Re: New Relic
Thanks, interesting stuff. I don't know if the New Relic SDK is going to be free or not, but my intention is to put the Perl modules on CPAN. On 20 December 2013 08:20, Gareth Harper spansh+lon...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 December 2013 22:33, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: So far all they've given me are some C libraries which I'm trying to link into a module using Inline::C. Once I've done that, apparently we can call the standard New Relic functions and everything will just work. It's supposed to be as simple as that. Inline::C and Inline::CPP are very good but you should be wary. I used Inline::CPP to interface the Boost library a few months back and whilst my tests passed perfectly and I could use the module in a standard Perl program, trying to use the module in Catalyst (and I suspect anything else which messes around with the namespaces to create relevant routing) causes some major issues (basically you can't find your namespace). I managed to get around the issue by using Inline::CPP2XS ( http://search.cpan.org/~sisyphus/InlineX-CPP2XS-0.24/CPP2XS.pm) and converting the module to a standard XS module, then continuing to make my changes there. There appears to be an Inline::C2XS module as well ( http://search.cpan.org/~sisyphus/InlineX-C2XS-0.22/C2XS.pm). It may be worth continuing down the Inline::C way until you're happy with the module and then converting it to a standard XS module for release (assuming you're intending to release it). Unfortunately I've steered clear of threads in Perl for many years, so I can't help you there. Gareth
New Relic
Hi, About 9 months ago we asked New Relic about Perl bindings for their web-monitoring software and we're told that there weren't any. A couple of weeks ago New Relic contacted me and said that they now have an SDK in beta which is aimed at allowing dynamic languages which do not already have a specific interface, such as Perl, to use New Relic. So far all they've given me are some C libraries which I'm trying to link into a module using Inline::C. Once I've done that, apparently we can call the standard New Relic functions and everything will just work. It's supposed to be as simple as that. However, I think there's a problem looming. The documentation is very sparse, but it mentions threads. Nothing specific about threads, just threads. Furthermore, my contact hasn't reacted when I've suggested that threading in Perl is a controversial topic. This has made me suspect that New Relic don't know about Perl and threading. Is there anybody on this list, or on the p5p list, who would like to contribute to the project and who has the specialist knowledge about Perl internals and threading to be able to field the issues which are likely to arise? Regards Duncan
Fosdem 2013
Is there going to be a Perl stall or a dev room at the next Fosdem? Duncan
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi, Thanks for all the replies. Interesting thoughts on telecommuters. Also interesting that nobody sees too much of a problem cross-training into Perl. I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). We're located in Thames Ditton and we do websites and backend systems for chains of motor dealers. We've doubled in size to about 70 in the last three years. In the last six months we've opened an office on the west coast of the USA to partner the existing one on the east coast. Earlier this week we bumped up our nominal presence in Australia to a proper office of half a dozen people. We can reasonably claim to be doing quite well. Thames Ditton is a bit difficult to reach from certain directions because of the way the Thames loops. However, the upside of that is that it doesn't feel like the big city. Plenty of greenery, nice riverside pubs etc. Generally a good working environment. The CMS and the inventory management system (IMS) are written in PHP and doing very well. The CMS serves thousands of dealers and we have contracts in place which guarantee that the IMS will do at least a thousand. There are other PHP projects in the offing. Any idea that PHP is a toy or that Perl programmers are automatically worth more than the better PHP programmers has to be justified. The feeds are all written in Perl, as are several other systems. The service-booking system won the Automarket award for Best Digital Initiative earlier this year. It's a Perl system and is the first one on which we've used modern Perl modules such as Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template::Toolkit and the like. We developed it over three years so there's at least 5 man-years of effort in there. Based on the success of the service-booking system and the general momentum of the company we are almost certain to be doing three or four more similar projects this year. Each will be big enough to keep the interest of an experienced programmer or provide a real challenge to a less experienced one. Hence we need more people (just one ticket signed at the moment). They don't have to be done in Perl, and they won't be done in Perl at any cost, but they sit logically in the Perl camp. As Lead Perl Programmer, I've got to make the case. We haven't been passive in our search. We saw it coming. Perl programmers have been rare for a while. It took some time to find our last Perl programmer whom we picked up from the BBC. We try to be visible in the Perl community. We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. I attended most of the London PM tech meetings until they stopped. I contributed to the Catalyst Advent Calendar this year. I offered to mentor one of the students from Rick Deller's Perl Academy. I attend Southampton PM meetings. I contacted Portsmouth University and there is a possibility that we may be going in for beer and sandwiches with their computer club in the autumn. (It's only a possibility because I'm not sure the other mongers are as keen to do it as I am.) I've also tried to contact Kingston University. I didn't get a reply and I confess that I haven't tried again yet. In spite of all that, I've only had five CVs across my desk this time. None were strong candidates. One we rejected outright. A second told me at the end of his telephone interview that he had just started a contract. Numbers three and four weren't present at the appointed times for their telephone interviews and the agency couldn't trace them either. We skipped the telephone interview for number five and rushed him in for a face-to-face with a view to hiring him if he was half-decent. He wasn't. He just wasn't. When we want a PHP programmer, we only have to whistle. Anyway, that's the background. Thanks for all your replies. A fascinating read. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Mark Stringer Sent: 14 May 2013 10:18 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers We sent out an Intern Wanted posting to heads of careers departments at various colleges and Unis. This was filtered through to the students and we had a number of promising looking applicants contact us. We're a startup, no track record, tiny budget, no benefits and all we had to our credit was wfh and flexitime. We had an intern signed in 4 days, and our pick from a number of decent looking ones. Sure, we're having to train him up a bit, but overall he's proving beneficial. With a decent sized budget for a full time employee, I'd have thought it'd be easy to get a high standard of applicant. They may not be experienced in Perl, but some experienced developers are willing to cross-train IME. Also worth pointing out that now is about the best time to be finding Uni/College leavers... they're all wondering what they're going to be doing
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Do you want to come out to Thames Ditton? It's a bit of a hike, but if you're interested I'll see what I can do. -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of James Laver Sent: 15 May 2013 23:20 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers On 15 May 2013, at 23:04, Tom Hukins t...@eborcom.com wrote: I'm pleased that you enjoy your involvement in our community, but please don't spread the rumour that anything we used to do stopped happening. With a small group of volunteers and a large group of followers and mailing list subscribers, reality sometimes disrupts our aspirations. Indeed, I've been volunteered to organise the next tech meet. Now if we could just find a venue. James
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Yes, we were a co-sponsor of the 2012 London Perl Workshop. Sorry for the typo. As far as I know, the last London PM tech meeting was in October 2012. It's great news if they are starting again. On 16 May 2013 09:16, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com: We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. Just to be clear here, I suspect you mean that you sponsored the last London Perl Workshop. As I understand it, the last London Perl Mongers meeting was sponsored by a recruitment company. Dave...
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi, Thanks for all the replies. Interesting thoughts on telecommuters. Also interesting that nobody sees too much of a problem cross-training into Perl. I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). We're located in Thames Ditton and we do websites and backend systems for chains of motor dealers. We've doubled in size to about 70 in the last three years. In the last six months we've opened an office on the west coast of the USA to partner the existing one on the east coast. Earlier this week we bumped up our nominal presence in Australia to a proper office of half a dozen people. We can reasonably claim to be doing quite well. Thames Ditton is a bit difficult to reach from certain directions because of the way the Thames loops. However, the upside of that is that it doesn't feel like the big city. Plenty of greenery, nice riverside pubs etc. Generally a good working environment. The CMS and the inventory management system (IMS) are written in PHP and doing very well. The CMS serves thousands of dealers and we have contracts in place which guarantee that the IMS will do at least a thousand. There are other PHP projects in the offing. Any idea that PHP is a toy or that Perl programmers are automatically worth more than the better PHP programmers has to be justified. The feeds are all written in Perl, as are several other systems. The service-booking system won the Automarket award for Best Digital Initiative earlier this year. It's a Perl system and is the first one on which we've used modern Perl modules such as Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template::Toolkit and the like. We developed it over three years so there's at least 5 man-years of effort in there. Based on the success of the service-booking system and the general momentum of the company we are almost certain to be doing three or four more similar projects this year. Each will be big enough to keep the interest of an experienced programmer or provide a real challenge to a less experienced one. Hence we need more people (just one ticket signed at the moment). They don't have to be done in Perl, and they won't be done in Perl at any cost, but they sit logically in the Perl camp. As Lead Perl Programmer, I've got to make the case. We haven't been passive in our search. We saw it coming. Perl programmers have been rare for a while. It took some time to find our last Perl programmer whom we picked up from the BBC. We try to be visible in the Perl community. We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. I attended most of the London PM tech meetings until they stopped. I contributed to the Catalyst Advent Calendar this year. I offered to mentor one of the students from Rick Deller's Perl Academy. I attend Southampton PM meetings. I contacted Portsmouth University and there is a possibility that we may be going in for beer and sandwiches with their computer club in the autumn. (It's only a possibility because I'm not sure the other mongers are as keen to do it as I am.) I've also tried to contact Kingston University. I didn't get a reply and I confess that I haven't tried again yet. In spite of all that, I've only had five CVs across my desk this time. None were strong candidates. One we rejected outright. A second told me at the end of his telephone interview that he had just started a contract. Numbers three and four weren't present at the appointed times for their telephone interviews and the agency couldn't trace them either. We skipped the telephone interview for number five and rushed him in for a face-to-face with a view to hiring him if he was half-decent. He wasn't. He just wasn't. When we want a PHP programmer, we only have to whistle. Anyway, that's the background. Thanks for all your replies. A fascinating read. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Mark Stringer Sent: 14 May 2013 10:18 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers We sent out an Intern Wanted posting to heads of careers departments at various colleges and Unis. This was filtered through to the students and we had a number of promising looking applicants contact us. We're a startup, no track record, tiny budget, no benefits and all we had to our credit was wfh and flexitime. We had an intern signed in 4 days, and our pick from a number of decent looking ones. Sure, we're having to train him up a bit, but overall he's proving beneficial. With a decent sized budget for a full time employee, I'd have thought it'd be easy to get a high standard of applicant. They may not be experienced in Perl, but some experienced developers are willing to cross-train IME. Also worth pointing out that now is about the best time to be finding Uni/College leavers... they're all wondering what they're going to be doing
Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Southampton PM
Hi, Southampton PM (http://southampton.pm.org/) meet at the Platform Tavern (http://www.platformtavern.com/) at 8pm on the first Wednesday of every month. That means Wednesday is a meet night. It's about a year since the group was revived. There have normally been between six and ten of us. The pub does good bar food so some of the group eat, the rest just enjoy a couple of beers. We chat about Perl and related topics for a couple of hours and the meeting normally breaks up around 10pm. I've always got something useful out of the meetings. New members are always welcome. All the best. Duncan
Re: Fosdem Perl-devroom AW1.126, Saturday, Feb 2nd, 11:00-19:00; Success! 14 speakers!
Well done! On 27 January 2013 20:48, Wendy G.A. van Dijk nl...@wendy.org wrote: Hello all, Fosdem. https://fosdem.org/2013/ We made it. We've got 14 speakers with 14 talks, one for each speaker. We even have 4 lightning talks. The schedule is craamed with Perly goodness, even without a lunchbreaks and with short 5-minutes breaks. We even have 3 speakers on standby who do not fit into the schedule, and 7 of the speakers proposed a second or sometimes a third talk, and they are on standby too. We could have filled a second day with ease. So, everybody is more than welcome in our very own devroom at the Fosdem in Brussels on Saturday, February 2nd. Room AW1.126, starting at 11:00 to 19:00. This night or tomorrow morning the schedule will be online: https://fosdem.org/2013/**schedule/track/perl/https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/perl/ At 11:00 we start with Curtis Ovid Poe, who will talk about Inheritance vs. Roles Other well-known names are Corion, Countzero, Maddingue, Carl Masak, ribasushi, Mark Overmeer, DuckDuckGo-Getty, inbetween some (relatively) unknown outsiders and we end with Liz Mattijsen who will talk about Perl's Diaspora. End of course come lightning talks. On Saturday and Sunday, 2nd and 3rd February, we will have a Perl-booth in Building K, level 2, stand number 3. At the booth you will find the largest library of Perl-books, the big Perl camel, goodies, brochures, tuits, and who knows what more. Guest of honor at the booth will be: Curtis Ovid Poe. He will present (and sign!) his brand new book Beginning Perl, of which we will have a decent pile. People who read this and who want to come over to Fosdem and who want to contribute something from their company, institutation, organisation, that has to do with Perl (or not), please please bring that with you. Stickers, folders, brochutres, books, buttons, t-shirts, pens, dolls, stuffed animals, and more, all is welcome and will be used for Perl promotion. Friday night is the famous Beer Event ( https://fosdem.org/2013/** practical/beerevent/ https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/beerevent/ ) at Delirium. We know that a group of at least 10 Perl Mongers will come, and some will try to come early and conquer our own corner. Pay for your own drinks... Saturday night we want to have dinner with a large group of people. We don;t know yet where that will be, ask at the booth. We think it is a nice accomplishment that we got a devroom filled within 4 days. Even within the deadline, so we will be printed nicely with our schedule in the booklet that Fosdem prints. And at first we did not even get a room, haha!! Many thanks to all who have talked, thought, chatted, mailed with us, who proposed a talk, who helped spread the call for talks. Excellent cooperation! Hope to see you Friday, Saturday, Sunday, in Brussels, Belgium. Kind regards, Wendy van Dijk Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/**practical/transportation/https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/
RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
Hi Wendy, It sounds like you're turning this into a good new story. Stop it immediately. We only go in for bad news stories at the moment. Only joking. It all seems under control. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 26 January 2013 18:27 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hai Duncan, At 06:44 PM 1/26/2013, Duncan Garland wrote: TPF posted a couple of days ago that it has £100,000 (or dollars or whatever) to distribute, so resources isn't the problem. Money is not the issue. If it were, I know enough people at TPF, YEF and elsewhere to ask for it. A couple of days ago Perl's official presence at Fosdem was minimal. I assume you didn't try very hard to get sponsorship because there was very little to sponsor. When something is completely free, indeed, nothing to sponsor. Yesterday things changed and you suddenly needed half a dozen or a dozen good quality speakers to drop everything and head to Brussels at seven days notice. One of those days has now gone. How are you getting on? We are getting quite a lot of proposals, and tomorrow we'll make a decision. We are sort of half-way. So anybody reading this: we can still use some help... By now, this happened: https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/welcome_to_perl_devroom/ We got it official online etc. I mentioned funding from TPF because I thought the speakers might require more funding than usual. They can't get cheap flights at short notice, they can't combine it with a business trip at short notice, they can't combine it with a family holiday at short notice. At least one family decided to do just that for the Dutch Perl Workshop... Which is on April 19 this year, so a bit more in the future. But they're adding a couple of days of The Netherlands especially for us. Nice people, huh, Perl people! I assumed that you wouldn't be able to offer funding until you had sponsorship. I thought that if TPF put up £5000 immediately then that would solve the problem. Then if commercial sponsors come forward you can return some or all of the money. The funny thing about many Perl people is that money is not too important for them. A lot of them put a lot of time in working, traveling, hacking, discussing... without any payment. Same for conferences. I did not yet receive one request for money to reimburse for travel and/or accomodation costs. If I get such requests, I know where to ask... My own company has done a couple of reimbursements in the past, so I know what i'm talking about. I've never been to Fosdem, but it looks important. Yes and no. I (and many with me) think it is important for Perl to show its face, its finest, its quality. We haven't been at Fosdem for many years (Fosdem exists since 2000). It is not to be compared with Oscon, it is not high-brow, slick, classy. Wanna see a mixture of office type people and your average family people with real nerds, like they are protrayed in movies, Fosdem is your place, much more so than Oscon. No classy lunch or dinner, no shiny handouts. It's different. So yes it is important for the image of Perl. It may attract more people. But it also shows Perl is not dead. And believe me, I heard the opposite way too often... All the best. Thanks.
RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
Hi, Isn't this something TPF should get behind? The Perl Community organises good conferences but they tend to be for quite small audiences. I've been told that YAPC Tokyo is the biggest with roughly 800 attendees and the next biggest ones are grouped around the 300 mark. Fosdem claims to attract 5000. We always talk about breaking out of the echo chamber, but never seem sure about how to do it. Isn't this an important opportunity? Shouldn't TPF commit to sponsoring this today and then launch a drive to find a commercial sponsor to reimburse TPF? (Perl still isn't listed on https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/ as having a developer room.) Regards Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 25 January 2013 20:41 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hello all, We know it is late, but we still have to try to make this work. Maybe to save the honour and pride of Perl! :-) Would you like to give a presentation in Brussels, please send me and/or Claudio a proposal. Today or tomorrow please. Thanks! Kind regards, Wendy van Dijk Dear Perl Mongers, I have to make this short and simple. Therefore most of this email is copied from last year's Call for Speakers. What? Fosdem, Brussels, 2 3 february 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/ Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/ Why so late? Because our dev-room request was denied at first. They gave it to another programming language community. Now another community could not fill their dev-room. We are Perl, so we jumped in and we asked for this. We got it. Now we have to fill it. So be quick and send in your presentation proposal. To: Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org). Thank you. Hope to meet you all in Brussels. __ Copied and adapted from last year's Call for Speakers: Please forward to your Perl contacts. __ Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial European event organized by and for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet (see http://fosdem.org/2013/). Over the last years the Perl community had an increasing presence at FOSDEM. Over the last two years we managed to have both a booth and a dev-room. We collected an impressive positive return and wish to renew the experience. Our dev-room request for this upcoming edition (2013) was at first rejected, in favor of another programming language community. So we would only have a booth. But another open source community could not fill their dev-room and we hastily requested it for the Perl-community. Yesterday we got approval. The stand request is approved some time ago. The stand will be open throughout the weekend. The dev-room event will take place Saturday, February 2nd 2013 , between 11:00 and 19:00, in room AW.126. The room itself has 75 seats, WIFI and a VGA projector. This environment, being a university classroom with raised seats, lends itself perfectly for talks. This is a wonderful opportunity to present your Perl project -big and small- or talk about subjects you care about. We are looking for a variety of subjects on all levels: starter and advanced, generic and specialized, core internals and CPAN. We have 8 hours time, so we have the flexibility of using different time formats: e.g. talks of 20 minutes, more classic talks of 40 minutes or longer (although we learned from experience that longer talks should be split into slices of 20 or 40 minutes). Please don't doubt to send a proposal (information about yourself, subject, short description and time needed). If you have several subjects you are enthusiastic to talk about please send alternative proposals. In the case more than one talk is not selected, your proposal will help us when putting the schedule together and even have backup talks in case someone cancels. Also mention your time constraints (if any). Please send your talk proposal by e-mail to the address below as soon as you read this. You will receive an answer within 2 days. We will submit a definitive schedule on Sunday 2013-01-27 to the FOSDEM organizers. Please forward / distribute this call as wide as possible (certainly to your local mongers). Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org). NB1: This is a community event without sponsoring. We don't have the means to pay for your trip and time. If you want to sponsor part of the event, please feel free to contact us. NB2: We'll also appreciate volunteers, booth and dev-room. Please tell us your availabilities so we can also prepare
RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
Hi Leo, I ran a workshop at this year's LPW. I got the company I work for to sponsor LPW. All the sponsorship money went to LPW, I paid my own expenses. I'll know next week whether I've succeeded in getting some sponsorship for the QA Hackathon. I've been to 6 of the 9 LPWs. The last 5 plus one a couple of years before that. I'm active in both London PM and Southampton PM. Don't patronise me. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Leo Lapworth Sent: 26 January 2013 12:06 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hi Duncan, Please contact the TPF and let them know how many hours a week you are able to commit to helping co-ordinate this sort of thing. Leo On 26 Jan 2013, at 11:25, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, Isn't this something TPF should get behind? The Perl Community organises good conferences but they tend to be for quite small audiences. I've been told that YAPC Tokyo is the biggest with roughly 800 attendees and the next biggest ones are grouped around the 300 mark. Fosdem claims to attract 5000. We always talk about breaking out of the echo chamber, but never seem sure about how to do it. Isn't this an important opportunity? Shouldn't TPF commit to sponsoring this today and then launch a drive to find a commercial sponsor to reimburse TPF? (Perl still isn't listed on https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/ as having a developer room.) Regards Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 25 January 2013 20:41 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hello all, We know it is late, but we still have to try to make this work. Maybe to save the honour and pride of Perl! :-) Would you like to give a presentation in Brussels, please send me and/or Claudio a proposal. Today or tomorrow please. Thanks! Kind regards, Wendy van Dijk Dear Perl Mongers, I have to make this short and simple. Therefore most of this email is copied from last year's Call for Speakers. What? Fosdem, Brussels, 2 3 february 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/ Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/ Why so late? Because our dev-room request was denied at first. They gave it to another programming language community. Now another community could not fill their dev-room. We are Perl, so we jumped in and we asked for this. We got it. Now we have to fill it. So be quick and send in your presentation proposal. To: Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org). Thank you. Hope to meet you all in Brussels. __ Copied and adapted from last year's Call for Speakers: Please forward to your Perl contacts. __ Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial European event organized by and for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet (see http://fosdem.org/2013/). Over the last years the Perl community had an increasing presence at FOSDEM. Over the last two years we managed to have both a booth and a dev-room. We collected an impressive positive return and wish to renew the experience. Our dev-room request for this upcoming edition (2013) was at first rejected, in favor of another programming language community. So we would only have a booth. But another open source community could not fill their dev-room and we hastily requested it for the Perl-community. Yesterday we got approval. The stand request is approved some time ago. The stand will be open throughout the weekend. The dev-room event will take place Saturday, February 2nd 2013 , between 11:00 and 19:00, in room AW.126. The room itself has 75 seats, WIFI and a VGA projector. This environment, being a university classroom with raised seats, lends itself perfectly for talks. This is a wonderful opportunity to present your Perl project -big and small- or talk about subjects you care about. We are looking for a variety of subjects on all levels: starter and advanced, generic and specialized, core internals and CPAN. We have 8 hours time, so we have the flexibility of using different time formats: e.g. talks of 20 minutes, more classic talks of 40 minutes or longer (although we learned from experience that longer talks should be split into slices of 20 or 40 minutes). Please don't doubt to send a proposal (information about yourself, subject, short description and time needed). If you have
RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
And I put a lot of effort at very short notice into an article for this year's Catalyst Advent Calendar. -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Leo Lapworth Sent: 26 January 2013 12:06 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hi Duncan, Please contact the TPF and let them know how many hours a week you are able to commit to helping co-ordinate this sort of thing. Leo On 26 Jan 2013, at 11:25, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, Isn't this something TPF should get behind? The Perl Community organises good conferences but they tend to be for quite small audiences. I've been told that YAPC Tokyo is the biggest with roughly 800 attendees and the next biggest ones are grouped around the 300 mark. Fosdem claims to attract 5000. We always talk about breaking out of the echo chamber, but never seem sure about how to do it. Isn't this an important opportunity? Shouldn't TPF commit to sponsoring this today and then launch a drive to find a commercial sponsor to reimburse TPF? (Perl still isn't listed on https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/ as having a developer room.) Regards Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 25 January 2013 20:41 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hello all, We know it is late, but we still have to try to make this work. Maybe to save the honour and pride of Perl! :-) Would you like to give a presentation in Brussels, please send me and/or Claudio a proposal. Today or tomorrow please. Thanks! Kind regards, Wendy van Dijk Dear Perl Mongers, I have to make this short and simple. Therefore most of this email is copied from last year's Call for Speakers. What? Fosdem, Brussels, 2 3 february 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/ Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/ Why so late? Because our dev-room request was denied at first. They gave it to another programming language community. Now another community could not fill their dev-room. We are Perl, so we jumped in and we asked for this. We got it. Now we have to fill it. So be quick and send in your presentation proposal. To: Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org). Thank you. Hope to meet you all in Brussels. __ Copied and adapted from last year's Call for Speakers: Please forward to your Perl contacts. __ Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial European event organized by and for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet (see http://fosdem.org/2013/). Over the last years the Perl community had an increasing presence at FOSDEM. Over the last two years we managed to have both a booth and a dev-room. We collected an impressive positive return and wish to renew the experience. Our dev-room request for this upcoming edition (2013) was at first rejected, in favor of another programming language community. So we would only have a booth. But another open source community could not fill their dev-room and we hastily requested it for the Perl-community. Yesterday we got approval. The stand request is approved some time ago. The stand will be open throughout the weekend. The dev-room event will take place Saturday, February 2nd 2013 , between 11:00 and 19:00, in room AW.126. The room itself has 75 seats, WIFI and a VGA projector. This environment, being a university classroom with raised seats, lends itself perfectly for talks. This is a wonderful opportunity to present your Perl project -big and small- or talk about subjects you care about. We are looking for a variety of subjects on all levels: starter and advanced, generic and specialized, core internals and CPAN. We have 8 hours time, so we have the flexibility of using different time formats: e.g. talks of 20 minutes, more classic talks of 40 minutes or longer (although we learned from experience that longer talks should be split into slices of 20 or 40 minutes). Please don't doubt to send a proposal (information about yourself, subject, short description and time needed). If you have several subjects you are enthusiastic to talk about please send alternative proposals. In the case more than one talk is not selected, your proposal will help us when putting the schedule together and even have backup talks in case someone cancels. Also mention your time constraints (if any). Please
RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
Hi Leo, No worries. I've seen your presentations on Puppet, DBIx::Class and Plack and always enjoyed them. I know you headed up London PM in 2011 as well. That was a good effort. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Leo Lapworth Sent: 26 January 2013 15:09 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hi Duncan, Sorry that was not meant to be patronising - so many people say TPF should do X,Y,Z - but miss that the TPF/Perl community needs people to get on and do it. As Wendy has mentioned this has come up many times. I did not mean to criticise you personally, just pointing out that if you or anyone wants something to happy you/they need to do it or get a group of people together who can do it (I think this is how Wendy, Gabor and several others first got going with Perl attending Fosdem again a few years ago, and they didn't need any help from TPF). Personally I have just got on and done things for the Perl community that I wanted to see happen, there are many generous people and companies (like you and your company) who can be approached without the need for a structure like the TPF. The TPF and other organisations come into their own when legal and financial assistance is required, but more often than not donations can be sort directly (e.g. metacpan hosting) without financial transactions having to take place. I applaud anyone who does anything for the community, and encourage anyone who wants more things to happen to ask the question of this list or the TPF or the EPO, etc (or all of them) Who do I need to speak to or what do I need to do to help get X done?. Best wishes Leo On 26 January 2013 14:05, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi Leo, I ran a workshop at this year's LPW. I got the company I work for to sponsor LPW. All the sponsorship money went to LPW, I paid my own expenses. I'll know next week whether I've succeeded in getting some sponsorship for the QA Hackathon. I've been to 6 of the 9 LPWs. The last 5 plus one a couple of years before that. I'm active in both London PM and Southampton PM. Don't patronise me. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Leo Lapworth Sent: 26 January 2013 12:06 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hi Duncan, Please contact the TPF and let them know how many hours a week you are able to commit to helping co-ordinate this sort of thing. Leo On 26 Jan 2013, at 11:25, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, Isn't this something TPF should get behind? The Perl Community organises good conferences but they tend to be for quite small audiences. I've been told that YAPC Tokyo is the biggest with roughly 800 attendees and the next biggest ones are grouped around the 300 mark. Fosdem claims to attract 5000. We always talk about breaking out of the echo chamber, but never seem sure about how to do it. Isn't this an important opportunity? Shouldn't TPF commit to sponsoring this today and then launch a drive to find a commercial sponsor to reimburse TPF? (Perl still isn't listed on https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/ as having a developer room.) Regards Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 25 January 2013 20:41 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hello all, We know it is late, but we still have to try to make this work. Maybe to save the honour and pride of Perl! :-) Would you like to give a presentation in Brussels, please send me and/or Claudio a proposal. Today or tomorrow please. Thanks! Kind regards, Wendy van Dijk Dear Perl Mongers, I have to make this short and simple. Therefore most of this email is copied from last year's Call for Speakers. What? Fosdem, Brussels, 2 3 february 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/ Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/ Why so late? Because our dev-room request was denied at first. They gave it to another programming language community. Now another community could not fill their dev-room. We are Perl, so we jumped in and we asked for this. We got it. Now we have to fill it. So be quick and send in your presentation proposal. To: Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org). Thank you. Hope to meet you all in Brussels. __ Copied and adapted from last year's Call for Speakers: Please forward to your Perl
RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
Hi Wendy, TPF posted a couple of days ago that it has £100,000 (or dollars or whatever) to distribute, so resources isn't the problem. A couple of days ago Perl's official presence at Fosdem was minimal. I assume you didn't try very hard to get sponsorship because there was very little to sponsor. Yesterday things changed and you suddenly needed half a dozen or a dozen good quality speakers to drop everything and head to Brussels at seven days notice. One of those days has now gone. How are you getting on? I mentioned funding from TPF because I thought the speakers might require more funding than usual. They can't get cheap flights at short notice, they can't combine it with a business trip at short notice, they can't combine it with a family holiday at short notice. I assumed that you wouldn't be able to offer funding until you had sponsorship. I thought that if TPF put up £5000 immediately then that would solve the problem. Then if commercial sponsors come forward you can return some or all of the money. I've never been to Fosdem, but it looks important. All the best. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 26 January 2013 14:46 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: RE: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hi Duncan, I salute you for this! Well done, thank you for your support. And I realise your question about Fosdem was a genuine question. The answer I gave was not the right one. I think the only right answer is: The Perl community itself is the only right organisation to organise events like YAPC, workshops, hackathons, PM meetings, presence at Oscon and Fosdem. Organisations like TPF, YEF YAPC Europe Foundation, EPO Enlightened Perl Organisation, SPPN Dutch Foundation for Perl Promotion, etc, are mostly here to assist. Bring people together, and if needed, support financially. Mention things on websites, press releases. Try to mediate in case of arguments. But TPF, YEF, EPO and SPPN have not enough people to organise or coordinate workshops or conferences themselves. This is not meant patronising. This is also a statement for many other people who have said the same as you did, I have heard and read ithis question before. Kind regards, Wendy van dijk At 03:05 PM 1/26/2013, Duncan Garland wrote: Hi Leo, I ran a workshop at this year's LPW. I got the company I work for to sponsor LPW. All the sponsorship money went to LPW, I paid my own expenses. I'll know next week whether I've succeeded in getting some sponsorship for the QA Hackathon. I've been to 6 of the 9 LPWs. The last 5 plus one a couple of years before that. I'm active in both London PM and Southampton PM. Don't patronise me. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Leo Lapworth Sent: 26 January 2013 12:06 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hi Duncan, Please contact the TPF and let them know how many hours a week you are able to commit to helping co-ordinate this sort of thing. Leo On 26 Jan 2013, at 11:25, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, Isn't this something TPF should get behind? The Perl Community organises good conferences but they tend to be for quite small audiences. I've been told that YAPC Tokyo is the biggest with roughly 800 attendees and the next biggest ones are grouped around the 300 mark. Fosdem claims to attract 5000. We always talk about breaking out of the echo chamber, but never seem sure about how to do it. Isn't this an important opportunity? Shouldn't TPF commit to sponsoring this today and then launch a drive to find a commercial sponsor to reimburse TPF? (Perl still isn't listed on https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/ as having a developer room.) Regards Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk Sent: 25 January 2013 20:41 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers! Hello all, We know it is late, but we still have to try to make this work. Maybe to save the honour and pride of Perl! :-) Would you like to give a presentation in Brussels, please send me and/or Claudio a proposal. Today or tomorrow please. Thanks! Kind regards, Wendy van Dijk Dear Perl Mongers, I have to make this short and simple. Therefore most of this email is copied from last year's Call for Speakers. What? Fosdem, Brussels, 2 3 february 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/ Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/ Why so late? Because our
LPW 2012 Template::Toolkit Workshop
Hi, Finally got round to creating a slideshare account and uploading the stuff from the LPW 2012 Template::Toolkit Workshop. http://www.slideshare.net/duncanmg/code-from-lpw-2012-templatetoolkit-worksh op http://www.slideshare.net/duncanmg/introduction-to-templatetoolkit Sorry for the delay. Duncan
Re: Perl 5 core maintenance fund drive
Note that 2 days after the announcement of the fund, both Booking.com and cPanel donated $10,000, which makes for a total of $30,000 (with the matching $10,000 from Vienna.pm), not counting any individual donations. How did you know that? This fund isn't listed on the Fund Drive Status page: https://donate.perlfoundation.org/index.pl?node=Fund%20Drive%20Status On 5 July 2011 09:28, Abigail abig...@abigail.be wrote: On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 09:13:31AM +0100, Pedro Figueiredo wrote: Here's the email I sent to the powers that be at Playfish. I apologise to Nicholas for the shameless ripoff. Hi, A couple of years ago booking.com made a hugely generous $5 donation to The Perl Foundation, and that money was used to pay one of the core developers, Dave Mitchell, to work on Perl 5 improvements and bug fixes. That money is now running out, however, and TPF is launching another fund raising drive, to pay for 3 months of work by Dave and Nicholas Clark (long-standing Perl5 committer and member of the Perl 6 design team). TPF are looking for both individual and corporate donations. I believe this would be a good opportunity for companies wishing to give something back to Perl, or wanting to raise their visibility in the Perl world, and to Perl developers. As well as giving the company a lot of good will in Perl developers' minds, and a warm fuzzy feeling, The Perl Foundation is offering: * donating $1000 or more gets your logo used, and a mention in the weekly report(s) you paid for * donate $1 or more and TPF will issue a joint press release thanking you profusely, on their homepage Furthermore, the Vienna Perl Mongers group have announced they will match the first $10k, with money from YAPC::EU 2007: http://vienna.pm.org/10_000_dollars_for_the_perl5_core_maintenance_fund.html Full details here: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund and donations here: https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give Note that 2 days after the announcement of the fund, both Booking.com and cPanel donated $10,000, which makes for a total of $30,000 (with the matching $10,000 from Vienna.pm), not counting any individual donations. Abigail
RE: Perl 5 core maintenance fund drive
Hi, We're talking about £100k a year here. That's 1000 people world-wide donating £100 per year. That doesn't sound too unreasonable. There must be far more people than that who have a vested interest in seeing Perl do well. (There was more Perl is nonsense on the web last week.) I can't see a timescale in the documentation. When will these two guys start to starve? I also can't see much about the bigger picture, but that might just be me looking in the wrong place again. How important is this? Does it mean 5.16 and 5.18 won't happen or just that a few bug fixes will slip by a release or two? Is this something LPM should be getting behind? Can LPW be used to raise some funds? Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Mark Fowler Sent: 30 June 2011 05:06 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Perl 5 core maintenance fund drive On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org wrote: Hence The Perl Foundation has launched a Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund It should be noted that the form also allows *reoccurring* donations. It was suggested at YAPC::NA (Hello England, I'll be back in a couple weeks) that if we all give 10usd a month then that's not a lot of money to each of us, but a lot of money overall. Mark.
RE: Perl and IPv6. It's alright now.
Thanks -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Paul LeoNerd Evans Sent: 26 April 2011 09:42 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Perl and IPv6. It's alright now. On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 02:02:59PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: What's the situation now? Anybody doing a high-level search on the subject is going to get the impression that Perl is harmful. It's clear that this is an exaggeration, but it's not clear whether or not the problem has been solved. Does anybody have a high-level summary of the current situation? Would anybody like to write one? I don't think I'm the right person. I don't know if it's alright now or not. One high-level summary I co-wrote: http://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/perl-ipv6.html Long story short: use IO::Socket::IP; for a fully IPv6-aware replacement of IO::Socket::INET. Pure-perl, no non-core dependencies on 5.13.x / 5.14. Requires Socket::GetAddrInfo on earlier perls, which is XS-based. Once 5.14.0 is out, I'm hoping to suggest placing IO::Socket::IP in core too, alongside the older ::INET. HTH, -- Paul LeoNerd Evans leon...@leonerd.org.uk ICQ# 4135350 | Registered Linux# 179460 http://www.leonerd.org.uk/
Perl and IPv6. It's alright now.
Hi, I was half-involved in a discussion about IPv6 on Friday. One of my colleagues had come across something that suggested that IPv6 may become critical sooner than we thought. As a result our development manager emailed him a strategy document he had written. It didn't concern me directly so I didn't ask for a copy. The next thing I knew was that they were discussing porting some of our code from Perl to Python in order to get better IPv6 support. I chipped in that I couldn't believe that Perl had poor IPv6 support and that I thought any areas of weakness would be fixed in a jiffy. This provoked some good-natured banter about me being an old man championing a * language. I let the matter drop. However, the conversation bothered me. A * language? God, these ideas are hard to shift once they get hold! We don't want the idea that Perl's networking is flawed to get a grip. I spent an hour googling perl and IPv6. It's clear that there was a problem two or three years ago and that the community's response was apathetic. As a result the language of those trying to highlight the issue became more emotive and now phrases such as Perl is harmful and The bad state of IPv6 in Perl leap out at you when you google the subject. I think some wheels were turning in the background. In the middle of last year one of the people who had been highlighting the problems, Steffan, filed it as a bug with p5p. He lists a number of tasks as completed (several by him) and a number more as outstanding. There are half a dozen constructive replies and then it goes quiet. That was nine months ago. What's the situation now? Anybody doing a high-level search on the subject is going to get the impression that Perl is harmful. It's clear that this is an exaggeration, but it's not clear whether or not the problem has been solved. Does anybody have a high-level summary of the current situation? Would anybody like to write one? I don't think I'm the right person. I don't know if it's alright now or not. All the best. Duncan
RE: Perl and IPv6. It's alright now.
Hi Jesse, Ok, I'll see if I can organise something. Perl 5.13 is a beta release which is due to become the production release 5.14 this year isn't it? Can I conclude that 5.14 is expected to have good quality IPv6 support. Thanks. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Jesse Vincent Sent: 17 April 2011 14:44 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Perl and IPv6. It's alright now. On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 02:02:59PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: Hi, I was half-involved in a discussion about IPv6 on Friday. [...] I think some wheels were turning in the background. In the middle of last year one of the people who had been highlighting the problems, Steffan, filed it as a bug with p5p. He lists a number of tasks as completed (several by him) and a number more as outstanding. There are half a dozen constructive replies and then it goes quiet. That was nine months ago. What's the situation now? Does anybody have a high-level summary of the current situation? Would anybody like to write one? I don't think I'm the right person. I don't know if it's alright now or not. Please test Perl 5.13.11 and tell us if all the primitives you need are in Socket.pm. Everything should work fine. If you need this support on earlier perls, please test out things like Socket6.pm.
Re: London.pm Dim Sum Pearl Liang Thursday 1pm
Léon Brocard wrote: What better way to celebrate the Chinese New Year than to have dim sum? Let's celebrate the year of the tiger at Pearl Liang. London.pm dim sum is a social event where we meet up every Thursday at 1pm at a different Chinese restaurant, spend about an hour (and about £10 cash) eating tasty dim sum (steamed and fried dumplings), then go our separate ways. Pearl Liang 8 Sheldon Square London W2 6EZ Paddington Station Tube Station http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=W26EZ http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Pearl_Liang%2C_W2_6EZ http://www.pearlliang.co.uk/ It's quite hard to find: be sure to check Getting here on the link above. See you there! Leon Hi Leon, Are there any plans for technical meetings? I'm in Watford so I'm a bit far out for the socials but I used to come in for the technical meeetings. All the best. Duncan
RE: Hardware Reliability
Hi, Most of our server drives our mirrored, so I wasn't really thinking about the failure of individual drives. I was thinking about a more serious failure which might take out the whole disk array or server. The starting point then is How often will a failure occur if we keep our kit new (ie three years), then the next step is to try and categorize them and decide how much loss they will cause to the company. It's interesting that there aren't any independent statistics. I supoose that's because the cards etc are changed so often that any statistics are out of date by the time they are published. I wonder if the problem can be approached from the other end. I wonder if there is a design standard (ISO or such like) which states that a manufacturer should aim for an MTBF of whatever. I'll let you know if I find anything. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org]on Behalf Of Avleen Vig Sent: 06 June 2009 03:40 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Hardware Reliability I don't have any written analysis for you, just 15+ years of experience. Most server hardware (cheap or expensive) will run 5 years without many issues, 10 years with some issues. By issues I mean the occasional bad disk, etc. IMO most drives which are going to die, do so within the first 12 months. After that they often last 3+ years, and 5+ years isn't unheard of. The biggest killer of old drives, is power cycling them. It requires bearings which have been in constant motion for years to suddenly stop abd then be exposed to sheer forces when starting up. If you are happy running older, slower, less efficient hardware, you can probably keep it longer than 3 years without a problem. On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:49 PM, duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, Can somebody please point me in the direction of some authorative reliability statistics for server hardware, preferably including add-ons such as disc arrays? I case to put together a case for the number of failures we can expect if we replace our hardware every three years. Everybody has an opinion but I can't find any proper published data. Thanks Duncan
RE: ActiveState Perl on Vista
Hi Lyle, That was a lot of the problem. I added trouchelle and uwinnipeg to the list of repositories and the list of available packages grew considerably. I was able to install Devel::ptkdb, Calatyst and DBIx::Class using the ActiveState PPM. It didn't install the dependencies properly for Devel:ptkdb properly. I hand to install Tk.pm separately. Once I had done that, it worked. I've never used the other two packages, so I didn't know enough about them to do even a simple test. Strange that a CPAN install didn't work. I tried it with perl 5.10 on both XP Pro and Vista Home Edition. Thanks for your help. Duncan -Original Message- From: Lyle [mailto:webmas...@cosmicperl.com] Sent: 14 February 2009 21:50 To: duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com Subject: Re: ActiveState Perl on Vista Hi Duncan, I'm in a similar situation. ActiveState have recently overhauled their whole autobuild process. Which has meant there are a lot more CPAN modules available, but it also means that some of those that aren't are to many people important ones like your listed. All you need to do is add the uwinnipeg repo and you'll be fine. http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/PPMPackages/10xx/ Also, if you are doing Perl CGI under IIS7 then you may find that IIS7 is a lot more picky about the headers it gets. Lyle Duncan Garland wrote: Hi, I've just upgraded my laptop from XP Pro to Vista Home Edition. I've installed ActiveState Perl 5.10 on it as I've done with my previous machines. However, very little seems to install properly. For example the PPM (Perl Package Manager) list of modules seems very small when compared to previous versions. Calalyst, DBIx and Ptkdb won't install via PPM or CPAN. I've never had Catalyst or DBIx before, so perhaps they aren't supposed to install on Windows. However, I've used Ptkdb for four years on Windows without any trouble. Am I just struggling to cope with Vista's eccentricities, or isn't Perl very well supported on Vista Regards Duncan
ActiveState Perl on Vista
Hi, I've just upgraded my laptop from XP Pro to Vista Home Edition. I've installed ActiveState Perl 5.10 on it as I've done with my previous machines. However, very little seems to install properly. For example the PPM (Perl Package Manager) list of modules seems very small when compared to previous versions. Calalyst, DBIx and Ptkdb won't install via PPM or CPAN. I've never had Catalyst or DBIx before, so perhaps they aren't supposed to install on Windows. However, I've used Ptkdb for four years on Windows without any trouble. Am I just struggling to cope with Vista's eccentricities, or isn't Perl very well supported on Vista Regards Duncan
Re: My New Job (Was: Social Thurs 8 Jan 2009)
On 5-Jan-09, at 4:42 PM, Chisel Wright wrote: On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 08:59:24PM +, David Cantrell wrote: And you know the Circle line's bad when a fat bastard like *me* says that. The Circle Line was one of my reasons for getting a foldy. The Circle Line was one of my reasons for leaving London ;-) Regards, James.
Re: [OT] Web Hosting on Linux with ssh access
www.oneandone.co.uk are good. Not too sure about how much CPAN they have installed but their tech support has always been good at responding to questions when I've needed to use them Andy Williams wrote: Hi, I'm looking for a hosting company for a website I want to set-up. It'll need the following: - ssh access - a database of some sort (mySQL, postgresql) - perl with a good selection of cpan installed - be reasonbably cheap. - can be on a shared machine but own box would be great. Any suggestions as I have only used US based ones in the past, but this site needs to be hosted in the UK. Oh and please not Amenworld. complete nightmare! Thanks Andy
Re: require
Are you declaring you array with 'my' int he require()d script? It's a bit late, but at a guess I'd say this probably limits the scope of the array to the require()d file, preventing the other file from ever seeing it. yes, this was exactly the problem. id cut and pasted it out of the code and left the my in there - DOH! problem solved and everythings working fine now though. thanks for the examples anyway. duncan
Re: require
ok, so this is a really basic question, but ive been having problems. i need to include an array thats located in an external file. everytime i try and require it i get no errors but the array isnt found, so the sub routine fails... problem solved. sorry for the waste of bandwidth... duncan
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
I don't think that's what Elaine was pointing at. You're hit by a bus and die. How do they contact your friends and family if you can't be identified? well they put you in a morge and release basic information to the police, who search their missing persons and suggest identification to anyone who reports a missing person fitting the basic description. after X amount of time the police publicise some of the information asking for help in identification. a guy was found dead in a rosebush near my old house in kingston and he had no identification on him at all and it took about a week and half for the police to eventually identifiy him (as a semi-homeless local alcoholic). duncan
Re: [REVIEW] Test Driven Development by Example
On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 12:19 pm, Dean wrote: Is the Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns general enough that people without smalltalk backgrounds can take something away from it? If so I may end up adding it to my reading list. Absolutely it is. The latter chapters perhaps are more obscurely applied to other languages, but the first two thirds of the book are some of the most useful tips for programming in the style Object Oriented I have ever encountered. It has changed the way I write code, and for the better :-) Regards, james.
Re: re-animating regexes
On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 02:44 am, Paul Makepeace wrote:
use Disclaimer qw(late_night_post);
Is it possible to Storable a qr// ?
WTF is a Regexp=SCALAR(0x) anyway, and how could I play with it?
Paul, who found nothing enlightening in Storable(3pm), perlref, or RT
I've actually needed to get this sorted out for $work_project as well,
so I took your email to task and really had a good go at beating this.
I've been going crazy all morning. It really should be possible.
Theoretically with things that you can't normally Storable you can
write a little memento for them ala:
sub STORABLE_freeze {}
sub STORABLE_thaw {}
to serialize/deserialize the data. The bizarre (or maybe not so
bizarre when you think about it) thing about things constructed with
qr// is that:
my $re = qr/^F.+k$/;
for (ref($re), $re-isa('SCALAR')) {
print ok\n if $_;
}
outputs:
ok
ok
So its a scalar reference right? We should be able to dereference with
$$ right? Nope:
my $r = qr/.../;
print that is strange\n if !$$r;
print $r;
It is very strange indeed, dereferencing the scalar reference gives as
an undefined value, but printing out the reference gives you a string.
Hmm.
So how do you get the original value? Its not easy, but it is possible
with big guns:
use B qw( svref_2object );
my $r = qr/.../;
print Original: , svref_2object( $r )-MAGIC-precomp,\n;
Well, thats something, I suppose. We can get the regex before it was
compiled. The problem is that even with this particularly nasty hack,
we're still not any closer to solving the problem, as we can't get to
the original scalar to monkey with. Of course the fact we have to
delve into magicland above indicates that we should expect to see some
very silly behavior in userland. Which we are doing. Which is good.
Even so, the bottom line is, I haven't figured out a way to do it yet.
I've gone through overloading the 'qr' constant, to walking the symbol
table and I still can't force qr// to make any sense. A reference
should reference something[0], and the data that it points to must
still exist within Perl because otherwise qr// wouldn't work at all.
And it does, but it is data of the special, magic variety, and to get
at it I need to call in the XS goon squad. But I will make this work,
I will!
/me wanders off in a corner to rock backwards and forwards for a little
while.
Regards,
James.
[0] I am right here, or am I going completely potty? I fear the latter.
Re: re-animating regexes
On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 03:00 pm, Nicholas Clark wrote: I've kept quiet up to now because I remember a thread on p5p from a while back where someone thought it would be possible, but it turned out it never was. IIRC. ie - I don't think that anyone's pulled it off yet. http://search.cpan.org/src/AMS/Storable-2.06/ChangeLog Hmm. CODE references are in. but not regexps. http://www.ululate.co.uk/code/Regexp-Copy-0.01.tar.gz A preliminary shot. It seems to Do The Right Thing on my machine, so hopefully it will do so on others. If interested parties could give it a shot, it'd be much appreciated. Regards, James.
Re: networks and scalability
I don't think a per-piece model works for content. Take a look at the way The Economist web site handles premium content. The per piece model they have is pretty clearly designed to drive people towards a subscription. it depends on the content i guess. i mean id not pay per-piece for mobile access to void or london.pm, but i would do for ntk (although ntk is a bad example because most of the content is off the email). ntk is long, regular and reliable - so there wouldnt be any surprises - no huge bill increases one week and huge reductions the next. i would however pay a flat fee for access to things like void and london.pm. ive used email on my mobile before and it was just prohibitivly expensive for the way i use email. so i guess the only way to do it properly would be to have a contract with the owner of the mailing list and the mobile provider to agree on a monthly price based on the average load and review it every 6 months or so. so for example i'd be paying 10p a week for NTK and 5 ukp a month for london.pm to be sent to my mobile. ignore the fact that most phones right now wont send email longer than 160 characters and all that crap. duncan
Re: Money and mouse clicks
Eeek...I wouldn't use this service for a fee, so I definitely don't see that many other people doing so. But if it were *free*, I'd use it at least 5 times per day. In this particular instance though, each click might cost me (as in, The Company) between 5 and 10p. So I'd need to find a revenue for each click that, given the expected volume of clicks would make me more than 5 to 10p each time. a cost to you of between 5p and 10p a click is fairly expensive. most services ive dealt with that have (and this was a long time ago) generated revenue from click throughs were paying 10p per hundred clicks. one way to do it is the approach that a lot of useful services are using - offer a few clicks per day/week/$time for free and then charging a premium for more. 192 and bt do this for their phone/address lookups. then its just a case of finding a nice cheap easy way for charging micropayments for clicks. a reverse sms/0898 number can give you credits. im working on a proposal for a large tv company to allow sms's to appear on screen at a cost of 1 euro for 5 sms's. then a loyalty scheme/incentive to encourage people to keep on registering for more credits and getting a discount as a result. i have a fairly good micropayment system working at the moment, the idea being that most services put such expensive costs on services that it discourages people from trying and seeing if they like it. text messages are a symptom of this thought. at an average price of 10 pence per message its actually a very expensive method of communication, if the cost was reduced to 5 pence per message im sure the profit would increase as the number of messages would go up to such an extent that the higher profit margin would be negated. its a fairly common idea that lowering the price can increase the profit, but only supermarkets seem to have cottoned on to the idea. for instance, the music industry seems to be stuck with the mentality that higher prices = more profit, even though sales are falling. 3g mobile networks will shoot themselves in the foot if the pricing of text messaging doesnt drop significantly - because why do i want to pay 40p for sending 50k of data (a picture with orange), when i am currently paying 10p to send 160 bytes of text. t-mobile are charging 20 quid per month and give you an allowance of 10 meg of pictures allowed to be sent that month. duncan
look at his name
apologies to anyone if this is you... http://www.novell.com/education/cde/features/randy.html
Re: pipelines
Oh, I know this. I meant, when you get down to it is OpenFrame a
while (1) {
...
sleep ($foo)
}
loop? Or a prefork or threaded or some strange new beast or ...
None. OpenFrame is none! Moohahahhhahahahahaha!
Its an exercise left up to the implementor. For example, under Apache,
it is preforked. It provides no real mechanism to tie it all together
behind the scenes, and blindly hopes that the server it runs under does
the right thing.
Regards,
james.
Re: london.pm digest, Vol 1 #611 - 24 msgs
On Thursday, February 14, 2002, at 10:27 PM, Mike Jarvis wrote: On Thu, 2002-02-14 at 17:04, Tim Noll wrote: And, as far as the london.pm meetings go, I'm off to the States for two weeks starting tomorrow. But when I return, if I can manage to drag some of my hapless colleagues along, I might just try to avoid that teaspoon mauling. They've gotten worse. When I was there the game was slap the yank. Seems like they've escalated. We prefer the term 'focused' :-) --james
MMS [was: Re: The Hotel Fiasco 2 - Please read and respond]
On Thursday, February 14, 2002, at 06:04 PM, Lucy McWilliam wrote: * Greg McCarroll ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: people staying at the MMS have a good stay, so I'm going to I blame NMS for the above, it should of course of been MMA. MMS = Michael Marshall Smith. Great author. 'Only Forward' was my favorite book for a very very long time. I've been reasonably disapointed by the books that followed, not because they were poor, but because they were so similar. I think if I'd read any of the other books first I would have loved them too. On the other hand the short stories in the latest compilation work (I forget the title right now) were great. He seems to target a specific emotion from the reader and really rip it out. I had to march around my flat punching walls after [I think] the first story. Anyway, James.
Re: User Input at speed
On Wednesday, February 13, 2002, at 05:36 PM, Ivor Williams wrote: I am also looking to track down a contrasty PC keyboard - black keys labelled in white, or white keys labelled in black (as opposed to dark brown I'd love to track down a translucent labelless keyboard. I can touch type on both UK and US keyboard layouts[0] and having one layout or another confuses more than helps, so its for a definite purpose. Well, except the translucent bit, thats just cool. Regards, James. [0] Oddly enough I prefer a UK layout if I'm writing copious documentation, or perhaps even a piece of prose. If I'm writing code I prefer a US keyboard. Why this is I do not know.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] OpenFrame 2.05
Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
Jonathan == Jonathan Stowe [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Jonathan On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Leon Brocard wrote:
This is the first wide announcement of the release of OpenFrame.
Jonathan I tested the previous versions and I can vouch that it passes its tests
Jonathan ;-}
Although it gives very strange errors when Apache::SessionX isn't
installed (like using a string as a hash reference! what return value
are you NOT testing?), and Apache::SessionX, being GRICHTER software,
has a very weird set of configuration questions that I got wrong three
times in a row.
Apache::SessionX is annoying from that perspective. I've gotten pretty annoyed with
it myself.
After that, it seems to install, but perldoc OpenFrame doesn't
have enough SEE ALSO links for me to figure out everything I just
installed. {sigh}
Thanks for that point -- I will make sure thats corrected in the next
release. For reference now, SEE ALSO probably should have
OpenFrame::AppWrite
OpenFrame::Install
and
OpenFrame::Slot
in it to give an overview of how it all joins together. Hmmm, a quick start guide
wouldn't go amiss either.
How is this different from OpenInteract?
Quite :-) The name is an unfortunate circumstance - we chose the name months ago, and
didn't notice the existence of OpenInteract until quite far into the development
process.
OpenInteract is more of a content management system application bundled
on top of an Application Server. We're trying to make OpenFrame a lot
more open (from a architecture point of view, rather than a license point of view) -
for example, we don't have any content management tools, we don't have an object
persistance system, and we don't require that you use much of anything we write at
all. OpenFrame provides a mechanism to plug transparant (to the client, like logging
for example) functionality together in a linear fashion. Also inside the distribution
we provide some examples of that transparant functionality, like our session system,
or our application dispatch system (which we like a lot and think is quite clever),
but we certainly don't enforce their use.
We don't enforce what you plug OpenFrame into from a server perspective either,
although our primary target is mod_perl, we also have a standalone HTTP server, and
programatic access. It would be nice to see OpenFrame plug ins written for all sorts
of things (IIS, NAS, etc, etc)
OpenFrame is probably closer to Andy Wardley's Camelot ideas, than it is
to OpenInteract.
Regards,
James.
OpenFrame presentation slides
Are available at: http://openframe.fotango.com/docs/presentation/London_pm-png/ as well as the beginning of the rest of the openframe website. Regards, james.
Re: Football
Consider me in - provided I can be rolling subbed on and off to stop me from dying I'll play :-) --james Richard Clyne wrote: I'll join in, but I'm not confident of getting enough players. Go on, prove me wrong!! Richard From: Greg McCarroll [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ok, i know this is probably a really stupid idea, however ... Would 9 other people (or more) be interested in a game or two (maybe regular) of 5 aside football. It would be good for our health and shouldn't be too competitive[1].
Re: pdcawley++
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Dave Cross [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/23/damians.html
I like the idea of a refactoring browser. Why not parse Perl with perl?
Is this what you were thinking of?
use strict;
use warnings;
use B::Deparse;
my $stringcode;
{
local $/ = undef;
$stringcode = DATA;
}
sub refactor ($) {
my $stringcode = shift;
my $dep = B::Deparse-new();
$@ = 1;
while ($@) {
my $substring = qq(
sub {
$stringcode
}
);
my $subref = eval $substring;
if (!$@) {
return sub refactored . $dep-coderef2text( $subref );
last;
} else {
$@ =~ /Global symbol \(.+?)\/;
$stringcode = 'my ' . $1 . = shift;\n . $stringcode;
}
}
}
print refactor( $stringcode );
Re: pdcawley++
[resent because of my other email address is not subscribed - bah] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is this what you were thinking of? No. At least, not until B::Deparse works on 100% of perl code. And of course, the browser needs to come back to the user and query for the names of the arguments and of the method, replace the code with a method call, preferably using named parameters, and generally make the place look nice. I think the problem I was trying to solve was more along the lines of how could I write something to turn a piece of code that relies on globals into a method that relies on lexicals, without writing a parser. I'm just playing around now with comparing chunks of the optree to the original code, and attempting to get enough info back from the optree to figure out where I need to place the method call - theory being that while the perl source code may change its variable names fairly significantly, the optree looks more or less the same. Of course any milage that I may gain here is subject to extremely hairy conditions in the first place. Of course at the moment its just comparing the output to B::Terse - but seeing as B::Terse is a textual representation of the optree, what works with one should work with the other. And 'Make method' is just one of the refactorings that a good refactoring browser should do, need things like 'rename method', 'push method to superclass'... Absolutly - I'm looking at starts rather than ends :-) If I can get it to work it's going to be *so* cool. The other thing I'd really like is a proper class browser. I've hacked together class browsers in the past, but they always are just a hack, although I've not done anything since B::Deparse became more clever. However, that is a *really* cool approach. Took a while to work out what was going on mind, but still, very cool. It is pretty hairy. What I meant above was 'let Perl worry about parsing perl, and let me worry about errors that are generated'. Essentially that is the approach - Damian (uses|used) a similar method for parsing arguments to attributes in Attribute::Handlers. Now, if Robin can just get B::Deparse working all the time... But I don't think we'll be seeing that until 5.10... I've not read p5p for a little while. I was under the impression that code spat out by B::Deparse was passing any test that wasn't reliant on order of BEGIN blocks (and therefore things like pragmata where a little bit squew whiff[0]). Regards, James [0] I've always loved this expression. I've never seen it spelled however, so this may be very wrong.
Re: pdcawley++
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is this what you were thinking of? No. At least, not until B::Deparse works on 100% of perl code. And of course, the browser needs to come back to the user and query for the names of the arguments and of the method, replace the code with a method call, preferably using named parameters, and generally make the place look nice. I think the problem I was trying to solve was more along the lines of how could I write something to turn a piece of code that relies on globals into a method that relies on lexicals, without writing a parser. I'm just playing around now with comparing chunks of the optree to the original code, and attempting to get enough info back from the optree to figure out where I need to place the method call - theory being that while the perl source code may change its variable names fairly significantly, the optree looks more or less the same. Of course any milage that I may gain here is subject to extremely hairy conditions in the first place. Of course at the moment its just comparing the output to B::Terse - but seeing as B::Terse is a textual representation of the optree, what works with one should work with the other. And 'Make method' is just one of the refactorings that a good refactoring browser should do, need things like 'rename method', 'push method to superclass'... Absolutly - I'm looking at starts rather than ends :-) If I can get it to work it's going to be *so* cool. The other thing I'd really like is a proper class browser. I've hacked together class browsers in the past, but they always are just a hack, although I've not done anything since B::Deparse became more clever. However, that is a *really* cool approach. Took a while to work out what was going on mind, but still, very cool. It is pretty hairy. What I meant above was 'let Perl worry about parsing perl, and let me worry about errors that are generated'. Essentially that is the approach - Damian (uses|used) a similar method for parsing arguments to attributes in Attribute::Handlers. Now, if Robin can just get B::Deparse working all the time... But I don't think we'll be seeing that until 5.10... I've not read p5p for a little while. I was under the impression that code spat out by B::Deparse was passing any test that wasn't reliant on order of BEGIN blocks (and therefore things like pragmata where a little bit squew whiff[0]). Regards, James [0] I've always loved this expression. I've never seen it spelled however, so this may be very wrong.
