Sunday, January 21, 2007

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.






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.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

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.