Chicago Perl Hack-A-Thon 2007

Perl Mongers in Chicago are hosting a hackathon on the weekend of December 14-16 (all day Fri-Sun). It's open-ended, so bring whatever project you want to work on and get some other people to help you out! It's a great way to spend some quality time with both your favorite Perl projects and your fellow Perl Mongers :)

The event is of course free, and it will be on the second floor of the J.Ira & Nicki Harris Family Hostel. Food will be provided :) Finally, if you're coming in from out of town, we've reserved rooms at the hostel for $115 (Thursday-Sunday). Pay for your room through The Perl Review.
Contact Jonathan Rockway (jon at jrock dot us) or Josh McAdams (joshua dot mcadams at gmail dot com) for any questions.

Making My Own CPAN

brian d foy presents on Making My Own CPAN.

Perl News 13 Sep 2007

Interview Audio

Welcome to Perlcast. This is your host, Randal Schwartz with another round of Perl news.

Let's kick things off with a little conference and workshop news.

YAPC::Europe 2007 has released some conference videos on YouTube under the tag 'yapceu07'. There are only a few videos posted right now, but expect more to follow.

Of course, YAPC::Europe 2007 isn't the only YAPC to release videos recently. YAPC::Europe 2002 have posted videos from the Munich conference on YouTube under the tag 'yapceu02'. Of course, the 2002 organizers have a pretty good excuse for just now posting their videos... the conference was held three years before the existence of YouTube!

Since we are on the topic of videos, I might as well mention that the London.pm Teach-In videos can now be found on Blip.tv at jtweed.blip.tv. There are videos for each of the four sessions available. Be warned that the audio on the last session cuts out near the end due to technical difficulties at the teach-in.

Enough about past events, let's move on to what is on the horizon.

First a reminder that the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is just around the corner. The workshop will be held on October 13-14, 2007 at the University Center on Carnegie Mellon University's Oakland campus. And, don't forget that in addition to the workshop, there will be a "From Zero To Perl," a special course for programmers new to the Perl programming language. There is an additional registration fee of $65 to take this course. Please select either the "Regular + From Zero To Perl" or "Student + From Zero To Perl" options when registering. Seating in this course is limited so register today before it's too late!

Next, for those brave souls with thick coats, the Minneapolis Perl Mongers have announced a one-day Perl workshop to be held on February 16th, 2008. The workshop is appropriately named Frozen Perl and will be an all-day workshop held at the University of Minnesota. More information can be found at frozen-perl.org, as well as, a link the Frozen Perl's call for speakers. The theme of the workshop is "Perl in Practice". If you want to take a shot at being a speaker, submit your abstract soon.

In YAPC news, Copenhagen, Denmark has been selected to host YAPC::Europe 2008. Copenhagen faced stiff competition from Braga, Portugal and the Informatics department of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Though the Wellcome Trust didn't win the bid, their submission marks the first from a non-Perlmonger group.

Copenhagen.pm has hosted several Nordic Perl Workshops and is expected to pull together a wonderful conference. Congratulations Copenhagen.pm.

We'll wrap up the social Perl news by welcoming a new PM group to the mix. Leeds.pm is getting started with an inaugural meeting on tentatively set for the 7th December. leeds.pm.org doesn't seem to running yet but there is a mailing list. You can find the link at Perlcast.com (http://www.hexten.net/mailman/listinfo/northofengland-pm)

On a slightly more technical slant, there have been a few update on search.cpan.org. CPAN search has added gravatar icons to author pages so that CPAN users can make a human connection to the people behind the code that thye are using. CPAN authors can add their own gravatar by signing up to gravatar.com using their CPAN email alias. Also, search results now display module ratings from cpanratings.perl.org. This allows for searches to quickly get an idea of which modules might work best for them.

While on the topic of CPAN, the PAUSE administrators recently put out an important announcement. They are planning to do a little house keeping on the CPAN Modules List. They intend to remove old namespace reservations which have been registered with the modules mailing list but for which there never has been an actual implementation on CPAN. This will apply to all unused registrations from May 2007 and earlier. The admins will send an email to every PAUSE author who has an unused namespace asking them to contact the modules-at-perl-dot-org mailing list about the issue. Registrants have until December, at which time the namespaces will then be made available again. If you've registered a namespace and haven't used it, be sure to watch your inbox.

CPAN Testers have started an IRC discussion channel since the #cpantesters channel has gotten a little noisy due to smoke reports. Now testers can have conversations on #cpantesters-discuss at irc.perl.org.

You've seen the 'digg it' links on people's websites and news stories. What about Perl-related stores? Is there an easy way to have people submit your post as a story to use.perl.org? Now there is. Visit use.perl.org to grab the two lines of JavaScript that make the majic happen. The submitter doesn't need to have an account on use.perl.org, but people with an account can add a description of the story they'd like to submit.

Believe it or not, Fall is here and it is time for the Fall 2007 issue of The Perl Review. In it's fourth year of print publication, the magazine has a new design that packs in more Perl into the same number of pages of older addtions. In this issue: Templating My Output -- Alberto Simões; Making My Own CPAN -- brian d foy; Programming Parrot: NCI -- Jonathan Scott Duff; Komodo Test Drive -- Jim Brandt; Named Captures in Perl 5.10 -- brian d foy; and much more.

The Perl Foundation has awarded a grant to Shlomi Fish to create a reusable parser for the syntax of MediaWiki, the popular open-source wiki engine that powers sites such as Wikipedia and Wikiquote. The deliverables of the grant are a CPAN module and a Kwiki plugin for using this MediaWiki syntax in Kwiki wikis, enabling people to create Perl projects that can parse its syntax and create compatible wikis. This grant is a second for Shlomi, who successfully completed a grant for XML::RSS improvements earlier this year.

If you want to contribute to the Perl community and get paid for it, consider proposing a grant to The Perl Foundation. If you would like to contribute and have no idea what to do, check out TPF's grant suggestions on their website.

Do you have a reasonably connected server with a static IP address? If so, you might be eligible to join the NTP Pool. The CPU requirements for ntpd are so small that you will hardly realize that it's there and with that small bit of CPU, you'll be helping millions of computer users around the world. In addition, if you are able to setup a GPS antenna then you can apply for free GPS devices. More information can be found at www.pool.ntp.org/meinberg.html.

exuberant ctags 5.7 is out with improved Perl support including support for 'package' keyword, multi-line subroutine, package, and constant definitions, optional subroutine declarations, formats, and much more. ctags is easy to use and is easy for module authors to add targets for in their distributions.

There have been a few Perl books released recently. At OSCON, brian foy's "Mastering Perl" came hot off the press. Now, Stas Bekman and Jim Brandts "mod_perl2 User's Guide" was just been published by Onyx Neon. Look for a book giveaway soon at Perlbuzz.com.

And finally, ohloh.net is a social networking site for open source projects. There are a few Perl-based projects out there waiting for reviews and others that need to be submitted. Check out ohloh.net and get a slightly different look at the open source projects that you use every day.

Ross Turk of SourceForge.net

O'Reilly's Source Convention (OSCON) 2007 is happing this week in Portland, Oregon. The conference is in it's first day of sessions, but has really been going on for about five days because of tutorials and the Ubuntu Live conference. As always, this is a great event for catching up with what is going on in the Open Source world and meeting up with people outside of the Perl community.

One of those people that I've talked with is Ross Turk, the Community Relationship Manager at SourceForge.net. Ross sat down for a while with Pete Krawczyk and me and talked about the SourceForge.net system, as well as, the Community Choice Awards 2007 that are scheduled to be handed out tomorrow night. Enjoy the interview.

Perl News 2007-07-20

• News Audio
  

Perl 5.9.5 release

Perl 5.9.5, the latest development release of Perl, has been uploaded to the CPAN. There have been scores of changes in this release including the removal of pseudo hashes, there move of the JPL and the removal of the byte code compiler and of perlcc. Of course, this release is not all about removals, there were also many improvements and changes in functionality and the addition of the Method Resolution Order pragma.

Perl 5.9.5 aims to be the last development release of Perl 5 before the new major stable version, perl 5.10.0. That means that no new feature or important code change will go in this branch before it's stabilized; focus will be now put on regression testing and documentation improvements.

This is a development release, meaning that is must not be deployed in production. However, it is provided so it can be tested as widely as possible, on many platforms and with many CPAN modules. Of course, feedback on any problems you might discover will be welcome; for that, use the perlbug utility,or, if you want to be involved more closely in the development process of Perl 5.10, subscribe to the perl5-porters mailing list.

At Last, A Perl 5 Wiki

For a long time now people have been grumbling about making a Perl 5 wiki. You know, some place central and official-looking to write down all things Perl. Well, at long last comes the announcement for the official Perl 5 Wiki!

Like any new Wiki it needs content. Content provided by YOU the user of Perl. Here are some suggestions:

• Add to the glossary.
  
• Help write up lists of recommended CPAN modules.
  
• Write down anecdotes and bits of lore. Maybe weird things that happened at a Perl Mongers meeting or conference,like the infamous London.pm quicksort dance.
  
• Or add yourself and others to the people of Perl.
  
• Add profiles of businesses known to use Perl.
  

You can find the wiki at perlfoundation.org

New PM Groups

We'd like to welcome five new PM groups the the ever-growing list of local Perl Mongers. The new groups are:

• Szczecin.pm - lead by Robert Olejnik
  
• Kiev.pm - lead by Serg Gulko
  
• The Woodlands.pm - lead by Todd Rinaldo
  
• Ithaca.pm - lead by Beth Skwarecki
  
• Thames Valley.pm - lead by Rafiq Ismail
  

Juggling For Geeks: The First YAPC::NA Video

During the course of YAPC::NA Barbie videoed Luke Closs presenting his Juggling For Geeks talk. Well, Luke took the video and uploaded it to revver, if you want to go watch it you can find the link at Perlcast.com.

Expect more from the Lightning Talk session in the coming weeks. You'll want to track Barbie's journal to catch them as soon as they come out.

A Trio of Perl 6 Microgrants

There is money to be made working on Perl 6 right now and three hard working programmers have proven it so.

Flavio Glock will receive a travel microgrant to help him attend YAPC::EU and evangelize kp6 and the Perl 6 in Perl 6 effort.

Steve Pritchard will receive a microgrant to complete the RPM packaging of Parrot and Pugs for Fedora and to submit those packages for inclusion in the official Fedora distribution.

Juerd Waalboer is the maintainer of feather.perl6.nl, the primary host for Pugs development. Juerd will receive a microgrant to purchase upgraded hardware for feather.

If you're interested in submitting a Perl 6 microgrant proposal, you can find more information about how to do so by following the link from Perlcast.com.

Adding tags to CPAN modules via CPAN::Forum

From now on, registered users of CPAN::Forum can add personal tags to every distribution. This is just the start. Expect more features such as seeing the tags of others and seeing them in a cloud, as well as, access to the data so that it can be used to enhance search engines. You are most welcome to register on the site and start adding tags to your favorite modules or just complain bitterly about the bugs and missing features on the CPAN::Forum page of CPAN Forum.

Parrot 0.4.13

Parrot 0.4.13 "Clifton." has been officially released. There have been many language updates, as well as, a move from the Artistic 1/GPL License to the Artistic License 2.0. Supposedly there were also speculated Parrot 1.0 release dates mentioned at YAPC::NA 2007 and they were more specific than 'by Christmas'.

Plat_Forms Report Published

The results and final report of the "Plat_Forms" international programming contest were published June 20th on www.plat-forms.org For each of the categories Perl, PHP and Java, three teams of three people each competed to produce a comprehensive "social networking" application in just 30 hours.

Team Etat de Genève / Optaros was declared winner of the Perl track. The Geneva solution, based on Catalyst and DBIx::DataModel, was especially praised for its compactness. However, other Perl solutions by "plusW" (Germany) and "Revolution Systems" (USA) were very close, and it was hard for the jury to decide. The report notes that compactness and extensibility are consistent qualities of the Perl solutions.

Pittsburgh Perl Workshop 2007

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP 2007, a two-day, low-cost conference on Saturday and Sunday October 13-14, 2007.

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is an annual conference dedicated to the Perl programming language. In 2006, the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers broke new ground by hosting the first Perl Workshop based in the United States. This year, the Perl Mongers are expanding the Workshop to a two-day format. As always, the 2007 Workshop is designed to provide you with a comfortable, exciting, and enjoyable learning experience. It is structured as a series of short lectures, but the atmosphere is low key and engaging – the perfect combination to open your mind and then cram it full of good stuff.

This year's conference has loads of new additions like:

• The workshop has expanded to a two-day event to allow for more talks, BOF's, and social interactions.
  
• There will be a one-day course for programmers with little or no Perl experience. This course will be given by a world-class Perl trainer.
• The schedule has become more relaxed to allow for more peer interaction.
  
• Scheduling of sessions has been improved to maximize flexibility in attending the sessions you want to attend.
  
• The web site is now powered by "A Conference Toolkit"(ACT)
  

Stay up to date with everything that's going on with the Perl Workshop by subscribing to our RSS feed at the conference website.

The call for papers for PPW is officially open! Talks are available in 20 minute, 50 minute or lightning talk durations. This year's theme is "Hands On Perl." What does this theme mean to you? We want to know. Please visit the conference website to submit your proposals.

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop relies heavily on sponsorship to make the conference low-cost for attendees. Please consider sponsoring the workshop financially. In return, you can send people to the workshop for free, promote your organization,and get a warm, happy feeling inside. More details on the workshop can be found by following links from Perlcast.com or going directly to the source: pghpw.org.

Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials in the Perl 6 / parrot repository

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, and Leo Tötsch wrote Perl 6 Essentials , which later became Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials . The universe has changed quite a bit since then. Despite that, the first chapter is still very interesting because it's a slice of history about what people were thinking and why things happened the way they did.

Allison recently arranged for O'Reilly Media to transfer the rights to The Perl Foundation so it could potentially turn into a community work that is up-to-date and relevant. The source files are currently marked as copyright of The Perl Foundation, but are expected to be released under the Artistic License 2.0.

The Perl 6 parts of the book went in the Perl 6 source repository, which you can access with SVN (and probably a few other ways). Commands for accessing the repositories can be found at Perlcast.com.

The source is the Pod export from O'Reilly's internal format,and you can use Allison's Pod::PseudoPod module to deal with it.

Perl 6 and Parrot Wikis Move To perlfoundation.org

For a year or two now Andy Lester has hosted the Perl 6 and Parrot wikis on his home server, on a not-too-fast DSL line,at rakudo.org. They've now been moved to the wiki infrastructure at perlfoundation.org, on a dedicated box. This means much better performance, so if you've tried the wikis before and found them slow, check them out now. You can find links to the wikis at Perlcast.com.

Thanks to Socialtext for the hosting.

Perldoc Suggested Search

If you frequently search the perldocs from the Firefox search box, don't you think that it would be nice if you could get suggestions when searching like you do for google search?Believe it or not, you can install the utility to do that from Mycroft. You can find the link at the Perlcast website or by searching mycroft.mozdev.org.

Perl Tips Newsletter

Did you know that there was a Perl tips newsletter? Well, at least 400 other Perl programmers know about it and now you dodo. Feel free to subscribe at perltraining.com.au

UnixReview/SysAdmin ends

It has been released that the August 2007 issue of UnixReview/SysAdmin will be the last issue. I wrote 71 bimonthly columns from March 1995 to July 2007 for that magazine sequence, covering a wide variety of Perl topics(from web 0.0 to web 2.0 and beyond), and getting my name in print around 10 million times. I will miss the job.

I'm still writing for Linux Magazine (94 articles and climbing), so you can still get a monthly dose of wisdom there.

Perl 5.005 Released

Perl 5.005 is a great version of Perl and still used by many people. There have been a few distribution updates and tool changes which mean that it no longer compiles cleanly everywhere, so it's time for a maintenance release of perl5.005.

Teach-In Slides and Videos Released

The slides from London.pm's Teach-In are are now available online.

You can also get audio and video of the first session on both Blip.tv and Google video. There's also an RSS feed that you can subscribe to if you want to know when the remaining three sessions are released.

Artistic License 2.0 Approved by OSI

In a June 6th meeting of the board, the Open Source Initiative has approved the Artistic License 2.0 for their online list of licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition. The new version of the license will replace the original Artistic License and the Clarified Artistic License. Though the revision process for the Artistic 2.0 was completed nearly a year ago, this marks a significant vote of acceptance for the license from the broader open source community.

Volunteer for the Perl Foundation booth at OSCON

The Perl Foundation will again make its presence known in the vendor room of OSCON in late July. If you would like to donate a couple of hours of your time to help run the booth,we'd be happy to have you! If you're interested, send an email to volunteer@perlfoundation.org We look forward to seeing you in Portland!

Call for Venue: YAPC::NA 2008

It's that time of year again, the Perl foundation needs your bids in to host YAPC::NA in your town next summer. Most of the details for a bid can be found at the Perl Foundation website.

Here are a few key points:

• If you plan on bidding, folks from your group should really have attend YAPC::NA this year to see how things work and maybe even help out.
  
• Get your bid ready early and TPF will give you feedback before the due date.
  
• Venue requirements are available and bids from previous years are available in the TPF Blog. Last year all of the bids were very good, so they are a good resource.
  
• Details on running a YAPC are available in the TPF project on Google code.
  
• As with previous years, the bids will be made public in the TPF Blog after the due date.
  

Parrot Grant Update

Parrot has been sticking to its new monthly release schedule,which means that we saw three releases in this grant period,0.4.9, 0.4.10, and 0.4.11. The highlight of this period is the finalization of the object design (PDD15), marking the completion of yet another design milestone. Allison was greatly helped by Jonathan Worthington in this work. A $2,000 grant payment will be made to Jonathan Worthington for this work. Of course, no design is ever 100% done until the product ships, so this period also saw updates to the IO PDD. Allison's next area of design focus will be on finalizing the design of PMCs (Parrot Magic Cookies). PMCs provide the underlying data structure for all high-level language data types implemented on top of Parrot. On the implementation side, Parrot 0.4.11 includes nearly complete implementation of the object design from PDD15. Since this work falls under an as-yet unfunded milestone (M3 - complete functionality),no payment can be made yet, but Jonathan will receive payment if and when the last two Parrot milestones are funded. The last 3 releases saw updates to many language implementations,including Lua, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, and of course Perl6. These releases also included many updates to the compiler toolchain. On the personnel side, in early March, Jesse Vincent stepped down as Parrot's Project Manager, though he remains in that role for Perl 6. Will Coleda, a long time Parrot contributor, is the new Project Manager for Parrot. Finally, a note of clarification for the previous report. Due to some confusion, I mistakenly said that Jerry Gay would be paid $1k for his work on IO design. That amount is actually$2k.

Help Wanted For SOAP::Lite

SOAP::Lite needs your help. Byrne Reese has posted a good assessment of the state of the SOAP::Lite on the web. To start, SOAP::Lite works. That is, it works well for easy things (it's actually the easiest out there in any language)and you can get it to work for complicated things. But it needs help and it's going to need more help in the near future. SOAP is becoming more and more important to interface between major software products. Perl excels as a glue language, but it won't be able to continue to do this if it can't talk SOAP easily. For example, one of the biggest problems right now is it can't easily generate WSDL. In addition to solving its problems right now, it will need to be ported to Perl 6. It will be much nicer to do that if we can get a decent re-write now. How do you help? * Byrne mentioned a few ways in his summary. He needs some dedicated coders. * Do you use SOAP and perl at work? Get your boss to let you spend time improving it. * I think this work would be appropriate for grant requests, either normal TPF grants or the new micro-grants. Let's break down the tasks into something manageable. This is a big project to tackle, but one that will surely have thousands of people running your code. And if you like coding in Perl, it will increase the chance that you'll be able to keep doing so in your day job. Contact Byrne or a TPF member for more information.

XML::RSS Cleanup Grant Completed

TPF is pleased to announce that Shlomi Fish has completed his XML::RSS cleanup grant. Shlomi has helped transform XML::RSS into a high quality tool for the community. Thanks to Shlomi and everyone who helped him make this grant a success.

Podcast Awards

Nominations are open at PodcastAwards.com through July 15th so be sure to put in your nomination for Perlcast or my own Geek Cruises podcast soon!

New TPF Community Relations Leader

After four years of excellent (and often thankless) work behind the scenes of pm.org, Dave Cross has decided to step down and take a well-deserved rest. Thanks, Dave!

Stepping into Dave's role is José Castro, already well-known to many in our community as cog. José will be leading a team charged with helping to establish and nurture Perl Mongers groups throughout the world.

There are already a number of projects under way, and several more in the planning stages, but José and his team want to hear from you. Any feedback or suggestions you have to offer will be greatly appreciated.

(Many thanks as well to log for generously sponsoring a portion of José's time throughout 2007 to work on PerlMongers and Perl Foundation activities.)

Presentation: Learning Perl 6

At the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007 brian d foy presented on learning Perl 6. You can get the slides for that presentation and also listen to the audio podcast. In the presentation, brian talks about Pugs and encourages you to try it out. Just a note, the binary versions will save you a few days of compilation.

Matt Trout on DBIx::Class

Jonathan Rockway and I talked with Matt Trout about DBIx::Class and the Perl ORM landscape.

Interview with Curtis "Ovid" Poe on Perl Testing

After a very long break, Perlcast is back in action. I have quite a few podcasts in the queue, most from the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007. Let's get the first NPW interview out the door with this one with Curtis "Ovid" Poe concerning his work with Perl testing and TAP::Parser.

You can find more information about TAP::Parser at Test Anything and you can also sign up for the mailing list.

Nordic Perl Workshop Update

I've been in Copenhagen for the past four days because of the Nordic Perl Workshop. Thanks to Stonehenge for getting me there!

At the workshop I had the opportunity to talk to many great Perl hackers who you will here from over the next few weeks. To get it started, here's a lightning talk from brian d foy about benchmarking Perl.

Perl News 2007-04-27

• News Audio

Parrot 0.4.11 Released

On April 17th Parrot 0.4.11, "Tax Bird", was released. This release included features such as:

• perl6regex front end reflecting recent S05 syntax changes


• Updates on Parrot-based implementations of Lua, PHP ("Plumhead"), BASIC, and pynie


• Refactorings and improvements in test coverage


• and many bugfixes, enhancements, and general code improvements

Pugcode.org Service Update

During the past couple months, #perl6 has revamped several pugscode.org services including:

• Updating run.pugscode.org, the popular run-perl6-in-your-browser page, to the latest development version, featuring a much more responsive UI via AJAX and mod_perl, and preloaded sessions.


• Updating dev.pugscode.org, a developer-oriented Wiki workspace based on Trac, featuring integrated source tree browser, ticket tracker, as well as devbot6, a new TracBot on #perl6 that announces workspace edits and planet six posts.


• Updating Svn.pugscode.org, Pugs's primary repository, to Subversion 1.4.2, providing much faster (30%+) turnaround for SVK 2.0 users with its pipelining/ra_replay support. There are also two read-only mirrors at svn.openfoundry.org and svn.perl.org, updated every minute.


• Updating Darcs.pugscode.org, the read-only Darcs mirror, to now be powered by Tailor, which preserves information on committer and commit messages.


• Updating Spec.pugscode.org to not only track the Perl6 specification, but also pugs/docs/Perl6/.



• Updating Invite.pugscode.org, where committers on #perl6 hand out commit bits to new Pugs hackers

Perl 6 Summary Writer Needed

The current maintainer of the Perl 6 summary will be unable to continue creating the Perl 6 summaries after April. A volunteer or group of volunteers is needed to take over the task. Please contact Ann Barcomb if you would like more information about what the job entails.

Perl 6 Microgrants

Best Practical Solutions has donated USD5,000 to The Perl Foundation to help support Perl Development. Leon Brocard, representing The Perl Foundation's grants committee, will work with me to select proposals and evaluate project success. Best Practical is__ hoping to fund a range of Perl 6-related projects over the life of the grant program. Accepted grants might be for coding, documentation, testing or even writing articles about Perl 6. The program isn't tied to any one implementation of Perl 6 and is nterested in seeing proposals related to Pugs, Perl 6 on Parrot, Perl 6 on Perl 5 or any other Perl 6 implementation. Most microgrant projects should be able to be completed in 4-6 calendar weeks.

To submit a grant proposal, please email perl6-microgrants at perl.org with the following information:

• A two to three paragraph summary of the work you intend to do


• A quick bio — Who are you? Is there opensource work you've done that we should have a look at?


• A brief description of what "success" will mean for your project — How will we know you're done?


• Where (if anywhere) you've discussed your project in the past


• Where you'll be blogging about your progress. (Twice-weekly blog posts are a requirement for getting your grant money)

Proposals will be accepted on a rolling schedule, with the first 10 grants paid out over the course of the summer. Submit your proposals early and often. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch ;)

First Perl 6 Microgrant awarded to Steve Peters for Parrot Portability

Speaking of Perl 6 Microgrants, Steve Peters was selected as the recipient of the first Perl 6 microgrant. Steve has been instrumental in helping to ensure that Perl 5 has stayed incredibly portable for the past few years. Steve is now starting to turn some of his attention to Parrot and in the course of the grant intends on ensuring:

• Successful completion of a full Cygwin compile of Parrot and application of necessary patches to Parrot. Test failures should be in line with what is observed on Linux or Mac OS X.


• Compile Parrot with Intel C++ and Sun Studio 12 for Linux, application of any necessary patches, and cleanup of compiler specific issues.


• Compilation of Parrot with Borland C++ on Windows with application of necessary patches to the Parrot core. Cleanup of compiler specific issues with necessary additional changes patched in the Parrot core.


• Investigation into gmake "-j" support to allow for parallel building of Parrot.

Steve will be blogging about his grant progress at http://use.perl.org/~speters/journal

TPF Grant for Perl::Critic Policies

The Perl Foundation has given Chris Dolan a grant for extending Perl Critic by implementing around 20 new Perl Best Practices policies outlined in the TODO document of the Perl Critic distribution. Chris plans on doing this work over the summer, which would cause Perl Critic to support all of the PBP policies that are feasible to implement.

TPF Grant For Improving Smoulder

Smoulder is a web-based smoke test aggregator that allows developers and QA testers to upload or monitor the test results from their projects. TPF has issued Steve Peters a grant to improve smoulder by

• Remove custom XML format in favor of using plain TAP and TAPx::Parser.


• Extend Smolder to handle small CPAN style modules more easily and automatically.


• Setup a Smolder server for the CGI::Application community to serve as a testing ground and public display for their 110+ CPAN modules.


• Add per-project and per-developer RSS feeds as an alternative to email notification.

Java to Perl Micro Grant

The Perl Foundation has awarded a grant for a Java to Perl 6 API converter. This will create the potential for highly similar APIs in both languages and has the potential to aid the development of the Perl 6 DBI.

Perlcast Gets A Rock Star Grant

With all of the grant-giving going on, Perlcast didn't want to be left out in the cold. The folks over at Stonehenge were kind enough to sponsor sending Josh to The Nordic Perl Workshop and to OSCON to get interviews for you through Perlcast. Expect to hear a lot more Perl content from around the world thanks to Stonehenge.

YAPC::NA Registration Open

Registration for YAPC North America is now open. The conference dates are June 25th through 27th at the University of Houston's central campus in Houston, Texas. The conference will feature speakers from throughout the Perl community, including keynotes from Larry Wall (the creator of Perl), Damian Conway, and The Perl Foundation. The call for papers has ended and the schedule has started to be released. (http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2007/talks).

YAPC::Europe::2008 Call for Venue

With preparations for YAPC ::Europe::2007 well underway in Vienna, it is time for the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee to consider suitable hosts for the 2008 conference. Any dedicated group interested in hosting YAPC::Europe::2008 should send a brief statement of intent to venue at yapceurope.org. A full and complete application should then be sent to the same address prior to the deadline for applications, which is June 30, 2007.

YAPC::Europe Call for Hack-a-thons

The organizers for YAPC::Europe are trying to find moderators for in-conference hack-a-thons. A hackathon is a moderated workshop with a specific topic where experienced users and newbies can get together and share experience, improve parts of the featured project or step through some project internals. The conference will allow for up to 4 hackathon sessions. The session will last about 3 hours and take place in a dedicated lab. The hackathon moderator will give a short introduction (approx. 30min) into the topic and then hack-away. For those willing to moderate a hackathon session we will provide sponsoring for travel and accommodation costs for up to 500 EUR. If you want to moderate a hackathon at YAPC::Europe 2007, please contact the organisers at vienna2007 at yapceurope.org .

YAPC::Asia 2007 Podcast Feed Available

YAPC::Asia 2007 barely ended before the organizers had a podcast feed available with recordings from the talks. There are dozens of presentations available from talks given at the conference. Some of the presentations are English, some are not. Of course, podcasts aren't all they are offering. There are also videos on Google Video and a videocast feed.

(http://tokyo2007.yapcasia.org/blog/2007/04/audio_recordings_available_for.html)

(http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=yapc+asia+2007&num=50&so=1&start=0)

(http://tokyo2007.yapcasia.org/sessions/videocast.xml)

Red Hat in the Data Center

The Perl NOC has started upgrading some of their boxes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 which includes virtualization.

Asian CPAN Mirror Needed

The Perl NOC is looking for a well-connected box for CPAN Search in Asia -- it probably wouldn't get much traffic, but it'd decrease latency for users there. Minimal specs required (it can be in a virtual box, vmware or xen): ~2.5GHz CPU, ~2GB ram, not much disk space, ability to install RHEL (we'll provide a license).

Apple TV Perl Plugin

It's pretty obvious when you go to a Perl meetup that many Perl hackers love their Macs. For those of you who bought an Apple TV, you can now run your Perl scripts (ahem, programs) on the device using a plugin developed by Eric Sadun. She wrote about it in her O'Reilly blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/apple_tv_perl_plugin.html?CMP=OTC-13IV03560550&ATT=Apple+TV+Perl+Plug-in)

Ebay Uploads to CPAN

eBay has contributed an official interface to their systems to CPAN which can be found by searching for eBay::API. Official corporate releases to CPAN aren't common-place, so this is pretty cool to see a company interfacing with the Perl community as if they were a member. Thanks to ebay for the upload.

Website in a Box

Website in a box is a Catalyst based content management system for individuals and small groups. It's got Google Code project space and a reasonably comprehensive test suite. It does some "Search Engine Optimisation" for you and has been built to be easy to hack on for those interested in picking up Catalyst. (http://code.google.com/p/websiteinabox/)

New site for TAP (Test Anything Protocol)

Perl's test result protocol is officially known as TAP - the Test Anything Protocol. Though it has been around for a while, there has recently be a fair amount of discussion about the future of TAP. One of the points that came up was that TAP is no longer Perl specific. That means that a Perl mailing list is no longer the best place to discuss it. So that there's a language-neutral TAP mailing list and a wiki that can both be found at testanything.org.

Perl on Frappr

There are a few frappr maps that have been set up to pinpoint Perl users around the world. You can check them out and even add your on location at http://www.frappr.com/perl and http://www.frappr.com/freenodeperl.

brian d foy on Benchmarking

Perlcast is back with a recording of a presentation conducted by brian d foy at a Los Angeles Perl Mongers meeting. The talk focuses on benchmarking your code and covers topics that brian included in his soon-to-be released book, "Mastering Perl". "Mastering Perl" is a text on creating professional programs with Perl. It can be pre-ordered now at most of the major book distributors, so go check it out at your vendor of choice.

Many of you know that brian is a partner at Stonehenge Consulting, Perlcast's primary sponsor. Recently Stonehenge kicked it up a notch and provided Perlcast with a Rock Star Grant to attend, speak at, and record interviews during the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007. I'm excited to be given the opportunity to visit Denmark an meet some of the excellent Perl hackers on the other side of the planet. I'd like to thank Stonehenge and the hosts of the Nordic Perl Workshop for all of their support and hope to meet many of you in Denmark at the workshop to be held April 28th and 29th, 2007.

This presentation is a pretty long one, but I encourage you to take the time to listen to the talk. brian is a great speaker and has some smart opinions and advice on benchmarking your code. Also, if your Perl Mongers group has the ability to record presentations, feel free to submit them to Perlcast for distribution. Just send an email to me at perlcast-at-gmail.com and we can iron out the details.

• Presentation Audio


• Perl Mongers


• Mastering Perl


• Nordic Perl Workshop
  

Perl News 2007-03-14

• Audio

$foo Perl-Magazin

There's a new Perl magazine on the scene. On February 1st, Renee Baecker published the first issue of a new magazine dedicated to Perl, $foo Perl-Magazin. The first issue features articles on topics such as new features in Perl 5.10, DBIx::Class, and Perl testing. To find out more visit foo-magazin.de.

Perl NOC Power Outage

If you noticed that some of the Perl.org sites were down on February 25th, it was probably due to a planned outage mandated by the building that the center resides in. There was a scheduled power outage because "a conductor cable has been compromised to the point that immediate action to repair it is necessary or a ground fault will occur to the building system". No email should have been lost during this outage, but it might have been delayed.

YAPC::Europe 2007 Call For Participation

Vienna.pm is officially announcing the call for participation for Yet Another Perl Conference Europe 2007... in other words, registration is open. This years conference theme is "Social Perl". The conference will be held in Vienna, Austria, from 29th to 31st August 2007 at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Regular attendance is 100 EUR, students and early birds can get in for 80 EUR. Businesses and sponsors are welcome to pay a voluntary 200 EUR to help support the conference.

LISA 2007 Call For Papers

The LISA 2007 organizers invite you to contribute proposals for refereed papers, invited talks, and workshops, plus any ideas you have for Guru Is In sessions, Work-in-Progress Reports, the new poster session, and training sessions. This year is the 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference, which will be held in Dallas, TX on November 11-16th 2007. The Call for Participation with submission guidelines and sample topics can be found on the USENIX Web site at www.usenix.org—cfpa. Extended abstract and paper submissions are due May 14, 2007.

Nordic Perl Workshop

The Copenhagen Perl Mongers will host the Fifth Nordic Perl Workshop on April 28-29, 2007. Submit proposals for papers, offer sponsorship, or volunteer to help. The price for two days of the workshop with lunch included is 500 DKK (about $US90). As usual, the workshop fee is waived for speakers, so submit a talk! To find out more visit the conference website at conferences.yapceurope.org—npw2007.

YAPC::Asia 2007 Schedule Released and Registration Opened

Sessions along with Timetable and Speakers profile for YAPC::Asia 2007 are now published at tokyo2007.yapcasia.org—sessions. The conference starts April 4th 2007 and continues through April 5th. Some speakers include Mark Jason Dominus, Chia-liang Kao, Audry Tang, Jesse Vincent, Dave Rolsky, Jose Castro, Ingy .Net, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, and many many more. Registration is open now. Last year the conference sold out within two weeks, so sign up soon if you plan on going.

Minimal Perl Review on Slashdot

Tim Maher's book Minimal Perl has received a review on slashdot ranking it 8 out of 10, and though the first of the slashdot comments mentions PHP, it's still good to see Perl books getting reviewed on high-profile sites. Of course, you don't have to write a slashdot review to help keep the Perl book market thriving. Remember that it is very valuable for you to throw you two-cents in on sites that allow customer reviews like Amazon.

Advanced HTML::Template Widgets on Perl.com

Perl.com is featuring an article by Philipp Janert entitled "Advanced HTML::Template: Widgets". The description reads. "HTML::Template is a templating module for HTML made powerful by its simplicity. Its minimal set of operations enforces a strict separation between presentation and logic. However, sometimes that minimalism makes templates unwieldy. Philipp Janert demonstrates how to reuse templates smaller than an entire page--and how this simplifies your applications.". You can find the article at Perl.com.

New Issue of The Perl Review

The next issue of The Perl Review is out, and it's a special editionfor the Nordic Perl Workshop! Not only that, the PDF-only price is now only $7. Subscribe now to beat the price increase for US postage rate increases in May. The Spring 2007 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. In this issue (besides the cover showing Gary Blackburn's "PERL GOD" license plate), there's: History of the Nordic Perl Workshop by Jonas Nielsen; New Features in Perl 5.10 by Renée Bäcker; Dynamic Object Reconfiguration by Peter Scottl; Adding Transactions to DBM::Deep by Rob Kinyon; Parsing with Parse::Eyapp by Casiano Rodriguez; Leon can() You Do It? by brian d foy and much more. Check out theperlreview.com for to get your subscription.

YAPC::Europe re-secheduled to start a day earlier

The ESC Congress 2007 is even bigger than anticipated and due to this, there very fews beds are available in Vienna for the night from Friday, 31st August to Saturday, 1st September. So as not to force you to leave on the last day of the conference, the organizers decided to reschedule YAPC::Europe: it will happen from Tuesday, 28th to Thursday, 30th August. If this change does cause you some problems, please inform the organizers of YAPC::Europe, and they'll see what we can do to help you.


On a brighter note, register or submit a talk through 31th March and win a book! YAPC::Europe has two coffee-table books (one including a DVD) on Vienna to raffle off. To enter the contest, all you need to do is to either register for the conference and pay your ticket, or submit a talk proposal by 31th March.


Visit http://vienna.yapceurope.org to find out more and to register for the conference.

CPANTS up again on a new server

CPANTS is now up and running again, with fresh data, which will be available again daily. Thanks goes out to hexten.net for providing the new server. You can now continue playing the CPANTS game and raising your kwalitee (and hopefully making CPAN a nicer place in the process...)

Mastering Perl on Pre-Order

Mastering Perl, brian d foy's latest contribution to Perl books, has made its way to the online bookshops, so be on the lookout for it at sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's books.

Komodo 4.0 Extensibility Challenge

Komodo 4.0 now allows XPI extensions, the same thing that Firefox has. Create something cool for the Komodo 4.0 Extensibility Challenge and you could win some money or prizes. The contest is open until April 1, and you can use the 21-day free preview of Komodo to participate in the challenge. ActiveState will go through the entries and put the best on their website to let the community vote on the one they like the best. They'll announce the results at RailsConf 2007 (but that doesn't mean you have to be a Ruby guy [or gal] to win).

Perl.com on Perl6 Parameter Passing

Perl 6 isn't quite out yet, but you can learn and play with it today in various incarnations. One of the most compelling new features is a revamped and revised mechanism of parameter passing. Phil Crow demonstrates how powerful it is, and how you can gradually adopt more and more powerful constructs. Find out more at Perl.com

Reverse Interview: Josh on YAPC::NA 2006

A co-worker of mine, Jason Gessner, interviewed me about my experiences in co-hosting YAPC::NA 2006.

• Interview Audio


• YAPC::NA 2007
  

Perlcast Featured on ClearBlogging.com

Many of you know that I interviewed Bob Walsh for Perlcast about his book "Micro ISV: From Vision To Reality". He in turned talked to me about podcasting and it looks like Perlcast might actually be mentioned in Bob's new book, "Clear Blogging". The text from Bob interviewing me can be found at his clear blogging site... sweet!

• My Interview at Clear Blogging


• "Clear Blogging"


• My previous interview with Bob Walsh


• "Micro ISV: From Vision To Reailty"

Interview with Uri Guttman

Back at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2006 I sat down with Uri Guttman to discuss what he is currently working on in the Perl world.

• Interview Audio


• Sysarch

Jeffrey Thalhammer on Perl Critic

Perlcast is back with an interview with Jeffrey Thalhammer, the creator and maintainer of Perl Critic, a static source code analyzer for Perl written in Perl. In the interview Jeffrey talks about what Perl Critic is, why he created it, and where he sees the system going.

• Interview Audio


• PerlCritic.com


• Perl Critic on CPAN

Perl News 2007-01-20

Perl news is back for the new year thanks to Randal Schwartz. The podcast link and news summary are below.

• Podcast Audio

A new year is just getting started and the conference scene for 2007 is already starting to ramp-up. There are calls for papers out for loads of conferences and we'll try to point out the ones that might concern Perl programmers. If you know of a conference that we don't mention, please let us know. Anyway, on with the show...

YAPC Europe 2007 Call For Papers

The official Call for Papers for YAPC Europe 2007 in Vienna, Austria, 29th to 31st August 2007 has been announced. The theme for this year's conference is "Social Perl". If Perl has helped you or your company to get people together, or if you can report how Perl is "social" to other programming languages, or how Perl may profit from inspirations from other languages, the conference organizers would like to hear about it. Of course, they will also be accepting talks on just about any theme, so if you have a 20 or 40 minute talk or 60-90 minute tutorial submit your proposal via the conference web site until Sunday, 27th May 2007.

YAPC::Asia 2007

Shibuya Perl Mongers have announced that YAPC::Asia 2007 is now scheduled on April 4-5, 2007 in Tokyo. Registration will launch sometime in February but start looking for your flights and booking hotels for the conference now. They are also looking for 20 and 45 minutes presentations. Please submit your proposal via our web form by February 16th, 2007.

Calling All Innovators to the 2007 O'Reilly OSCON

The Call for Participation is now open for OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. This year, the program will focus on the progress and innovation that open source movers and shakers are contributing to the computing industry. Program chairs will be looking for proposals that convey real-world scenarios using open source, and the new tools and ideas that will help participants be more productive or write better code. The Call for Participation deadline is February 5, 2007. Let's get those Perl-oriented proposals in now so that we have a great showing at OSCON again this year.

Visit conferences.oreilly.com?oscon for conference information and to submit your proposal.

Where 2.0 Conference Call for Participation Is Open

The O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location industry. The Where 2.0 call for participation is now open and the program committee is seeking speakers to debate and discuss what's viable in the location space now, and what's lurking just below the radar. Where 2.0 takes place May 29-30, 2007 at the Fairmont in San Jose, California. Proposals are due no later than January 5, 2007. If you are working in the area of location technology, you'll want to consider speaking at Where 2.0.

OSDC.tw Call for Papers and Participation

Taiwan will host the Open Source Developer's Conference on 7-8 April 2007. They are taking proposals for talks (in Chinese or English) until the end of January. More details will be available from the conference website or by email to hcchien@hcchien.org.

Whew, okay, enough with the conferences for now. Let's get back to some real Perl news.

Jobs.perl.org numbers increase

jobs.perl.org has been active for almost six years and has seen a steady rise in the number of postings year-over-year. From a mere 280 postings in 2001 to a record hight of 1857 postings in 2006. So are there more Perl jobs available now than ever? Who knows! What we do know is that more companies are finding jobs.perl.org a valuable resource for finding Perl talent. So, if you are looking for Perl talent or looking to change jobs, remember to use jobs.perl.org.

Win32 Builds of Parrot and Pugs

Want to start playing around with Perl 6 or Parrot now but not wanting to compile them on Windows? Don't worry, there are Win32 builds of Parrot and Pugs that you can pick up at jnthn.net.

First CPAN Stats update for 2007

CPAN Stats, locatied at perl.grango.org, has been updated for the new year with a few minor changes to the site layout. Also, there have been some status updates as far as the CPAN testers are concerned. Chris Williams is surging for top place in the Top Testers of all time, and should be ahead by February. Yi Ma Mao is likely to regain 2nd place again once she passes Jost. Keep it up CPAN testers!

Perl.com

There are two new articles up at Perl.com. "Painless Windows Module Installation with PPM" and "Using Java Classes In Perl". Visit Perl.com to find out more.

TPR 60% Off

The Perl Review has cut the price for online subscriptions to The Perl Review to $7, and made the PDF-only subscription available to everyone, including subscribers in the US. People who subscribed to the web-only edition in the last couple of months will have their subscriptions extended by a year. Normal print subscription prices will stay the same as long as the Postal Service keeps their prices the same. Visit theperlreview.com to find out more.

Help Perl Win The Plat-Forms Contest

Perl is being represented in the Plantforms contest that takes place on January 25th and 26th 2007. You can help out the Perl team by visiting the Platforms live contest blog during contest time, which is Thursday 8:00 UTC until Friday 15:00 UTC, and posting feedback. The blog address is http://www.plat-forms.org/2007/blog/. Mark your calendars for January 25th and help Perl represent at the platforms contest.

If you don't know, Plat_Forms is an international programming contest. It aims at comparing different technological platforms for developing web-based applications such as Java EE, .NET/ASP, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby-on-Rails.

And that's all of the Perl news that we have so far is 2007. Keep us in the loop by sending email to perlcast@gmail.com.

Tim Bunce on DBI

Welcome back to Perlcast! We have a great round of shows lined up for the new year starting with none other than Tim Bunce talking about the future of the Perl DBI. Based on the interview, it looks like we'll need to take the word 'Perl' out from in front of DBI because it looks like Tim has big plans for the future of the distribution.

• Interview Audio