This year six of our fellow mongers managed to attend to the YAPC::EU in Pisa, constituting the 6th-largest perl mongers delegation at the conference. Every one of us also managed to get a room in the conference hotel, so it was a very comfortable event for us all.
While the authors can't speak for all Erlangen.pm members, it seemed to be a very good conference, with lots of interesting talks, nice social events and a good many meetings in real life.
Some of the talks that kept in mind were the one by Tim Bounce about his Devel::NYTProf and the one about CPANTesters by Barbie. The latter one showes the importance of Kwalitii to the Perl community and an ambisious project to enable quality assurance in CPAN, which is said to have lots of crap in it. Jonathan Worthington impressed with a talk about Perl 6 signatures, which others praised too.
At YAPC::EU 2010, amongst all the talks I've attended and people I've met, I also gave a talk myself.
The talk was titled "When Perl Met Android" and discussed the Android operating system for mobile devices and the SL4A project and how to use it to run Perl on your phone.
You can find the slides right here. Hopefully I'll be able to cut the screencast to parts and upload to youtube or presentingperl.org - or both. Once that happens, I'll post links here as well.
The ideas to give the talk at YAPC::EU 2010 (which was also my first YAPC ever) and to participate in the SL4A project itself - promoting Perl - were both conceived by Gabor Szabo, to whom I owe quite a lot.
This is a good chance to say "thank you". Gabor has supported me with talks in multiple PM groups. He was the one who got me interested in SL4A (when it was originally called ASE) and pushed me to go to YAPC::EU and even give a talk there. He also supported me throughout YAPC::EU, which was quite intimidating for me at first.
The White Camel Awards recognize significant, but non-technical, achievement in the Perl community, traditionally in three areas: Perl advocacy, Perl user groups, and Perl community. Non-technical work tends not only to be thankless jobs which nobody praises in public. However, these people keep doing the work despite the possibility or reward or recognition. Curiously, the awards tend to go to people who don't think that they deserve them. Sometimes we have to force the award on people, which makes them the ideal candidates for them.
But that's okay, because we're not completely here to reward the person. Giving the White Camel Award gives us a chance to show the world that there are things that we value in the Perl community. This year's recipients, as well as their projects, have been deserving of this sort of recognition for a long time.
Currently I'm located at the Dutch Eth0 Summer 2010 event, which is a camp-with-tents-and-attend-talks-and-workshops event. My younger brother who studies IT went with a bunch of classmates, and I decided to tag along.
So far it has been fun - I've done some Perl evangelising and handed out Round Tuits to random people (thanks for those Tuits, Wendy).
The overall view of Perl is the same ol' "Perl is line noise and the language hasn't seen changes in 10 years lol". While a rebuttal is easy, it's somewhat disheartening but not unexpected.
I was never much of a prolific blogger - and since I was out of action nearly a year back for an extended period, I have not managed to resume at all...
So I'm aiming to do a little perl blogging here, as opposed to on my other (mostly abandoned) blog. Hopefully this should manage to keep going for a while.
So... I've got this set of modules I've been going to opensource for more than a year now. Strangely, main obstacle is a choice of namespace.
Internally, they are called Stream::*. It is multi-layered set of classes with common interfaces, from low-level Stream::File / Stream::Log / Stream::MemoryStorage, to more complex Stream::Queue (local file-based queue supporting multiple parallel clients). Also, there are functional-style filters, catalog which can construct stream objects by their name, pumpers connecting input and output streams, multiplexing, and a lot of abstractions, base classes and roles...
Together, they assist in implementing complex asyncrohous, realtime and possibly distributed data processing.
By now, i think the paradigm I'm trying to implement is called a Flow-based programming, but until recently, I've mostly been thinking in terms of this image:
Anyway. I'll have a chance to talk about it later when this code will become public.
Any hints about namespace?
I don't like Stream::* that much, and there is a Stream-Reader in that namespace already.
mst's State of the Velociraptor talk at YAPC::EU inspired me to start a blog here, although this first post has nothing to do with Perl...
After reading Chisel's post on highlighting useful words like TODO in Vim, I decided to see if TextMate could do the same. After a bit of trial-and-error and a brief glance at the documentation, the following worked for me:
This module dates back to 1999, but as of late 2009 it had only been patched twice over a 5 year period. The RT queue was full of very good (but unapplied) patches. The world of browsers had also changed considerably over this 10 year period, making the module helpful but missing a lot of coverage. Since I didn't feel like rewriting this module,I took the time to contact the author about seeing if he'd allow me to apply the patches. I'm happy to say that he was very responsive. He added me as a co-maintainer immediately and I set about working through the queue.
Over the last few years, I've come to rely on tools that summarize information for me: Being on a mailing list in digest mode and receiving a summary of activity once or twice a day is a great example -- and it's also the specific challenge that I'm struggling with.
As my information consumption habits change, I find that I also want to customize how that information is delivered, and when, more than simply changing to digest mode allows. And, frankly, even in digest mode, I receive too many individual e-mails.
To resolve this, I end up setting my list subscriptions to "no mail" and fooling myself into thinking I'll peruse them on the Web from time-to-time. However, for those mailing lists, I'd actually would like to see what's happening regularly. So, last week I started brainstorming a tool that would send me a daily summary of all activity across a variety of different lists -- combining, say, all lists about security into one daily e-mail summary with links to the individual posts.
It's over a year since I released Devel-CheckLib-0.699_001 which introduced a Useful and Shiny new feature, but it's still not had a proper release because it doesn't work on Windows. I don't have access to Windows, and even if I did I wouldn't know what to do, and, to be blunt, I don't care to learn.
So I'd like to find someone to take over maintenance, fix the bugs, be able to test it on both Windows (Cygwin, MSVC and ideally Borland too) and Unix, and get a release out. If you know VMS (for which it has no support at all) then all the better!
Any volunteers? Please email me if you'd like to do this.
I ran into Michel Rodriguez at YAPC, so I started talking to him about my idea for an XML::Twig cookbook. I really, really love his module and want more people to use it. It takes a bit to get used to, so I think it's ideally suited for some cookbook-style documentation.
His advice is that XML::Twig is what you use when parsing and futzing with XML is not the primary purpose of your program (e.g., you have some config files to read). That turned into a bit of a discussion with those around us about when you should use which XML modules, and that we should answer the same cookbook recipes with examples from multiple modules (like a Bobby Flay cook-off, I guess).
Once there was a time where you could upload conference presentation videos to Google Video. No more.
video.google.com refers to youtube.com. My google video uploader does not work anymore.
Youtube tells me that I may upload videos not longer than 10min - my video is 55min - but I may try to convert it down to <100MB and then it will be accepted.
Ok, I converted from full screen resolution 1280x1024 (I made a screencast with live audio at YAPC::EU 2010 Pisa of my Perl Compiler talk) down to 512x384 and got from 346MB to 127MB, split into two parts of 54MB and 73MB.
youtube is telling me now: video too long, max 10min, but if I was allowed to upload longer videos before I still could. I know that I uploaded longer videos to Google video, because that's why I used that.
youtube also tells me that I may ask for guru status, and then I might get permission to upload my conference talk. So what is guru status?
In Order to do a little hacking together, we created a Erlangen.pm group at Github. Due to the fact that many of our fellow Perl programmers are allready subscripted at Github we started that group over there.
In the group we want to share code snippets and scripts for our all benifits. We also want to share projects and locate the stuff, we are hacking on all together over there.
Whoever in the Erlangen Perl Mongers group (or whoever feels like one of our fellow Mongers) wants to join our combined efforts in programming just need to have a github account and send me a message and I will take her over into our group.
So far, have a nice hacking together and remember: github is our facebook!
The BBC team I'm currently working on has a very, very slow test suite. On my box, it was generally taking about 2h10m to complete. Between Johan Lindström and myself, we've shaved half an hour from that. Johan used transactional savepoints for his part. This allowed us to roll back some database changes rather than rebuild the database tables. My part involved subtests and a very strange use of Test::Class.
its been a great YAPC, emotionally. Not as many technical talks where really compelling, but lot where really funny. But I met a lot of people I like. martin berends, jnthn and the bunch, finally i met mattia barbon which was also releasing and intresting (our interview will come soon on radio YAPC). I met a lot of germans, larry who tried to talk to me german too. and there were a lot more. great people, great food, wonderfull ice cream, fantastic hostel, great rides. it was the best possible holiday for me now.
This article is a simple guide to installing and running Parley on a
remote/virtual server. It doesn’t cover modifiction, extension and
configuration. I hope to cover this in a separate entry.
I’ve been meaning to write this for some time, partly inspired by passing
comments from people who’ve tried but found it too difficult or confusing.
I just blew my time budget on the Perl survey stuff for looking at programming language info, and I want to offload what I had to do to get to this point.
Firstly the tl;dr: You can see the complete results for language usage at the survey website.
Here are the gory details (just a note: the <- operator is a bit like the = operator in other languages, but there's also a -> assignment operator too, which means you can do all sorts of clever things in 1 line of code):
What we asked was for the 5 programing languages that you use most, roughly in order of how much they're used. Then we asked where perl came in that list.
The BBC team I'm currently working on has a very, very slow test suite. On my box, it was generally taking about 2h10m to complete. Between Johan Lindström and myself, we've shaved half an hour from that. Johan used transactional savepoints for his part. This allowed us to roll back some database changes rather than rebuild the database tables. My part involved subtests and a very strange use of Test::Class.
I mentioned http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ on #yapc IRC channel this morning, saying it would be nice to see all the old YAPCs as well as the new ones.
