EPO sponsors Perl QA

03 Dec 2011 at 15:03

mdk

Enlightened Perl Organisation, Uncategorized

No Comments

For the second Year running the Enlightened Perl Organisation is proud to be counted among the sponsors for the (Perl) Quality Assurance Hackathon. The membership have voted to sponsor the event with 1,000 Euros to help with the operating costs as seen appropriate by the organisers.

The QA Hackathon is a free of charge coding workshop for people involved in Quality Assurance, testing, packaging, CPAN, and other projects related to quality assurance. The workshop is not only aimed at Perl projects, however, many of the attendees will be planning to work on projects that have a direct benefit to the Perl language.

This year the Hackathon will once again be organised by the French Perl Mongueurs, who have taken up the baton ahead of the UK who will be running the event in 2013.

Make sure you visit the QA Website and show your support by speaking about this event and perhaps consider donating or sponsoring yourself.

You can follow me on twitter as @shadowcat_mdk, on Facebook or by typing 6 letters into your browser mdk.me.

-mdk

 

Google Code-in – Fit the First

22 Nov 2011 at 14:45

mdk

Google, Google Code-in, Ironman, Perl

No Comments

Yesterday, Monday 21st November, saw the official start at 08:00 UTC of the Google Code-in Student participation. What this meant was that students could sign up to the program and start taking tasks from that point. I thought I would take this opportunity to bring you all up to date on how the efforts are going and to supply you with further information.

Firstly due to a problem with Melange which is the software powering the initiative provided by Google we have been given an extra seven days to submit tasks. So if you still have tasks you would like to submit you can get them into the first round of tasks before Monday 28th November. We would particularly like to see tasks that focused on fixing bugs in a module or library, or perhaps writing or adding tests. We also seem to have very few Perl6 focused tasks so would appreciate any that addressed this. If you miss this date don’t worry as the next round is due on the 16th December 2011 where we can add more tasks. We currently have 335 tasks listed for our students to attempt, but the more choice we have the more students we can attract and many of the tasks can be completed in a few hours. We already saw success on the very first day of the event when a student completed a task and it was verified (before 08:00 UTC Tuesday which was within the PST that Google uses), two others were awaiting verification from mentors.

We would like to encourage all those people who have decided to sign up as a mentor, who think that they have the time to try mentoring (we will give help and each mentor has a back-up and support from the other mentors), or who have added their name to the list on the wiki but have not yet filled out the form, to go online at: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/profile/mentor/google/gci2011 as soon as possible and sign up. We have so far had twenty-eight people sign up as mentors and would dearly love to have more so that we can cover all the tasks and students . The role is a valued one and is enormously rewarding when you consider you are involved in perhaps the next generation of programmers who will help shape our world, and who knows we may encourage more people into the glorious world of Perl.

So far we have had twenty-five students sign up for the tasks that are on offer. Students will often complete more than one task and many of them will do a handful of tasks. the most successful applicants are invited to attend a special conference at Google’s headquarters in San Francisco and all students are rewarded for successfully taking part. If you know of anyone who would like to attend, or have the ability to pin up a flyer at a school, social club or other venue attended by student, particularly if you know a teacher or head of IT at a local school or young person’s college than we would be very grateful if you would do so. the flyers are available as pdf files online at:

Full colour – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic.pdf

Reduced colour (prints in B&W) – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic-home-small-office-printer.pdf

TPF press releases – http://www.perlfoundation.org/press_releases (simply scroll to the bottom of the page)

Students and Mentors can sign up at any point during the initiative but the sooner they do so the better it will be.

Thanks for all your help thus far, Rafl, Paul and I will be sure to keep you all updated as we progress through this year’s initiative.

- mdk

MetaCPAN Logo Competition

17 Nov 2011 at 17:09

mdk

Ironman, Perl

2 Comments

The Enlightened Perl Organisation was approached recently by Florian Ragwitz (rafl) to sponsor a competition aimed at creating a logo for MetaCPAN. Rafl’s proposal (which can be viewed here), is to hold the competition so that the winner would make his artwork available in the first part to MetaCPAN to use while retaining moral copyright of authorship. The data released to MetaCPAN would subsequently be open sourced, the usage of it being the same licences as Perl.

The Enlightened Perl Organisation held a vote according to its member charter and all those who voted were in approval of the scheme and sponsorship. The Enlightened Perl Organisation will award the winner of the competition with an Amazon gift voucher to the value of $400.

Once the competition is announced I will make sure to advertise it on this page and others, please keep your eyes peeled for the notification, you can follow either myself (@shadowcat_mdk) or rafl (@perldition) on Twitter.

-mdk

 

NWE Hakathon Moves Date

17 Nov 2011 at 10:04

mdk

Events, Hackathon, Ironman, North West England Perl Mongers, Shadowcat

No Comments

Hey all.

For those of you planning to attend the NWE yearly Hackathon this weekend please note that we have had to have an emergency move of date to the 3rd December.

Both Ian and I are truly sorry for doing this at the very last minute but it was completely unavoidable. Hopefully this means we have a couple of more weeks to help persuade people of the need to come to this important event. Remember you can attend both in person and across the aether-nets.

If you attend in person it will be at the Shadowcat Systems offices in Lancaster where we will be happy to provide you with snacks, beer and pizza. This year we intend to add new features and improvements to both the Ironman and Presenting Perl projects. The hackday will run from 10:30 – 20:30 UTC (GMT +0). Please make sure you sign up at: https://nwe.eventwax.com/hackday-2011.

-mdk

 

London Perl Workshop 2011

14 Nov 2011 at 15:10

mdk

Events, Ironman, London Perl Workshop, Marketing, Promotion, Workshop

3 Comments

Reflection, part two

In my first post on Friday I reflected on the fact that this year’s London Perl Workshop was the fourth event that I had organised, in this post I want to talk about this year after the event and some elements around it.

If you build it…

In preparing for this year’s conference I built upon some of the lessons of previous years. The first element I conquered was to start the organisation, especially in regards to the venue and the sponsors, at an early stage. there is really no early date for this, if you start to organise the following year while the event is ongoing in the previous year you are doing a good job. The venue is a fixed element that is essential for any further promotion as it gives your time and location. This will help in gaining the sponsors as they will be able to target their needs and any surrounding advertisment to your event. So do it early.

Building on that thought, advertise, promote, push. You have to keep the event fresh in people’s minds and spoon them as much information as you can, though you also walk a very fine line between being interesting and boring, annoying and alienating your audience and any potentially new people. It is a very fine line, trying to give as much new information while still keeping any concurrent details fresh in people’s minds is a difficult balance.

I think, aside from one or two over-enthusiastic mail list postings, I managed to increase the promotion without becoming victim to this issue. I am aware however that I have to start the whole process again now for next year.

I’m going to have myself a real good time…

Over the past few years we have managed to increase the size of the audience at the London Perl Workshop, aside from last year whose many elements caused a major issue in number calculations that bucked the trend it has risen year on year. The number was between 140-175 persons who attended on the day, but the increased promotion and change of conference format to incorporate more beginner tracks and training seems to have paid off dividends this year. We had over 250+ persons attend on the day, some of them attending on either the morning or afternoon and some stayed the whole day and into the late evening.

 

People signing in at registration

People signing in at registration

This figure is a conservative estimate, we had 280+ signed up on the website and many people arrived who had not pre-registered.

Sign of the times

One issue that arose from this was that there was a large amount of over-subscribed talks, for the most part we were able to accommodate the extra numbers, but some people ended up disappointed as they were unable to attend the talks they had placed on their personal schedule.

Another issue was with signs. Although I had extra signs printed for the event the vast number of people and the five different rooms caused some confusion so that a few people went to the wrong room.

Signs on the wall

The confusing signs that we apparently proliferated confusion with

We have plans to make sure that doesn’t happen next year.

Time after time…

There are always people who volunteer their help for the London Perl Workshop. Some of these people return year after year and do so unfailingly. One such person is Dave Cross who returns each year to do a presentation, tutorial or workshop for the conference. Ian Norton also ran a workshop for new beginners to Perl and aimed at learning together, Ian is a regular volunteer and really took the challenge of bringing Perl to new people to heart and created a great workshop from It. The other workshops/training by Miyagawa and Gabor, although sponsored, were fantastic events and greatly appreciated that these busy and important people could give up their time. Lastly a huge thanks to Andrew Solomon for creating an introductory workshop to Dancer that was similarly well received.

 

Ian Norton hard at work training people

Ian Norton hard at work training people

But there is also Chris Jackson, Steve Sexton, Léon Brocard (did I manage to get the spelling remotely correct this time?), Avi Greenbury, Tom Doran, Martin Brooks, Leigh Keating (+Ben, +Bump), Billy Abbot, Sean Tohill, Mike Whitaker, Jess Robinson, Leo Lapworth, David Dorward and many others who helped in large ways and small, and as the saying goes they do it “time after time”.

I could talk for some time about the speakers, about the high quality of their presentations, about how some of them are insane and actually indulge in conference-driven development. But I know there are tweets and blogs being written about them and I encourage you to seek them out, the first to get the word our was by Dave Precious, http://www.preshweb.co.uk/2011/11/lpw2011-my-thoughts-overall/, who works for one of the Sponsors and turned up with (Jim, James, Jimmy and Jock (or Jim, James, Dave and Ross as they are also known)) to the event.

There are also our sponsors. Some of these return each year and are a constant mainstay, without whom this event would be so much less than it is. I can hardly contemplate them not being with us, they are amazing and this year I asked more from them and I received it with good will and good wishes. So to:

  • antibodyMX
  • Booking.com
  • Bytemark::Hosting
  • Dotcloud.com
  • Enlightened Perl Organisation
  • Exonetric
  • Magnum Solutions
  • Moonfruit
  • Net-A-Porter
  • O’Reilly
  • Shadowcat Systems Limited
  • SurVoip
  • University of Westminster
  • UK2.net

Thank you so very much for your support, thanks to those of you who sent sponsor items, who attended, who sent staff and who did presentations. A big thanks to O’Reilly for once again turning up with a great selection of books and fantastic deals for the day.

Please sir, can I have some more…

One of the great things about a workshop, and I find it is common to most open source or Creative Commons linked technical workshops, is the quality of the topics you find in the hallway tracks and social events around them. The London Perl Workshop now seems to have acquired a tradition of a social event involving sponsored amber nectars after the day, and we have also incorporated coffee and cakes, sponsored food and a wealth of other tiny elements of excellence in this to further enhance this social phenomena.

The numbers of people this year led to the unwanted (yet also excellent) position of the food and drink disappearing in record time and quantities, something we will have to consider for next year if we want to continue to offer this service or organise an equivalent appropriate element.

 

Outside the social venue for lunch

Outside the social venue for lunch

 

Yesterday’s forgotten the morning after…

So the conference is over for another year…well not really.

There is the Conference Survey to fill out. If you registered for the conference a link would have been sent to you to fill out so that we can get feedback and work out plans for next year. The survey also helps the speakers to know how to pitch their talks, or improve and adapt them and their performance for future years.

Then there is the processing of photographs, of which I have posted some on flickr: http://link.shadow.cat/tAIlJf and Facebook: http://link.shadow.cat/ugpGwE – and while you are there you might like to “share” or “like” the Facebook page for the event which will be updated with news throughout the year.

Lastly there is the videos, which must be ripped, cut, edited and processed and then uploaded to the internet for you who were not there to enjoy, or for you to watch again and relive and share a fond memory. They will be uploaded to http://www.presentingperl.org in due course.

So for your friendly organiser and his fellow volunteers the job is not yet over…

Also, as I said at the start of this piece we now start the whole process off again, part of that is the winding down of this year’s conference and the reporting on its events and impact and making sure, as I hope I have, to thank all those involved in the event. For the rest, let me announce that the London Perl Workshop 2012…will be next year :).

–mdk

 

London Perl Workshop

11 Nov 2011 at 13:27

mdk

Ironman, London Perl Workshop, North West England Perl Mongers, Perl, Workshop

No Comments

Reflection, part one

So I am speeding through the misty, and drizzly, English countryside aboard a Virgin Pendilino train heading towards London and my fourth stint as the organiser of the London Perl Workshop (The United Kingdom Perl Workshop).
It has been an interesting four years doing this gig, when I started it was just to “help out” Greg, who quickly volunteered me to do everything. Back then the Workshop was mostly organised by whomever was the London.pm leader and associated accomplices who they arm twisted into helping. My first year was a success and I introduced more sponsors than the event had traditionally approached but I saw room for improvement.
Year two was somewhat better, though it got off to a slow start as it wasn’t until the August of that year that I was ‘volunteered’ again to help organise, or as we can call it, organise. I once again attracted sponsorship and this year saw people starting to treat me as the permanent organiser, or at least knew I would do it again – arm-twisting courtesy of Nicholas Clark. So I was given suggestions for year three from several people.
Year three was organised in advance, would be introducing new concepts in the shape of more sponsorship for food and a coffee break that was sponsored. It was also the year that Cthulu (all praise to him, the virgins are in the post) decided that I should praise him more as he threw complication after complication at me (see I <3 My Community on http://www.presentingperl.org), including but not limited to a blanket of snow (the snowpocalypse) and a last minute change of venue.
Also for year three I had a major life change of my own in the shape of my son, Benjamin, who was the youngest person to work at a Perl Workshop as he was on registration at five months old (though the youngest attendee was six weeks in the US at Frozen Perl).
Now we have year four. I have new responsibilities in the community and am involved in shaping more conferences. I am also awaiting the arrival of my second child, my wife is 6 months brewing, who will no doubt add to my duties in the coming year.
This year we have had to attract more sponsors than ever before as changes to the university system has led to us needing to find funds for rooms. Our sponsors, old and new, have responded magnificently. We have new elements to our event, banners, posters, free coffee, cake, lunch, supper buffet and beer, sponsored speakers and training sessions. I couldn’t have asked for better.
We have also had more sign ups than ever before with over 270 people (and approaching 280 as I type this) registered to attend and we always have people who turn up without registering.
So, tomorrow I will learn more about shaping this growing event, and I will hopefully get a wealth of responses to the conference survey which is being run for the first time this year.
Keep your eyes peeled to this blog and on the mailing list and websites as I update you on the evolving excellence that is the London Perl Workshop.

-mdk

Linter in Test::WWW::Mechanize

01 Nov 2011 at 23:09

mdk

Ironman, Perl, Perl5, Uncategorized

No Comments

Duke Leto (Jonathon Leto of Parrot, Perl 6 and Perl 5 CPAN fame) who I recently caught up with in San Francisco at the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s meeting, has added a new, and as he would no doubt state it ‘small’, feature to the latest release of Test::WWW::Mechanize (version 1.38). You can now pass custom HTML::Lint objects allowing you to sidestep some of the issues in Test::Mechanize.

Previously only Test::WWW::Mechanize->new( autolint => 1 ) was supported, but with this update you can do: Test::WWW::Mechanize->new( autolint => $linter ); where $linter is a custom HTML::Lint object with whatever options that you require.

Currently Test::WWW::Mechanize assumes when checking a modern web application that everything is ASCII, this has the obvious drawbacks of any UTF-8 (and other) characters throwing an error.* Now we can create a custom linter that allows us to sidestep the issue when running Test::WWW::Mechanize and only report if a structural error is thrown.

The real issue would be to solve the error that only allows Test::WWW::Mechanize to see ASCII characters, but for now we have a ‘small’ addition to the latest release and neat tool which moves us forwards until that is achieved.

* Using “autolint => 1″ on a utf8 website/application would wrongly report an error about special characters.

 

San Francisco Perl Mongers

27 Oct 2011 at 06:54

mdk

Perl, Perl Mongers, Uncategorized

No Comments

“If you’re going to San Francisco…”

Make sure you tell the local Perl Mongers you’ll be there…

Okay so not really fitting with the song, but almost. So Ingy, t0m, Rafl and I were all attending the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s meeting on the weekend of the 22nd-23rd October and while we were here we managed to attend the San Francisco Perl Mongers’ meeting. Rafl and I started the ball rolling on this by firstly contacting the local Mongers to tell them we were in town and to suggest a meetup (a little more on that later), as luck would have it the local group here meets once a month on the fourth Tuesday and that meant we would be here for their regular day.

The Guys (excluding t0m and I) who were at GSoC

t0m

t0m, just me missing but not from Miyagawa's flickr stream

It has been my tradition, pretty much inspired by the manner in which London.pm throw special socials for visiting mongers and the manner in which Dave Cross always tells Edinburgh.pm he is in the area, to tell local Perlers if I am going to be in town and have some free time. I think it is important to make sure you meet as many Perl people as possible, you are going to find people with similar interests but you will also always find a new way of looking at something, a social scene that makes you feel welcome and takes some of the sting of foreign climes and a group of people who are intelligent, thoughtful and often with a jar of sweet nectar in their hands.

We met at Citizen Space, San Francisco, which Fred (SF.pm organiser/leader) had found for us. I walked to the location as it was only thirty minutes from my hotel. SF.pm use meeting space to organise their local meetings.

They started the event with a quick run round of who was in attendance and what they do with Perl. We had some extra special guests with us as Ingy had persuaded Larry Wall to attend and Miyagawa was freshly back from YAPC Asia and was keen to meet up, so aside from the international guests they had the massively popular[1] Perl creator in attendance.

Larry "the Master" Wall

Larry Wall, a.k.a. TimToady and all around sorted chap (dapper 'tash as well)

Ingy mentioned he had spent some of the GSoC meeting in a hot tub and I had to use my favourite line, “I am Mark I stalk Perl people” quickly added to with some words along the lines of, “and after seeing Ingy in a hot tub this weekend I am cured of stalking Perl People”[2]

Ingy, who is by the way Ingy döt net creator of YAML, did a talk on Acmeism[3], Ingy’s own definition of Acmeism is “Language tends to naturally divide people and ideas” and he would like to “encapsulate an idea” so it can be ported to other languages.

Acmeism would be written using Pegex – which is an Acmeist PEG language [4] – subsets of this would be available in all languages and then ported using the Pegex and uploaded to other language repositories. Ingy’s main goal is not to transliterate whole complex sections of language, but to eliminate issues you encounter when you work with multiple languages that can share a common approach but often do not have the simple tools for that approach from the other language. So small modules that achieve specific goals can be created in one language and then uploaded to a multiple of languages that share similar traits, in this case OO dynamic languages.[5]

Ingy deep in explanation

Ingy deep in explanation

A Surprise Launch

Ingy then spoke about YAML2 – which he launched at the meeting – based on his feeling that it is the right time as OS is much richer now than even 2 years ago

Basic reading is that Ingy wants to:

-Remove unused elements
-Make a Test-driven specification
-Make it an Acmeist Implementation

The evening ended, as they often do, with a social gathering at a nearby watering hole and a general discussion on the local groups and people in it. Personally I want to extend a warm and grateful thanks to the local Perl mongers of San Francisco for making us feel welcome and a little bit like we were at home.

——

[1] Popular not just for creating Perl but for being a generally cool guy, funny too (seriously I am not jealous…well maybe a bit I mean creates a languages and has good one liners that is just unfair).

[2] Sorry Ingy, you know I think you’re gorgeous ;).

[3] A short (and probably badly represented) read of which is ‘using a single language to build simple modules that can then be uploaded to many other languages as many Dynamic Languages share common elements of syntax and grammar’.

[4] PEG – Parsing-Expression-Grammar

[5] Again sorry Ingy for not doing justice to the wonderful way you tell this that I am probably mangling badly ;).

YAPC::BRASIL::2011

18 Oct 2011 at 15:19

mdk

Events, Perl, Perl Mongers, Promotion, YAPC::Brasil, YAPCBR2011

No Comments

This year’s YAPC::Brasil is being held in the magnificent city of Rio de Janeiro in the Centro de Convenções Flex Center from Friday 4th November to Sunday 6th November 2011.

The schedule for Friday will feature a 1 day course by the guest speaker brian d foy who will be teaching “Effective Perl Programming”. The two weekend days, Saturday and Sunday, will feature a broad range of talks on topics such as TDD, OpenData, JavaScript, Facebook for all levels of Perl knowledge in both English and Portuguese (not simultaneously).

A complete schedule is currently online and you can also register for the event, images promoting the event along with maps detailing how to attend are also online.

The event has its own tradition in the form of a Perl Quiz on the final day (after the conference ends), it is inspired by Jon Orwant’s famous version but the Brasilian Perl Mongers have added their own unique twist and it is highly recommended.

If you are in the region, or are able to fly to this event, then I recommend you go, I also suggest you take a few days around the event to see the magnificent city of Rio, you will not regret it.

Terms of Search

08 Oct 2011 at 13:01

mdk

Ironman, Marketing, Perl

No Comments

a.k.a. I need your help 2 [1]

I would like some help from the community, I want a list of terms, what would you search for if you were looking for things relating to Perl? What keywords or buzz words would you use? What terms, names or words would you expect to see in articles, blogs or other media associated with Perl?

I would like to compile a comprehensive list for a small side project that I will let you all know about if it is successful, for now your help is appreciated and please don’t hesitate to suggest :).

Thanks in advance.

-mdk

[1] Not really a sequel, more that it is the second time I have used that phrase in a title or title like element.

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