The Perl Foundation tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2010-03-22://18 2012-01-31T11:07:50Z Movable Type Pro 4.37 Perl 5 Grant Application: Travel to QA Hackathon tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2954 2012-01-31T10:18:05Z 2012-01-31T11:07:50Z We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Ricardo Signes Project Title Perl QA Hackathon 2012 Amount Requested: $900 Synopsis This grant will be used to pay for travel for Ricardo Signes to and from the Perl QA Hackathon... Karen http://martian.org/karen We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes.

Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org.

Name

Ricardo Signes

Project Title

Perl QA Hackathon 2012
Amount Requested: $900

Synopsis

This grant will be used to pay for travel for Ricardo Signes to and from the Perl QA Hackathon held in Paris in Q1 2012.

Benefits to Perl 5

I have attended three of the four Perl QA Hackathons (Oslo, Birmingham, Amsterdam) and have, at each of them, been able to contribute several solid work days of very productive work to the infrastructure behind the CPAN and related tools. Specifically, I was one of the chief implementors of the new CPAN Testers platform (Metabase) and built the Fake CPAN system for testing CPAN tools, and several reusable software libraries that are used to power both Metabase and Fake CPAN.

In 2012, I hope to continue some work performed with David Golden in 2011, refactoring PAUSE and adding more regression tests to it. PAUSE is the system which processes contributor uploads to the CPAN, manages CPAN contributor identity, and builds the CPAN indexes used by CPAN clients to locate libraries for installation.

In previous years, I also spent a significant amount of time working with other attendees on their contributions, and plan to do the same this year. This is one of the several reasons that attendance in person is incomparably superior to "virtual attendance."

Deliverable Elements

The QA Hackathon does not have a set agenda, so promising specific work product from it up front seems unwise. I have detailed, above, the sort of work that I am almost certain to do, however. Further, I will provide a public, written report of my activities at the Hackathon.

Any software that I produce will be released under the Perl 5 standard license terms.

Applicant Biography

I have been building software in Perl professionally for about twelve years. I am a frequent contributor of original software to the CPAN and a frequent contributor to, or maintainer of, other popular CPAN libraries. I am also a contributor to the core Perl 5 project, and its current project lead.

I have been the recipient of TPF grants twice before, both of which were completed promptly and successfully.

]]> Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs: Report for Month 22 tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2952 2012-01-30T08:46:42Z 2012-01-30T08:54:41Z Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the December period. Spent it continuing my overhaul of the re_eval mechanism. This month I finished off fixing literal code blocks within patterns; that is to say, in all places where a code block appears literally within a quoted-regex context in perl source, that code block will only be compiled once, at the same time as the surrounding perl code, and then passed round as necessary rather... Karen http://martian.org/karen Dave Mitchell writes:

As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the December period.

Spent it continuing my overhaul of the re_eval mechanism. This month I finished off fixing literal code blocks within patterns; that is to say, in all places where a code block appears literally within a quoted-regex context in perl source, that code block will only be compiled
once, at the same time as the surrounding perl code, and then passed round as necessary rather than being recompiled.

The main things left to do are to fix non-literal code blocks, e.g.

$code = '(?{...})';
use re 'eval';
/abc$code/;

and make the code blocks be invoked in such a way that things like die,
return and caller() will work.

Over the last month I have averaged 8 hours per week.

As of 2011/12/31: since the beginning of the grant:

94.9 weeks
1052.4 total hours
11.1 average hours per week

There are now 248 hours left on the grant.

Report for period 2011/12/01 to 2011/12/31 inclusive

Summary

Effort (HH::MM):

0:00 diagnosing bugs
37:00 fixing bugs
0:00 reviewing other people's bug fixes
0:00 reviewing ticket histories
0:00 review the ticket queue (triage)
-----
37:00 Total

Numbers of tickets closed:

0 tickets closed that have been worked on
0 tickets closed related to bugs that have been fixed
0 tickets closed that were reviewed but not worked on (triage)
-----
0 Total

Short Detail

37:00 [perl #34161] METABUG - (?{...}) and (??{...}) regexp issues

]]> craigslist Charitable Fund Donates $100,000 to the Perl Foundation tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2950 2012-01-24T09:49:09Z 2012-01-24T09:49:52Z The Perl Foundation is proud to announce that the craigslist Charitable Fund is supporting the Perl community with a generous donation of $100,000 toward Perl5 maintenance and for general use by the Perl Foundation. mdk http://www.shadowcat.co.uk The Perl Foundation is proud to announce that the craigslist Charitable Fund is supporting the Perl community with a generous donation of $100,000 toward Perl5 maintenance and for general use by the Perl Foundation.

According to craigslist CEO and former Perl Hacker Jim Buckmaster, "craigslist has gloried in and relied upon Perl for most of its software development for more than a decade. craigslist Charitable Fund is honored to recognize the wizardry and generosity of the Perl community, help ensure the ongoing maintenance of Perl5, and contribute to the future evolution of Perl." He added, "It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it."

Karen Pauley, Perl Foundation President stated, "I am extremely grateful to craigslist Charitable Fund for their incredibly generous donation. What a fantastic way for The Perl Foundation to start 2012!"

"This generous donation will allow us to further improve the Perl 5 Core and the work done with the Core Maintenance Fund, as well as sponsor a range of Perl 5 related activities through grants and initiatives already in existence and in the community."

craigslist Charitable Fund makes donations in areas including Open Source & Free Software, Civil Liberties, Peace & Veterans Issues, Sustainable Transportation, and Journalism & New Media. For more information send an email to charitable@craigslist.org.

craigslist is a network of community moderated and largely free local classifieds and forums sites, where its users find jobs, housing, goods, services, romance, and anything else you can imagine. It began in 1995 as an email list of San Francisco events run by Craig Newmark, and was incorporated as a business in 1999. craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month, is in the top 5 companies worldwide for English-language page views, and is used by more than 50 million people each month in the United States alone. Today craigslist is available in 700 regions, 70 countries, and 10 languages. craigslist hosts more than 50 million new classifieds each month and over 200 million user posts in its discussion forums. craigslist is based in San Francisco.

craigslist has become ubiquitous with the idea of searching for anything imaginable and this has transferred from the popular consciousness to media. In The Big Bang Theory: Season 4: The Prestidigitation Approximation, Sheldon says:

"Sheldon: And is this my card? Rats! I wonder if Howard used a radioactive tracer. Where am I going to find Uranium-235 this time of night? Come on, Craigslist." (source)

This is only one of a host of occurrences of craigslist in television and film such is its place in the popular mindset.

Visit www.craigslist.org.

]]> Improving Perl 5: Grant Report for Month 4 tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2946 2012-01-08T12:29:38Z 2012-01-06T12:48:37Z Nicholas Clark writes: The start of December was mostly spent unpicking and simplifying how embed.h is included in perl.h. embed.h is one of the core's generated headers, containing C pre-processor directives to simplify use of the C API functions, by wrapping them such that the programmer doesn't need to deal with the implementation details of ithreads. Over the years, embed.h has come to be included by perl.h in 4 different places depending on which OS perl is being built on.... Karen http://martian.org/karen Nicholas Clark writes:

The start of December was mostly spent unpicking and simplifying how embed.h is included in perl.h. embed.h is one of the core's generated headers, containing C pre-processor directives to simplify use of the C API functions, by wrapping them such that the programmer doesn't need to deal with the implementation details of ithreads.

Over the years, embed.h has come to be included by perl.h in 4 different places depending on which OS perl is being built on. The confusion started 13 years ago when a second #include "embed.h" was added later in perl.h to support the now long defunct "PERL_OBJECT" system. This later migrated to be used for all Win32 builds. Subsequently VMS and Symbian gained special-cased includes of their own in perl.h, as like Win32 they defined HAVE_INTERP_INTERN, which needed to be done before embed.h was included.

The silly part is that it turns out that there was no reason why the include of embed.h had to be early on any OS. So it's possible to simplify perl.h by taking the Win32-only #include embed.h near the end, and removing the conditional code, so that all operating systems use it.

I also eliminated code from a2p to support using Perl's malloc, which was "temporarily" commented out 13 years ago, pending a proper fix. The lack of bug reports suggest that no-one has missed this. I worked with Craig Berry to simplify vmsish.h, which contained support code for a2p on VMS that isn't actually necessary.

Related to investigating both, I spotted that conditional code for NO_EMBED could be removed from sdbm.h. The functionality of NO_EMBED was removed 13 years ago, and most every other reference purged in 2003.

There is probably quite a bit more conditional compilation code that could be removed from sdbm.h. However, I'm not sure that it's worth it, as the cost of verifying that one has done it without error is likely to be much greater than the benefit that it brings. There's a lot more low hanging fruit elsewhere, plenty more than we have people to harvest it.

The "highlight" of the month was installman, the script that make install uses to locate documentation and install it as man pages. Initially it was something I could work on offline whilst travelling by train to London to meet Jesse (and others) for Dim Sum. Except that it turned out to be a lot more messy than it first seemed.

installman is responsible for finding Pod documentation in .pm and .pod files, passing the Pod to Pod::Man to generate manpages, and then installing the manpages in the correct location. There are exceptions - we don't install documentation for certain modules, we don't install certain modules (so we shouldn't install their documentation), and we should skip test modules. Half of this overlaps with what pod/buildtoc does. However, the code was completely different, with partially inconsistent exception lists, exceptions that are no longer needed, etc.

installman and buildtoc now share as much code as possible, with the installation exception rules in one place, and all dual life Pods now install in man1/

While the code still fresh in my mind, I also refactored the common Pod installation to eliminate pod.lst. This was the master Pod data file, added in 2003 by commit 416302502f485afa as part of a refactoring to reduce the amount of manual work needed to maintain Pod-related rules in various files, and to reduce errors and inconsistencies between them. It turned out that pod.lst contained quite a lot of data which were only needed to generate the table of contents in pod/perl.pod, and that there wasn't that much extra in pod.lst that wasn't in pod/perl.pod. Hence the two were near duplicates of each other, and simplification should be possible. By careful use of =begin, =end and =for Pod directives in pod/perl.pod is has been possible to readably encode the extra data into the source of pod/perl.pod without affecting the rendering and thus eliminate pod.lst. This both simplifies the distribution, and the tasks the release manager needs to perform each month.

In the process of doing this, I discovered that the changes that permitted dual-life Pods to move from pod/ to their owner distributions in dist/ and cpan/ had introduced another regression post v5.15.0 - the Pod files were now installed as if they were modules, into lib/, instead of the correct location with all the other core Pod files. In theory, this was a simple change to the installperl script to get it to use the code common to installman, buildtoc and a couple of other helper scripts. In practice, it turned out to be more complex, as there was another organic mess that needed simplification.

Key to this was changing the invocation of File::Find::find() that processes lib/ to run with 'no_chdir'. This allows that code to call other routines that use pathnames relative to the top of the build tree to access files, and as a side effect eliminates the localised package variable $::depth which was used to maintain a faked path prefix for display purposes to counter the effects of the directory change.

There is still a considerable amount of sanity refactoring that could be done on installperl. In particular, the code that processes lib/ has accumulated a lot of exception rules, at least some of which are now redundant and should be removed. This is left as an exercise to any reader who enjoys the mental challenge of figuring out the history of code from the "blame" log: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blame/HEAD:/installperl

A more detailed breakdown summarised from the weekly reports. In these:

16 hex digits refer to commits in http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git
RT #... is a bug in https://rt.perl.org/rt3/
CPAN #... is a bug in https://rt.cpan.org/Public/
BBC is "bleadperl breaks CPAN" - Andreas König's test reports for CPAN modules

HoursActivity
0.50#105928
0.2593ea32b83e27783a and vmsish.h
0.25NO_EMBED in sdbm.h
2.00POSIX
POSIX::dup2 RT #98912
POSIX::sleep
0.50Pod::Functions
0.50Porting/corelist-perldelta.pl
0.75Porting/expand-macro.pl
0.25Porting/pod_rules.pl
0.25Porting/podtidy
0.50SSNEW
0.50a2p
a2p and vmsish.h
8.25abolish pod.lst
1.00checking and merging smoke-me branches
0.75cross compiling
12.75embed.h in perl.h, perl.h in x2p
6.50fc [foldcase]
4.75fileno on a localised tied handle
1.50global destruction backref panic
global destruction backref panic (analysis)
39.25installman
installman/installperl
0.50pod/perlmodlib.PL
6.25process, scalability, mentoring
1.25questions about saving stacks
19.50reading/responding to list mail
0.25sfio
0.25suidperl purge
2.75t/porting/utils.t
0.25t/re/regexp.t cleanup
2.00version.pm and POSIX::set_locale
0.50x2p/malloc.c

114.50 hours total

]]> 2012Q1: Call for Grant Proposals tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2948 2012-01-07T21:27:28Z 2012-01-07T21:30:24Z Its that time of the year, again. The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $2000 in February 2012. You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish it, we want to hear from you! Do you have something that could benefit the Perl community but just need that... Alberto Simões http://null.perl-hackers.net/ Its that time of the year, again. The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $2000 in February 2012.

You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish it, we want to hear from you!

Do you have something that could benefit the Perl community but just need that little extra help? Submit a grant proposal until the end of January.

As a general rule, a properly formatted grant proposal is more likely to be approved if it meets the following criteria

  • It has widespread benefit to the Perl community or a large segment of it.
  • We have reasons to believe that you can accomplish your goals.
  • We can afford it (please, respect the limits or your proposal should be rejected immediately).

To submit a proposal see the guidelines at http://www.perlfoundation.org/how_to_write_a_proposal and TPF GC current rules of operation at http://www.perlfoundation.org/rules_of_operation. Then send your proposal to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Note that should be properly formatted accordingly with our POD template.

Proposals will be made available publicly (on this blog) for public discussion, as it happened in the previous rounds. So, please make it clear in your proposal if it should not be public, and why.

]]> Perl.com Wants Your Articles! tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2944 2012-01-05T06:15:06Z 2012-01-05T06:21:29Z chromatic writes: Last year (2011), Perl.com came back to life, this time under the guidance of The Perl Foundation. We're glad to be back, publishing tips, tricks, and tutorials for novices, dabblers, and professionals alike! We've already published some great articles, but we need your help. What cool things are you doing with Perl in your work? What clever hacks have you perpetuated as you play? Which module did you just now discover to save you time and frustration? What... Karen http://martian.org/karen chromatic writes:

Last year (2011), Perl.com came back to life, this time under the guidance of The Perl Foundation. We're glad to be back, publishing tips, tricks, and tutorials for novices, dabblers, and professionals alike!

We've already published some great articles, but we need your help. What cool things are you doing with Perl in your work? What clever hacks have you perpetuated as you play? Which module did you just now discover to save you time and frustration? What technique did someone show you to get your work done faster, with more simplicity and elegance?

Perl can do anything, and 2011 has demonstrated that Perl is bigger and better than ever. Well-established projects like Catalyst, Moose, Dancer, and Mojolicious increase the fun and decrease the boilerplate. New projects like Marpa, Plack, and Carton simplify our work. Yet there's always room to talk about old stalwarts--including new and long-forgotten features of Perl 5 itself.

This is our site, and it's exactly what we make of it. Let's show off a little bit. Send your article proposals and ideas to editor@perl.com, and let's make 2012 the best year for Perl yet.

]]> Booking.com Sponsors 
€100,000 to Perl 5 Development tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2012://18.2942 2012-01-01T15:26:27Z 2012-01-01T15:35:48Z Booking.com donates again to The Perl Foundation, gives €100,000 to Perl 5 development Booking.com have announced that they have donated a new grant of €100,000 to the Perl Foundation to aid with further development of the Perl 5 programming language. The grant follows Booking.com's $50,000 grant to TPF that was just recently successfully concluded, having contributed to a significant improvement in quality of the Perl 5 core. Booking.com is the world's largest and fastest growing online hotel reservation service. It... mdk http://www.shadowcat.co.uk Booking.com donates again to The Perl Foundation, gives €100,000 to Perl 5 development

Booking.com have announced that they have donated a new grant of €100,000 to the Perl Foundation to aid with further development of the Perl 5 programming language. The grant follows Booking.com's $50,000 grant to TPF that was just recently successfully concluded, having contributed to a significant improvement in quality of the Perl 5 core. Booking.com is the world's largest and fastest growing online hotel reservation service. It is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

"Perl is central to the success of Booking.com.  With this grant, we want to keep up our tradition of giving back to the community," said Darren Huston, Chief Executive Officer of Booking.com.

"Booking.com has seen strong growth in its business for several years. At the same time, Perl has made a comeback as a time-tested language of choice for online applications.
As one of the world's largest employers of Perl developers, an investment for us into a healthy and dynamic Perl community is an investment in the future of our company and innovative web development in general."

The grant was received by Jesse Vincent and Karen Pauley on behalf of The Perl Foundation at Booking.com's half-yearly internal IT-conference in Amsterdam, which was attended by the over 200+ person IT team of Booking.com.

Since the foundation of Booking.com in 1996, apart from the Perl programming language, the company has always used open source projects and products for its IT infrastructure such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Java.

About Booking.com

Booking.com B.V., part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN), owns and operates Booking.com™, the leading worldwide online hotel reservations agency by room nights sold, attracting over 30 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.

Established in 1996, Booking.com B.V. guarantees the best prices for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels to five-star luxury properties through Booking.com. The Booking.com website is available in 41 languages and offers over 178,895 hotels in 161 countries.

You can download a pdf of this release on the TPF Press Release pages.

]]> 2011Q4 Grant Proposals: Results tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2940 2011-12-27T13:47:05Z 2011-12-27T15:45:25Z Dear Community, After the voting process, the grants committee rejected all grant proposals. One of them (translation of Perl documentation) was rejected by not compliance with the GC rules, and the other were rejected by a vote of the committee. A new round of grant proposals will open next week.... Alberto Simões http://null.perl-hackers.net/ Dear Community,

After the voting process, the grants committee rejected all grant proposals. One of them (translation of Perl documentation) was rejected by not compliance with the GC rules, and the other were rejected by a vote of the committee.

A new round of grant proposals will open next week.

]]> Perlverse: Perl Weekly and Gabor Szabo tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2938 2011-12-27T09:24:00Z 2011-12-27T09:59:51Z In August of 2011 Gabor Szabo started an ambitious project intended to bring a snapshot of the Perl World to the wider community. That project was called Perl Weekly mdk http://www.shadowcat.co.uk In August of 2011 Gabor Szabo started an ambitious project intended to bring a snapshot of the Perl World to the wider community. That project was called Perl Weekly.

Gabor had seen an issue in the community, in order to follow the latest news, learn about the latest events or keep up-to-date with important elements of the community you were required to sift through a large number of blogs, news pages, Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, CPAN and MetaCPAN knowledge, hang out in irc channels and follow the 'right' people who seemed to release the information. This is quite a task and most people are too busy with their personal and professional lives and don't normally have feeds to this information. Gabor, of course, had as he has always been deeply involved in the Perl community.

After viewing other newsletters, most especially Javascript Weekly which was a heavy influence on Perl Weekly, Gabor launched issue one and didn't look back. His goal is described clearly as:

"You are busy churning out code or managing the developers. You care about Perl but don't have time to go through tens and hundreds of articles and blog posts every day. You want to keep an eye on the development of Perl without drowning in a sea of blog posts. You need someone to point out the most important news and articles in the Perl World.
Let me be your guide."

Perl Weekly reached its 22nd issue on 26th December (it is released without fail every Monday no matter what other commitments Gabor has) and will enter 2012 with an issue on the 2nd January. If you want to follow events in the Perl world and do not have time to sift through the wealth of different sources you should subscribe to Perl Weekly (while also keeping the occasional eye on the Perl Foundation Homepage and blog [shameless plug]) and Like/follow their Facebook page.

Perl Weekly has over 2,200 subscribers but we know there are many more people out there who can and should subscribe and benefit from Gabor's hard work, you needn't be an advocate of Perl, just interested in how the community and language is developing and evolving.

Gabor Szabo has been active in the Perlverse for many years, he is a professional Perl Trainer who has recently started a cost-effective series of online Perl training courses under the Perl Maven brand. The first in this series is aimed at people new to Perl and will efficiently introduce you to programming concepts and best practices in Perl.

Gabor is a keen developer as well and is the founder of Padre, he is also the maintainer of the CPAN forum and has a number of modules on CPAN. Gabor was awarded the prestigious 'White Camel' in 2008 for his contributions to the Perl Community, but isn't the type of person who allows praise to let him rest on his laurels.

Gabor is an organiser for the Israel Perl Workshop in 2012 (which he had a principal position in resurrecting after a short hiatus) and a regular speaker at many Perl events. You can read more about Gabor here, follow him on Twitter, Facebook and identi.ca.

Series Description

This is a series of articles on various elements of the Perl community that I like to refer to as the 'Perlverse'. The series is not in a particular order and election to it is entirely subjective and mostly based around my knowledge of the person or item. They are intended to highlight the rich variety of people, companies, projects and events that happen in the Perl world and can be used as the basis of examining the rich diversity of the Perl culture.

If you would like to add commentary or further information into the body of an article, or if you would like to elect an item to this series for me to write upon then please contact me with your information or proposal.*

-mdk

*At which point the series will gain further objectivity

]]> Holiday Greetings tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2936 2011-12-23T17:50:10Z 2011-12-23T18:01:06Z This year the Perl Foundation have been proud to send out a festive card to celebrate the, broadly Western, holiday season. The list of recipients was garnered from those who have supported the Foundation in the past year in many different ways, excluding those who have selected not to be contacted further. This method however was not wholly effective and I know that we missed a whole bunch of people who were deserving of our love and praise. Therefore, I... mdk http://www.shadowcat.co.uk This year the Perl Foundation have been proud to send out a festive card to celebrate the, broadly Western, holiday season.

The list of recipients was garnered from those who have supported the Foundation in the past year in many different ways, excluding those who have selected not to be contacted further. This method however was not wholly effective and I know that we missed a whole bunch of people who were deserving of our love and praise. Therefore, I would like to apologise if you were missed from the list it wasn't intentional we at the Perl Foundation are proud to be a part of this excellent community.

Now, for everyone else in the Perlverse, and wider technical communities, I would like to extend the good wishes of this season and wish you a Gregorian New Year, we hope that you will continue to visit our sites and be embraced in the community in 2012. Below is a copy of our festive image for 2011.

reindeer-holidays.png

If you would like to be added to the list for future celebratory releases and general Perl Foundation mail, or wish to be removed from the list then please contact pr(at)perlfoundation.org stating your preference. We never knowingly spam people or share our data with other agencies.

]]> Stick it to them...[1] tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2934 2011-12-18T16:51:06Z 2011-12-18T17:08:15Z Perl Foundation gets a new sticker for the 2012 conference season. mdk http://www.shadowcat.co.uk For some time there has been a square Perl Foundation Onion sticker doing the rounds at conferences and events and we are finally at the point where there are very few of them left.2 So I (Mark Keating/mdk) thought it was about time we had some new stickers for the organisation so that we can stick them on people and things at the many Perl and non-Perl related events.

This is the new look sticker and as you can see it bears the tagline I am running with this year for the foundation which I think reflects our ethos succinctly.3

sticker-logos3.png

View Large Image

This image shows the cropped sticker. If you would like some stickers for a conference or event or to use them in marketing pushes then don't hesitate to contact me at mdk(at)perlfoundation.org or mdk on irc.perl.org. I will also supply a version of the sticker with a bleed so that you can have local copies printed if you require large volumes, again please don't hesitate to contact me.

----

[1] Groan...sorry I just can't stop the puns sometimes.

[2] Thankfully! This version used the old onion logo, the text was badly printed (printers fault not the designer) and the colour was wrong (was the wrong shade of blue) and the logo was off centre which is fine if it was intentional but my feeling is that again the printer may have offset by accident.

[3] The Perl Foundation have always associated themselves with the line "Dedicated to the Advancement of Perl" while at the same time pushing their community involvement, interest and commitment. So to promote that we are dedicated to the community and to get a nice short line that could fit under titles and in limited spaces such as on this sticker, I evolved that to "Advancing Perl - Supporting Community".

]]> 2011Q4 Grant Proposals tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2932 2011-12-18T16:24:48Z 2011-12-18T16:28:03Z Dear Community, In the last two months we had a call for grant proposals. We got four proposals that are now available for discussion. Please follow the links below, read each proposal, and comment about the relevance of the grant, and if you think TPF should sponsor that work. #103612: Still - perl-controlled alcohol distillation system by Steve Eirium #104490.1: raidlax - raid5-style redundancy above the filesystem by Steve Eirium #104490.2: recogniser - responsible applications of entropy by Steve Eirium... Alberto Simões http://null.perl-hackers.net/ Dear Community,

In the last two months we had a call for grant proposals. We got four proposals that are now available for discussion. Please follow the links below, read each proposal, and comment about the relevance of the grant, and if you think TPF should sponsor that work.

]]> 2011Q4 Grant Proposal: Still - perl-controlled alcohol distillation system tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2930 2011-12-18T16:20:13Z 2011-12-18T16:21:08Z Alberto Simões http://null.perl-hackers.net/ Steve Eirium <[hidden email]>

DISCUSSION

In a world of bank bailouts and wikipedia's cries for funding, one thing rises above the swamp of crap: making alcohol. Clearly one of the best things to be doing on the surface of a planet, it is only natural that some fusion would erupt on the interface with perl. Operating a reflux still is a fumey experience of careful timing. To avoid dying or going blind, one must cut the condensate hose from one jug to another at the appropriate column temperatures to avoid thesurrounding methanol. The process is mostly lying around in the sun, however.

However, the process is mostly operating valves, checking the temperature probe, and moving a hose from one bottle to another. This is all so simple, in a world of 12v solenoids that could be operated as fans right off a motherboard, why not have a junky computer full of perl in your brewery?

First step: get the perl. I propose I will write software to operate a reflux still, self-containing the whole process from fermentation to huge-bottle-of-ethanol. It will be highly flexible, as are systems of alcohol production, so that eg. merely monitoring the temperature and sounding an alarm when the cut is to be made, or just pumping around mash automatically, is possible.

Benefits to the Perl Community are having out there the softer half of an alcohol making robot, a fairly real thing anyone would think is cool.

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DELIVERABLES

A system of objects for simulating alcohol production gear.

An API for doing things with said gear.

Clear code and appropriate documentation at the interface to the PID controller, or arduino, or whatever.

A web interface so you can have your screen full of digitised alcohol production gear and control things.

Some clues as to the acquisition of digital taps, thermometers, etc. for good measure.

A CPAN release.

PROJECT DETAILS

...

PROJECT SCHEDULE

2 months of casual hacking.

BIO

http://github.com/st3vil was writing perl professionally for three years, but now only wants to do it for good cause. I have another robotical project and I think they will share some intellect, if not actual code.

I'm an unemployed musician, mostly by mental necessity. I feel this is my job as a human, I just need a way to get off social welfare (I have one in the pipes). It would be great to get some bucks for staying alive. I live in a garage fairly cheaply right now but I'll probably live in my car again in a few weeks what with it being summer.

AMOUNT

$2000 please.

]]> 2011Q4 Grant Proposal: recogniser - responsible applications of entropy tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2928 2011-12-18T16:18:57Z 2011-12-18T16:19:57Z Alberto Simões http://null.perl-hackers.net/ Steve Eirium <[hidden email]>

DISCUSSION

Browse for a file in nautilus (or whatever), you are seeing a staggering lack of form that shrouds what's there amongst itself. You feel clinking fatigue as you struggle to apply your natural capacities for visual recognition to this stark landscape of despairing monotony. What about all the chaos that went into the creation of this mess? It's in the order of the dates, you feebly suppose.

I hope this damning criticism strikes a revolting chord. Computer interfaces are nowhere near good enough, improvement is generally held to be a sprawling meta-problem for the coming generations to grind upon.

All I endeavor to build is a more impressionistic file browser, both more and less structured. There are two sides:

]]> ENTROPY DECREASES

Knowning how to handle what's there in the face of the user is key. To know that we must learn - dynamicism is key. Just as nice software collaboration tools allow me to build upon the great pyramid scheme, we must allow users to build on the pyramid too. In a tiny little language, almost one per paradigm.

Most users only care about their artifacts - Music for example has a fervently upward meta-thrust, with my the Net::LastFMAPI manpage for example we can learn a lot to help the user organise their artifacts without organising them. Chiefly we must keep a generic face and not shy away from replication of art.

If, for example, a zip file hits Downloads/ which seems to contain a particular identifiable album, one or less swift movements should take it into the fold, making irrelevant its filesystemic realities, for it is now in the monolith, available for enjoyment.

It seems like you could divide a filesystem between art and not-art. Sure. Whatever. What's important is to know what's not important.

Knowing things means knowing how to take care of them in menial ways. It will be able to "put Robbie Basho on my ipod", and in patterns more elegant than a human user would bother to achieve.

Without becoming too much of a system for consuming other systems.

ENTROPY INCREASES

Spatially liberal display of complex data, only a corner of which represents the current "File Browser" paradigm.

You probably want an island of Music, Pictures and Video, like Ubuntu seems to suggest but with no further geographical detail. Non-art will be floating grey and textey in the sea between, but still with some respect to historicity and user interest. Smaller the non-art will be. A staircasing array of little names snakes down between the alive things, just incase you wanted everything in order, it's there, usefully interactive. Draw a line between Downloads and Music and explore the things that have travelled thus recently. Music that's been around for longer is arranged more amongst the other music. Music sporadically streams in from the various portals, you see.

All of this is mere organicism, a game quite abstract to the librarianism of identification. The rules can be brushed around by the user. It informs rendering and behaviour of this archipelago-like interface I'm describing. This is what I am proposing to build, I can provide concept art. I have no experience with graphics programming so it'll be more like a really slick game of chess than civilisation. But it's about making the technology behind this bit work.

DELIVERABLES

With lessons learned from raidlax, a meta-filesystem.

A rule engine to create forms from chaos with.

A basic Music paradigm.

GUI for graphing out our forms.

More GUI for reorganising the organic cruft.

More GUI for organising the art.

PROJECT DETAILS

...

PROJECT SCHEDULE

3 months of involved hacking.

BIO

http://github.com/st3vil was writing perl professionally for three years, but now only wants to do it for good cause. I have another robotical project and I think they will share some intellect, if not actual code.

I'm an unemployed musician, mostly by mental necessity. I feel this is my job as a human, I just need a way to get off social welfare (I have one in the pipes). It would be great to get some bucks for staying alive. I live in a garage fairly cheaply right now but I'll probably live in my car again in a few weeks what with it being summer.

AMOUNT

$2000 please.

]]> 2011Q4 Grant Proposal: raidlax - raid5-style redundancy above the filesystem tag:news.perlfoundation.org,2011://18.2926 2011-12-18T16:16:59Z 2011-12-18T16:18:05Z Alberto Simões http://null.perl-hackers.net/ Steve Eirium <[hidden email]>

DISCUSSION

RAID5 is well-understood but under-utilised, mostly due to the massive logistical problems of doing anything with it. RAID is a layer below the filesystem and above the disk partitions, one would have to be some kind of pervert to bother with such arcane nonsense. Just google around to see what a wasteland of human experience it is.

The reality of the security you get on the life of your data is very simple and there's no need to have it hooked up as arbitrary chunking of your disk under the filesystem. It would be much less expensive and more classy to use files themselves as our chunks.

So what I'm proposing to build is a multi-master database for tracking the member filesystems. 1/(n-1) of each filesystem would be the node's share of the parity.

Anyway, your laptop gets stolen but the two disks in your PC have it all between them, so even though you've got nearly 400G of shite and 600G of disk, you're OK.

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DELIVERABLES

Something for scanning a filesystem into a git database, on cron or whatever, depending on mtime and/or hashing.

Some more of that same thing for trying to talk to the other instances. This could be as flexible as git, I suppose.

Something else for talking to users, getting set up, recovering lost filesystems.

A project page with a funky domain name so it can really thrive out there.

PROJECT DETAILS

...

PROJECT SCHEDULE

2 months of slightly involved hacking.

BIO

http://github.com/st3vil was writing perl professionally for three years, but now only wants to do it for good cause. I have another robotical project and I think they will share some intellect, if not actual code.

I'm an unemployed musician, mostly by mental necessity. I feel this is my job as a human, I just need a way to get off social welfare (I have one in the pipes). It would be great to get some bucks for staying alive. I live in a garage fairly cheaply right now but I'll probably live in my car again in a few weeks what with it being summer.

AMOUNT

$2000 please.

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