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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.]

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:

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.]

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

I'd like to find an alternative to the term "technical debt", but I doubt I could convince people to adopt it. Technical debt is so ingrained in the programmer's consciousness that we seem to confuse metaphors with synonyms. Metaphors are to synonyms as transvestites are to my wife (and that's an analogy I'm sure she's going to bring up over the dinner table).

Technical debt bears a resemblance to actual debt, but it's not the same thing. Like actual debt, it's accrued in the same currency (skilled labor over time) that must be used to pay it off. Like actual debt, it's often desirable if you need something now and can't wait for it.

We were discussing in email at work when Abigail put the nail in the coffin of the "technical debt is actual debt" debate. Specifically:

• Sometimes it's OK to default on technical debt (code rewrite, proof of concept, business requirements change, and so on)
• Monetary debt has a schedule on which you must pay it. Technical debt does not.

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.]

TL;DR version
"Perl has many \@grammar."
Perl is inspired from english fucking grammar, *not* english fucking language.

You see what Ich did there ? I used the word "fucking" two times. In both instances, I placed it between two different words. The communicated result is free fucking emphasis.

The idea of adding *fucking* in between two words for emphasis is a very interesting principle.

my fucking lunch.
my fucking life.
bang fucking bang.

The fact that it can be placed between two arbitrary words is *important*.

In fact, the idea of using '*' around words is also similar to THE idea of emphasis.

In the first case, we used infix notation and in the second case we use the circumflex notation.

And that my dear world, is a grammatical principle. It is a structural principle. It is a generative principle. It's inorganic chemical experiments for alphabets to do interesting things.

I'm glad that I can announce the release of HTML::ValidationRules.

• http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTML-ValidationRules/

Even if we validate user inputs on client-side according to client-side form validation spec. defined in HTML5, we still need do same thing on server-side. It results that there're redundant validation rules around.

I wanna make a proposal; How about regarding client-side form validation as some common format for describing validation rules both for client-side and server-side?

This distribution consists of 2 parts modules below:

• HTML parser to extract validation rules from given HTML file/string.
• Plugins for existing validation module (for FormValidator::(Simple|Lite) so far, because I usually use it).

Caveats: This module hasn't supporte all the attrs defined in HTML5 spec.

Anyway, some patches or proposals are welcome.

October was a rather quiet month publicly, but behind the scenes there has been a number of fixes, improvements and discussions.

The most notable fix was getting the summary emails running again. It is still not perfect just yet, but I'm hoping that the ongoing fine-tuning will reduce the bouce-backs and faults that I'm currently seeing. The configurations are all from what was in the database at the end of August, so apologies if you've wanted to change these. The configurations are normally exposed via the Preferences website, but as the SSL certificate for the new server hadn't been approved it has a little longer than anticipated to get it up and running again. GoDaddy have now approved this and it's all ready to go, so I'm hoping this can all be sorted in the next few days.

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.

Anyone using HAProxy?

I am writing a perl module to interface with the Socket API.

https://github.com/robinedwards/Net-HAProxy/

Will be pushing to CPAN next week sometime, your feedback is most welcome.

http://prepan.org/module/3Yz7PYrBHH

Bad timing: now that smart-matching is under scrutiny, I've started to have fun writing Perl like this:

use signatures;
use Path::Class;

file( 'file.txt' ) ~~ sub ($f) {
   say $f->basename;
   say $f->slurp;
};

This style and syntax is reminiscent of Python's with and Ruby's do, and, for this use case in particular, feels a bit more natural to me than right-to-left, functional-style Perl5:

map { say $_->slurp } file( 'file.txt');

I am teaching kids perl programming. They use perldoc.perl.org. Search on perldoc.perl.org is awful. Period.

Problem is not the outdated tutorials somewhere on the internet. Outdated official sites like perldoc.perl.org, cpan.org - are the real problem.

It’s the first Tuesday of the month, so that means it’s YAPC::NA Planning Meeting time. If you’re in the Madison area, or don’t mind a drive there is a YAPC planning meeting tonight at the Essen Haus at 7pm. As always the food and beer are sponsored by Plain Black, and the room is sponsored by Essen Haus.

We’ve got a lot to discuss so the meeting will probably last until around 9pm, but you’re free to come and go as you please.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

This posting series relate to wishlist for existing modules. Some items are serious, some are not. I have not created a patch or submitted an RT ticket for the items, I'm posting them first to see other people's take on things.

1. Parallel cpanm. Last time I checked, there's a github issue on it. Ever had to install 200-300 modules on new servers? Without -n? Not for the terribly impatient. I suspect this is best implemented by a wrapper for cpanm.

2. DateTime->from_ymd(). It irks me that I have to write DateTime->new(year=>Y, month=>M, day=>D) everytime or (worse) having to use one of the DateTime::Format modules for this simple task.

In the past week or so, there has been a lot of discussion about improving the Perl tutorials. I think this is a great idea, and I even think I have something to contribute. Much of my work has been to allow for more scientific computation with Perl, including using PDL.

In order to start making a “Perl for Science” tutorial site, including some non-science Perl beginning material, I wanted to find a CMS, written in Perl (I can’t have a Perl tutorial site written in PHP!!) and having built-in code syntax highlighting. I couldn’t find it. Then I decided I had wanted a reason to try Mojolicious, so maybe this was it. I could write a template for tutorials and populate then with content using PPI to provide highlighting.

Since Mojolicious::Plugin::PPI didn’t exist yet, I made it up, based in large part on PPI::HTML. It is still rough around the edges, but I thought I would post something here to get some comments. I’m thinking about trying PrePAN too, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

P.S. The tutorial site isn’t up yet, and may not be for a little bit. Of course I will post here when it is.

Cyber jacked ya, eh?

Merge Hash

sub merge_hash {
    my ($self, $precedent, $subordinate) = @_;
    my @not = grep !exists $precedent->{$_}, keys %{$subordinate};
    @{$precedent}{@not} = @{$subordinate}{@not};
    return $precedent;
}