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Let this blog post be also an invitation to my talk that I'll have on this years YAPC::EU::2011 in Riga and a reason "Why?" there will be more questions then answers.

There is one question that keeps me busy for quite some months now already and that is: What if the knowledge and wisdom is not in answers, but in questions?

As it kept me busy for just too long and as I'm a full-time Perl programmer, I've decided to write a code to help me answer "Why?".

Sherm Pendley passed away on Saturday, July 9th. He was best known in the Perl community as the primary author and maintainer of CamelBones, an Objective-C/Perl bridge for use in Cocoa development. He was known among his friends and loved ones for his wit, humor, and intelligence. Sherm once wrote: "Simply put, my overall goal is to leave the world a better place than I found it."

See also his obituary and guestbook.

I logged in to perlmonks yesterday to find this!

10 years of programming Perl.

I'm grateful to have found such a wonderful language to help me do almost any job at work better, and for keeping me entertained long into the night away from the office. I look forward to another 10 years. Thanks Perl!

I'm was playing with PSGI spec and Plack last few days and found Debug middleware just amazing:

You should just try it:

plackup debug-demo.psgi
firefox http://127.0.0.1:5000

Ran into an issue today and wanted to share in case anybody else hits the problem.

Using the good-old cpan client I found myself unable to install a module. It took me a while to track down the problem...

I had CPAN::SQLite installed and that appears to have a bug (which I filed as RT 69415):

If a greater version of a dist is removed from the CPAN, CPAN::SQLite will fail to reindex the "current" (lesser) version, which means the cpan client will spiral into a 404 loop and give up.

So if you try to install a module and cpan spews 404 errors for a different version than you're expecting, open up ~/.cpan/cpandb.sql with sqlite3 and delete that record with something like:

DELETE FROM dists WHERE dist_name = '?'

Ricardo wants to fix smart matching, which is horribly broken and always has been, although we're just starting to realize how bad it really is. He reduces the table to just a few operations:

$a      $b              Meaning
======= =======         ======================
Any     undef           ! defined $a
Any     ~~-overloaded   invokes the ~~ overload on the object, $a as arg
Any     Regexp, qr-OL   $a =~ $b
Any     CodeRef         $b->($a)
Any     Any             fatal

Hi Folks

Module::Metadata::CoreList compares module pre-req version #s in your Build.PL or Makefile.PL with the versions of those modules in Module::CoreList, for a given version of Perl.

This can help you specify the minimum version # for the pre-req.

It used to be that my preference for Perl was considered niche; now it seems to be considered outdated. Google trends shows how Perl has declined over the past 7 or so years:

My previous post about a weird do-block bug I stumbled upon has been fixed as of 7c2d9d0, the day after I posted. I don't know if anybody saw this post or if it was a coincidence, but thanks!

I love the comment:

Fix context propagation below return()

A.k.a. "RT #38809 strikes back".

I was curious about the recent number of CPAN uploads. I found some raw data from CPAN testers, and created a little chart:

And to make 2011 comparable to previous years, here are counts for the first 6 months of each year:

iCPAN hit the app store about a year ago. I didn't really expect there would be a lot of downloads, but the reality is that there was far more interest than I had expected, which is good. After the original app was released, I was able to release a couple of subsequent versions with updated Pod, but it soon became clear that some problems were not being solved.

The first issue was that it was taking a very long time to put a build together, because I had to parse all of minicpan with each run. The second issue was that my coverage was too low, around 60,000 docs. A lot of docs were being missed and there were a lot of edge cases to work out.

About a month or two months ago I started writing together with Smash, a book on CPAN modules and frameworks. The final name and table of contents is not yet fully defined, but some chapters are already popping out.

I put up a simple page where the draft documents will appear. I know the URL sucks, but I might fix it soon. At the moment I made one chapter available.

The final document will be made available in electronic format freely to the community (without that DRAFT watermark, that is there just so you know this wasn't yet revised). Also, a printed version will be available, probably in lulu, but not yet totally defined.

The book is being written in PseudoPod, and it available on GitHub. Refer to the book page for details.

I am happy with comments, corrections and grammar fixes. We know our English sucks. Just try to be positive, or we might end up quitting from this job :)

UPDATE: check the new webpage address: http://ambs.github.com/Books.

As a PAUSE admin, I ran into a new problem today. The URI::Dispatch module did not index because it has no package statements and has no provides in META.yml.

This leads me to a couple of questions, for which I invite you to answer:

• Just how hard should the PAUSE indexer work to discover namespaces when you work hard to hide them? Remember, at the moment it's only MooseX::Declare, but it might be many other modules later.
• What are other MooseX::Declare people doing to have their stuff indexed?

I'm also thinking about this for my BackPAN indexing bits, which uses my module Module::Extract::Namespaces. That's a PPI-based module, which I guess I now have to mutate to understand Moose. I haven't thought too much about that, so I'm not sure how I'm going to do that.

The Astro-satpass distribution contains classes to compute satellite position and visibility. The recent ‘Heads up’ posts were the latest chapter in its life, and that chapter comes to an end with the release of version 0.040. The only code modification since the most-recent ‘Heads up’ was to have the satpass script take advantage of the new lazy_pass_position attribute.

So who uses this distribution anyway? Since it is open source, the only users I find out about are the ones who write me — usually with a problem of some sort. Most of these represent an opportunity to improve the distribution, even if only to try to make the documentation a little clearer.

My impression from the correspondence is that most uses of this package are casual — hobbyists, interested amateurs, and the like. This is not to deprecate those users: I am one myself.

But it appears to be be in serious, day-to-day use in at least four places. These are:

Recently, we had to rework a legacy project using Catalyst. We chose HTML::FormFu as our Form engine because we had good experience with it in other projects.

However, we had to face one problem: Forms had to be different for every user. Well, the difference is based on the user's roles, to be precise.

As a rescue and a generic approach, we chose to create a simple HTML::FormFu::Plugin that can get applied to every or some of the forms, just as needed. To get things working, we need to do two things:

• mark certain fields inside the form with the rights we need for editing
• have our plugin make the privileged fields readonly

A simple form (in perl syntax) might look like this:

There's DBI_TRACE, but sometimes I just want to see the queries that are used in $dbh->prepare(). Here is a simple dip script to do that.

dip -e 'before { warn ARGS(1) } call qr/DBI::.*::prepare/' foo.pl

We have changed the domain for YAPC::NA 2012. It was yapc2012.us. It is now yapcna.org. The reason for this change is that we want to start a tradition of handing down resources from one YAPC::NA to another so that each new conference organizer need not start from scratch. So after YAPC::NA 2012, we will hand over this domain and a bunch of other resources to the YAPC::NA 2013 organizer, and they will hand it down to 2014 and so on.

Therefore we have a bunch of new links for you:

Blog: http://blog.yapcna.org

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/yapcna

RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/yapcna?format=xml

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/YAPCNA/222065877826581

June proved to be an eventful month for CPAN Testers. We had several updates and passed a couple of significant milestones.

Firstly, the updates. As well as the blog and wiki updates earlier in the month, David Golden also released a new version of CPAN-Reporter. This release is notable for two reasons. It now defaults to using the Metabase, rather than the email transport method of old, and also attempts to automated as much of the Metabase ID creation as possible. In order to encourage new testers, simplifying the setup process is a must. David made significant changes to CPAN.pm regards auto-configuration, and he's incorporated the same ideas into CPAN-Reporter. Ultimately we'd like to see a common client, which uses the APIs of CPAN-Reporter and CPANPLUS-YACSmoke, and can abstract away much of the configuration and processing of smoke testing. The aim being to encourage more casual testers to send us reports from the real world, as distributions are installed or upgraded.

I've just recently released my first Perl-related screencast, Fun with clouds.

It details how to install and build your first Mojolicious web application. I'd like to create more, just let me know what Mojolicious-related topics you would like to hear about on http://mojocasts.com. The more feedback I get, the more I'll release.

Mojocast #1 Fun with clouds! from glen hinkle on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

Hm, seems that ironman is not picking up my new, selfhosted (and selfpowered) blog, so this here is just a short ad for my post there:

http://domm.plix.at/perl/dancer_and_postgres_on_dotcloud.html