Category — Uncategorized

Testing 1 2 3… is there anybody just like me?

If you’ve had your head in the sand for the last week, IronMan MkII goes live tomorrow evening!

See my original post at http://idn.per.ly/2010/04/03/12/ for the full low down.

We’ll be having an online hack on the IronMan code tomorrow night starting at around 19:00 BST and putting it live once we’re happy any show stopping issues are dealt
with.

Come and help out – we’ll be online at irc.perl.org in our very own
#northwestengland.pm

Remember that you don’t need to be an expert in the project or code to make valuable contributions in how things look and operate, features that we’ve missed or things that look a bit unfamiliar compared to the existing site.

The project todo list can be found at:

http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/bast/ironman/branches/mk-ii/IronMan-Web/todo.pod

That’s right! T minus 7 days and counting for the new IronMan!

See my original post at http://idn.per.ly/2010/04/03/12/ for the full low down.

Seems I screwed up posting the original article, so apologies to those who saw it but were unable to read the contents when it was posted.

The time is nigh and soon it will be the first anniversary of the IronMan blogging project (18th April 2009).

The North West England Perl Mongers group have been working on a replacement codebase for IronMan since the December Hackday in 2009.  This will permit us to replace the existing Plagger installation with a Perlanet data gatherer along with a Catalyst based web UI that can host blog archives and improve the general usability of the site.

So let’s start by giving a link to the lightening talk I gave at the NWE.pm March 2010 technical meeting which details the system architecture and components.

So, if you missed it in the presentation, checkout the beta site. We’re looking to launch this site to the live IronMan site on the 14th of April 2010 and would appreciate comments and even patches if you’re so inclined (repository at http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/bast/ironman/). It seems to be a social meeting for NWE.pm on the 15th of April so we’ll be having a small celebration of the release

Comments to #epo-ironman on irc.perl.org or indeed on this blog if that doesn’t take your fancy.

Further considerations and possible features:

• Language tagging of posts to enable filtering and possible translation (See comments here and also here)
• Archives of all posts (the future http://all.things.per.ly)
• Improved spam handling

Comments have been made regarding the competitive nature of IronMan. I’m sure that mst and mdk had comments about this and were talking about introducing a set of new badges for those who don’t wish to partake in the competition but still wish to have their blog aggregated or indeed archived may still do so.

Finally, I’d like to take a moment to say a big thankyou to a few people (in no particular order):

• Mark Keating (mdk)
• Matt Trout (mst)
• Iain …(iain)
• Graham …(grim)
• Carl … (fade)
• Oliver … (aCiD2)
• Jess Robinson (castaway)
• Dave Cross (davorg)
• YOUR_NAME_HERE (that’s my own very special way of thanking those I’ve missed, and also those who will volunteer… oh my, yes…)

Sorry I’ve not posted for a while, been really busy at work (MEN) working on the new site, however next Friday is my last day here. I’m leaving for pastures new. I’m soon to be the new development manager for Set Fire Media.

I’ll be working mainly with RoR but still a bit of Perl – as a result I’ve been playing with Rails for a couple of weeks now, and all I can conclude is that RoR might as well be Catalyst with Moose and a different templating front end. You can certainly see where the ideas have crossed over!

With regards to the new server, this is now a new server running Cherokee rather than Apache, so we’ll see how things go!

My Ironman Status

Okay now the second half of that opening statement was a awful, awful pun but I refuse to be apologetic.

So in a short post aimed at eliciting a response I am posing a couple of questions at my fellow bloggers assembled.

Question One: Should we have an archive of articles?

I like the Ironman challenge and sometimes I also like searching back through the week to see if there are articles I have missed or want to link to people, but I am also now thinking that I would like a general archive – with perhaps a searchable status. This is because I am lazy, because I want to have one location to search the blogs on this challenge etc., but mostly because I am lazy.
What do you think?
Can we use it to drive more traffic to places Perl?

Question Two: The notion of a T-shirt

I have been thinking of putting a t-shirt design on CafePress and Spreadshirt for people in the challenge to purchase. I am further thinking that I should make it -at cost- so the only profit being made is by the printing company. Should I:

A. Put up t-shirt designs for people to buy?
B. Place them at cost?
C: Put a small charge onto them and donate the profits to the EPO or similar?

Let me know your thoughts people If I were to make a profit I would not only state what profit EPO gets from the sale of each t-shirt but would publish sales figures and sponsorship data.

In the beginning…

An apology (apple-ogies), for my wanton use of a simple post to keep my Ironman-ish status. This week I have mostly been on holiday in the wilds of Scotland – to whit I have been camping in the Inner Hebrides around Mull and Iona and on the mainland near Glen Nevis so haven’t been hugely internet-connected or Perl involved. For this reason this post is thinly connected .

So what can you post about?

Well actually I can continue to post about Lisbon as there are a few more things I wish to share with you all. And this week I would like to share some pictures.

So still a cop out then?

Not really, didn’t you just hear me apologise? Alright, still a bit of a cop-out if you want to view it that way, but really it isn’t. My intentions when deciding to join the Ironman challenge were to put a slightly different slant on things and not just to blog about the language of Perl but the community and the people and this is just a continuation of that.

So where are the pictures?

Just keep scrolling down and you’ll get to the pictures. I am deeply indebted to all the great people at the conference for looking so good in these images and to (mostly) ignoring the random git with a camera. A special thanks to Andy Armstrong who gave me the idea of putting these people into grayscale by doing that himself and making it look so damned good.

So there is a set of conversations happening in the community at the moment whether it is on respectable blogs such as Philip Smith’s discussion on Perl Typefaces, the discussion on the EPO marketing list regarding logos or London Perl Mongers call to bring more (cuddly/stuffed) camels to their next social meeting(!). These discussions all regard the look of Perl, in regard to quality and consistency and I thought I would tackle the issue of the logo.

There are two logos that people identify with Perl. The first is the Camel used by O’Reilly on some of their Perl books and adopted by the community (and London.pm with Amelia and Shadowcat Systems/Enlightened Perl Organisation with Niles) as a fun logo to use.

Niles (on the left) and Amelia (on the right) meet in Lisbon

The second is the Onion which I believe was created as a logo to represent Perl (it is an onion it has many layers, they could have chosen a tiramisu ). The Onion is owned by The Perl Foundation.

If you wish to use either of these logos you must first (and quite rightly) contact either of the two bodies who own the copyright/trademark for these logos, and who will usually grant you permission as long as the involvement is with Perl and not derivative (or -too- derivative if we count Matt S. Trout in an Onion t-shirt).

So there is an issue as the logos in question are owned by a corporate body and an organisation and therefore have restrictions in how they can be used/displayed and cannot be freely used by anyone wishing to do so. One must seek permission and even if this passes smoothly through the inevitable red-tape you must still be careful not only to make sure you do not deride the logo and to ensure content in location doesn’t breach any conditions that the company may set. To take a random for instance, O’Reilly could rightly restrict me using the Camel on a page that advertises the Apress/Packt Catalyst books and so could TPF as it shows favouritism to a company/companies/competitor. I am not saying they will do, but we have no control over them doing so, and it may be within their best interest to do so.

What is the answer?

It is quite simple to me, in order for us to have a logo that can be picked up and used by anyone in the community and used in any manner to promote Perl or their Perl-related project we must have a logo that is associated with Perl that is under Creative Commons licence. The more we use such a logo to promote every site/article/work/whatever in our language the faster it will grow in perception as being the recognised, adopted standard.

To do this we must either persuade O’Reilly or TPF to release the image under a CC licence or we must come up with a new logo for Perl and release it under the CC licence. The author of such work can still claim Artistic Copyright but it must be allowed to be used by everyone however they wish.

There is an issue of releasing it as CC and then someone producing derivative forms of the logo for their own purposes, but to my mind this isn’t much of a problem. Let us examine this, if we have a hundred sites that use the logo in a good faith manner to promote Perl and a random punk decides to mock us with an obscene version of the logo how much damage would that actually do? The answer is very little if any at all. To the people outside the bubbles (either in Perl or in the punk’s kingdom) their would be the perception of a recognised logo showing consistency and brand recognition and a random site created by someone with too much time on their hands.

There could be an issue of someone using the logo for their own product as it carries a CC licence, but if the logo is actually called The Perl Logo, then that is also part of the Licence, so let them. It would be kinda funky to have a logo called The Perl Logo on the side of a -come up with your own obscene, techy, smart or satirical item here-.

For me, I would like to see The Perl Foundation release the Onion as the logo for Perl under the CC and to let us use it as we see fit. They could even take a specific version of it and make it their copyright image and leave us the outline vector art for us to fill, merge, warp, cut and manipulate as we see fit for our sites and modules. As long as we have some recognisable element that makes people in the community see it as Perl and that we can present as part of our branding and display as Perl then it is forward from where we stand now.

If that isn’t possible, then I may be willing to put money, and to grab other people into putting money, into having a logo either designed for us, or as a prize in a competition.

Let me know what you all think…the debate is on.

Day One of the YAPC Europe Conference in Lisbon has been interesting for me and for the Enlightened Perl Organisation.
First off we are going to be approached by Edmund to take over the organisational aspects of the Send-a-Newbie program.
Secondly Ovid asked me to come along to the BOFF on Marketting Perl.
Thirdly I got a great idea for the Italian YAPC::EU::2010 organisers that I may have to grab them for But more on that if it happens.
The end of the day saw the next big thing for me as Leon sort-of, rather easily, persuaded me to organise the LPW once again – as usual lots of help has already been offered by Leon, Dave Cross et al., and we have a theme that I will be announcing sometime soon…
That’s it for day one – must hide during day two.

Oh some pictures to close with:

Niles eyes up the competition

Niles and Amelia

Leon and Edmund

Yuval tries out a new hat

Busy hackers

Conference Crowd

This year's organisers

Leigh models this years YAPC t-shirt from Shadowcat

Pre-conference meeting

Larry at the pre-conference meet

So the time rolled around again and the now gaggle of Perlers in the North West of England did meet to consume beer and talk about things, oft Camel, somewhat Penguin (who was sadly absent) and mostly YNK and this time Doctor Who, System Admin tales of yore and many topics in-between of a geekish/nerdish/churlish nature and not at all centred around Perl or computers.
It was a very good social .
The Ship and Mitre is a grand pub to hold a social in as its wide variety of liquors and frequently held beer festivals allow one to succumb (succumbage perhaps) to intimate vices with fermented vegetable products, and submit to its minx-like charms we all did.
At the same time something substantive also happened as my fellow cohort and I in the capacity of leadership and somewhat guidance did knock crowns together and fix upon some shape for meetings to come, so in a grand Wellsian tradition I shall now lay out our thoughts (with of course suitable apologies to those whom I am inviting to participate in the next half year who have not fully been informed of this separately but to whom we have discussed somewhat of ideas):

“The Shape of Things to Come”

2nd September
August Technical (yes I realise the disparity of the month) to be held in Lancaster, hopefully at Lancaster University, and to discuss matters pertaining to GSoC and building Perl in the educational community.

30th September
September social (held within the right month ), this should be held in the wonderful wee town of Warrington.

28th October
October technical, hopefully this will be held at the wonderful MEN offices in Manchester and may feature a talk by Jess (Castaway) on documenting Perl projects and we are hoping if Jess is about and we can arrange the technical fiddly bits to have a live sync’d conference with KD in Australia and Matt S. Trout where these three can take a live Q&A session and discuss their recent Catalyst book.

25th November
Social for Novemeber, and to continue a newish trend, we will hopefully be holding the social in Manchester but may change venues if there is a decent suggestion from our Manchester contingent – perhaps we could go for food first?

12th-13th December
For our December technical we are firstly meeting early and secondly attempting a 1-2 day hackathon at the Shadowcat Systems offices in Lancaster. There will be more details about this hackathon and other events on the nwe.pm website as we get them

No doubts there will be more in one month + 2 days for the August Technical.