhones. Not Blackberrys or Samsung, or whatever, just iPhones). There's that time between finishing the in-flight magazine and reaching 10,000 feet, or waiting in line for passport control after I wonder if the guys with the guns would really shoot me if I took out my cell phone.

My idea is the confluence of several problems:

Early-Bird Pricing for YAPC::NA 2012 ends on May 1. Register today before the prices go up!

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Steffen from modules@perl.org responded to my email yesterday and made me a co-maintainer of String::Strip. I've applied the 64 bit bug fix to it, and pushed 1.02 to CPAN. Thanks for everyone who responded to my thread yesterday about requesting co-maintainer. This is how open source is supposed to work!

Edit: orginially rchomp, but Aristotle’s suggestion of chomped is perfect!

brian d foy posed an interesting interview question: “What five things do you hate most about language X?” positing that an experienced user of X should know 5 things (s)he hates about it.

In my list is the return value of chomp. Yes I understand why it works as it does

print "chomped" if chomp $input;

but I find that use case happens far less often than the usual

chomp( my $input = <> );

It looks bad, and it is not intuitive, especially to the new user. Just today another one popped up on StackOverflow. This has got to be one of the most common questions on the site.

In a month an a half, we'll once more have the QA hackathon. Before going to Paris, I'm going to blog about the things that I want to do. I have a fairly packed list of things I'd like to do there; definitely more than I can do in 3 days, but fortunately there will be free-floating helpers that will hopefully help me out.

Also things that require feedback from other people.

Metadata now

Currently, there are three pieces of metadata that may be installed during a cpan install. They are neither complete, nor can one rely on their presence

.packlist

The packlist files contain a list of files that were installed. It's a very simple format, essentially just being a list of files and their types. Pretty much only useful for uninstalling distributions.

However, this is probably also why it's often absent. Many distributions, most notably Debian, remove them from their packages as they don't want the perl toolchain to uninstall files from debs.

We’re exactly two months out from YAPC::NA. Can you believe it’s that close already? 

If you haven’t already, then it’s time to get serious about making your travel arrangements for YAPC::NA 2012. 

Remember, YAPC::NA 2012 will be in Madison, WI from June 13-15. Book your flights, your hotel rooms, buy your badge to the conference, and bring your spouse along to enjoy our amazing Spouse’s Program.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I've made some progress in getting ccv to compile under Windows. Now I can start with opening up the API and writing some XS for it. Soon, the below image can be created completely from within Perl instead of using a shell call out to the executable to find "interesting" points in the object and the scene and match them together.

The SIFT algorithm seems to be quite a useful tool to do feature recognition without any prior training. I hope to (ab)use this to recognize objects and how they move around in movies. Also, I imagine this can be used to automatically stitch images together.

If you don't know it, Archive::Tar is SLOW; it even says so. Running NYTProf recently on a project revealed that the major part of the program was taking a little more than 27 seconds to run and a little over 24 seconds of this was Archive::Tar reading the archive into memory. Since I did not need the in memory feature, I switched to Archive::Tar::Wrapper. That sub now takes about 2.5 seconds to run and the equivalent portion to Archive::Tar->new($file); is now Archive::Tar::Wrapper->new; $arch->read($file); now takes 631 ms.

I had to make a last-minute drive to Chicago last Friday, which is about a two-and-a-half hour trip from Madison. So naturally, to pass the time, I loaded up my phone with podcasts. When I was about halfway home, it hit me: I didn't have any Perl podcasts on my phone! Unfortunately, I don't know of Perl podcasts; I've seen Perlcast, but it looks like it hasn't been updated in a year and a half. So, this is a call to the Perl community: are there any Perl podcasts out there?

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.]

String::Strip has a problem on 64 bit environments, and a release has not been made in over 10 years. I have sent an email to modules@perl.org asking for COMAINT as the author has apparently not been responding to RT tickets.

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=70028

http://search.cpan.org/dist/String-Strip

If anyone sees this post and has the magic powers to make this happen, I'd be very appreciative if they could help out.

Until this weekend I was only vaguely aware of the Perl QA Hackathons. Something led me to the attendees page for the Perl QA Hackathon 2012. If you scroll down to the section "Registered, seeking sponsorship", you'll see a list of names, many of which you'll recognise, along with a list of things they're planning on working on.

If you see something listed that you want, or think Perl will benefit from, why not donate.

I'm not going, but I liked the sound of a PAUSE web service, DBIx::Racer, and MetaCPAN work, and we all benefit from CPAN Testers.

I often wonder why people praise Dist::Zilla for ease of use. Recently I heard this argument: 'It was never easier to make a release. You cannot do that with EUMM'.

So I here is my little make release snippet from one of my Makefile.PL.

There is more in it. make README, make gcov and make gprof for XS extensions.

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.]

New post on my Software Engineering blog: How to Estimate like an Adult

While releasing and compiling Prima 1.33 for 5 different perls, I'm taking a moment to send a couple of warm ones towards the TIFF specification. Prima originally was written to be used in (among other) software for microscopy recordings, and recently a former colleague sent me a bunch of tiffs no software could read. Heh, here's the challenge, thought naive me. Indeed, these were 10-bit grayscale tiff bitmaps, and as bit-shuffling was some long time ago an interesting topic for me, I've implemented these in Prima's tiff codec. Everyone's happy.

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.