blogs.perl.org

I'm a developer currently working as a build automation engineer for an e-commerce services company. I've been working with Perl since 1994, and although I started focused on web applications I've gradually moved into toolsmithing and custom applications.

My PAUSE/CPAN ID is MJGARDNER, and I usually host my public development efforts on GitHub.

With the American holiday of Thanksgiving right around the corner, perhaps it's time to consider what you are thankful for, and hopefully one of those things is YAPC. If so, you can show your thankfulness by marking down on the paper or digital calendar of your choice that you're coming to YAPC::NA 2012 on June 13-15 in Madison, WI. And if you're not sure you can afford it, ask for it as a Christmas present!

Also don't forget that you can bring your spouse or significant other with you to enjoy our Spouses Program. 

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

I’ve decided this is so important to me that I’ll no longer attend or speak at conferences that don’t adopt and publish a code of conduct. I’ll also be using whatever clout I’ve got to encourage conference organizers to adopt and publish anti-harassment policies. […] So why, given the issues [with codes of conduct that] I outlined above, do I take this so seriously?

He makes the point, but does not emphasise it enough in my opinion: the code of conduct is not there to communicate to attendants how or how not to behave (in which capacity it is superfluous with the well-behaved majority and ineffective with perpetrators): it is there to reassure members of minorities that they will be heard and their concerns are understood.

Mojocast #1 was a hit!

The first episode detailed how to install and get your first Mojolicious Lite app running, and the followup continues the process by explaining how to use multiple types of placeholders, http methods, and formats to give you more flexibility in your lite apps.

Mojocast #2: Placeholders, methods, and formats

Hooray!

You can download last version from sourceforge. If you are on Windows you need Strawberry Perl, just unzip it and click on pni.exe ... if you are on Linux launch the pniguitk script ( but you will need Tk installed ).

Every feedback is welcome !

Rob Hoelz, the leader of our software team for YAPC::NA 2012, is holding an Act workshop from 5pm to 7pm at the Essen Haus on Tuesday, November 15th. These are the two hours before our normal MadMongers meet up. Don't worry if you can't make it for the entire two hours. People are free to come and go as they please. But if you want to learn about how you can help enhance Act for YAPC, then you should definitely try to make it. 

Bring a laptop with you, preferably with Perl already installed. If you don't have a laptop, then we can buddy you up with someone that does. Rob will take care of the rest once you arrive. Hope to see you there.

Last month we kicked of the meetups for the fledgling Bangalore.pm group. Our first meetup in July was attended by 3 devs including myself to kick things off, this saturday we had our second ever meetup of Bangalore.pm.
The meetup was attended by Venkat(wolf), kumar ravish and yours truly from the first time and one new member in form of Krishna Abbina from my team at work. We met up at Legends of Rock at Koramangala,(the place serves delicious cheese bites)
We mostly talked about Perl and its application to our daily chores. Each of us come from a diverse background w.r.t. what we do with perl and it made for some very fruitful discussions and KT! :)

957,044 ... that's 957,044

That's the number of report submissions we saw during the 31 days of July! This biggest monthly submission we've ever had. Just over 40,000 reports more and we would have broken the 1 million barrier. Considering it took 9 and a half years to reach out first million milestone, the fact that we're now seeing nearly 1 million a month is just staggering. I've stopped posting about passing each million mark as its becoming to frequent. You'll have to wait for the 20 millionth report (expected about Christmas 2011 at the current rate) for the next notable post in that regard.

So, a few days ago, I intended to post a paragraph of metablogging, and then get on with introducing a project. Then I was going to post a few paragraphs. Then I actually write it, decided it deserved it’s own entry, and posted it … and decided that I deserved a break. So here I am, a few days later…

Java::Bridge’s intent is to be a way to use and control any arbitrary Java API you want, from inside of Perl code, without requiring the author of Java::Bridge (IE me) to have considered your use case in advance, or having to have a Java compiler on the target system. (Or, for that matter, a C compiler. Preferably, at all.)

We are officially having a Hackathon at YAPC::NA 2012. The hackathon will be June 11 & 12 (the 2 days before the conference). We decided to make it two days so that as much work as possible can get accomplished at the YAPC Hackathon.

We've acquired a room in the Pyle Center (the location of the conference), and we're working on sponsorship so we can provide free food and drinks to all who attend.

We'll work with community members between now and the conference to determine if it should be a free-for-all event, or if it should have structure and goals. If it is decided to have structure and goals, then we may also seek prize sponsors to reward those that achieve Perl-community related goals.

Please reply here if you've got feedback or ideas.

This is reposted from the blog of David Precious (bigpresh), original entry available here.

Today marks two years to the day since the first version of Dancer hit CPAN!

According to the BackPAN, Dancer-0.9003.tar.gz hit CPAN on 07-Aug-2009.

I think you'll agree we've come a long way since then, thanks to the awesome community and user base built up around the project since then.

In these two years, we've had countless valuable contributions from a large list of contributing users (see the list on the about page), gathered over 300 watchers on GitHub, had 84 people fork the repository on GitHub, had 620 pull requests submitted... amazing stuff.

We've seen a wide range of awesome Dancer plugins appear on CPAN.

We've seen Dancer presented at various conferences including FOSDEM, OSDC.fr, the French Perl Workshop, the Bulgaria Perl Workshop, PyWeb IL (an Israeli Python group).

We've seen screencasts on using Dancer (thanks Gabor!), we've seen Dancer discussed plenty within the Perl community with plenty of helpful suggestions.

This post is for users of Marpa's Constant Ranking Method. You are using the Constant Ranking Method if you specify the "ranking_method" named argument of a Marpa recognizer, with the value "constant". If you're not using the Constant Ranking Method, you can stop reading here.

Marpa::XS 0.008000 is the last release that will support the Constant Ranking Method. In future releases of Marpa, Marpa::PP, and Marpa::XS, the Constant Ranking Method may be removed. At a minimum, it will behave differently at the interface level.

Marpa is alpha but previously, whenever I've changed the documented behavior of an interface, I have kept backward compatibility. As alpha development ends and I approach a beta release, I am forced to be more ruthless. I will be changing or eliminating the Constant Ranking Method, and duplicating its exact semantics for backward compatibility is simply too difficult.

If you have time over the next few weeks, could you record 30 seconds to a few minutes of video about your thoughts on YAPC and/or Perl? I want to make a few commercials and maybe a mini-documentary for YAPC. Feel free to do some serious stuff, and/or some zany stuff. I'm sure I can find room for it all.

When it's ready, send me a URL (admin at yapcna dot org) where I can download it so I can edit it together with the rest of the videos.

CPAN mail no longer blacklists github.

And BTW Graham Barr last month fixed the linking of licences in the package view. it now recognises gpl as gpl and not as Postgres license and also gpl_1 .. gpl_3 with much more verbose and precise links. Thank you both. Im just the guy who keeps nagging (one more ticket about pause packages status coding is still underway).

TPF

After the recent problems with Bash::Completion and Bash::Completion::Plugins::perlbrew on my system I realized that maybe the problem I was having is in the actual default operating system install of Perl. To investigate this problem I did a fresh install of openSUSE 11.4 64-bit into a VirtualBox. After running the security updates I installed Task::CPAN::Reporter to pull in what I needed and configured cpan to send reports in. I used the metabase_id.json I had already generated for my development machine as it is recommended to share this file if you plan to have multiple systems sending in reports.

So in the fresh test environment did Bash::Completion install correctly? No, it failed during the testing stage just like before. I dug through the openSUSE package manager, installed and re-installed different things and tried cpan Bash::Completion over and over again. After running out of ideas I set this problem aside for now and focused on other issues that came up during this process.

We now know quite a bit more about how we're going to structure the job fair at YAPC::NA 2012.

It's going to be held on June 14th, 2012 in the AT&T Lounge in the Pyle Center on the University of Wisconsin Madison Campus. It will run from Noon until 4:30pm. This will allow attendees to stop in both during their lunch breaks and during afternoon sessions, whichever is most convenient for them.

We're going to allow outsiders (people who have not purchased a ticket to YAPC itself) to come to the job fair. And we're going to promote it far and wide in the Madison area, to ensure a good turn out. Our reach will include every high school, technical school, college, the University, and every technology-related user group within 50 miles of Madison.

Companies wishing to exhibit at the job fair can do so by either becoming a Silver Level (or higher) Sponsor, or they can just contact us to buy a table for $200. 

Companies that participate in the job fair will also get to post their Perl related jobs to our blog and can print flyers for us to insert into our attendee registration packet. 

Say, you have a function, which takes a string, a pattern, and then matches the pattern to the string, but with a twist; a (fixed) code fragment is inserted:

sub example {
    my ($str, $pattern) = @_;
    $str =~ /$pattern(?{ 1; })/;
}

The code block here is trivial, because it's not about the content of the block, just about its existence.

The above doesn't work, because by default you cannot interpolate a string in a pattern containing code blocks. So, you have to use re 'eval';:

So. I had 5.12 installed on my MacBook Pro, and wanted to build the latest and greatest perl. Unfortunately, the nm that comes with XCode 4 doesn’t play nice with perl’s Configure script, causing it to wonder if you’re using a Cray. Nice upgrade, but it doesn’t get the perl installed.

Everyone seems to be using perlbrew nowadays and there’s information on how to make perlbrew work under these conditions at http://www.perlbrew.pl/FixLion.html.

If, like me, you want to actually build perl the usual way (i.e. without any brewing), you need to patch your perl source. You could, of course, dig into perl-bleed and work out the needed patch yourself, but that would be work. Quite insufficiently lazy.