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I have now sent out all the talk evaluations from this year's Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. If you were a speaker and haven't received an email, please check your spam folders first, and let me know (barbie at cpan . org) if you don't find it. The mail will have come from barbie at birmingham . pm . org.

My thanks to all the organisers of PPW2011, the folks on IRC (#yapc) and everyone who took the time to respond to the evaluations. From previous experience the speakers have very much appreciated your feedback.

The results of the main survey will be published soon on the YAPC Conference Surveys site.

Matt Horsfall will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Dyn (better known as dyndns.org) is an organization built from the beginning on Perl.

While we’ve incorporated many other languages and technologies into our platforms since then, Perl is still the number one language of choice for development and is at the core of many of our key products.

In this talk I’ll give a brief overview of what we do and how we use Perl to do it. From support management tools, to customer

APIs and UIs, to automated testing and deployment tools, we use Perl for everything.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I know I didn't write here for a long time, and I apologise for it, but I have this entry and another one in mind and I hope they can compensate for it.

For my work on Freecell Solver, I've written some code for encoding and decoding game positions into a compact format, by encoding them as a delta from the position of origin. I first wrote it in Perl, in order to prototype it, and later translated it to C (which is the language that Freecell Solver is written in). I have written some rudimentary unit tests for it, but also wanted to test the code against a large number of positions, by runnign it over the solutions of many Freecell deals.

Using Mouse for my experimental Module Forward::ORM really seems to pay off.

One of my classes just has to delegate method calls to another class, here my first draft:

##  Delegation (using Method::Signatures::Simple)
method manager {Forward::ORM::Migrations::Manager->new}
method create_table (@params) {$self->manager->create_table(@params)}
method add_column (@params) {$self->manager->add_column(@params)}
method remove_column (@params) {$self->manager->remove_column(@params)}

with the Mouse handles command, it becomes:

has manager => (
    default => sub {Forward::ORM::Migrations::Manager->new},
    handles => [qw/add_column create_table remove_column/]
);

This is 46% less code. And the savings will become even bigger as I will add new commands :)

The commit

Seriously, I love perl, someone can indicate me good tuts?
lawl

Submit a talk for YAPC::NA 2012. We’re especially interested in talks on real-world Perl apps and quintessential Perl 101 talks, but we’re open to any ideas you have. 

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

It's been quite a while since Padre 0.90, the current development version 0.91 has been bubbling along quite nicely, with some amazing changes introduced through the hard work and effort of Ahmad Zawawi in porting Wx::Scintilla giving us an shiney Scintilla widget for the Padre text editor.

It wasn't enough to just get the module sorted out, but Ahmad went on to really improve the functionality of the editor itself. Check out just some of the goodness to come.

Adam Kennedy has again been deep into the core of Padre and its API's. It takes a lot to commit yourself to knowingly go into a code base break it and then commit to making all things work again.

Kevin Dawson has stuck around and continues to prod and poke at the code base, improving the dialogs using the new FBP process to create better dialogs ( another of Adam Kennedy's major efforts out side of Padre ).

Kevin has also introduced patch editing. In Kevins words:

While thinking about how to best define migrations/tables in my experimental module Forward::ORM, I realized that I might need Ruby like code blocks to keep certain things in scope:

In my first version, I used default Perl:

sub up {
    my $self = shift;

    $self->create_table('authors', sub {my $t = shift;
        $t->add_column('id', 'integer', primary_key => 1);
        $t->add_column('name', 'varchar', length => 40);
    });
}

I then noticed that Method::Signatures::Simple also works with anonymous functions and methods, so my code now looks like this:

Does anyone reading this have experience with debugging ORA-12157 TNS Internal network communication error?

Googling for it isn't really helpful. I get a bunch of pages that say the same thing as the Oracle docs (turn on tracing and reproduce the issue).

The problem is that we don't see it consistently enough to even know to reproduce it properly much less create a minimal test case.

Update:
I looked in the alert.log and found a few "ORA-609 : opiodr aborting process unknown ospid" errors each with a corresponding trace file that ends with "opiino: Attach failed due to ORA-12537".

The University has opened the reservation process for dorms for YAPC::NA 2012. You can simply visit the reservation web site to make your reservation. You can stay from Monday, June 11th though Saturday, June 16th (leaving Sunday) or anywhere in-between. A single occupancy room is $62.95 per night, and a double occupancy room is $42.10 per person per night. You must register before Monday, May 14th, as reservations will be closed on that date.

If you don’t wish to use the web-based reservation, you can download a PDF reservation form.

There’s also a complete list of amenities that you’ll be receiving with your accommodations.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I wrote the following email to the Perl 5 Porters mailing list a few days ago. I thought you might enjoy it.

Hello Porters,

I had a dream that Perl 5 had moved from using -> to using . like most modern languages. And moved the existing . for concatenation to ~ like Perl 6. Then I wrote the code and was shocked how tiny it was.

I have this in the leonbrocard/dot branch, but is is really one commit:

http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/commit/0c1fbeee

It's a very small tokenizer patch which interacts with a new "dot" feature. Then you can do things like:

My Twin City Perl Workshop 2011 review, featuring lots of photos!

In this post, I pit Marpa against the Perl regex engine. The example I will use is unanchored searching for balanced parentheses. I have claimed that many problems now tackled with regexes are better solved with a more powerful parser, like Marpa. I believe the numbers in this post back up that claim.

To be very clear, I am NOT claiming that Marpa should or can replace regexes in general. For each character, all an RE (regular expression) engine needs to do is to compute a transition from one "state" to another state based on that character -- essentially a simple lookup. It's the sort of thing a modern C compiler should optimize into a series of machine instructions that you can count on the fingers of one hand.

Tracy Ragan will give a talk at YAPC::NA 2012 described as:

Defining a build to deploy process that can easily be passed between development operations can be a challenge with the “one off” script.  The scripts designed for the developers purpose do not meet the production control needs.  Developers are looking for speed and agility, while production looks for audit and control.  

This talk reviews how OpenMake Software leverages Perl to create a Smart Scripter language that can auto-generate build, test and deploy scripts for multiple environments across the life cycle. You will learn how Perl has been used to create a adaptable build, test and deploy process without relying on one off script driven process, moving instead to a dynamic and adaptable model driven process based on the Perl language.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I'm doing some work with ElasticSearch and while I find Clinton Gormley's Perl interface to ElasticSearch to be excellent, the ElasticSearch docs have left me a bit confused at times. It's based on Lucene, so while trying to find examples of analyzers for non-English langauges, I found a quick introduction to Lucene.

That introduction said I could find a list of analyzers for other languages in the Lucene sandbox.

Except that's a 404.

So in hunting around some more, I find this email which explains that the sandbox has been merged with the rest of the codebase and is now at this subversion repository.

That repository has a single file named trunk_development_moved.txt and clicking on that gives me:

I just submitted PrePAN to Masup Awards 7. As they're claiming, MA7 is the Japan's No.1 web hack contest. I don't know whether it makes sense that I apply to the award, but it could be some help to announce to Japanese.

• PrePAN - Social Reviewing Site for Perl Modules | Mashup Awards 7 (#MA7)

I'm glad if you'd give some look at the page.

I started working on epan, a (somewhat thin) wrapper around cpanminus to create a version of CPAN trimmed down to your needs for installing specific stuff.

This is what the cool guys probably call DPAN these days, but I found that the whole concept of DarkPAN revolves much around getting your private stuff into the "normal" Perl toolchain, while in this case I need to be able to easily install modules in machines that are out of Internet reach.

To start with an example, suppose you have to install Dancer and a couple of its plugins in a machine that - for good reasons - is not connected to the Internet. It's easy to get the distribution files for Dancer and the plugins... but what about the dependencies? It can easily become a nightmare, forcing you to go back and forth with new modules as soon as you discover the need to install them.

Thanks to cpanminus, this is quite easier these days: it can actually do what's needed with a single command:

From guest poster brian d foy:

I speak at many Perl events, from casual Perl mongers meetings to the big conferences. I’ve even been in front of a big room at Comdex and WWDC. That’s over a long career of speaking that built up to those big events. As conference season approaches, you have a chance to stand in front of a bunch of people and say whatever you like. You’re probably nervous about that, maybe even terrified. I want to you to tame that terror. It’s not going to disappear, but you can learn to control it.

You might think that you’re not a good speaker. Well, you aren’t now, but Muhammad Ali, a great boxer and a better speaker, wasn’t the world champion boxer league he started either. Darth Vader was a lowly slave boy before he almost ruled the galaxy. Shakespeare was a short order cook in high school. Chuck Norris was probably always Chuck Norris, though.

Tom Christiansen compiled a table of escape sequences by the version of Perl that introduced them. This is the sort of Perl documentation that I like. It's too bad he doesn't blog, but I don't think he'll mind me reposting this part of his private email. :)

We've come up with all sorts of good ideas for Programming Perl since we turned the book in two weeks ago.

(Download as gist 1342877)

This list is sorted by escape, but you know Perl so you can re-sort it by version yourself:

For reasons I don't fully understand, I don't get the chance to give classes very often in my own country. And even less often do I get to give public classes. I'd certainly like to do so more frequently, but the opportunities just don't seem to arise.

So it's an unusual pleasure to be offering two classes in both Melbourne and Brisbane in the next month or so. As part of the YOW! 2011 conference, I'm running my "Perl Best Practices" class (on Nov 29 in Melbourne and Dec 7 in Brisbane) and my "Presentation Aikido" class (on Nov 30 in Melbourne and Dec 8 in Brisbane). That second class is a particular rarity, as I've never before offered it as a public class in Australia.

So if your interested in improving either your mastery of Perl or your skills as a presenter, click on the links and sign up!

Damian