Kirrily Robert: August 2007 Archives

Thanks to those who've been uploading photos to Flickr and tagging them with yapceu07. Here's one by Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni of Leon Brocard and his pet camel:

Dave Cantrell reports on each day's activities: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

The conference dinner at a Heuriger on the outskirts of Vienna was great. The orga-punks had hired a small fleet of buses to get us there and back, and one of the sponsors laid on a great buffet. The local wine was pretty damned fine too, and then the evening de-generated into Schnapps, with toasts to Her Majesty, to her splendid navy, and to The Village People.

BinGOs has made available the slides he used for the POE Hackathon: introduction and main slide set. [ Ed: these links are timing out for me right now, but I hope they'll come good soon. ]

osfameron has uploaded his "Big Bad Wolf" slides -- all about debugging web applications -- to slideshare:

Smylers spoke at YAPC::Europe about How to talk at a Perl conference for beginners.

If you've recently created some amazing software that you're eager to evangelize then that's an obvious thing to talk about. But what if you haven't? That's OK -- there's lots of good stuff you can talk about that's produced by others who aren't at the conference, or don't have time to create presentations about it, or are so close to the project that they can't relate to beginners, or ...

If you'd like to present at YAPC next year, or any other Perl conference, his guide should get you started.

And finally, domm has been posting links to further videos of YAPC::Europe on YouTube. We showed you the pre-conference dinner in our previous post, but now videos of Tuesday and Wednesday are also available. I really like the second one:

A couple of sets of slides available from YAPC::Europe presentations given over the last couple of days:

• Stevan's Moose slides, and
• Miyagawa's Web::Scraper slides:

If you're presenting at YAPC::Europe and putting your slides online, tag them yapceu07 and/or tell us about it in a comment or an email.

A quick round-up of news and links from Vienna, where the community-run YAPC::Europe conference is currently in progress.

domm reports on the pre-conference dinner with video:

maks gives his take on day one:

The talks are on going, schedule got some last minute updates. Cog gave us a fun keynote on how to socialize in order to get most out of a YAPC. Larry Wall gave his current vision on scripting languages. Matt Trout had a full audience for an enthusiatic talk about the community around DBIx::Class. Hackathons are ongoing and domm is preparing videos of the welcome night. The Selenium talk by Barbie got high prise. gwolf did a very good presentation about the challenges of the Debian Perl group. So the first day looks like a win and we are happy to see how it will go on.. :)

Rija has been live-blogging each day: Tuesday and Wednesday are up so far.

A few people on Flickr have been tagging their photos with yapceu07 -- if anyone else is uploading photos, please do the same! Here's one by Andy Armstrong of Mark Jason Dominus, author of Higher-Order Perl:

And finally, next year's YAPC::EU will be in Copenhagen. jonasbn reports the news on use.perl.org.

There's very little case law around Open Source software licenses, but this week we've seen an interesting case involving the Artistic License, under which Perl is distributed.

The blog Law and Life: Silicon Valley has a discussion of the case:

The decision makes two important points: (1) the Artistic License is a contract and (2) the failure to include the copyright notices was not a "restriction" on the scope of the license. The first point is important because the Free Software Foundation and some lawyers have taken the position that open source licenses are not contracts. They have good reasons for wishing to avoid some contract formalities, but this position has complicated discussions about the enforceability and remedies for open source licenses.

The second point is very important because it deals with remedies. Generally, the remedy for contract violations under US law is damages, not "injunctive relief" (which means that the court order a party to cease their violation). On the other hand, copyright infringement generally includes a presumption that injunctive relief is appropriate. Thus, the question of whether the violation of a license is a contract violiation or copyright infringement (it can be both) is very important, because licensors would prefer to obtain an injunction prohibiting the breach of the license.

As pointed out in the article linked above, this decision in relation to the Artistic License doesn't apply to other licenses. This will no doubt have some bearing on how Perl chooses to use the Artistic 2.0 license.

An article on use Perl asks:

• Could the same thing happen under the Artistic 2.0 or Will further revisions to the Artistic license be required?
• Should adoption of Artistic 2.0 wait until Perl 5.10?

However, as a District Court case, this decision only applies in California -- admittedly a very influential place in the tech world, but we can still hope that this decision, which many see as a bad one, will be overturned in a higher court.

Further reading:

• use Perl article
• Slashdot article
• Court papers published by the model railway project involved in this court case.

I was recently amused to find my personal blog listed in the Top 100 Australian Blogs. In a similar spirit, I've just put together a naive ranking of Perl blogs based on the list of Perl blogs on the Perl 5 wiki and their Technorati "Authority", which is based on how many other blogs link to them.

Here are the top 10 (that I could find):

I've posted a longer list of the Perl blog rankings via Google Spreadsheets, if you're interested. It only includes blogs with a Technorati authority of 10 or higher.

If you'd like to be included in future, comment here and let me know (and don't forget to add yourself to the Perl blog list too.)

(Note: A permanent page about this is here.)

I've been filtering the full CPAN uploads feed for a few days now and posting the highlights to our CPAN Watch blog. I thought I'd take this opportunity to publicise a few tips on how to get your module listed on CPAN watch.

Do...

• Include a Changes file. It can be named Changes, CHANGES, ChangeLog, or anything of the kind, just as long as it exists.
• Document the changes for each release. I can't tell what's changed if you don't tell me.
• Put your change log in reverse chronological order. This makes it easy to see the most recent change.
• Give me an easy headline by listing the most significant changes first.
• Be specific. Don't just say "bugfixes", tell me which bugs in particular.

Don't...

• Make me go to an external website or Subversion repository to find out what's changed.
• Refer to "improvements", "new features", or "bugfixes" without explaining what they are.
• Leave your Changes file completely empty. (Yes, I've seen this!)
• Release a list of your Subversion commit messages as a change log.

If you follow these guidelines, I'll read your change log and try to determine whether your release is "significant". This is a bit of a fuzzy judgment, but here are some of the guidelines I use:

Significant

• New features added
• Major bugfixes
• Breaking backward compatibility
• Many changes grouped together, even if each is individually small
• First release of a major module in some time
• New release of something that looks to be of broad interest and usefulness

Insignificant

• Documentation/packaging/test changes
• Internals-only changes, refactoring, etc.
• Small changes (eg. one small bug fixed)
• Developer releases
• Unauthorized releases

I hope this will help clarify what criteria I use for CPAN Watch. Not surprisingly, these are the same sorts of things potential users of your module look for as well. As time permits, I'll be automating some of this process, so it will be increasingly important for distributions to document their changes in a way I can pick up programatically.

It's only a week until YAPC::Europe, Europe's grass-roots, community-run Perl conference. This year's is being held in Vienna from August 28th to 30th, and if you haven't registered yet, it looks like you can still do so.

YAPC conferences are always packed full of fantastic sessions, and this one is no exception. Take a look at the schedule with its three consecutive streams of talks and two rooms for hackathons. There will also be BOFs (Birds of a Feather sessions) which are being organised via the conference's wiki so be sure not to miss them.

And now, some notices:

Greg McCarroll seeks stuff to auction

For many years, Greg has been running a charity auction at YAPC to benefit The Perl Foundation. Items auctioned range from the serious to the silly, and it's the novelty items that make the auction an unmissable event.

Greg writes:

There are 8 days left till the YAPC::Europe auction and I've realised I don't have one novelty item to auction. I've just been too busy starting work at Venda (a Perl shop in London with I'd guess about 20 Perl hackers and hiring more) to contact people. So I'd really like people to contact me with ideas, in the past we've had things like ...

• Signed photo's of buffy & willow, to see which was more valuable.
• Pledges in order to see Damian and Schwern arm wrestle (semi-nakedly).
• The date of the London.pm meeting (I won!).
• Japanese meals cooked by Perl mongers.
• Lessons In hacking the Perl core.

You name it, so please please please, if you have an idea about something I could auction, contact me at greg@mccarroll.org.uk.

Perl Buzz needs you!

If you're going to YAPC::Europe, we need your help! None of our editors will be there, alas, so we're relying on the Perl community to tell us what happens so we can cover it. You can contribute in the following ways:

• Email us directly with news, reviews, and so forth. The address is editors@perlbuzz.com.
• Tag your blog posts with yapceu07 so we can find them via the blog search engines.
• Upload photos to Flickr under a Creative Commons license and tag them with yapceu07.
• If you take photos and don't use Flickr, but would like us to see them, email the URL of your gallery to editors@perlbuzz.com.

Welcome to Perl Buzz! Andy and I are excited to be launching a new Perl blog, and hope you'll like it as much as we do.

A lot of people have been asking us, "Why do we need another Perl blog?" We believe that there's room for as many Perl blogs, journals, and news sites as people want to set up. Each has its own flavour and will appeal to different groups of people, and that's just fine. Perl Buzz's unique selling point is that we're bringing a shiny, happy view of the Perl world to the masses. Some other sites focus on communicating within the existing Perl community. We'll do that, too, but we also hope to reach out to those who aren't yet part of the tribe, and show them just how cool Perl is.

So, let's take a look at what Perl Buzz has to offer.

• The main Perl Buzz blog, which you're reading right now, is all about news, reviews, and what's exciting in the Perl world. We're interested in everything from impressive Perl websites (see our review of iusethis.com) to releases of free and commercial Perl software (like Movable Type 4.0, released last week) to interesting uses of Perl you might not know about (like attributes or how to write a LOLCODE parser using Parse::RecDescent).

• Over in Project Hum, we track what's going on in Perl projects. Anything from performance tweaks to calls for help to translations of docs into other languages. We watch other Perl news sources to find out what's going on, but please let us know if you'd like us to post something about your project!

• CPAN Watch is all about what's noteworthy on CPAN. Watching the full feed of CPAN uploads can be like drinking from the firehose, so we filter it and just post the most interesting releases, along with why you should care.

You can subscribe to any or all of the feeds via RSS; see the links in our sidebar.

If you'd like to contribute to Perl Buzz, please email us at editors@perlbuzz.com, or see our How to contribute page.

The world of online real estate is exploding with new websites. One of them is Nestoria, whose website lists properties in the United Kingdom and -- since May -- in Spain as well.

I talked to Mike Astle, the head of engineering at Nestoria, about the site and how they use Perl.

"We knew Nestoria was going to have a lot of pieces, and Perl is a good tool for building all of them," he said when I asked him about their choice of Perl as a development platform. "We're spoilt for choice on web development frameworks and data access toolkits, and we can leverage the breadth of CPAN for all of the data analysis and manipulation task that go on behind the scenes."

"These days it seems that all the hip young kids are using Ruby or Python. We believe that Perl has reached a higher level of maturity than it's newer companions. We can rely on Perl for stability -- something that is even more important to us than overall speed or language features. Optimizing a stable system is easy. Trying to figure out why the garbage collector in your fancy new runtime isn't working right is hard. We want to be on the bleeding edge of product innovation, not language design."

I asked what toolkit Nestoria used, and what their favourite CPAN modules are. Mike tells me they use Mason as the web development framework, along with various DBI modules to talk to MySQL and GD for resizing thousands of images a day.

They also use a lot of CPAN tools to speed their development process. "We are a small team without a QA department, so we rely very heavily on automated tests for unit, blackbox, and performance testing." Modules used include Test::WWW::Mechanize for functional testing of their website and Devel::Profile for profiling code performance.

Nestoria participated in the recent Yahoo Hacks Day in London, and will be at YAPC::Europe in force. Mike also mentioned other ways the company is involved in the Perl community, from presenting at user group meetings to contributing to CPAN. Most importantly, he adds, "We are always happy to buy a few beers at the monthly London.pm meetings. Those guys write a lot of the code that we rely on."

Movable Type 4.0, the latest version of the software that runs PerlBuzz and who knows how many other blogs, was released yesterday by Six Apart, who are also responsible for TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox -- all written in Perl.

The list of what's new is pretty long, with lots of interesting stuff on it.

Artur Bergman, over at O'Reilly Radar, says:

Significant new features [...] are centered around community building, with first-class support for comment conversations using OpenID and user registration. The new community pack delivers a social network in a box, allowing end users to create profile pages and rate others.

Unfortunately not all of these features will be included in the forthcoming Open Source version, and it's hard to know exactly what the differences will be at this point. Byrne Reese, product manager for Movable Type, said, "Before we dive too deeply into defining the precise difference we wanted to engage the community about that." The discussion around Movable Type Open Source will occur on http://movabletype.org, the MT community site.

The Open Source version is a new step for Six Apart. Although Movable Type was free for download in its early days, the release of Movable Type 3.0 in 2004 came with a new proprietary license, requiring all but the smallest blogs to pay to use it. This engendered a great deal of controversy at the time.

In any case, the new commercial version looks pretty slick, and the administrative interface is quite a departure from earlier versions.

If you'd like to check it out, there's a free demo system for you to play with. Or you can download a version for personal use for free. Licenses for the commercial versions begin at $49.95.

PerlBuzz will be upgrading to the official 4.0 release as soon as we find enough round tuits.

Other coverage:

• TechCrunch: Movable Type's version 4.0 final release
• Problogger.net: Movable Type 4.0 released - Interview with Anil Dash
• Movalog: MT 4.0 (Athena): A Developer's Perspective

Unless you’ve been buried in a bog for the last year, you’ll have come across lolcats, the pictures of cats speaking an amusingly stilted dialect of English.

From lolcats came lolgeeks and then, inevitably, lolcode:

HAI
I HAS A VAR ITZ 1

IM IN YR LOOP
   VISIBLE VAR

   IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 39 O RLY?
       YA RLY
           GTFO
       NO WAI
           UP VAR!!1
   KTHX
KTHX

KTHXBYE

I talked to Joe Drago, author of a lolcode interpreter written in Perl.  The parser is based on Parse::RecDescent, a recursive descent parser written by Damian Conway.

Joe’s a Senior Software Developer at a video game company, where most of his work is in other languages, but he says he prefers Perl to the C++ that pays the bills.

Joe says, “I’d never used Parse::RecDescent before… I found it to be wonderful. I’ve been wanting to write a parser for a while now (I own the Dragon book and one on lex/yacc), but I needed a test case. This was a great opportunity to screw around with that. The module is very Perlish, in the sense that it lets you have fun with the grammar of a language without having to plan complex data structures too much to see some results. I highly recommend P::RD for Perl programmers interested in how grammars are written.”

Unfortunately Joe’s lolcode interpreter predates the official lolcode specifications and isn’t compliant with them. But, he says, “I released it under the BSD license under the notion that someone more interested in the final standard would be inspired by my simple stuff and make something really cool with it. Hint, hint!”

If you use a Mac, you need to use this.

iusethis.com is a software review site for Mac OS X software. With 4,500 pieces of software listed and 20,000 users constantly adding reviews or simply saying “I use this”, you can find just about anything there.

I spoke to Marcus Ramberg and Arne Fismen, who run the site, and asked them about how they used Perl to develop it.

The main tool in their toolbox is the Catalyst Framework. “Without an MVC framework like Catalyst, it would be impossible for us to write a structured app, maintain it, and not end up in a big mess,” Marcus told me.

Marcus is the developer, Arne is the designer. “Arne loves Template Toolkit!” Marcus tells me. “That’s pretty much the only Perl thing he actually knows he’s using. Of course, he interacts a lot with DBIx::Class objects, but it speaks to DBIC’s credit that it just works, from a designer perspective.”

So what’s the best thing about the site? What makes the guys smile and say “Wow, that’s cool!”?

Arne tells me, “For us its the way people interact with it. When we started out we expected having to add a lot of the applications ourselves, but we have seen a great community effort helping us out. It is also a very positive community, we are having very little trouble in terms of moderation.”

For Marcus, it’s the site’s APIs that bring a smile to his face, especially when he sees what other people are doing with the data. “Appfresh is probably the best example of this so far, but we look forward to seeing what people will come up with in the future”

The guys have some more projects in the works, all hush-hush, but while we wait to see what they come up with next, check out the guys’ current experiment: iwatchthis.com, a video sharing site with certain similarities to iusethis.