Category — Ironman

Presenting Perl Website

Today, 1st March (though this post was written late on the 28th February), Shadowcat Systems, in the guise of Matt S. trout and Mark Keating are launching a new community resource site called Presenting Perl.

So what is it?

Well basically…

The presenting Perl website is a resource location for talks and presentations on, or about, the Perl language. The site will initially have videos from conferences and workshops but it is our aim to provide a single location for all Perl audio/visual resources and material. Coming soon will be the ability for the authors of the videos to add html links and materials of their own to other resources, such as slides, supporting documents on the net. Or to embed those items in the page their video or presentation is displayed upon.

Future iterations of the site will, we hope, incorporate other multimedia properties as we develop them. The site is built and maintained by Shadowcat Systems Limited, but we will accept offers to support, promote, and build the project from interested parties.

Presenting Perl is powered by Idiot Box which is built using the Web::Simple framework created by Matt S. Trout for ‘light web applications’ development.

All of the material will have a licence on the page it is on. The general site licence is a “Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence”, other material provided by authors may have their own restrictions and conditions. If you wish to use any of the material at another location then please contact the site owners to confirm usage, also so we can promote and link your usage.

Well okay then…

I know that all sounded very dry and stuffy but I was writing this as a serious piece that I could ameliorate to different contexts, then I realised that what I wrote couldn’t be fused into different styles without still sounding stuffy so I left it and will hope you’ll forgive me for sounding so drab and making a fun thing sound so restrictive.

If anyone has any video or resources they want to start adding to the site then please contact me and we’ll work on incorporating that. If you have some time and want to help work on aspects of the sites code, design, look, feel, message and purpose, well you know where we are . I will keep you all updated to the changes and new features as and when we release them.

-ttfn – Mark

Having a certain swagger…

By now I hope most of you have been following Gabor Szabo‘s and Renée Bäcker’s efforts to get Perl promoted at non-Perl conferences (see events on the TPF wiki here) and like me are in support. Their efforts are supported by The Perl Foundation, the YAPC Europe Foundation and the Enlightened Perl Organisation all of whom have helped by supplying funds/items to give away at the booth/event.

Wherever I lay my pint…

So the EPO have produced a set of Beer Mats as promotional items. About 1,000 of these mats will be sent to the CeBit conference to be given away (see more details on the CeBit Perl attendance on the Wiki page on TPF wiki), but there are another 2,000 of these items available and if you have an event, know of an event, where technical people may gather and would like some beermats to give away, then please contact Mark (the owner of this blog) at m.keating(at)shadowcat.co.uk and request some. We will deliberate and decide if it is a worthwhile request (don’t be shy, that’s just to stop people saying they want one for their beer mat collection – though go to a conference, add your support and grab some if that’s the case).

What they look like?

Well I am glad you asked. The beermats all share a common background image and the front is three different projects that are part of the EPO supported projects. They are displayed below. Enjoy .

Back Image of the beermats

-ttfn – Mark

What is it? It’s it…

The Send a Newbie program is designed to introduce new people to YAPC’s by collecting sponsorship from supporting companies. It was successfully run by Edmund von der Burg last year, but due to other circumstances Edmund has decided to pass the reins on this year and asked the Enlightened Perl Organisation to pick them up.

Where’s it at?

The website is now up at send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (also sendanewbie.enlightenedperl.org) and there is already a Donate button on the front page if you feel magnaminous and want to make a donation. All contributions will be published on a donations page (though the option to donate anonymously will be offered if requested).

The send-a-newbie was originally done for YAPC::EU and had three people sponsored to attend. This year the Perl Foundation (TPF) will also be organising a send-a-newbie for the YAPC::US and we wish them all the luck in their endeavours. Hopefully the two programs will continue to work together and maybe we can get groups to do this at the other YAPCs worldwide.

Who can do it?

The EPO believe that the send-a-newbie should be open to everyone. The program is being run by Rosellyne Thompson and Mark Keating and they will be happy to answer questions & queries, send an email to  send-a-newbie(at)enlightenedperl.org.

-ttfn – Mark

This is the third article based upon my Keynote that I presented this year and is part of a series of articles on the Terrible Things We All Must Do.

Lead but not always complete…

Last week I said that I would continue to do these Daisy Chain articles eventhough most of my readers (if you are out there) will no doubt grab the same posts I do the idea is to make links for people who do not find this through the Ironman source and associated areas, who perhaps follow me on Twitter/Facebook.
But I did fail, almost epically, to get a second post up about a different matter and for that I apologise profoundly, hopefully this week I will rectify that situation and you can all stop laughing at me…well laughing at me about that at least…

On with the gossiping.

What we struggle to do…

Alias has made a great comparative post about Perl’s place in the pantheon and ponders what challenges we should face, what is the struggle we should undertake that will spur a round of development as development in one project usually has a knock-on effect of raising the quality/standard of other components – particularly those that it depends upon.

The post begins by giving a brief introspection of the current shape of the languages and their differences and how those differences came about. My only addition to this is that it should have been pointed out that Python is the easiest to learn because it was developed as a teaching language. This is what provides it with its ease of uptake and what limits its ability. Also I am going to make a small gripe, not much of one (and certainly as no insult to an excellently composed piece), in that he doesn’t distinguish between Ruby and Rails and I think there are major differences. In fact to my mind Rails is to Ruby as PhP is to Perl and should be treated in such a manner.

The post also discusses Padre and Strawberry Perl…

Juice for Windows

Speaking of Strawberry the incredibly busy Mr csjewell and his companions have brought us the latest release of Strawberry Perl (which is now available with a Padre release bundled inside). Strawberry Perl is one of the stand-out projects that is running in the community and the ability for them to port latest Perl releases at speed onto this platform is worth of a lot of praise.

Speaking of stand-out projects

More than one person has been hailing the praises of Tim Bunce’s Devel NYTProf (see Leo Lapworth’s post and  oylenshpeegul’s post, Jerome Quelin wrote on How to Profile a Perl Program, for more details) and so I thought I would add my weight to those already calling as I saw Tim’s presentations at London Perl Workshop in 2008 and at Italian Perl Workshop in Pisa in 2009.

Help me if you can….

Another great post this week was by Redspike in which he discussed ‘How to Learn to get help in Perl‘. This is a newish feed and I think this may be the first post from him, if so I commend it as it is humourous, informative and extremely readable, looking forward to further posts from this erudite individual.

Lastly…

There are a final few mentions for me to make of the posts I wanted to share with you, they are in no particular order:

Dagolden has provided a method for getting English-only Ironman feeds. I like seeing lots of different languages in my browser window when I go to the Ironman site – and that is my preference, I can see how this would be an irritation in a feed reader, so we have to applaud dagolden for not only seeing an issue but for solving it. Lets hope he can swing by the #northwestengland irc channel on irc.perl.org and help out with feed manipulation on the upcoming Ironman Archives

Rob Kinyon, a friend of old, has announced the call for papers of YAPC::NA, I dearly wished I was going and presenting once again this year but that plan has come unstuck as the dates for the conference correspond with the due dates for my expected child (Not sad about the child, sad about the collision of dates).

Speaking of conferences, there is also the announcement about YAPC::EU::2010 and this year’s European Perl conference in Pisa commented on here.

Lastly I should just put a shout out about my good friend (and business colleague) Matt S Trout’s post last week which was another in his sensible rants on the community and methods in which we can do things better (Show us the Whole Code). This time he is speaking about Debugging on lists and in channels and how you can help make this process easier.

That wraps up my week of Ironman posts that I needed to share with you.

-ttfn – Mark

This is the second article based upon my Keynote that I presented this year and is part of a series of articles on the Terrible Things We All Must Do.

Lead by example…

One of the points I made in my Daisy Chain article last week was the need to link to each other in our blogs and social media locales. So I have resolved myself to lead by example and to try and do that as much as I can. To this end I will be attempting to blog to Ironman twice a week from now on (when necessary) so that I can link to and discuss other peoples blogs and the groovy things I read on them.

Basically I am gossiping.

Wrap it up and Design

There was a great post by XSawyerX (http://blogs.perl.org/users/sawyer_x) which pointed out the need for all Perl modules/libraries/projects to have a good looking website. This went from a series of discussions he had concerning popularity of projects being connected to how they present themselves.

My feeling is that this is part of the problem, not the whole of the issue (not that he implies that, I am just talking out my thoughts) and that there are some other things for us to consider in the marketing and understanding of the marketplace, some of which I am going to try and cover in this series of posts.

But his idea to have a website for every project, that looks good and promotes the item is a solid one and I join Leo Lapworth (http://blogs.perl.org/users/leo_lapworth) in supporting him, check out his post on More Design Love.

Outside the Bubble

FOSDEM happens this week and the energetic Mister Szabo will be manning the stand and presenting papers on Perl to a wider audience, so if anyone can get there then please seek him and the other volunteers, including the indomitable Master Dave Cross, and say hello. This is really a great effort and it is good to note that they are also getting some help form the wonderful TPF (The Perl Foundation Homepage) at this event.

Frameworks

The other notable item for me this week was the article by Stevan Little On Frameworks, I really like Stevan’s blog he always seems so wide read, considering how busy the guy is I wonder how he makes the time to do so much reading and thinking on things. Thankfully I can read his blog so that I don’t have to think about them : ). Also good to note that Miyagawa has taken yet another step closer to a version 1.0 release of Plack (Plack the Perl Web Server)

Cultured Perlers

In a bold move I have decided that I will start yet another blog initiative (I currently blog to 4 places, some more than others which are all linked from flavors.me/mdk) if Dave Cross gets his Cultured Perl site up and running. I like the idea and have expressed the need for more introduction/promotion of the Perl community to a wider world and expressed this as part of my keynote, so I felt obliged to join in. My only concern will be the overlap with this blog and the strain on my limited writing capabilities. But, hey ho, we will see what happens. Hopefully Dave will let us all know soon what is going on.

That wraps up my week of Ironman posts that I needed to share with you.

-ttfn – Mark

This is the first article based upon my Keynote that I presented this year and is part of a series of articles on the Terrible Things We All Must Do.

Meanwhile…

While I was writing this article I was also checking the web and eagerly awaiting the keynote from Apple and their possible latest release, I know I am such a fracking fanboi or something, or maybe I just like cool devices, slinky sci-fi-esque toys – look I am a child of the 70s, this is all futuristic to me man. Also, Bubble Wrap is 50 years old today, so much fun from something so simple as the “Tension Sheet”.

She links me yeah, yeah, yeah

In my Keynote at the Oasis Perl Workshop (see my post last week) I mentioned that I would like to see a giant daisy chain of Perl sites. What I meant by this was down to obvious things we must do and a significant element missing from many Ironman Posts.

The obvious thing is to remember to name drop sites and people in your blogs, Twitter et al., of the people and places, especially Perl related, that you have been-seen-done-wanted-heard-insertownthing. Not only that, you must also link to them, and if you’re link isn’t obvious from its context as to what it is then you better do this, you better link twice, ’cause otherwise you’ll be naughty not nice. As an example, consider the request Miyagawa made of us to mention the best Perl Web Server (Plack) – you see not only do I link the phrase to follow in context I also name the thing and link that as well.

The element missing from many Ironman posts is a link to the Ironman Competition itself and the Planet Homepage. This is fairly poor people. There will be other visitors to your sites, not just those from the Ironman site, a link (or even use the banner I made or one of your own) will be very useful. There are something over 7000 posts on the Ironman archive and only 6300 links to Ironman on the internet, so even if the links are only from Blogs on this site that is a shortfall. Personally I think there is probably about half of them that don’t link to here – so make sure you do link on every post. Also try to link to the sign-up page so we get new competitors.

Socialise…

We need to make sure we link to each other and to make those links relevant, it is a tool we can use to make sure things are found  by people searching for information. By using the social media sites to talk about Perl and the things happening in our universe we can promote and raise awareness of the tools and language we all hold dear.

btw, as a matter of yet more praise I have to say that there are people to whom I owe much regard as they already do this to a great extent, one of those is my business partner Matt S. Trout and another is the (afore praised as magnificent) Dave Cross. They are not on their own, there are many others and we should join with them.

</rant>

A further article in this series will follow (maybe next week)

-ttfn – Mark

Fun – fun – fun in the sun – sun – sun

Last Saturday was the Perl Oasis conference in Orlando Florida arranged, orchestrated and conducted by the Orlando Perl Mongers in the fleshy guise of Chris and Jamie (notice how those two names could be used by either of them?).

The Organisers looking busy

The conference is a relatively small affair attracting a core group of presenters and attendees numbering approximately 30 people, and one might think that this lessens the importance in the face of larger workshops and the continental YAPCs, but I say ‘nay’ and perhaps ‘pish and tosh’ to such fallacy. The truth is that this type of event is equally as important as any other. It has its own merits and shortfalls that nicely contrast with a larger event. It would be hard for anyone at a YAPC/similar sized event to be able to get to talk to almost every attendee, and comment to the speakers in person about their talks. It is also very easy to feel on the edge of a crowd, especially if new to conferences at a large event. Perl Oasis has no issues like this. The group size was large enough to gurantee a good range of talks on the schedule, a good number of opinions at the bar and let everyone socialise together. There were new faces at this conference who had not been to a Perl event before and suddenly they were drinking and discussing with the developers and authors of Moose, Plack and Dbic.

The Hallway track was well-attended

The Plays the thing…

I managed to see a good number of talks while at the event, as well as delivering my own rather ranty little keynote. I will get to see all the talks as I videoed the half I didn’t view on the day and will catch up with them during editing and posting online. Those I saw:

Stevan Little – Untitled Number 12 – Stevan brought us uptodate with his current thinking and work in the Perlverse and managed to talk about some of the other projects out and about and steal Miyagawa’s thunder at the same time by talking a lot about Plack.

Stevan points out where the screen is…

Shawn Moore – Surviving in the Cruel, Unforgiving World – What lengths a programmer will do to create a Perl powered bot to tackle a complex game.

Attendees in the talks – everyone has a laptop these days

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa – Plack: State of the art web framework superglue – Plack was a big thing in 2009 and will no doubt make greater impact in 2010, take a look at this exciting web framework/server interface tool. Make sure you click on this link to the Plack homepage and check this out.

Cory Watson – From Zero to CPAN – Adding a new product search to Magazines.com – although not primarily about Perl, Cory is a Perl user amongst other languages and a great conference speaker. He also sponsored this year’s event and was quite the demon for go-kart driving (except when someone killed his iPhone in a reportedly brutal collision).

Cory’s great presenting style – “it was this heavy”

Casey West – Writing a JQuery Plugin – another talk not really about Perl, but I attended to try and learn more about JQuery. Unfortunately for me it was aimed at people who already had a working knowledge. No matter as the talk was still good and Casey did move heaven and Earth to get there arriving late on the day of the conference and almost running into his presentation.

Devin Austin – Google a Summer of Code - Devin spoke about his experience completing the summer of code last year and how this has helped him develop. A good introduction as to why GSOC is important to Open Source and to Perl.

Matt S Trout – The Troll the God and the Mountain – In his indominable style Matt told us an epic story or he told us about developments in Dbic, nobody can be quite sure. My only complaint is that I have to now watch this again to learn about the Dbic stuff as the tale of the two Trolls was so interesting I missed the Perl A must see on the conference circuit or online this year.

It isn’t all fun and games…

The conference was fun and after it was over we retired into the night for the usual food and the Orlando Mongers’ preferred relaxation pursuit, Go Karts. Cory, Jay, Miyagawa, Stevan and mst had already been practicing the previous day (with Cory and Jay doing a lot of practice) and some injury had resulted (to Cory’s iPhone) – there were quite a few people who raced about the track, and some fun from the spectators as they sometimes spun out of control to end up in reverse or were taken by the kids.

Is this a conference organiser being beaten by a small boy?

Shaun, Cory and Jay, just before the infamous spin-out

So the conference was a great event and a good deal of congratulations, praise and general love should be poured onto Jamie and Chris for organising the event, making people happy and welcome and working their asses off to provide us with a great experience.

Shadowcat Systems expressed their gratritude by providing the Perl Mongers of Orlando with a mascot to keep them happy and agreeing to fund next year’s conference and pay towards the conference the year after (2011, 2012).

Niles (on right) and Aurelea (check spelling!) the Orlando PM mascot

Let’s see more of you….but not too many…then

-ttfn – Mark

A superband that will not split….

SO it is just a few short days, nerve-bitingly it is less than 3 days, to the wonderful Perl Oasis held in the – hopefully – sunny city of Orlando in Florida. I am biting my nails because I rather foolishly jumped into the fray and declared, “yes, I shall do a Keynote for you muhahahaha,” what a plonker.

So what is my keynote on? Well you might well ask and I might well answer. Actually I am sort of going to answer, maybe…

I have decided to talk a little about some of the ‘Horrible Things’ that we in the community must do, and the terrible word that links all of this. Some of you may have guessed what this is just by that short description, and the rest of you will have to wait until after the conference for me to tell you.

So why am I mentioning it here? Well I want you all to pay attention to the fact there is a conference. Be upset that you missed it. And resolve to make it there next year. I will, of course be talking about this conference in my blog next week where I may also start my campaign of Awful Things We ALL Must Do.

-ttfn – Mark

Precis, damn you, precis

Last week I spoke about the rather magnificent Dave Cross[1] and in the continuation of a theme[2] this week I am going to talk about some of the magnificent chaps and chapesses of North West England Perl Mongers and their associated brethren[3].

The Context

It has been a year since Ian Norton (Facebook) and I (Facebook, Twitter, mdk) formed the North West England Perl Mongers group[4], and one of our aims in starting the group was to “do good things for Perl and the community”. Of course our very first task was to get some regular members.

The “good things” we wanted to do were to promote Perl in the local region, a task which we have started but need to really push some more this year, to hold regular technical meetings, which we have and there are videos of our tech talks available, we even managed to broadcast one of these live on the internet! Another task we set ourselves was to start to build useful sites/tools for Perl folks (and others) to use. The first task in that was to get the Ironman (from the Ironman Blogging competition) archives running and call this all.things.per.ly[5]. The Ironman Blogs on Enlightened Perl only display the most recent posts and we thought it would be a great tool/resource to have a site that collected/collated all previous posts and allowed them to be indexed and searchable. This is almost ready for a live test (currently under a password protected site), and we will be shouting about it when it is released.

The Finest

So who are these finest people I would like you to know? Let me list them for you:

Matt S. Trout (mst)

Matt is a Director of Shadowcat Systems and one of the “loudest and most profane”[TM] voices of Perl and the Perl Enlightenment. Matt is a constant community player and provider, prodder and poker, charmer and cahinsawer[6], and delights in using the term “well volunteered”[7]. Matt is the “architect” (of sorts) of the current all.things.per.ly scheme. He also talks at almost every technical meeting and is first in the pub whenever possible.
(Homepage, Blog)

Graeme Lawton (grim)

Graeme is the first (in this list only) of our MEN trio of regulars who make up a consistent force in the North West England Perl Mongers group. Graeme maintains per.ly blogs and is a Catalyst and Dbix::Class guru.
(Blog, Twitter, Perly on Twitter)

Iain Hubbard (Iain)

Second of the this-list-only MEN trio is Iain who came to Perl through the vomitous mire of random php[8], Iain is a core member of the group responsible for getting all.things.per.ly working.
(Blog, Twitter)

Carl Johnstone (fade)

Third and not final of the MEN trio is Carl who is a Systems Admin and therefore a sweet and nice guy who every loves and has the mildest and gentlest of natures [9]. Like all good SysAdmins one is never quite sure what Carl does, or what he does with all.things.per.ly, though you can lay bets on it not working if he hadn’t done his magic.
(Twitter)

Ollie (aCiD2)

New to North West England Perl Mongers but a contributor to things Catalyst, Ollie joined us on our hackathon and in channel on irc. We are hoping to pull him into being a regular member/contributor. Ollie worked on the Perlanet side of the project.
(Twitter)

Ian Norton (idn)

Ian works at the University of Lancaster where he maintains the Universities Mail systems and constantly promotes the use of good Perl. A guru in the use of RT (and a vocal proponent of this technology) Ian has become more involved with the community in the past eighteen months and is a successful co-leader of a Perl Mongers group. Ian has spoken at the London Perl Workshop, UKUUG Conferences and the NWEPM tech talks.

Jess Robinson (castaway)

There are few people who inspire awe from just about everyone who has heard of them and Jess is one of those people. I would need a whole post to list all the things this wonderful person does and how much praise for her should be given and she would probably beat me up if I did as she’s quite modest. Maintainer of many docs for a plethora of projects (not an easy task, if you think writing documents is easy then help Jess out, though you had better be good because the standard you are matching is high) and contributor to them as well, including Catalyst and DBIx::Class. Jess works for Sophos and technically lives in the South, but we maintain she is a northener in her nature.
(Blog, Twitter)

Dave Cross (davorg)

Spoken about at length in my last post and maintainer/author of the excellent Perlanet which we use for all.things.per.ly. Dave has now been pulled into chatting in channel and updating his code for us as we bend and twist it a little .
(Perlanet Git, Perlanet CPAN, Homepage)

(All descriptions are my own and the people being spoken about had no direct influence on me, though they may do after reading this :0 ).

So there they are, and hopefully in a couple of weeks time I will be telling you all to visit all.things.per.ly to see what we have done. Please look them up online or on irc and say hi and offer to buy them a beer when you next see them as they are all worth it.

[1] Like The Fantastic Mr Fox but with grey hair, human and not a fox (except to the ladies).
[2] One supposes with this being a ‘net thang I should call it a meme, but it really isn’t (well not yet at least).
[3] They are our “associated brethren” for although they may not strictly belong in the group by region, they are certainly members by association and perhaps even spiritual home (for in the faire counties of the North doth all of England’s heart dwell, for the Midlands have the stomach and further south the bowels (yes Kent you are the rectum, Cornwall has the pointy bits)).
[4] For strict accuracy it was formed on the weekend of the 2008 London Perl Workshop, but we officially started in the January of 2009.
[5] This name was chosen as we are intending to use the site for a range of matters and the per.ly namespace (Perly Website) is owned by a member of the #NWEPM (Twitter search term).
[6] I promise to quit with the epithets soon.
[7] This term has now become something of a legend in the Perl community, I am going to attribute it to mst, unless someone can give me an example of prior consistent usage.
[8] Not all PHP is bad, and there are many decent coders in its ranks. It has the same number of poor projects/bad code as any other language I suspect, but many Perl coders have waded through poor php code on their path to Perl.
[9] It will be a cold day in hell before I annoy a SysAdmin.

-ttfn – Mark

A very modest[1] man in need of praise

Last week the very well-known and indominable force of nature that is Dave Cross was kind enough to mention Matt and I in a list of people in his article The Without Whoms, who had done good work in 2009 for the Perl community. Specifically he mentioned the work we did on the Ironman blogging competition. I found this strangely humbling as I have a great deal of respect for Dave Cross and so in return I will try to capture a little of the impact of this man.

Dave is the founder of the London Perl Monguers and has been a principal force in both the bringing into being of the YAPC Europe conferences and the London Perl Workshop. He has spoken as the Keynote speakers at both 2008 and 2009, he has also presented free workshops at conferences to encourage new, or greater, participation in the community.

Aside from running a vast number of projects to be found on CPAN and on his Github Page Dave maintains a number of Blogs. These are: Perl Hacks; davblog; as well as administering: Blogs at Perl.org; and tweeting happily here: Davorg on Twitter where he is possibly the greatest human being ever to hold the title Davorg; slicdes from his conference presentations are updated to Slideshare for all to view.

More information on Dave can always be found on Dave’s personal website, which is kept up-to-date (and I swear he must have a team of immigrant children working in a sweat shop somewhere to track all that he does and update all this).

Professionally Dave is well respected for his training courses that have been run at many conferences and workshops with O’Reilly, UKUUG, YAPC and others all desiring his services. His company website Magnum Solutions has a full list of details about these.

There is still more that can be said about Dave Cross. He is constantly supportative of the local community around him as is shown by the number of Planet sites he has built, or is involved with:

The Planetarium;
Planet Balham;
Balham Twits;
SW12 Org;
Planet Westminster;
The Political Web;

This list doesn’t include the fact that Dave is always on hand on varioius IRC channels, or in person at community events to give advice, offer help and support and generally be an all-round excellent
person[2].

This list is not exhaustive or complete, and any errors or omissions are mine and i would be glad to correct them. Please send me an email to add a comment to this list about Dave.

[1] Dave may or may not be modest, I only believe so from personal experience and the fact that he didn’t do anywhere near enough blowing of his own trumpet in his article.

[2] He makes all the girls and boys moist with anticipation.

-ttfn – Mark