August 2010 Archives

Help newbies, your project and the community - README

If you want newbies to help you with a project - in fixing code, writing tests or even documentation - my course students will be given a course completion project to help out an open source project. That project can be yours!

Background:
I've been very inspired by DJB (Daniel J. Bernstein) and his course on UNIX Security Holes. The highlight to me was how his students interacted with the outside world - something I personally never did while studying programming (or anything else, for that matter) at school. I saw two of my brothers go through their degr…

Add more RSS feeds to your reader (using Google Reader)

I try to encourage my students to join the Perl community as an aid of learning. I always stress that the community is such a learning benchmark, it is practically considered vital.

While showing a student how to work with Google Reader (since he already integrated much of his life into Gmail and the Google Calendar), I noticed something I overlooked before: you can specify search terms for subscription adding and it will search that through known RSS entries and let you pick which ones you want to subscribe to.

In Google Reading, click on "Add a subscription" and write down "…

Above my intellectual pay grade

I've been continually discouraged recently with various projects and endeavors. I've found that - while "stupid" is too strong of a word, "ignorant" should suffice - I will likely be unable to pursue certain paths while yielding positive results. "An intellectual FAIL," one might say.

It is not just in the realm of code, but well beyond it. I have a tendency for drama, I suppose, but it is still overwhelmingly clear that spreading oneself thin makes for... well, a rather thin layer. I've contemplated throwing the towel (and the water bottle, and the spit bucket, and half of the locker…

What I would change about POE::Test::Helpers

Since plunging into the event-based programming world POE offers, I've been infatuated with combining the tests I've learned to write (Perl Testing Handbook FTW!), which proved to be a pesky task.

Writing tests was fun, writing POE was a bit difficult for me at first and combining them seemed close to impossible.

I started off by using MooseX::POE by (++Chris Prather) and it helped me instantaneously understand and write event-based code. However, with time I learned to se…

Slides from YAPC::EU 2010 - When Perl Met Android

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.…

Dist::Zilla strictures tip

So, mst wrote up strictures which basically bundles the "Kensho" pragmas, so to speak: strict, warnings (FATAL!), no indirect (vpit++). It plans for clean separation of different versions so you can maintain compatibility using specific versions of the pragma. How nifty is that? That's right, very nifty!

I'm using Dist::Zilla with Dist::Zi…

PIMC - Perl is my Community

I have been delaying my posts on the 2nd and 3rd day of YAPC::EU for quite a while. How can you sum up so many experiences, so many lessons, so many cool people and new friends?

If you thought that my post on the first day was long, just imagine a post that covers more than thrice the amount of stuff spanning across two whole days. I can't.

I will say that I've learned a lot about Perl, XS and technology in general, but I've learned the most about community and how important it is. For that I wish to thank the YAPC::EU organizers and everyone who helped organize, gave talks, c…

First day of YAPC::EU

After we reached the hotel yesterday at 10PM, we met up with Shmuel Fomberg from Israel.pm who was in the lobby. He provided us with a lot of information (we missed the get-together that day), maps and explanations with the locations of various places (hotel, leaning tower, where the Friends and Family meeting the next day is, etc.) and even offered some food. One awesome guy!

We tried to find a place open nearby but in the dark, near a stretch of main road, it all looks like places to get mugged/gang-raped. We decided to stay in where I could practice my lecture one more time before …

At the airport en route to YAPC::EU

After a while of loose planning, while working on 20 other things at the same time, we've finally left for the airport. We've taken 4 hours in advanced so we don't worry about delays.

We've reached the airport and got to the terminal so quickly that it left us quite a lot of time. One of the people at the border checkup asked me which metal festival am I going to. "A Perl conference" - "what?" - "computer stuff" - "oh..", "surprised?" - "hell yeah!" I suppose a lot of tattoos give that impression. :)

Unfortunately there isn't much to do here. There's internet connection so I w…

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