perlnews

D/FW PM Has a New VP (Mr. Muskrat)

Nicholas Perez, author of POE::Component::Jabber and POE::Filter::XML has taken over as vice president of the Dallas/Fort Worth Perl Mongers as of today. Please join me in welcoming him to the position!

Merlyn's tutes for OSDC::AU 2006 (prowler)

Hi, I was wondering if anyone (merlyn, jarich?) had any further information on the tutorials Randal will be running - http://osdc2006.cgpublisher.com/registrations/options/20 doesn't give a whole lot of information either.

Prowler
- Spelling is a demanding task that requies you full attention.

The Secret Life of Houdini (friedo)

Greetings, monks!

I'd like to take a moment to shamelessly plug the new book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero by my friend and client Bill Kalush, and co-author Larry Sloman.

The copious research for the book was made possible by a web-based, fully text-searchable, categorized database of over 700,000 documents.

The system, called Alexander, used MySQL as a backend, mod_perl, and several batch processing jobs that talked to pdftk, iconv and Image Magick.

It also made heavy use of dozens of CPAN modules. Among them:

It was all made possible by Perl, and of course the gracious help of The Monastery!

2006-10-24 Retitled by Arunbear, as per consideration {tye: (edit) Remove "OT:" from title} (Keep: 7, Edit: 15, Reap: 0)

New Version: Pod::HtmlEasy (geoffleach)

Pod::HtmlEasy node 320838 has not had any maintenance recently. I've fixed the outstanding bug reports and cleaned up the code somewhat.

Testing is solicited.

pause.perl.org/pub/PAUSE/authors/id/G/GL/GLEACH/Pod-HtmlEasy-0.08_01.tar.gz

Tcl::Tk 0.92 released (vkon)

Tcl::Tk version 0.92 is released on CPAN

Tcl::Tk is a very lightweight and powerful module which provides Tk GUI for Perl programs.

Tcl::Tk solves very similar task as perl/Tk, also it supports same syntax.
The main difference between these two modules is that perl/Tk module contains Tk inside it, while Tcl::Tk connects to existing Tcl/Tk installation

Users of this family of modules (also Tkx, Tcl) are welcomed to discuss features, problems, etc in tcltk@perl.org mailing list.

With best regards,
Vadim

Pugs 6.2.13 released! (audreyt)

After nearly four months of development and 3400+ commits, I'm very glad to announce that Pugs 6.2.13 is now available:

http://pugs.blogs.com/dist/Perl6-Pugs-6.2.13.tar.gz
SIZE: 6839270
SHA1: b06b8434c64e9bb5e3ab482282fbae0a6ba69218

Motivated by increasing use of Pugs in production, this is an extra release in the 6.2.x series, offering another 200%+ improvement in performance, comprehensive support for interoperability with Perl 5 modules, a built-in grammar engine via native perl5 embedding, and much better support for roles, classes and objects.

The web-based presence of Pugs and Perl 6 has improved as well:

http://run.pugscode.org/ puts the Pugs shell in your browser.
http://spec.pugscode.org/ annotates the Synopses with "smart-linked" tests.
http://smoke.pugscode.org/ annotates that further with fail/pass/todo records.
http://rakudo.org/perl6/ is a Wiki dedicated to collect Perl 6 related information.
http://www.programmersheaven.com/2/Perl6-FAQ offers a comprehensive FAQ on Perl 6.

Thanks again to all lambdacamels on #perl6 for building this new ship together; it is truly an exhilarating voyage. :-)

Have -Ofun!
Audrey

Changes for 6.2.13 (r14402) - October 17, 2006

Build System

Perl 5 embedding is now enabled by default
- For Windows users, Perl 5.8.x is required
- Set the PUGS_EMBED environment variable tonoperl5 to disable this

Prompting for Parrot embedding is now disabled by default
- Set the PUGS_EMBED environment variable toparrot to enable this

Support for compiling using GHC 6.6
- GHC 6.4.1+ is still supported, but 6.6 will be required in thenext release

Feature Changes

Interactive Shell and Command-Line Flags

New pugs -d flag to display a trace for debugging
The :r command now resets the environment once, nottwice
The return value of blocks, such as gather {...}, isdisplayed correctly
$_ is no longer clobbered with the result of eachexpression's evaluation

Perl 5 Interoperability

Arrays and Hashes now round-trip from Pugs to Perl 5 land andback
Importing functions from Perl 5: use perl5:CGI <headerparam>
Passing unboxed values across runtimes no longer leaksmemory
When embedding Perl 5.8+, Unicode flag is now on forPugs-to-Perl5 strings
eval($str, :lang<perl5>) now accepts non-ASCIIcharacters in $str

Lexical Syntax

Capture literals: \($bar: 1, 2, 3, named => 4)
Here-docs now work as specced; also warns against inconsistentindentation
Interpolation of chained calls: "$foo.meth.meth.meth.meth()"
List comprehension: for 0 < list(@x) < 10{...}
Named character escapes: "\c[LATIN CAPITAL LETTERY]"
New grammatical category term:, separated from theprefix: category
New magical variables: $?COMPILER and$?VERSION
Parse for LABEL: STMT, although it's currentlytreated the same as STMT
Pod directives: =begin/=end and =for nowterminate without =cut
Pod variables: $=FOO and @=FOO give youaccess to the Pod section FOO
Quote adverbs no longer take non-parens brackets:rx:P5{...} is valid again
Shell-like quoting rules implemented for << $x "qq"'q' >>
Signature literals: :($foo is copy = 42, $, @)
Support for UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encoded source files
Support for backquotes and qx/.../ for capturingexternal command output
User-defined infix associativity: sub infix:<foo> isassoc('right') {...}
"\123" and "\03" are now errors; write "\d123" and"\o03" instead
$::x now means exactly the same a $x,instead of $*x
%h<> now means %h{} -- the entire hash,not the empty string as key
($::('x')) with two adjacent closing parens now parsescorrectly
0_123_456 now parses as 0d123456, not anerror
1<2> is now a fatal error: Odd number ofelements in Hash
q() and qw() with parentheses are parsed asfunctions, not quotes

Declarators and Operators

Argument interpolation via prefix | and|<<
Binding to qualified uninitialised symbols:&fully::qualify := sub {...}
Contextual variables are now declared with my $x is context, not env $x
Hyperised reduce operators: [>>+<<] and[\>>+<<]
Implicit invocation assignment: .= uc is parsed as$_ = $_.uc
Mid-block redeclaration no longer allowed: my $x; { $x = 1;my $x = 2 }
Negated comparison operators: !eqv, !=:=etc; !~~ replaces !~
New infix comparison operators: === andeqv
New infix non-short-circuiting boolean AND operator:?&
Nullary reduction of builtin operators gives identity values:[*]() === 1
Postfix operators can be called with a dot: .++,$x.++, $x.\ ++
Prefix = now iterates on arrays as well:=@array
Short-circuiting chained comparison: 1 > 2 >die('foo') no longer fails
Smart matching against code objects: $obj ~~ { 1 > $_> 5 }
Smart matching against implicit invocation: $obj ~~.meth, $obj ~~ .[0]
Typed constraints on autovivification: my Hash $x; $x[0] =1 now fails
Typed declarations: my Dog $fido, my T ($x,$y)
* is now always a term, never a prefix operator

Blocks and Statements

Implicit invocation in when: when .true {...}, when .<key> {...}
Listops in conditions no longer consume the block: for say{...}
Loop topics are not forced into rw: for 1..3 { $_++ }now fails correctly
New &break and &continue primitivesfor use within when blocks
New &leave primitive for exiting from theinnermost block
New postfix given statement modifier: .say givenfoo()
Support for FIRST, NEXT, LAST loopcontrol blocks
Support for START, PRE, POST,KEEP, UNDO, ENTER, LEAVEblocks
Support for repeat blocks: repeat {...} while 1,repeat while 1 {...}
Support for the &each list interleaver: foreach(@a; @b) -> $x, $y {...}
The for loop no longer double-flattens lists: for%h.pairs -> $p {...}
Topicalisers for if, else, while,given blocks: if EXPR -> $x {...}
Topicalisers for postfix for loop: -> $x {...}for 1,2,3
&last and &redo now work inrepeat {...} and loop {...} blocks
&take no longer flattens array literals: take[1,2,3];
&take now works in functions called from within agather {...} block
BEGIN(...), END(...), etc., are now parsedas calls, not syntax errors
END {...} in .pm files are no longer ignoredwhen executed directly
INIT {...} now works correctly inside eval "..."
do {...} is now a loop block that takes standard loopcontrols
do {...} with statement modifiers is explicitlydisallowed

Regexes and Grammars

Anonymous tokens and rules anchor on both ends: 123 ~~token{2} is false
New s[...] = EXPR and s[...] = .meth syntax;s[...][...] is deprecated
New tr/// syntax for transliteration; y///will not be supported
Pugs::Compiler::Rule (PCR) replaces Parrot/PGE as the defaultengine
Support for :c/:continue, <prior>,and much more: see PCR's ChangeLog
$(), @() and %() parse correctlyas $$/, @$/ and %$/
/.../ matches $_ under Int, Num and voidcontext in addition to Bool
m:g/(1)|(2)/ now returns only successfully matchedsubcaptures

Modules and Routines

Allow space-separated adverbial named arguments: f(:x<foo> :$y :!z )
Multi-dispatching now handles named, slurpy and optionalarguments
Multi-dispatching now handles parenthesized expressions asarguments
Named arguments with no matching parameters is now anerror
New &c.call($capture) method to call without acaller frame (similar to Perl 5's goto &sub, but itreturns)
New &c.signature method to get a Signature objectfrom a Code object
Parse for the proto routine modifier: proto methodfoo ($x) {...}
Precompiled .pm.yml files with mismatching AST versionwill no longer load
Support for user-defined unary and optional-unary prefixmacros
The main package is now ::Main, not ::main
&?CALLER_CONTINUATION is now fully reentrant
&yield in coroutines works correctly within loopblocks
sub ($x = 0 is copy) no longer allowed; say sub($x is copy = 0) instead
sub f ($x is lazy) {...} no longer evaluates $x morethan once
sub f (@x?) {...}; f() now sets @x to[], not [undef]

Classes and Objects

Attribute-like method call syntax: @.method(1),$.method: 2, 3, 4
Class attributes: class C { my $.x is rw }
Class name literals are now term macros, not prefixfunctions
Compile-time self-mixin no longer allowed: role A doesA
Default initialiser expression for attributes: class C {has $.x = 123 }
Dot attributes are now method calls: @.x is the sameas @(self.x)
Dynamic method calls: $obj.$meth
Hyperised method calls: $obj.>>meth
Quantified method calls: $obj.*meth,$obj.+meth and $obj.?meth
Reopening classes: class C is also {...}
Role mixins: role R {...} class C does R {...}
$?SELF is gone; write self instead
BUILDALL/DESTROYALL trigger once per class even withdiamond inheritance
does R and is C statements in class body nowevaluate in compile time

Built-in Primitives

New &HOW, &WHAT and&WHICH functions replace &meta,&ref and &id
New &VAR macro to force lvalue evaluation of anexpression
New &comb function, a dual to &splitbut matches the wanted parts
New &crypt function to create one-way digeststrings
New &fork function to create a new process
New &printf function for formatted printing
New &quotemeta function for escaping strings
Support for %b in formatted printing
The &system function no longer dies when thecommand does not exist
The .as method is renamed to .fmt forformatted printing
The .perl method now returns Unicode strings

Bundled Modules

New modules

ext/Automata-Cellular/- Build and render cellular automata in a terminal
ext/Math-Basic/- Basic mathematical functions and constants
ext/Math-Random-Kiss/- Pseudo-random number generator
ext/re/ -Pragma to choose among grammar engine backends

ext/CGI/

A new as_yaml method to dump CGI parameters asYAML
Allow initializing the CGI object with a hash ofparameters
New Dump function adapted from Perl 5's CGI.pm
New basic tests for escapeHTML andunescapeHTML, which were broken
New tests for PATH_INFO
Only send the Content-Type: header if we actually have acontent-type
Only send the Status: header if it's a redirect, or if it'sexplicitly added
Refactored into an OO-only module. N.B.: this breaks backwardscompatibility!
Some work on charset handling, though a charset methodis still missing
The content_type method is renamed to typefor compatibility
The cookies attribute is renamed to cookiefor compatibility

ext/HTTP-Server-Simple/

The old non-standard ./method syntax has been replacedwith self.method

ext/Rosetta/

Significant updates to the lib/Rosetta/SeeAlso.poddocumentation

ext/Set-Relation/

Renamed from ext/Relation/
Beginning of separate Set::Tuple andSet::Relation classes

ext/Test/

Converted Test.pm documentation from Kwid to Podsyntax
The eval_ok and eval_is functions are gone;use is eval instead, which runs its string in the currentlexical scope rather than in Test's (which is usually what youwant)

Test Suite

util/prove6

Can now run only a portion of the test suite, or even a singlefile
Original shell script rewritten in Perl 5 for improvedportability
Support for multiple Pugs backends and multiple Perl 6implementations

util/smartlinks.pl

A new visualiser of smartlinks used in the test suite
Generates much nicer cross-referenced HTML pages
See annotated specs in action on http://spec.pugscode.org/
Smartlinks replace the old util/catalog_tests.pl

util/smokeserv/

See the SYN links on http://smoke.pugscode.org/ forthis in action
Smoke client now uploads raw .yml results as well as.html
The smokeserver now annotates the spec with test results usingsmartlinks

t/

All tests now begin with use v6-alpha; instead ofuse v6;
Many, many more smartlinks have been added into the spec
Programs and modules in examples/ aretested for syntactic correctness
Tests in t_disabled/ are merged back into the main test suite
t/02-test-pm/created to ensure that Test.pm works as advertised
t/blocks/ renamedfrom t/subroutines/
t/closure_traits/created to test closure traits (FIRST, LAST, etc.)
#!/usr/bin/pugs is gone from all test files
eval_ok and eval_is are now ok evaland is eval, so that eval'd strings will be run in thecurrent lexical scope

Examples and Utilities

examples/

All Perl 5 programs have been renamed from *.p5 to *-p5.pl
All Perl 6 programs have been renamed from *.p6 to *.pl
All references to them, except in talks, have been likewiseupdated

examples/games/dispatch_quiz.pl

A game to test your knowledge about Perl 6's multi-dispatchsystem

misc/runpugs/

A web teminal for running an interactive Pugs shell on theweb
WebTerminal: a library for building web terminals forinteractive shells
See http://run.pugscode.org/ for a livedemo

Documentation

docs/Perl6/Perl5/Differences.pod

Significantly updated and linked from http://spec.pugscode.org/

docs/Perl6/Spec/

A new S16 draft for IO/IPC/signals as docs/Perl6/Spec/IO.pod
A new S26 draft for documentation as docs/Perl6/Spec/Documentation.pod
Revamped S29 draft in docs/Perl6/Spec/Functions.pod

docs/Pugs/Doc/

New directory for Pugs-specific documentation
docs/Pugs/Doc/Hack/Style.pod- Haskell style guide for Pugs hackers

docs/talks/extraction.xul

Slides from Nathan Gray's Practical Extraction with Perl6 talk

Perl 6 on Perl 5

perl5/Pugs-Compiler-Perl6/

The v6.pm implementation of Perl 6 now handles./pugs -CPerl5 commands
See its own ChangeLog for more information

v6/

A new subproject to write a Perl 6 compiler in Perl 6
Bootstrapped from the v6.pm compiler on the perl5runtime
See its own ChangeLog for more information

Experimental projects

misc/pX/Common/P5_to_P6_Translation/

Converts Perl 5.9.4+'s YAML syntax tree into Perl 6
Handles regexes, arrays, hashes and many builtin functions
See its own documentation for more information

misc/pX/Common/convert_regexp_to_six.pl

Converts Perl 5 regex into Perl 6
See its own documentation for more information

misc/pX/Common/redsix/

An Perl 6 implementation on Ruby 1.9+
See its own documentation for more information

Perl script leads to MySpace sexual misconduct arrest (Tatnall)

Hello Monks,

ars technica just released an article about perl being used with the National Sex Offender Registry to find offenders using MySpace.

Article

Tatnall

"Recognizing who we aren't is only the first step toward knowing who we are." - Os Guinness

Perl 6 FAQ (gjb)

A FAQ on Perl 6 has been released at Programmers Heaven.

Enjoy, -gjb-

xdg at Perl Seminar NY Tuesday October 17 (jkeenan1)

Perl Seminar NY's seventh season begins this coming Tuesday. We meet on the third Tuesday of each month from October to May.

Date & Time:
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
6:15-8:15 pm

Location:
NYPC Users Group
481 8 Ave
(Ramada New Yorker Hotel building), btw West 34 & 35 Sts, Manhattan
Room 550-51

Main presentation:

David Golden
The Vanilla Perl Project

The Vanilla Perl Project is a community-based effort to provide binary Perl distributions for the Microsoft Windows operating system that include a bundled compiler. Bundling a compiler provides the ability to install XS CPAN modules directly from CPAN.

While releases are still only officially at the alpha stage, Vanilla Perl and its sibling, Strawberry Perl, are the closest thing to Perl on Unix, and are being used on a daily basis by a number of major CPAN authors and Perl personalities when they need to work with Perl on Windows. Among its notable achievements, it is the only Windows-based Perl known to support v6.pm -- the experimental Perl 6 on Perl 5 bootstrap compiler.

David Golden, core developer and release manager, will give an overview of the project's history, status and roadmap as well as a quick guide to getting started, with hints and tips for things that work and things that are still under development.

Jim Keenan

Perl gets to compete after all (cog)

So it seemed that "577719".

After some people (myself included) emailed the organizers, here's (part of) the response:

Dear Folks,

thank you all for patiently (or, in some cases, not-so-patiently) educating me about the state of Perl as a web development language.

As a result, my misjudgment is now corrected, Perl teams will be admitted into Plat_Forms, and the website has been updated accordingly:http://www.plat-forms.org/ http://www.plat-forms.org/faq.htm

See, it wasn't a matter of "We don't like Perl", as Lutz explains further in his email, but rather an honest assumption that Perl wasn't good enough nor used in enough places.

I'd also like to say that Lutz seems to be a very nice person and I don't even want to imagine the kind of feedback he must have gotten from part of our community O:-)

Anyway, problem solved and Perl now gets to compete. Yay :-)

If you enjoy solving problems... (Anonymous Monk)

Hi,

Here's a site you can go to for some fun yet tough challenges:

http://rankk.org/

There's a bit of perl and python code there for you to solve too.

Have fun :)

Perl doesn't get to compete. (chargrill)

Plat_forms. [href://http://www.plat-forms.org/index.htm].

What is it?

Plat_Forms is an international programming contest. It aims at comparing different technological platforms for developing web-based applications: Java EE, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby-on-Rails.
Software development platforms for web applications (such as Java EE, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc.) are among the most critical factors of development productivity today. The pros and cons of the various platforms are by-and-large known in principle, but how the pros trade off against the cons in one platform and how that compares to another platform is the topic of quasi-religious wars only, not a subject of objective analysis, as almost no data is available that allows such direct comparison.Plat_Forms is a contest that will change this. It will have top-class (and hence comparable) teams of 3 programmers implement the same specification of a web-based application under the same circumstances and thus generate a basis for objective comparison of the various characteristics that the platforms generate.

Notice anything missing? From the FAQ:

What about Perl?
We have been considering Perl as one of the platforms to be admitted to the contest. So far, we have decided against it because we believe that too few professionals use it professionally for us to hope to get enough requests for admittance for the Perl platform.
If you are a team that would like to participate and would like to use Perl, please contact prechelt@inf.fu-berlin.de (Lutz Prechelt).

Update:

I've heard through the grapevine that Matt Trout wanted to pass along this message (sent along through several perl email lists)

They're having a platform war. We're forever left out of the ruby vs. python games, the "enterprise" people ignore us (though really, I'm not sure I mind that :) but ...
Our community has repeatedly failed to market it's way out of a paper bag, I've even helped contribute to this with my eminently forgettable London Web Frameworks Night talk. But this is about producing working code. *That* we know we can do.
Stand up and be counted. It's gotta be good for a laugh if nothing else.

--chargrill

s**lil*;  $*=join'',sort split q**;  s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)

Way too much Perl..and ..out (Anonymous Monk)

a yahoo story

Accepting XForms data in Perl (marto)

You may be interested to learn that over at IBM developer works an article titled Accepting XForms data in Perl has been published recently. See also WC3 XForms reference.

Thanks

Martin

Google Code Search (artist)

The Google Code Search debuted today, at[http://www.google.com/codesearch]can make it easier to search perl code.

--Artist

Announcing the release of Bigtop 0.17. (philcrow)

Bigtop is a language for describing web applications with pluggablebackends for generating them. It is initially targetedat the Gantry web framework, from the same shop where it was born.

The newest version (0.17) has been released to CPAN. There are severalnotable features of recent versions, see below. The Changes file hasthe full list. You need the latest version of Gantry (3.40) to useBigtop 0.17 most effectively.

With Bigtop 0.17 you can have a running multiple table app, with itsforeign key and many-to-many relationships in a few seconds. In acouple more minutes you can change the default column names (andtheir labels), add extra columns, and do the other things needed tocomplete a database frontend. For example, the long demo movie (see [http://www.usegantry.org/movies]) builds a complete two table app and gives a tour of the generated code in under 6 minutes.

Even with the new ease of use, Bigtop is still a language and you canstill hack on its input source at will with your favorite text editoror our favorite language. The new command line flags and tentmakerfeatures just reduce the amount of hacking required.

As always you can safely regenerate your Bigtop built applicationsthroughout their lifetimes, since Bigtop maintains strict separationsbetween the code it generates and the code you write.

Notable Features of recent releases (0.14 - 0.17):

Command line data model descriptions via poor man's ASCII art:
```
bigtop --new AppName 'table1 table2<-table3'
```
table3 will have a foreign key to table2
Augment existing bigtop files with new tables, with or withoutforeign keys:
```
bigtop --add file.bigtop 'table1->new_table'
```
Use --new and --add with tentmaker to edit before building.
Better support for DBIx::Class through a new many-to-many mechanism. Easy syntax for getting one:
```
bigtop --new Store 'item<->color'
```
tentmaker now has even better defaults and magic. Example: change a name, everything referring to it also changes.
tentmaker now has a Quick Edit box to concentrate the most commonly changed descriptors in one place for each table.
tentmaker now lets you make many table columns at once.
Generated stand alone servers allow database connection info changes via command line flags:
```
    ./app.server -n db_name -u db_user -p db_pass -d mysql  
```
There are screen cast movies you might be able to view. (They arein QuickTime format .mov. I'm sorry I'm not savy enough to make them legible in other formats.) If viewing doesn't work, try the Do-It-Yourselfversions. Visit this URL for links to the movies: [http://usegantry.org/movies]

Phil

The State of the Onion 10 (marto)

Larry Wall has posted The State of the Onion 10 over at Perl.com. There is also a discussion thread over at Slashdot.

Martin

ActivePerl sitecustomize.pl Local Privilege Escalation (Anonymous Monk)

http://www.osvdb.org/25974

OSVDB ID: 25974
Disclosure Date: Jun 5, 2006
Description:
ActiveState ActivePerl contains a flaw that may allow a malicious user to gain access to unauthorized privileges. The issue is triggered when the attacker creates a malicious 'sitecustomize.pl' file in the 'site/lib' directory. This flaw may lead to a loss of integrity.
Technical Description:
This issue can only be exploited on Windows operating systems.
The issue is caused due to a combination of insecure use of the 'sitecustomize.pl' file and insecure default directory permissions granting Users group to create files in 'site/lib' directory. This issue allows local attackers to execute Perl script code with the privileges of other users executing ActivePerl.
Vulnerability Classification:
* Local/Shell Access Required
* Misconfiguration Problem
* Loss Of Integrity
* Exploit Available
Products:
* ActiveState ActivePerl 5.8.8.817
Solution:
Currently, there are no known upgrades or patches to correct this issue. It is possible to correct the flaw by implementing the following workarounds:
1. Create an empty sitecustomize.pl in the 'site/lib' directory.
2. Always run ActivePerl with the '-f' command line option.

Nick Ing-Simmons Deceased (belg4mit)

Mr. Simmons (ni-s@cpan) author of Perl/Tk has passed away.

-- In Bob We Trust, All Others Bring Data.

On the shoulders of giants... (renodino)

Some tragic news for the Perl community...the following was posted to p5p and the Perl/Tk lists today:

I am sad to inform you all that yesterday evening,Nick Ing-Simmons died following a massive heart attack.His partner, Medi is concerned to ensure that this newsreaches all his friends online. Please pass this messageon to all who knew him.He will be greatly nissed.Shona McNeill, PSDCE (formerly Elixent Ltd.)

The Perl community owes much to Nick's contributions. He wasa giant upon whose shoulders we all have stood.

New semantic search technology (Tanktalus)

I just noticed on NewsForge an article on semantic searching - the idea of searching for 'fruit' and finding documents that contain 'apple' or 'orange' in them.

After implementing their first algorithm in Perl and C++, they found the algorithm couldn't scale. So they rewrote it with a new algorithm, this time in just Perl, and now have their scalability.

I thought this was interesting both from just a pure geek perspective (I've wished for something like this from google a few times), but also from a pure Perl perspective - proving, once again, that the speed/scalability of the underlying algorithm generally matters more than the language it is implemented in.

Radio Perl : a new Perl Podcast in german (sir_lichtkind)

Jochen Lillich is the man who started under http://www.it-dojo.de/content/blogsection/0/9/ Radio Perl. I'm big fan of Josh's work but definitly glad to see activities like this.

EDIT:

I 've listened to the first episode and its quit informative (for newbies :) ). Basicly about the current state of Perl, new Module releases, about his aims with that podcast and some plans about future episodes.

Jeremy Zawodny on YDN: show support for perl! (Anonymous Monk)

Jeremy Zawodny on his blog post today announced that Yahoo Developer Network has two new language support centers: one for ruby and one for flash.

Jeremy then asked "What language should we do next?"

Feel free to add your voice by commenting on his post in favor of perl, if so inclined!

Call for Papers / 9. German Perl-Workshop / 21..23 February 2007 (Happy-the-monk)

Call for Papers / 9. German Perl-Workshop / 21..23 February 2007
Location: Fachhochschule München

The 9th German Perl-Workshop will take place from Wednesday, 21 Feb.2007 to Friday, 23 Feb.2007 and you are invited to submit proposals fortalks or tutorials. We will happily accept proposals for interestingtalks related to Perl. Please use http://www.perl-workshop.de/ to enteryour proposal.

We are looking forward to your talk proposal.

Ridiculously Good Looking Pittsburgh Perl Workshop 2006! (ehdonhon)

The first-ever Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is almost here, and it's goingto be fantastic! We have two excellent sets of sessions scheduled, anawesome after-event venue, and a bunch of surprises you never expectedto get for such a low price. If you have to pick only one thing to doon September 23rd, make it the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop.

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is nearly sold out! Please register nowto reserve your spot. Early-bird registration is now closed, but theworkshop is still very affordable at just $40 for general admissionand $20 for students.

Volunteers

We still need more volunteers to help make this a success. If you'reinterested, please sign up for the available positions on our wiki.

Church Brew Works after party

We are planning to go to the festive and microbrew-licious Church BrewWorks for an after-party at 7pm. It's very important to sign up if youwant to go, so we know how many tables to reserve!

The Perl Review 3.0: Fall 2006 (brian_d_foy)

It's the start of the third year in print!

The Fall 2006 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. You can even buy TPR on the newsstand now if you shop at Powell's Technical Books in Portland.

In this issue (besides the cover showing the Larry Wall action figure byArtCard Mike):

Google's Summer of Code -- Jim Brandt
pmtools -- Mark Leighton Fisher
Parrot Magic Cookies -- Jonathan Scott Duff
Agent-based Programming in Perl -- Guinevere Nell
ETL Nightmares -- Thomas MacKenzie
and other stuff

--
brian d foy
Subscribe to The Perl Review

banking.pm - a mailing list for Perl Mongers in the Financial Services sector (rinceWind)

It's a novel idea having a Perl Mongers' group that's not location based. It also seems to fit with the banking BOF that took place at YAPC::EU 2006.

http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/banking-pm

From the mailing list introduction:

This list is for discussion of matters of importance to people who program perl in the Banking and Financial sectors. It was originally planned to be orthogonal to London.pm - a kind of "TheCity.pm" or "WallStreet.pm" but is open to people all round the world who use perl.

--

Oh Lord, wont you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree.
Your powers of persuasion will set them all free,
So oh Lord, wont you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
(Missquoting Janis Joplin)

YAPC::Europe::2006 - The Aftermath (barbie)

Welcome to the last announcement from the organisers of the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference in Birmingham, UK.

Thank You

Many many thanks to all our sponsors, speakers, crew and to everyone who came along to enjoy the delights of Birmingham. Judging from the feedback we've had, everyone seems to have had a great time at the conference and got to see some fantastic talks. We only wish we could have seen them too ;)

Vienna Here We Come

Congratulations to Vienna.pm for the winning bid to host the 2007 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference. We wish them all the best for YAGC (Yet Another Great Conference), and look forward to seeing everyone again. We just wonder whether they really know what they've let themselves in for ;)

Receipts

Several people asked for receipts during the conference, but failed to collect them. If you still need receipts, please get in touch and we'll send you a link to where you can download yours. Please supply your name, email address and company (if appropriate) so that we can correctly reference you within the system.

Talk Recordings

We managed to record the talks held in the main hall, and are looking to get permission for the speakers to release them. If you are a speaker expect an email in the coming weeks outlining what we plan to do, and what we need from you to release the talks.

Survey

A few weeks prior to the conference, the organisers realised what the value of a survey of attendees could be for future organisers. There were several poignant questions that sponsors asked of us, that were impossible to answer with real data, as it doesn't currently exist.

As such, we plan to notfiy all attendees and speakers of an online survey that we would like them to complete. The intention is to provide anonymous statistics that help to persuade sponsors that they really are going to get the kind of exposure they want. In turn this will hopefully mean more sponsorship and less pressure for future organisers.

The Future

Like several YAPCs previous, Birmingham.pm are now looking to host a Perl Workshop next year. We have yet to discuss the details, but you can expect to hear more from us sometime in 2007. Hopefully Jos's Perl Workshop Tour will include us on his route across Europe :)

Unlike some hosts though, our numbers are not going to dwindle away, as we plan to continue to provide some great technical meetings and great company at our social meetings. So if you're ever in the area, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know, as we'll be delight to see you. And no excuses now that you know where to find us ;)

Thank you one and all, for helping us make this a conference we are pleased to have been a part of. See you next year in Austria.

Thanks,
The YAPC::Europe::2006 Organisers
http://www.birmingham2006.com

YAPC::Europe::2006 was sponsored by

Morgan Stanley, Systems Mechanics,
Shadowcat Systems, Outcome Technologies,
Google, Shopzilla, Booking.com, Belfast Perl Mongers,
UKFSN, AnServe, TSS, Jon Allen,
logicLAB, Positive Internet, UKUUG, SendIt.com, Apress, O'Reilly Media, & Manning

YAPC::Europe::2006 | 30th August - 1st September 2006 | Birmingham, UK

--
Barbie | Birmingham Perl Mongers user group | http://birmingham.pm.org/

Damian Conway in Lisbon: Life, the Universe and Everything (cog)

Damian Conway will be in Portugal next week, lecturing his Perl Best Practices training class.

However, those not lucky enough to attend the event will still have a chance to see Damian in person, and speaking.

Life, the Universe and Everything, by Damian, September the 13th! Read the page (in Portuguese) and send the requested email if you plan on attending.

Perl 5.9.4 released (theorbtwo)

Perl has taken another step on the path to 5.10 with the release of 5.9.4. The most fun new feature, as far as I'm concerned looks to be state variables. Read pod/perl594delta.pod for more on that, and other new things since 5.9.3. (There is no release announcement yet, so I'm not linking to it.)

Update: Er, yes, there is a release announcement, and this is apparently old news.

Update: Typo fix, thanks, McDarren

Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

Proposed North of England PerlMongers group (g0n)

Thanks to the comments of various people over the last few days at YAPC::EU, in particular cog's talk on wednesday, I seem to have talked myself into arranging a perlmongers group.

Currently there's a big gap in the map between Nottingham and Edinburgh, relieved only by a red dot in Hull. While that would be OK-ish for me (at least some of the time) it's not a lot of help for perlers in Leeds, Manchester, and points further north and west - I guess Nottingham is reasonably close for those in the Sheffield area. The WYPUG.pm group listed at pm.org seems to be inactive. From conversations with the potential members who were present at YAPC::EU, the idea would be to have quarterly meetings, varying venue to try and keep things fair to everyone. Manchester and Leeds are candidates for a first meeting, as they are reasonably central and well served by public transport.

We're provisionally calling this the NorthOfEngland.pm group. Alternative suggestions are welcome (although suggestions such as 'Whippets.pm','FlatCaps.pm' etc. are likely to be ignored ;-)).

Anyone interested in joining can subscribe to the temporary mailing list http://g0n.net/mailman/listinfo/northofengland.pm. When you subscribe to the list, please post a message introducing yourself, giving some indication of where you're located. We can register with pm.org when we've settled the geographic scope and name.

I'll cross post this to

use.perl
local LUGs

Other suggestions and comments would be very welcome.

--------------------------------------------------------------

"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."
John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider".

Vienna selected for YAPC::Europe 2007 (kudra)

YAPC::Europe Foundation (http://www.yapceurope.org) is pleased to announcethat Vienna, Austria has been chosen as the site for the YAPC::Europe 2007,the eigth European YAPC.

Vienna faced tough competition from Lyon, France and Pisa, Italy, andwe hope that these groups will give us the opportunity to consider theirproposals again in the future.

We are confident that Vienna.pm's experienced team--which was responsiblefor several Austrian Perl Workshops--will put together a wonderful conference.The theme for the next YAPC::Europe will be 'Social Perl'.

We hope to see you in Vienna next summer!

Strawberry Perl 5.8.8 Alpha 2 released (xdg)

Strawberry Perl 5.8.8 Alpha 2 for Win32 is out. Largely synchronizes with Vanilla Perl Build 7, but with updates to CPAN.pm and other toolchain modules.

Download strawbery-perl-5.8.8-alpha-2.exe (24.0 MB) (Changelog)

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

Announcing the Chicago Hackathon, Nov 10-12, 2006 (petdance)

The Chicago Perl Mongers andThe Perl Foundation are proud to announce the Fall 2006 Chicago Hackathon, theweekend of November 10-12, 2006 in suburban Crystal Lake, IL. It will bea round-the-clock weekend of programming on Perl-related projects withyour colleagues in the open source community. Dozens of programmersfrom the open source community in the midwest, as well as others fromaround the US, will be getting together to share ideas, work on code,and move theirPerl-related projects forward.

The participants set the agenda for what we'll be working on, but Perl6 and Parrot are already on the roster of projects. Chip Salzenberg,pumpking for theParrot project, will be on handto help with Parrot and Perl 6. Andy Lester will also be drivingsome Parrot maintenance tasks, and other midwest programmers willbe working on their own projects. There's sure to be somethinginteresting for everyone!

Participation in the hackathon costs nothing.The Perl Foundationis even providing hotel rooms at a special rate if you want to spendthe night. Even if you're in the area for just an hour, stop by,grab a snack or some pizza and talk with other people interestedin Perl. You might contribute more than you think just by talking withother programmers.

To find out more, visit http://hackathon.info.If you'll be attending, please sign in on theAttendees wiki page, and/or emailrsvp@hackathon.info.You can also send questions to Andy Lester atandy@hackathon.info

xoxo,
Andy

rxvt-unicode now embeds perl (bsb)

rxvt-unicode,my favourite terminal, now embeds a Perlinterpreter to do various bits of DWIM magic that I'm yet to fully explore. From the homepage:

Embedded perl, for endless customization and improvement opportunities, such as:

Tabbed terminal support.

Regex-driven customisable selection that can properly select shell arguments, urls etc.

Selection-transformation and option popup menus.

Automatically transforming the selection once made.

Incremental scrollback buffer search.

Automatic URL-underlining and launching.

Remote pastebin, digital clock, block graphics to ascii filter and whatever you like to implement for yourself.

Here's urxvt.pm and some pluginsto whet the appetite.

[SANS] Using Perl to decrypt malware. (starbolin)

Daniel Wesemann wrote a nicely technical little article over on SANS where he uses command-line perl scripts to decode some encrypted malware. Very educational.

s//----->\t/;$~="JAPH";s//\r<$~~/;{s|~$~-|-~$~|||s|-$~~|$~~-|||s,<$~~,<~$~,,s,~$~>,$~~>,,$|=1,select$,,$,,$,,1e-1;print;redo}

Skip CGI.pm versions 3.21 and 3.22 when upgrading -- they break the upload() method (mr_mischief)

I had a spot of trouble with some applications after my hosting company did an upgrade of CGI.pm and had to do some research. I found this:

Change file for CGI.pm version 3.23

which says that upload() was broken in 3.21 and remained that way in 3.22 as well. Monks who are looking to upgrade their stock CGI.pm should steer clear of 3.21 and 3.22 and go straight to 3.23 -- especially if needing that functionality.

Christopher E. Stith

LAMP vs. LAMP (marto)

Some may wish to know that Newsforge are running an article titled LAMP vs. LAMP, an investigation into benchmarking mod_perl and mod_php.

Martin

YAPC::Europe::2006 - The Last Bulletin (barbie)

Welcome the twelfth official bulletin for the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference in Birmingham, UK.

Important: Registration Payment

As of 23:59 GMT+0100 Friday 25th August, payment via the website will close. If you are still planning to attend the conference we advise you to register as soon as possible.

Please note that the payment method of Bank Transfer has now been disabled. As funds would need to be cleared into our account by close of business 25th August, this would not be possible if you were only beginning the transaction now.

We have over 200 people registered for the conference and we are extremely close to reaching our limit. It is currently unlikely we will have registration on the door. As such, if you are planning to come and turn up on the day, please be aware that we may not be able to accept admittance. We have to abide by health and safety regulations and cannot exceed our allowed attendance limits.

Registration Statistics

Directions

Directions are now available online for many routes to Birmingham, hotels and the conference venue. If there are any directions we have not included that would be useful to you, please let us know and we'll do our best to add them.

Further instructions for places to eat and drink around the conference venue will be added shortly.

Talk Recordings

We are currently investigating the possibility of recording some of the talks. At the moment this isn't guaranteed, and if it is possible we will need a signed confirmation from the speakers concerned that we can record them.

If you are a speaker, you may need to get permission from your employer for us to record your talk, so please ensure that you get the correct agreement before signing your confirmation. Confirmation notices can be signed during the conference. Please also consider what licensing you wish to have assigned to your talk audio.

Things To Do for Early Arrivals

On the early arrivals page of the wiki, we have added some suggestions for things to do for early arrivals. Most of the activities are a short walk or bus ride from the city centre and can be a nice way to get to see other parts of the city.

Joerg Plate has announced that he plans to visit Cadbury World, so if others want to join him, advertise your interest on the wiki.

Arriving Early wiki page

Pre-Registration

On Tuesday 29th August, we will be doing a "get in and setup" at the venue. After this we will decamping to just around the corner to The Panama Bar on Gas Street, where we will begin pre-registration. We will likely be there earlier, but will be there at least from 6pm.

Conference Events wiki page

YAPC::Europe - Day One

The venue will open at about 8am. Once conference crew are in place, then registration for the day will begin. The opening speeches and keynotes will begin at 8.45am, so you'll need to be there early to get a good seat.

We would like to register as many people as possible before the opening speeches though. So if you are able to make the pre-registration on Tuesday night, please do so, otherwise try and get to the venue early. We will be registering people throughout the conference, so if you are a late arrival, please go to the registration desk in the foyer when you get here.

Note that badges should be worn at all times while at the venue.

YAPC::Europe - Day Two

During the second day of the conference there is a broadcast recording that will be taking place. This is not related to the conference, but we have been asked to ensure that people who are coming in and out of the Shadowcat Room (the workshop room) do so quietly so as not to disturb the recording.

Saturday, 2nd September

For those leaving on Sunday or later after the conference, we are planning to get together on the Saturday after the conference. We'll meet in a pub in the city centre (Broad Street on a Saturday night becomes club central), then decamp to a nearby restaurant. Pub and restaurant will be decided during the conference.

Please let us know before hand on the wiki's Staying Late page, if you want to meet up with us, so we have an idea of numbers. Don't worry if you're a bit undecided though, as you can let us know next week. We just need to gauge what size of pub and restaurant to suggest.

Staying Late wiki page

Contact

Should you wish to contact us, please use the organisers' email address, where you can mail us with your questions and suggestions. There is also the regular YAPC::Europe conference mailing list, which is open to all.

That's all for this release. There may be a couple of short announcements over the next few days, but this is likely to be the last main bulletin. As such we hope you all have a safe journey getting to Birmingham and we look forward to seeing you all next week.

Thanks,
The YAPC::Europe::2006 Organisers
http://www.birmingham2006.com

YAPC::Europe::2006 is sponsored by

YAPC::Europe::2006 | 30th August - 1st September 2006 | Birmingham, UK

--
Barbie | Birmingham Perl Mongers user group | http://birmingham.pm.org/

TPF RFC (Ovid)

From Bill Odom, the president of TPF:

TPF's been a busy little foundation lately. Interesting things are taking shape, and you'll be seeing announcements about some of them very soon. Be sure to stay tuned.

Much of this progress is a result of the excellent feedback we've received from the community. (It's not always pleasant feedback, but it's useful all the same.) But we're a greedy bunch, and making progress just makes us want to make more.

That means we need to continue to hear from you. Do you know what TPF does, and what it supports? What can we do to keep you better informed? Perhaps most importantly, what else do you want us to do, or to do more often?

We've got lots of ideas, but limited resources. It's critical that we know what you need most. How can we serve you, our community, more effectively?

Go to that link and tell 'im what you think.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

OT (funny) How to write unmaintainable code (zentara)

This -> writing unmaintainable code originally focused on Java, but it is chock full of tips for maintaining job security. :-)

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.Cogito ergo sum a bum

PDL-2.4.3 released (syphilis)

For those interested, you'll find it on CPAN ( http://search.cpan.org/~csoe/PDL-2.4.3/ ) ... or sourceforge (though I haven't bothered to dig up that link).

See http://search.cpan.org/src/CSOE/PDL-2.4.3/Release_Notes for a summary of the improvements it offers.

Cheers,
Rob

Release of Lucene-0.01 -- API to the C++ port of the Lucene search engine (tbusch)

Like it or not Apache Lucene has become the de-facto standard for open-source high-performance search. It has a large user-base, is well documented and has plenty of committers. Unfortunately Apache Lucene is entirely written in Java and therefore of relatively little use for perl programmers. Fortunately in the recent years a group of C++ programmers led by Ben van Klinken decided to port Java Lucene to C++.

The purpose of the Lucene CPAN module is to export the C++ Lucene API to perl and at the same time be as close as possible to the original Java API. This has the combined advantage of providing perl programmers with a well-documented API and giving them access to a C++ search engine library that is supposedly faster than the original.

http://search.cpan.org/~tbusch/Lucene-0.01/lib/Lucene.pm

Code Golf (frodo72)

I've come across Code Golf, where golfing challenges can be solved in 4 different languages: Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.

The site is quite young and the "interface" is still evolving. At the moment it's not possible to see solutions to older challenges (none of them is actually closed), but I've read that they're changing the basic rules to have "golfing seasons" (here's the relevant post).

An overall leaderboard of languages is also missing. At a first glance it seems that the shortest solutions are either in Perl or in Ruby: I hope some good monk will put it right :)

Update: corrected link.

Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<Don't fool yourself.

(OT) It's offical. Disagreeableness is a trait of the "cognitively superior". (BrowserUk)

Read and weep all you amiable, agreeable guys & gals! :)

Damian Conway in Portugal - Perl Best Practices training (cog)

Damian Conway (TheDamian), one of the world's most renowned members of the Perl community (as a programmer, CPAN author, writer and speaker), is coming to Portugal, this September's 12th and 13th, to lecture his Perl Best Practices course, in an event organized and sponsored by log.

Apart from being one of the people pointing Perl 6 in the right direction, Damian is the author of the much appraised "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices" books. He is also the creator of some astounding CPAN modules, including Getopt::Euclid, IO::Prompt, Lingua::Romana::Perligata, Parse::RecDescent, Smart::Comments, Switch and Text::Autoformat.

More information on the event can be attained in log's webpage (in Portuguese) or by contacting jose dot castro at log dot pt directly.

Frankfurt Perl Workshop 8..10 Sep 2006 (Happy-the-monk)

Gladly announcing the first so-called Frankfurt Perl-Community Workshop Friday to Sunday 8..10 September. (one week after YAPC::Europe).

There will be Perl talk and Perl talks from Friday night 5 pm (rally at the Café Activ) to some time on Sunday. Whereas Friday night is supposed to be a social time, Saturday and Sunday moning will see all kinds of technical talks at the "Gartenhaus" in the back yard of Haus der Jugend. If you have a talk (of any length or perl related subject you like) to submit, do so and write in our wiki.

Main language for talks at the workshop is believed to be German, but feel free to propose talks in English, if you want to. If you are an international visitor and interested do come, we will be able to entertain you in English, too.

Please find German language information in our wiki, and add your news to it if you want to participate.

Participation at the workshop is all free (thanks to sponsorship by reneeb and his company!)
You will have to pay for what you eat and drink at the venue(s) (reasonably cheap)
and if you need accommodation, you'll find that at Haus der Jugend too (also reasonably cheap).

reneeb, strat, Corion and all the other good Frankfurt monks are looking forward to see you there!

Cheerio, Sören

Advocacy ammunition: perl vs java at Amazon (doom)

I came across some interesting ammunition for perl advocacywritten by Steve Yegge. While he isn't particularly a fan ofperl (to put it mildly), he is someone who watched Java and perl programmers in action at Amazon for a number of years, and came to the obvious conclusions. It's nothing you haven't heard before, but sometimes it's useful to have it from an "outsider":Isweak typing strong enough?

Some quotations (with many sentences ellided, check theoriginal for the full text):

I watched the strong/weak battle play out (in various ways) in Amazon's Customer Service Applications group for years. ...

One thing I observed was that the folks who favored Perl always seemed to be able to get stuff done really, really fast, even compared to experienced Java folks. And they had their act together; it wasn't just crude hackery, as many Java programmers would like to believe. Their code was generally very well organized, and when it wasn't, they'd go in periodically and fix it. Sometimes they did quick, hacky scripts, and in fact the ability to do this proved to be mission-critical time and time again. But generally the Perl stuff worked just as well as the Java stuff. Whenever performance became an issue, they'd find clever ways to make it perform well enough. ...

So for years, we had Java and Perl development going on side by side. This was a decision made in old days, purely for expedience reasons. When we were deciding how to implement Arizona (our internal web-based application suite for CS), we had about a 50/50 split between Perl and Java programmers on the team.

During the initial development, the Perl use-cases got finished astonishingly fast. For a while, Arizona had more Perl than Java, because our Perl programmers started grabbing tasks assigned to the Java folks. Over time, the "climate" across the company pushed us to migrate everything towards Java. It was a pretty complicated situation not worth recounting here, but over a period of years, most the Perl stuff in Arizona was gradually rewritten. (I hear after I left, the climate changed again, with Java being phased out in favor of C++ and Perl, but for reasons mostly unrelated to the languages themselves.)

In any case, for several years I got to watch Perl and Java folks working side by side doing pretty much the same tasks. In some cases, they even had to implement the same logic in both languages. Yes, there were inefficiencies with our Perl-and-Java approach. However, it was the right decision at the time, and as a result, I was personally able to witness a more or less apples-to-apples, multi-year comparison of the strong-typing and weak-typing camps at work in the same production environment.

In nutshell, I was pretty impressed. I was a die-hard Java guy at the time, and even then, I could see that the Perl code was far smaller and simpler than the Java code. It didn't feel "cleaner", since Perl itself is a bit challenged in that department, but it seemed modular enough. It had a well-defined architecture, and it got the job done, year in and year out.

Our Java code (to me) seemed far more complex, even though I could read Java more easily. I think Java programmers have a tendency to overengineer things, myself included. I suppose many Java folks would have thought of our Perl code base as grossly under-engineered. But if it was really under-engineered, it seems like it should have caused more problems than it did. In practice, most of the problems in the Perl code were interoperability issues with external services (or databases, in cases where there were no services yet.) Most service owners didn't include Perl bindings for their interfaces, so our Perl folks had to do a lot of head-scratching to find workarounds.

Vanilla Perl Build 7 released (xdg)

Vanilla Perl Build 7 for Win32 was released this morning. Very minor changes: addition of a GNU make from MinGW and a developer release of CPAN.pm with improved behavior on Win32. This will be used for some early testing before rolling similar changes to the next alpha of Strawberry Perl.

Download vanilla-perl-5.8.8-build-7.exe (23.2 MB) (Changelog)

-xdg

YAPC::Europe::2006 - Hotel, Meal & Auction (barbie)

Welcome to the eleventh official bulletin for the 2006 YAPC::Europe Perl Conference in Birmingham, UK.

Hotel Bookings

The offer period for Jury's Inn has ended, but you may still be able to get the same rate. However, it is much better to give them a call to see what is available. nitenite still have rooms available, and there are several other hotels nearby, if anyone wants to stay elsewhere.

Conference Meal

We are delighted to announce that we are finalising details for the Conference Meal, and it will be a very Birmingham Balti experience. For anyone who might be concerned, vegetarian options will be available. The meal will take place at a venue that is slight distance from the conference, but roughly a 15 minute walk. We will arrange for a mass walk from the conference venue, and provide details for anyone wishing to get a taxi or make their own way there.

Conference Auction

As is traditional, on the final day of the conference we will be holding the YAPC::Europe auction. For those who have never experienced a YAPC auction, be prepared to witness a rather strance phenomenon. We will be auctioning off the usual Perl / Open Source related items - we have been very fortunate to have several individuals and sponsors approach us with items to put up for auction. So far in the pot are T-shirts, books, magnets and other assorted paraphernalia. More is promised, and we'd be delighted to hear from you or your company if you would like to contribute any items for the auction. But aside from these, there are also a number of oddities, In the past, the colour of T-shirts, websites, and even the language of the opening speech have been auctioned off. This year is likely to be no difference, so join in the fun and help raise funds for some good causes.

So what good causes are you helping to raise money for?

All money raised will initially be donated to Birmingham Perl Mongers Limited, a non-profit company with aims to help fund Perl projects. After covering any outstanding expenses of the conference, Birmingham Perl Mongers Limited plans to make a donation to The Perl Foundation (TPF), use some money to help with future events for Birmingham.pm, and provide an initial amount to the organisers of next year's YAPC::Europe conference.

So please take part and help to keep the YAPC::Europe continue their success. In order for us to appropriately apply funds to the right places, we would request that you pay by cash (Pound Sterling only), a UK drawn cheque (no Euro or other currency can be accepted) or credit card (online PayPal payment). Further details will be available during the conference.

More Sponsors

Following on from our previous major newsletter, we are delighted to announce further sponsors. We are really greatful to all our sponsors helping to make this event happen. If anyone is still interested in sponsoring the conference, please get in touch. Although some deadlines have passed, we still have items available for sponsorship and we can still accept swag for conference bags or the auction.

Our latest sponsors are Google (speaker sponsor), Shopzilla (organiser's tshirt sponsor), Booking.com (refreshments sponsor), UKFSN (broadband sponsor), AnServe (sponsor donation), Sendit.com (auction donations), O'Reilly Media (auction donations) & Manning (auction donations), who have all made the organiser's lives less worrisome :)

We are extremely grateful for these sponsors providing us with the ability to put on the kind of conference we would like, however there are still plenty of other niceties we would like to include. As such if you or your company would like to sponsor us, please get in touch as soon as possible.

Contact

That's all for this release. Look out for more news and announcements in the future.

Thanks,
The Birmingham 2006 Organisers
http://www.birmingham2006.com

YAPC::Europe::2006 is sponsored by

Morgan Stanley
Systems Mechanics
Shadowcat Systems
Outcome Technologies
Google
Shopzilla
Booking.com
Belfast Perl Mongers
Jon Allen
TSS
logicLAB
Positive Internet
UKFSN
AnServe
UKUUG
SendIt.com
Apress
O'Reilly Media
Manning

YAPC::Europe::2006 | 30th August - 1st September 2006 | Birmingham, UK

--
Barbie | Birmingham Perl Mongers user group | http://birmingham.pm.org/

Creation of APPP - Portuguese Perl Association (cog)

We're proud and pleased to announce that we finally have a entity devoted to Perl in Portugal.

APPP - Associação Portuguesa de Programadores de Perl (Portuguese Perl Programmers Association).

We already have an onion logo and we'll be opening a public contest for the website design pretty soon.

And here's the current status of the Portuguese PM groups:

Lisbon.pm - 78 members
Viana.pm - 14 members
Braga.pm - 13 members
Porto.pm - 4 members
Cascais.pm - 2 members
Guimares.pm - 1 member
Oeiras.pm - 1 member

Planet Catalyst (jwang)

I just set up Planet Catalyst at http://planet.catalystframework.org to aggregate blogs about the Catalyst framework. It is also linked from the main Catalyst homepage so you can reach it from there. The planet is focused on articles related to Catalyst and friends which means it filters articles on catalyst, dbic, dbix(::|-)?class, html(::|-)?widget, h::w or handel (case insensitive). Let me know if there are any other topics of interest that should be included.

Planet Catalyst is powered by Plagger, a Perl-based RSS/Atom feed aggregator. Thanks to Tatsuhiko Miyagawa for writing Plagger and answering my questions on the #plagger FreeNode IRC channel.

If you have questions or would like a blog added, send email to the catalyst-dev mailing list, comment on this article or ask on #catalyst / #catalyst-dev perl.org IRC channels.

OT: The Code Commentator (coreolyn)

Call it lack of self control but I had to share this link.

The Code Commentator.

coreolyn

Considered by jdporter: reap. homenode material, not Perl News.
Unconsidered by planetscape: keep (and edit) votes prevented reaping ( keep:10 edit:3 reap:15 )

Lisbon.pm ICS Perl Calendar (cog)

The Lisbon Perl Mongers have put up an ICS Perl calendar.

The calendar will contain all the social and tech Perl events in Portugal, as Perl-related conferences and deadlines around the world.

Suggestions are welcome.

Enjoy :-)

Lisbon.pm tech meetings' slides are now available (cog)

The Lisbon Perl Mongers have put up a page containing the slides for the tech meetins so far.

The page will be updated as the meetings happen.

Suggestions to make the page more user-friendly are welcome.

Enjoy :-)

Class::InsideOut 1.01 now with added sugar (xdg)

Class::InsideOut 1.01 just hit CPAN.

After seeing Damian's "Sufficiently Advanced Technologies" presentation, I decided to add some automation for common cases. register() now blesses for you and even provides an anonymous scalar reference if you don't give it one. A basic constructor is as simple as this:

sub new { register shift }

Going one step further, an optional and very simple constructor is provided on request that automatically initializes properties from the arguments to new(). A minimal Class::InsideOut based class is now as easy as this:

package My::Class;use Class::InsideOut qw/ new id public private /;public  name => my %name;private age  => my %age;1;

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain|public domain]. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

"10 Perl CPAN modules for manipulating specific file formats" on TechRepublic (CountZero)

TechRepublic - Builder.com published today an article on Perl: 10 Perl CPAN modules for manipulating specific file formats by Mellonfire.

He seems to be the "decimal" specialist of TechRepublic, with such other articles as 10 CPAN Perl modules that make life easier for Win32 programmers, 10 useful server variables you should know for creating dynamic Web pages and Get control with 10 useful Perl modules for network programmers.

If you like lists, go and have a look!

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

White Camels 2006 (davorg)

The 2006 White Camel Awards were announced at OSCON last night. The winners were:

Jay Hannah (for many years helping out behind the scenes at pm.org)
Josh McAdams (for Perlcast and helping to organise this year's YAPC::NA)
Randal Schwartz (for many, many things)

Update: More details from brian_d_foy.

--
<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk aboutPerl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

Lisbon.pm tech meeting #4 (cog)

It's Lisbon.pm's 4th tech meeting, this Thursday, July 27th:

Perl Multithreading (Miguel Duarte)
Digital Libraries in Perl - Greenstone and KOHA (Rafael Antnio)
How NOT to create a curriculum and how NOT to behave in an interview (Jos Castro)

Talks will be in Portuguese and you can find more details (in Portuguese) here.

The meeting will be held at log 's facilities.

perl.org servers offline due to a power cut (grinder)

There's a semi-scheduled power cut at the colo facility where certain perl.org servers are hosted, notably search.perl.org. In the meantime, PAUSE and svk.perl.org are unaffected. For search, Randy Kobes's search site seems like the best bet right now.

Keep an eye on server outage for updates.

update: looks like most servers are now back online.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl