January 2011 Archives

One more week for OSCON proposals

The OSCON Call for Proposals ends February 7th.

In the Perl track, we're looking for:

  • Perly stuff that deals with Javascript, JSON, or HTML5
  • Who's going to do a Plack talk?
  • Modern Perl or modern Perl.
  • Cool new things you can do with Perl 5.14 (see the Perl 5.14 posts at The Effective Perler)
  • Using Unicode in Perl
  • The latest Perl development support tools
  • Current Perl good-enough practices
  • What's up with Parrot and Perl 6

If you're not up to a 40 minute talk, especially if you're a new presenter, we also have short, low pressure 5-minute lightning talks.

And, since speaker participation includes a peer-review process, I have a lot of advice on improving your chances.

The 2011 Perl QA Workshop, April 16-18 in Amsterdam

The 2011 Perl QA Workshop will be April 16-18 in Amsterdam, sponsored by Booking.com. If you show up, you might never leave.

The QA workshop is perhaps one of the most productive workshops. Here are my notes and videos from the 2010 Perl QA workshop in Vienna:

What's "a good book about programming for Unix"?

What's a good book about programming for Unix? In Learning Perl, while showing the file test operators, we say:

Don't worry if you don't know what some of the other file tests mean--if you've never heard of them, you won't be needing them. But if you're curious, get a good book about programming for Unix.

But, we then leave the reader hanging without giving them an idea which book they might. I guess Chapter 4 of Stevens's Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment might be the answer, but is there something else?

A Perl interface for sharktools

Sinan Ünür created a first pass at a Perl interface to sharktools so you can have all the fun of Wireshark right in your Perl program. Why should Java and Python have all of the fun while analyzing network traffic?

I'm paying him to do it because I need it for a project and he's much better than I am at that sort of thing. However, I bet a lot of other Perl people would find it useful, so we're making it open source. Sinan already set up the github repository, and eventually that will make its way to CPAN as Net::Sharktools unde…

What are your environment settings for Unicode?

How have you set up your environment to work with Unicode? I want to make a cheat sheet for the Perl newbies. There is some information in the googlesphere but it's disperse and unfocused.

I'm working Unicode into the next edition of Learning Perl. The most frustrating part of this for newbies (Perl, Unicode, or otherwise) is getting all the pieces to cooperate. Even if you get it right inside your Perl program, your terminal might not handle Unicode. If your terminal handles it, you might not have the right fonts. And so on and so on.

brian's 2011 Perl goals

These are the things that are likely to happen:

  1. A new cpan(1) (the thing from App::cpan and also bundled with CPAN.pm) version for Perl 5.14. I need to get on that pretty soon, then. :) The current cpan(1) has support for loading alternate config files, and I'd like to also provide a config option that acts as much as possible like cpanm. I think that's probably 90% possible, even if we have to convince CPAN.pm to do things slightly separately.

  • A new edition of…
  • About brian d foy

    user-pic I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).