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. 

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.

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.

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.

I will be arriving in Europe this week-end, at the start of a whirlwind visit to Portugal, Norway, Latvia, and Switzerland. In three of those four countries I will be giving a free talk, which I'd like to invite you to attend if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

In Lisbon, I'm presenting "Fun With Dead Languages" on Monday August 8, starting at 19:00. Entry is free, but seats are limited, so you do need to pre-register.

In Oslo, I'm presenting "Fun With Dead Languages" (yes, the same talk) on Thursday August 11, starting at 18:15.

In Lausanne, I'm presenting "The Twilight Perl" on Thursday September 1, starting at 19:30. Note that, despite the claim on the website, the talk is completely free.

In between these events I'll be speaking at YAPC::EU as well as offering some public training classes in Oslo, Riga and Zurich.

I hope to see many of you in one or other of these places, especially at YAPC::EU, where there will be a genuine Baltic smorgasbord of fantastic talks, tutorials, and other Perl-related events.

Damian

This review is now hosted elsewhere.

Hello, everybody! (Hi, Doctor Nick!)

This blog will, hopefully, keep you updated on my hackish projects. (Both those involving Perl and otherwise, despite the domain name. Hope you don’t mind overly much. Really, I think most of my hackish projects will grow to include Perl at some point during their lifespan anyway. It’s insidiously useful like that.)

Please, if at any point you find that I’m not updating enough, or I seem to have left behind a project that you are interested in hearing more about / seeing completed, comment. One reason — possibly even the most important reason — I’m starting this is because I want to stop writing so much code that nobody ever sees or uses, and feeling like I never get anything done. If I seem to have dropped a project without telling you why, call me on that, too.

Edit: sorry about the URL; this post was originally going to be about something completely different, which should be the subject of the next post, once I finish writing it.

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.

Ditto.

YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 tickets are now on sale.

Should you need any help, if you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact me at @lestrrat

Pod::Plexus development has led me down a slippery slope peppered with boulders and broken glass I thought I could avoid forever.

My inner typographer wants to lay out documentation "just so", which means putting all the POD together, usually at the end of the file. Pod::Plexus and Pod::Weaver move POD around, making this semitypographical exercise a big time waster. All the careful consideration of placing "SEE ALSO" before (or after) "BUGS" matters naught.

Suddenly interleaving POD and code doesn't sound so bad. It doesn't change the finished product. I can also get rid of some of my pre-method comments, since the documentation will do double duty. Smaller distributions and less work for me? What's not to like?

Earlier today a some dev work on MetaCPAN had the unfortunate side effect of dropping the ElasticSearch index. This has effectively forced us to re-index the site from scratch. What makes this particularly painful is that we've lost the author data (including +1) which so many Perl devs have lovingly created over the past few weeks.

The short story is that minicpan should be indexed within a few hours. The rest of CPAN and BackPAN will likely be in the next day or so.

Because we've been looking at adding new features and haven't spent time on a proper backup strategy, we're in a suboptimal place right now. The good news is that this didn't happen several weeks from now with much more author data. Also, we're now forced to find a workable backup solution as our first priority.

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.

Just a quick update to let people know that I am not, in fact, dead.

I have just released Marpa::XS 0.008000. With this release the core Marpa algorithm has been converted to C, vastly speeding it up. Marpa::XS is still alpha, but the additional development needed at this point is a matter of packaging (See Note 1).

It is my hope that Marpa will become the standard parsing algorithm for problems too big for regular expressions.

• Marpa parses all classes of grammar that are currently in practical use in linear time. (See Note 2).
• Marpa is a general BNF parser -- that means if you feed it anything written in BNF, it "just parses" it. This includes grammars which are left-recursive, right-recursive and ambiguous -- even infinitely ambiguous.
• Marpa never goes exponential -- worst case, even for highly ambiguous grammars, is O(n**3), which is considered optimal (See Note 3).

Limitations and Comparisons

The foremost limitation of Marpa is, of course, that it is alpha. Development is well advanced, but the interface remains subject to change.

AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean:

Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons.

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. 

Today on the way to work I almost finished off Test::BDD::Cucumber, but didn't quite manage it. So work having finished, I cracked out my MacBook Air and put the finishing touches in!

Choose your own adventure: if your reaction was:

WTF is Cucumber? - the tutorial

Where can I browse it? - MetaCPAN, GitHub

Well that's boring... - cat pictures to the rescue...

So now that preparation for YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 is in full swing, I thought I'd share some nitty gritty details from YAPC::Asia.

(Oh, and we're currently accepting talk submissions! Hint Hint)

This entry is mainly about marketing and fundraising for YAPC::Asia Tokyo. Yes, $$. Stuff that artists and engineers don't really care about, but you should. This is also part of my talk from YAPC::NA 2011, "How to run Japan Perl Association"

So let's start out with the core funding: Every year Japan Perl Association (JPA) collets membership fees from its members. We have different levels of membership which vary from $500/yr to $6,000/yr. The expensive plans are actually divided up into two portions. 30% goes to fund JPA operation, and the rest is for YAPC. The sum varies from year to year, but we have worked with our members to collect around $12,000 ~ $14,000 as the core funding to run YAPC.