North West England Perl Mongers: March Tech Meeting 2010
Event Location
Event Sign-up

Just a short post today to remind people who haven’t signed up who can make it that they have just 24hrs to sign up before we close the signing process in anticipation of Thursday night’s NWE.pm’s first tech meet of 2010.

If you cannot make it then keep your eyes peeled to this post or to the front page of the Presenting Perl site for the usual video that will be produced.

For our Technical meeting Matt Trout (Shadowcat Systems) will be doing the wonderful The Troll, The God and The Mountain King that he did at Perl Oasis – as is common with oral histories the telling is different each time, so expect changes if you are familiar with the source material.

That’s it for now – I am swamped with work before my holiday. Next week’s post may just be on how much Perl I can think about at Disney

For those of you who have been keeping up-to-date with things we are working on a new version of the Ironman feed which will be called all.things.per.ly and is currently being developed as Ironboy by the members of northwestengland.pm and their associated friends who hang out on irc.perl.org in the #northwestengland.pm. channel.

This post is just to let you know that we have finally worked through a lot of the issues we were having with feed subscriptions (language issues) and working to weed out spam signups as well as developing code for the Perlanet which is replacing Plagger as the code the site runs on (well, sort of, there’s Catalyst and stuff in there as well, but someone else will be outlining the tech specs in a future post).

The eventual plan for the Ironboy code, once it is up and powering all-things.per.ly is to rip out Plagger from the current ironman.enlightenedperl.org and replace it with Ironboy (using Perlanet) this should help us to fix some issues such as the badge updates (finally).

Well keep watching as this will soon be a reality and we can all gush and say cool, now let’s have this feature…

If you want to help us bring the next generation of Ironman into existence then join the channel mentioned above and state you want to help.

I should not that my co-conspirator-leader Ian Norton (idn on irc) has been the principal force and focus for this project and all extra bits of kudos that are left over from praising all the people who are working on this should be gathered up and heaped on his impressive shoulders.

-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

This week I am blogging from a line at Paris, Disney. Actually right now I am back in my room and typing this to you but I was in a line when I made notes about this. Why am I in Paris and why Disney? Well the Paris is easy, it is an exotic and beautiful city and visiting it at this time of year is wonderful, it was the first foreign location I went to alone with my wife when we were first dating and therefore holds a special place in my heart. Why Disney, well my wife, like her mother, is a Disneyphillic, she adores the place and her parents paid for us to be here, so again colour me uncomplaining, it is a nice Christmas present.

Perl in the Sun…

But, soon we shall have joy, we shall have fun and we shall discuss Perl in the sun (ouch bad) and this is me telling you all to come along to Perl Oasis in January. Sure it is in Orlando, sure it is soon after Christmas, but it is going to be a great event, except for maybe the keynote, I have some doubts about that, but there again I am writing that.

In fact I am writing my thoughts about it while I stand in these Disney lines. When I told Perigrin about this he thought it was rather apt as the Oasis is in the theme park capitol of the world.

Matt S. Trout and I will both be there from Shadowcat Systems representing the Enlightened Perl Organisation and the North West England Perl Mongers at this so enlightened of conferences.

So go here to the Perl Oasis site, and register.
Look at the great list of talks.
Or say nice things about Perigrin.

-ttfn – Mark

Saturday 12th December was the North West England Perl Mongers 6th Technical meeting of the year and for this month we decided to have a happy Hackathon. So we gathered in the office of Shadowcat Systems who were sponsoring the event with snacks, pizza and beer (as well as a temperamental net connection from a crappy ISP).

[The collection of snacks]

Our goal was to make decent inroads into a new archive for the ironman challenge in Perl that will become a much grander project as time goes on. To do this we would be taking ther current Plagger install and bolting on a new system using Dave Cross’ Perlanet as detailed by the great man himself here (Dave Cross’ Blog post on NWE.PM’s efforts).

[Everyone is hard at it]

The day was extremely succesful. Not only did we get eight people in the office, but a further three joined us online for the event (though IDN was working on the bug-tracker software for Perl 5 core). We hope to have the archive out for general viewing very soon and will be under the rather nifty address of all.things.per.ly – so stay tuned for more information.

[Recursive Photo taking - ahh infinity loop]

[NWE.PM co-leader IDN hacks at it]

[Pizza time - YAY!]

So to all those who turned up on the day, worked hard, continue to work hard and have made the last twelve months, and our inaugural year a great sucess I say thank-you. I hope to see you all in the new year and look forward to drinking, coding and socialising with you.

-ttfn – Mark

My Ironman Status

The Event:

So last Wednesday, as reported in this blog the North West England Perl Mongers held a live video feed of their session Question the Catalyst Authors (See: http://per.ly/chat/) – held between 8.15 p.m. and 9 p.m. (GMT) on Wednesday 28th October.

The Issues:

The technical difficulties of this session were:

Castaway and Theorbtwo (Jess Robinson and James Mastros) had to travel 300 miles on the day to the venue and some less-than-stunning Manchester folks directed them to the wrong location – MEN Arena not the MEN offices.

KD (Kieren Diment) lives in Australia so was on OZ time (11hrs ahead) and had to get up in the early hours of the morning, added to that we had to do a sync with Google Talk and then project him, which always loses video contrast.

The whole thing was being streamed to the internet using a service that had to be tweaked into working on the day.

This sounded like a bit of a nightmare and it was not helped by the rail service in the North West going into meltdown on that evening. Ian, Matt, Leigh, Clair and I had decided to travel early (thankfully) to eat before the event and we were delayed by 1hr 30mins because of signal failure north of Lancaster. We were delayed on the way home for three hours due to a fatality, a woman (suffering from illness and depression) had committed suicide by placing her head on the line.

So after getting to the venue late, Matt and I had to race out to find Jess and James who thankfully could direct us to where they were and we got to the MEN offices with ten minutes to start up. There were a few teething troubles with contrast and signal for the video feed to KD, but the sound was clear for the webcast so people did get to hear the whole event. There will no doubt be a video of it going live and linked to from the nwe.pm site sometime in the near future.

The People:

So this seemed like an awful lot of effort for one 40 minute broadcast to a provincial Perl group, right? Well, to be honest it was, and it was also extremely rewarding. It proved yet again what a great group we have. Sorry for tooting on our own horn (we have been unable to find someone else willing to do it for free) but we really rocked. This was a great communal group effort and we were rewarded for it with a good experience.

And I wanted to share that with you all.

A Big Thanks:

I also wanted to make this another opportunity to give a big thanks to the people who made all of this possible in the first place, so in no real order:

Thanks to KD for writing the Catalyst book and getting up really early in the morning to talk to a bunch of insane Northerners.

Thanks to Jess and James for traveling across the UK on a very dreary day just to get lost in an unfamiliar city and then thrust into answering questions.

Thanks to Iain, Carl and Graeme for dealing with technical issues and once again securing us a venue in which to do this crazy stuff.

Thanks to Matt S. Trout for the constant performances and helping to write the Catalyst book.

Thanks to the Manchester Evening News for letting us use their venue.

Thanks to all the people who watched, pitched in and gave support, it was very kind of you all.

And Finally…

Here are some images from the night, the first is the dedication that Matt left in a book for the MEN offices by way of thanks for letting us host the occasional technical meetings on their premises, the second is our mascot doing scenes from well known internet sites – “Luggage rack Penguin is watching you….”:

My Ironman Status

North West England Perl Mongers broadcast to the web

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the North West England Perl Mongers (nwe.pm) would be holding a night with the Catalyst authors and would be trying to broadcast this to the world. Well we will be doing just that. If you go to:

http://per.ly/chat/

Between 8.15 p.m. and 9 p.m. (GMT) on Wednesday 28th October and you will be able to see and post questions live to the authors. If you like you can also post questions to this blog and they will be asked on the night. Or use #nwepm on Twitter.

Italian Perl Workshop

Last week was the Italian Perl Workshop and was held in Pisa, Italy (convenient it being the IPW) and Matt and I both attended and presented. Which is why as a poor attempt at padding a post this week I am presenting you with a few pictures from this event.

Yes, this is a feeble filler, but the several days in Pisa have left me with a backlog of work. Also, many of you who have met me know that I am almost always attached to a camera so it is in keeping that I do this.

My Ironman Status

While in Lisbon at YAPC::EU::2009 I was fortunate enough to talk to Aaron who is an avid Perler and member of the Edinburgh Perl Mongers. Without going into too much detail it is enough to say that Aaron is a member of the Reg team and we had a discussion about pushing the Perl envelope. Specifically how to get Perl back into the consciousness of the wider world. What we decided was to try and get regular articles about Perl out into the world. We decided to start with the Reg as Aaron felt sure he could get a positive response.

Well he went away and he did get a good response. If we can produce the articles the Register may print them, but we will need to keep up a steady flow, about one a week.

Now we have to fulfill the other part.

The Numbers

Here’s the basic upshot. I need authors. A lot of them, the reason I need a lot is to cut down the strain and I’ll explain why. Aaron and I have managed to get the opportunity for a weekly article on a Perl subject to be printed on the Reg. If 4 people take on this task they will each have to write at least 13 articles in a year, if it is 8 the figure halves and so on. So I want 52 people, minimum

If we have 52 authors we can pair up on articles, two authors working with each other to write/edit their work and get an article turned around in good speed. So we would have 2 articles a year each and the possibility of editing another 2 – and I’ll cover that in a minute as we think of peer editing and article groups.

Of course if we have 104 people or more it becomes 1 a year and the task gets so much easier for all.

Editing and Themes

The idea of writing the articles is that they would be short pieces. Maybe 500 – 3,000 words in each maximum and I think it would be good if we set ourselves themes to cover. These themes would be things such as:

Begining Perl - articles on how to get started in Perl

Windows Perl - articles on setting up and running Perl on Windows

Projects - a series of articles introducing some of the bigger projects – Moose/Catalyst/Padre/Raduko/Mojo/Dbic etc. – with the idea that we can introduce and explain how to use these projects

Using Perl – companion articles to the begining/using Perl with the idea of using specific projectsd to achieve aims

Modern Perl

Enlightened Perl

There are obviously others but this is a start.

We would assign groups of people to one ‘theme’. So if we had four articles on Moose Roles we would attempt to assign 8 people. This working group would be responsible for writing/editing the 4 articles between them (hopefully drawing on their respective different strengths) and thereby reducing the stress even further from one pair.

These are my initial thoughts.

I will be returning to this theme in my next post when I want to talk about the conditions the Reg requires and what we do with the articles once we have them published/written and in one place.

What I really need is…

VOLUNTEERS

Stop thinking that you couldn’t do a task like this. You can. You will not be alone. You will be at least one of a pair, in a working group of maybe six or eight and part of a wider group who can help you. And you will be helping the community in a huge way. If there are people who want to write articles on their own, that is also cool, we will work with peer review and editing in the same manner. All contributiuons will be useful. I will also need people to help me control who is writing what, where and when. Controlling submissions and tools for co-operative collaboration – so you people who think you can do that should also be raising your hands.

So sign up now. Or else I will find you…

Please email Mark Keating at:

m(dot)keating(at)suppliers.shadowcatsystems.co.uk

Thanks

My Ironman Status

Welcome ye one and all to a chance in a lifetime, well an almost chance in a lifetime, especially if you do not know the authors of the Catalyst book, or have only heard about either them, the book, or Perl, or are just curious, or have been living in a tree somewhere, or chanced across this blog, or are one of my many spammers, or are someone who wishes I would stop using or as it is unnecessary, you might be an oar…wow, that was quick I lost my thread in the first paragraph again…

Step back. Take deep breaths. Remove the lighted blue touch paper from head.

On Wednesdasy 28th October 2009 the North West England Perl Mongers group will be holding a technical meeting in Manchester at the MEN Offices. The focus of this meeting will be Writing Documents and then a live web link-up with KD (Kieren Diment) in Australia and MST (Matt S. Trout), Castaway (Jess Robinson) in England, three of the authors of the Definitive Guide to Catalyst book who will be available for questioning.

Even more fun ensues, and the possibility of failure, as we will be trying to do a live web-cast of the event so that others can watch the proceedings over t’internet (something has to go pop here, I know it, two time zones and three different pieces of tech – meh, we’re all techies we don’t need help in screwing this up ).

So, I invite one-and-all to send me some questions in advance of the event. I will also be trying to use a Twitter Feed (more tech to fail) and possibly Facebook/IRC at the same time. But pre-sent questions will go first. If we fail at the tech we have fall over situations.

Failure to web-cast – we simply put up the video afterwards.
Failure to link to KD – we still have MST and Castaway

Whatever the outcome we should be able to quiz these guys so you in the Perlverse/Tech-World need to get us your questions so that we can do that.

Either use the comments form on this blog or email Mark Keating at:

nwe-questions(at)suppliers.shadowcatsystems.co.uk

Thanks

This was the final message given to us at the conclusion keynote speech of the YAPC::EU::2009 which was held in Portugal from the 3rd-5th August. So why was this, seemingly bold, claim made and how can we be certain of this?
Well let’s first examine some of the facts.
To begin there is the statistical information about CPAN, for those of you who do not know what CPAN is take a look at this description. I am not going to repeat the statistics themselves as they can be found in the slides from Barbie, the slides can be found here, with further statistics from CPAN here, and Barbie’s journal post gives a much better description than I can here. Below there are two images that give us a quick view, they are the number of new Authors uploading to CPAN each month and the number of new distros uploaded each month:

Authors Uploaded

Distros Uploaded
What these two graphs tell us, and coupled with the rest of the Statistics on the linked pages is that the trend of new people uploading to CPAN and number of new libraries, modules etc., is in fact on the increase.These figures are not the total number of, but the new (additional) on a month by month basis.
The next area to consider is the number of conferences and events that are being held. In the Perl world there are more YAPC’s each year, not only that but the attendance to these events is generally quite high for a conference that devotes itself to a dynamic language. There is always the same question that is asked at these events which is “for how many of you is this your first YAPC?”. It is always a pleasant surprise to see that the numbers of “new” attendees seems quite significant, for instance out of the 192 people (67%) who too the survey for YAPC::EU::2008 (YAPC 2008 Survey found here) sixty-seven of them said it was their first YAPC – a third of the attendees.
There are an increasing number of workshops, hackathons and local Perl user group meetings and events being organised with many of them showing increases in attendance as they repeat them on a yearly basis (see osfameron’s talk here).
So there are more new authors, more new distros, more conferences, more events and workshops, new monger groups and I haven’t even had to cover the development of the language which is seeing a Renaissance/Enlightenment in Perl Five, there are so many events happening in the language being covered by a growing number of bloggers.
Now we just need Brian Blessed to take us out…”Perl is Alive (aha, saviour of the universe)”