For some time now, I am a Dancer contributor. It all started in the last Christmas (everything in the Perl community start or end at Christmas time), with Dancer Advent Calendar.
Getting a little behind... I tried to learn to use Catalyst some time ago, reading a Packt Publishing book and found at that time that the book was already outdated. Unfortunately that is standard in Technology, and the books that keep up to date for some time are the ones that focus the foundations of computer science, and not the technology itself. It didn't work. Probably I was not tuned to the MVC model, or I didn't have a concrete project where to test Catalyst.
I had a dot cloud invite that I had not used and I wanted to learn some HTML5 and looking around there did not seem to be a N-back version in HTML5 (most of them use flash) so I created a web app Bodhi . The intent is that this app works on the browser as well as mobile devices ( at least iPad). This is the initial version and I am looking for some feedback on improving this or adding some more tasks.
I am pretty impressed with the dot cloud infrastructure, it's easy to get started and deploying is simple.
After a long 3 months or so, Padre 0.86 has been rolled up and released into the wild.
0.86 comes with a warning that there are still some lumps to be smoothed out, but with that it also comes with a newer version of Scintilla which means better support of Perl.
Thanks to the efforts of Ahmad Zawawi and Mark Dootson, who you often see in the Perl Wx mailing list, this version of Padre now supports an updated version of the Scintilla text editor/control. You can enable the new Scintilla by setting the feature_wx_scintilla configuration parameter in Padre's Tools / Preferences / Advanced dialog.
The process of organizing my summer speaking tours is often NP-complete, with too many possible events competing to fit into too few available timeslots.
So it's a refreshing change, this year, to find myself with an entire unused week, during which I definitely need to be in Europe, but could be anywhere in Europe. The week in question is August 7-11 (i.e. the week immediately before YAPC::EU).
Normally I would just arrive at the conference venue a week early, lock myself in my hotel room, and hack for 168 hours straight...but this year I thought I might try something different. So I'm putting out an invitation to the entire European Perl community: make use of me for a week!
The idea is simple: anybody anywhere in Europe is welcome to contact me with a suggestion/proposal for occupying my time from August 7 to August 11.
So far what I did, was fix some low-hanging fruit
bugs, apply some patches, as well as start the long process of converting
the test suite, which still uses Test.pm to
Test::More . There are
still many bugs lurking there, and some of them are XS bugs that are still
beyond my reach, and I could use some assistance there. But it's a start.
If you're interested in helping, the clone the repository, write a patch and
send me a pull request.
Text::Table Update: I've written about
resuming
the maintenance of Text::Table in April, and it progressed nicely:
the tests were converted to Test::More, a lot of the code was cleaned up,
the build system was converted to Module::Build, and keywords and resource
URLs were defined, and some bugs were solved (along with tests). I'm still
looking into ways to clean up the code, and if anyone has an idea for a cool
feature, then they should drop me a line (or provide a patch).
You cannot eat breakfast all day,
Nor is it the act of a sinner,
When breakfast is taken away,
To turn his attention to dinner;
And it's not in the range of belief,
To look upon him as a glutton,
Who, when he is tired of beef,
Determines to tackle the mutton.
Ah! But this I am willing to say,
If it will appease her sorrow,
I'll marry this lady today,
And I'll marry the other tomorrow!
-- William Schwenck Gilbert, "Trial By Jury"
It gives me great pleasure to announce Perl 5.12.4, the fifth stable release of Perl 5.12.
You can download Perl 5.12.4 from your favourite CPAN mirror or from:
Primarily the updates for the Wiki site concentrated on user management, and the ability to register as a new user. There is still a problem with sending UTF8 mail, but mail itself should be working for anyone who has forgotten their password. The most obvious change though is that we have now changed to use Gravatars for the images used in user profiles. This falls in line with many other Perl & CPAN sites, which have standardised on using the Gravatar service.
For the Blog site, although user management has been improved, the updates were mostly for image management. For regular readers, its unlikely you will notice much change, but pages should render a little quicker now.
I've started maintaining a list of interesting-looking jobs. You'll find mostly perl jobs here (with a pinch of ruby, python, and maybe even php). The jobs will tend to be telecommute, PDX, or "we will relocate you" jobs.
I originally planned to attend
YAPC::Europe::2011 in Riga, Latvia
(on 15-17 August, 2011), and so bought an early bird ticket, but will no
longer be able to attend due to personal reasons. As a result, I'm now seaking
to transfer the ticket to someone else, for the right price (which will be
cheaper than what I bought it.).
If you are interested, please
contact me and we will
negotiate a price. I hope everybody enjoys the YAPCs.
I am helping to organize a series of Courses with Damian Conway in late August. The Courses will be held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich Switzerland. As we are choosing the topics we are looking for input as to what people are interested in. If you are in the region and are thinking about participating, have a look at our toppics selection page.
If many people attend from abroad, we may be able to strike a bulk deal with some local hotel. I will post again as soon the program is finalized. Then I will also have information about the prices. The more people attend, the lower …
After spending way to much time away from Perl lately I found myself happily at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2011 event that occurred in Malmö, Sweden this weekend. Organizers this time were Jonathan Worthington and Carl Masäk - both Perl6/Rakudo hackers extraordinaire. They and several other speakers both local and from the new world gave a variety of presentations ranging from parsers to message queues to why well structued documentation matters. And as usual there were also a few lightning talks (more about mine a bit down).
I've been going to Perl conferences the past 10 years or so and personally these gatherings are to meet old friends and new friends which can give me inspiration and ideas. Getting a face on an IRC nick adds a lot of value.
And as such, our mythical plate (from "a lot of stuff on my plate") is never to be completely cleaned, but only periodically.
So I've had a lot of stuff to deal with recently. This has created a lot of downtime for me. I've not written almost anything, and neither did I code much. I've maintained a half-present administrative role in Dancer, helping making some decisions. I'm fortunately blessed with a very positive community that really gives you strength, even (and especially) in down times and can take care of itself. I really want to thank the entire Dancer community for that.
Here's a short list of stuff I'm going to be working on soon, or at least wish to:
The Perl 5 tutorial for freiesMagazin (the first and hardest part) is complete and I'm very happy about it (read it in the next month issue). It was a great teamwork and all who read it so far, like it very much. The result will reside in the wiki of perlcommunity.de (link later when arrived there), so it can be further expanded/improved/updated and can help a lot people more. Because its the most visited Perl forum in German and thanks to tinita++ we have there banners that link to different important pages in the wiki which gets 20 times more visited than the others.
You maybe say OMG no no no please send me to detroit but not another Perl tutorial. So take you lists of tuts you know and scrap all that are not German, all that are not up to date with Perl 5.14, all you have to pay for and all that don't take full advantage of HTML and I wonder if there is anything left.
After a long, long time maintaining the perlfaq, I'm moving on from that part of my work in Perl. That leaves a spot for someone else to step in. The latest stuff I had in my briandfoy/branch was merged with blead earlier this week, but any changes I had queued up on my local machine are going to drop through the cracks. I can send that to-do list to anyone who'd like to take on the job.
As such, I'm also stopping the autoposter to comp.lang.perl.misc. This was driving all of the updates as the people in that newsgroup noticed even the most trivial of errors. Although it sometimes took me awhile, I responded to most of them, and the perlfaq was much better for all of the work that other people did and I merely committed.
My most recent hacktivity includes preparing Org::Export::Pod and Org::Export::Text (both not yet ready) following Org::Export::HTML. I am planning to document source code (currently just for functions) using Org as the master format instead of POD. From Org, I'll be exporting to various target formats, including POD itself, inserted to modules' source code in the build process using a simple Dist::Zilla plugin.
Now why Org? First and foremost, obviously because I use Emacs, and the last few months I've migrated practically all of my notes/todolists/addressbooks to this format. Also, it's visually nicer to look at than POD when it comes to things like headings and lists. Org also supports tables (I understand that there's an extension to POD that supports tables too, but I imagine it will not be as easy to write?). BTW, among other lightweight markup languages, Markdown Extra also supports tables with an equally nice syntax.
I would be very happy if somebody could prepare a talk about Perl 6 influence and give it at YAPC::Europe 2011. The language ideas appeared more than 10 years ago and during that time lots of brilliant things landed in its specification.
I wonder which features, trends and directions initially proposed for Perl 6 appeared in other programming languages. Classical example is a 'say' operator which came from Perl 6 to Perl 5. But what about PHP, Python and Ruby. Or JavaScript 6, for example?
Or something more hidden, like .NET and JVM inspired by Parrot VM :-)
If you feel you can do such talk, please let us know: mail@yapceurope.lv. All the speakers attend the conference free of charge and become famous and recognizable people.
Alternatively, could you also comment with post with random pieces of such influence if you know about it. Thank you!
