We’re trying to pull off a fairly major overhaul of Act, the conference registration system in time for YAPC::NA 2012. So far we’ve already converted it from mod_perl 1 to Plack, and added Twitter and Facebook authentication. We have another dozen features to add, and more that we could add if we had help.
Even if all you want to do is scratch an itch that has been bothering you about Act, we’ll be happy to help you get started working on that as well. Perhaps you have the same itches we do!
2 of 3 talks ( / days almost) done and I roll some ideas in my head what I do next weeks. I spoke with brian d foy (brought lot of insights on the state of perl docs) and damian (thanks for helping on my slides) and with lot of ather people. I heard about twin city workshop, which I try to attend (Turin and Frankfurt too).
When I come back to germany, next $foo needs 2 more article (recension and wxperltut9) and I have to think about the 4th part of the fm-perl.tutorial as well as about my "perl 6 data structure" i will give in Pisa and frankfurt. There I will give up to 4 talks (the "hgit" again - this time with enough time, writing docs, new lang ideas).
Brian reminded me that I owe him something for the new perl review but I will not let to grow this all over my head. Kephra rewrite is after all most important and yet another article will arrive real soon (tm).
Apologies for not being perl enough in this post .. my working environment is
key to me being able to get anything done so I figure it’s a grey area I’m
allowed to wander into.
Something I’ve battled with for a long time is how best to manage my bash
setup and aliases.
For far too long I’d been copying a .bashrc or .bash_aliases file onto each
new box I’m working on, comment out a few parts, fix a few parts, …
As I started having accounts on more machines the lack of scalability soon
bacame very apparent.
Luckily (for me) I’m more than happy to steal-and-adapt ideas that other
people have already thought of.
bashrc.d/
The concept I’ve stolen is the /etc/*.d/ pattern. If you’ve seen one of these
directories you won’t be too shocked by the following explanation of my
setup.
The gist of my setup is to have a small snippet of code and a directory of
useful (turn-offable) snippets.
I love Zurich. It's such a beautiful, well-organized, and just plain civilized city.
And so conveniently central; reachable by plane from almost anywhere else
in Europe in only 2 or 3 hours.
That's why, for the past few years, I've been running public classes in
Perl, Vim, and presentation skills in Zurich each summer.
This year is no different. From next Monday, I'm offering six classes on
basic and intermediate Perl topics, and one each on Vim and
presentation.
It's very late notice, I know, but we still have some seats available,
so if you find you have a day or two spare in the next two weeks, and
you've been looking for a chance to take one of my classes (or just want a
pretext to visit one of the loveliest cities in Europe ;-), then this
might be an excellent opportunity.
Due to the feedback we’ve gotten from previous year’s surveys, as well as many blog posts and other rants in the Perl community, we’ve decided to replace the long-standing tradition of a charity auction with something new at YAPC::NA 2012. We thought about perhaps doing a silent auction, but we wanted to set it apart from that, and we wanted to make something that anybody could get in on, not just those with large amounts of cash to spare. So instead, we’ve decided to do a series of raffles.
The first half of 2011 was a bit of a slow period for Padre.
I was distracted with getting wxFormBuilder integration to a working state, Ahmad Zawawi was distracted by his efforts to build our own Scintilla wrapper instead of waiting for Wx to upgrade, and the broken threading had people annoyed at Padre's bugginess (and me) and not wanting to contribute a whole lot.
But with the problems of background threading, rapid GUI development and having an editor widget we can actually control solved, things are starting to move forward again rapidly.
We've also seen a recent boost to volunteer numbers, with some oldies returning (prompted in many cases by Padre's birthday party easter egg) and some newbies arriving to solve specific problem areas like Mac support and packaging.
With the big problems out the way the team is able to start looking at polishing out some of the smaller problems that weren't a priority until now, and we can start to upgrade some of our crude first-generation tools into much nicer versions.
Following up on my previous post that demonstrated how to get a basic Catalyst application up-and-running on dotCloud in under ten minutes, let’s explore how to take things a step further by adding a database service.
However, unlike the tutorial (or most Catalyst tutorials for that matter), we’re going to use PostgreSQL instead of SQLite — and we’re going to deploy the app into the cloud vs. just developing locally (thanks to the magic of dotCloud, which makes it so easy).
Memoize is a great module. It's one of those fantastic modules that, when you need it, does exactly what you need. Like when you're perfectly healthy and want to beg for money so reach for a crutch. That's how many people use Memoize.
Don't get me wrong: I've been lazy and abused this module myself. It's quick, it's easy, and as it says on the tin: "Make functions faster by trading space for time". So you know there's a trade-off: you save time, but your memory overhead increases. That's OK. Memory is cheap. No argument I might put down will dissuade you on that point.
No Starch Press will be providing some of their entertaining and insightful books as prizes at YAPC::NA 2012. We’re so glad to have them as a sponsor. And the books they sell would make great Christmas gifts this year.
No Starch Press publishes the finest in geek entertainment—distinctive books on computing, such as bestsellers /Steal This Computer Book/, /Hacking: The Art of Exploitation/, /Practical Packet Analysis/, and /The Manga Guides/. We focus on open source/Linux, security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, and science and math. Our titles have personality and attitude, our authors are passionate about their subjects, and we read and edit every book that bears our name. Our goal is to make computing accessible to technophile and novice alike, and our readers appreciate our straightforward presentation and fearless approach to the complex world of technology. No Starch Press titles have been included in the prestigious /Communication Arts/ Design Annual and STEP inside 100 competition, and have won the Ippy Award from /Independent Publisher/ magazine.
I'm proud to say that today Sergey Gulko officially announced me as a leader of Kiev.pm group. Thank you Sergey and my appreciation to all members of Kiev.pm for approving me for this assignment and great support during debates and planning stage. Guys, you are great! Sergey I wish you a very good luck in all spheres of your personal and professional life.
Kiev.pm community exists since June 1, 2007 and until today was lead by Sergey Gulko. Our community is about 200 registered members. During past few years we had organized two Perl workshops called ‘Perl Mova’ together with Moscow.pm. This gave us an opportunity to meet Jonathan Worthington, Andrew Shitov, Alex Kapranoff and many other great people, collaborate and better know each other inside of the community.
Today was the first day of talks at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia. I arrived a few days ago and Riga is a beautiful town to walk around, full of restaurants and squares with outside tables to drink beer. I enjoyed walking around the main market, which is housed in ex-Zeppelin hangers.
The pre-conference meeting on Sunday was great, we slowly took over the main square here. It was nice to meet new people and see old faces.
This morning started with a quick walk through the park to get my ticket scanned and a badge (well, label) printed with my name on.
Andrew Shitov is the main organiser of this conference and he started off the conference with a welcome. A quick show of hands shows that this is the first YAPC for about half of the attendees.
Larry Wall then took us a quick tour of postmodernism of Perl 5 and Perl 6 with lots of photos of Riga.
Today at YAPC I got unexpectedly moved to the main room; somehow this messed up all the mental preparations I’d made for the day:
sitting through at least one talk in the room
checking the layout, setup, etc
working out where I’d stand relative to the screen
(yada, yada)
I was lazy in the wrong ways and hadn’t figured on a move to a stage with a podium and a mic and a huge projection behind me.
Worse, and the thing I’m kicking myself most about is:
I didn’t plug my (current) laptop into ANY projectors at all before my talk
I’d assumed I could remember (in a moment of panic) that I could find certain settings
Bad Move.
Silly move!
In my vague defense:
the previous talk overran
I didn’t have the five minute grace period to find the setting(s) I wanted
people were drilling into my head with their evil laser-beam eyes!
I did muddle my way through but I’m thoroughly upset and unimpressed with my presentation skills today.
It’s only my second YAPC talk but I really should have known better.
I’d like to officially thank ThinkGeek for becoming a Silver Level sponsor of YAPC::NA 2012. You are probably all aware of Think Geek and the amazing selection of geeky items they have for sale. Either way, it’s a great place to start your holiday shopping this year!
It's another EXTREMELY hot day in Japan. And we had another sponsor visit first thing in the morning. While we're grateful to our sponsors, we seriously hated the weather. But anyways...
So today I added 3 more sponsors to our list, and we now have 21 sponsors total for YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011. We are expecting a few more, actually.
This year we also have a set of Individual Sponsors -- these people paid a little extra to show their spirit. We much much much appreciate their support.
We also have a few announcements. Since our blog feed isn't being syndicated to ironman, you may have missed it:
Tom Christiansen filed RT 96814 noting that Perl identifiers (that is, variable names and such) should be normalized.
I covered this today in my Surviving Perl Unicode course at YAPC::EU in Rīga. Here's a program that output another Perl program that shows the problem:
We have secured space for exactly three booths to be set up for the entire duration of YAPC::NA 2012. These booths will be placed in the main entrance of the Pyle Center (the conference facilities) where all attendees will travel as they go between sessions, enter and exit the building, use the elevators, or go to and from the job fair. This is really the perfect opportunity to get your company’s message out, recruit attendees for open positions, and participate as a major player in YAPC.
For each of these spaces, we will provide power, internet access, a table, and two chairs. You can request the space by becoming either a Platinum or Diamond sponsor. These are first-come first-served. The first three sponsors at either the Platinum or Diamond level will get these booth spaces.
I arrived yesterday (conference -2 days) afternoon, we met up with various mongers, had a crap experience trying to get food in one place, and then found somewhere that did very good steaks, followed by a quick drink in the main square.
Today, a bit more with it, acme, ralf, Michael and myself had a stroll around the main market - housed in old Zeppelin hangers! - which was interesting and had very tasty donuts, and a general look around the old town.
I then attended the Speakers training run by Alex Kapranov with Damian Conway also speaking. It was really interesting and now means I have to update my slides (thankfully not too much)!
I showed once section of my presentation and got some really useful feedback (come to my Plack talk if you want to see the changes in action!)
If you ever get a chance to go to this Speaker training I really recommend it, how ever many talks your already done.
