use Perl

Ladies and Gentlemen, Techies and Programmers,

The San Diego Perl Mongers are happy to announce, for one night only, the one and only Damian Conway! He will be appearing Monday night, September 29 at the Qualcomm Building Q Auditorium. Please arrive by 7 PM to hear him muse on a myriad of topics, including, but not limited to (in his own words):

modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross- dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn't frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft's new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.

Note: Topics are subject to change without notice, reason, or warning, so please pay attention!

So please come on by and learn something new. Bring some friends if you like, and have fun in the process.

Please let me know if there are any questions.

Directions can be found on the San Diego Perl Mongers web site.

Both Gabor and Herbert have been discussing what they see as desirable in an editor.

I think most of the specifics of what this tool should do or that tool should do are largely irrelevant, because as a user interface we're facing what is fundamentally an "Open Problem".

What we can do, however, is identify the underlying effects that we need to achieve in the creation of tools for wide audiences, and then refer back to effects when looking at individual features.

The level is probably basic for most of the readers here, and the presentation is not so "bullety" (someone is supposed to be speaking... :-), anyway, it's up on Slideshare, and I will put it up as a simple PDF file sometime in the near future.

Any feedback is welcome. Please consider it's my first talk ever. Ok, fire now... :-)

As soon as DNS catches up for you, the all new CPAN Testers Reports site is now live. There are plenty of changes and fixes that have gone into this release, and my thanks specifically to Gabor Szabo and David E. Wheeler for contributing patches.

So what do you get with the new site? Well thanks to Gabor, a pass matrix has been added to each distribution page. On each author page, the distributions now link to their own respective pages. David E Wheeler's patch has been incorporated to provide an RSS feed that excludes the PASS reports. In addition the RSS feeds now limit to at most the last 100 reports. For the author page, the very latest release is listed, and not just the latest with reports, so authors can see more immediately whether their latest version is known about. On the distribution page, all known releases are listed, with those having no reports having text saying that. This latter change has been a cause for concern with some authors, as the latest versions were often getting missed. Unfortunately this was due to everything being referenced as per the BACKPAN files, and did not include everything that was still on CPAN. There have been many minor fixes, which all help to contribute to better usability.

I finally have my first draft of App::Prove::History saving test suite information to an sqlite database. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and to be frank, I'm unhappy with my design, but I'll keep hacking on it and eventually I'll have an alpha out to the cpan.

Currently it only saves the start and end times of each test suite run, but that bit is just to show me that I have the (clumsy) basics working. All things told, I can't complain.

Get Julian Cash's book of Perl people portraits, free for download or pay to have it as a bound book.

At OSCON, Julian had a nice printed and bound book of his portraits of Perl people from various conferences. He gave me one for free, since I'm in it. Now you can get it for yourself.

At the moment, these are the latest updates on the running TPF grants:

Parrot 0.7.1 is available via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.