Sunday, June 26, 2005

Off-Schedule

Just an update... Perlcast will be a little off-schedule this week. I've spent the weekend getting ready for and then traveling to YAPC::NA. Hope to have something for you soon. Also, I'm still working on the results for contest 4. Looks like there might be a tie!!

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Perlcast 14

Perlcast 14 is now available. This week features an interview with Mark Jason Dominus, the author of Higher-Order Perl.

Be sure to vote on contest 2 entries. The taglines are in the sidebar.

News Links


Interview Links

Contest 4

Okay, contest four is all about "There Is More Than One Way To Do It". For this contest, take the string 'a string to fOrMaT' and format it so that the first letter of each word is capitalized and all other letters are lower case. I've got an example of one way to do it below. Send me all of the ways that you can do it before noon CST on June 24th. The person with the most ways wins a copy of the upcoming edition of Advanced Perl Programming.

Here is my sample:

$x = 'a string to fOrMaT';
print join(' ',(map {ucfirst lc $_} (split /\s+/, $x)));"


Here is the resulting string:

A String To Format


Good luck!

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition - Contest 3

This contest is quite a bit easier than the last. In the code below, you get the output of 'file.da' instead of the intended output of 'file'. What is wrong with the regex? Send the repaired regex to perlcast at gmail dot com before 17th June 2005 at noon CST to be entered in the drawing for a copy of Simon Cozens upcoming book Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition.

For Windows Users:

perl -e "$x='file.dat';print $1 if($x=~/(.*).(.*)/)"

For Unix/Linux/etc Users.:

perl -e '$x="file.dat";print $1 if($x=~/(.*).(.*)/)'

Perlcast 13

Perlcast 13 is out. This is a short one, pretty much just covering the news and one Phalanx module.

News


Phalanx Module


The GarageBand.com artist this week was once again Enter the Haggis with Another Round.

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Mailing List

I've just set up a mailing list for Perlcast. Right now, it is an announce-only list. I had some requests for email updates of when new shows come out... guess everyone is not using RSS :)

Anyway, you can subscribe to the list if you want to get email notification of new Perlcasts and new Perlcast.com contests.

Please give me some feedback if you want me to start a Perlcast discussion list. It seems that the message board has gone dead... possibly a mailing list would do better. Email or Skype me and let me know.

Monday, June 6, 2005

Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition - Contest 2

Okay, so the first contest (which is still going on) required a little coding knowledge. This one requires nothing of the sort. Bascially, there are two catch-phrases that I have used for Perlcast:

  • Perl news, Reviews, and More

  • Podcasting Perl


These both pretty much stink. So from now until June 17th, email perlcast at gmail dot come with suggestions for new tag lines. After the 17th, I'll put my favorites on this site and open up voting (still working on the method of voting). Between the 18th and 30th votes will be accepted. Whoever sent in the highest ranked tag-line first will win a copy of Advanced Perl Programming.

Saturday, June 4, 2005

Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition - Contest 1

The broken code for the first contest can be found below. In the code, the hash { a => 1, b => 2 } is being passed through Data::Dumper and then eval'ed back into a hash. This works fine, until strict comes into the picture. When strictness is enabled, the code fails with the error: "Can't use an undefined value as a HASH reference". How can you make this work and still keep strictness for all of the code.


perl -Mstrict -MData::Dumper -e 'my %x = %{eval Dumper({ a => 1, b => 2 })}';


Email perlcast at gmail dot com the answer to this, along with the comment that I mentioned in Perlcast 12 and you will be entered into the contest drawing. The deadline for entry is this Friday at noon CST (2005-06-10 12:00:00 UTC-5).

Perlcast 12

Perlcast 12 has been released. This is an exciting episode! There is an interview with David Wheeler of Bricolage. There is a module talk by Kees Cook. And finally, there is the first of our contests for copies of Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition.

News


Interview
This weeks interview with David Wheeler, the president of Kineticode and lead developer of Bricolage project. Quite a few linkable items were mentioned in the interview... the one that I'm putting here is for Krang, the CMS system that David said was similar to Bricolage.

Phalanx
Kees Cook was kind enough to provide a talk about Device-SerialPort, which he is currently maintaining.

Lest we not forget that you shouldn't use Crypt-DES, but should instead turn to Crypt-Rijndael. You have be warned.

Contest
The first O'Reilly give-away starts today... the broken code for the contest should be posted shortly.

GarageBand.com
The GarageBand.com artist this week as the Lemmings with their track More.

Friday, June 3, 2005

O'Reilly Book Giveaway!

O'Reilly Media have offered five copies of Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition to Perlcast listeners. Starting with Perlcast 12, a contest will be held each week in June. Be sure to tune in and listen for how to win.