jmcada writes “The White Camel Awards for 2008 were just presented at OSCON. This year’s winners are Jacinta Richardson, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, and Gabor Szabo. The winners have all made significant contributions to the Perl community. Congratulations to the winners!”
I was told last week that my current contract won’t be extended when it finishes at the end of this month. I’m obviously looking for a new contract, but I’m also investigating another option. I’m thinking of running some commercial, public Perl courses in London at the end of July. The plan is basically that I’ll book a room for a week and run a couple of two-day courses (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl) and a one-day Advanced Perl course. It’s still far from confirmed, but if you’re at all interested in this (or other training courses that I may run in the future) then please sign up to the mailing list in order to be kept up to date with the latest news.
Every year, at OSCON, the White Camels are presented. If you look at the previous winners, you’ll notice that these are mostly unsung heroes, like previous awardee Eric Cholet, the human moderator of so many Perl mailing lists, or Jay Hannah, one of the people running pm.org (if you ever created/maintained a pm group, chances are that Jay walked you through the process). Some of these people may be well known, like Allison Randal or Randal Schwartz, while others may be complete strangers to at least part of the globe, like Josh McAdams or Jay. Some of them may be extreme Perl hackers who created the original JAPH, but they actually received this award as a recognition for their community contributions to Perl. That’s not to say a great hacker can’t receive the award, but you don’t have to be one in order to be eligible. That being said, the nomination process for the 2008 White Camels is now open.
YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen is fast approaching, and the deadline for proposals for next year’s conference is not too far away (June 30th), but I’ve been thinking of events even further in the future. With the Perl Monger census that Dave Cross is organising, I’m hoping it might identify some of the groups that could potentially host the event, given that their membership would be big enough to help out. I then hope to get to know some of the leaders and members that are attending YAPC::Europe themselves, and see if I can encourage a few to at least think about hosting a YAPC::Europe. Seeing as we’ve now had 3 in the UK, there’s no reason why we can’t hold it in Germany, France or Portugal again. So I won’t just be trying to persuade those in countries who have never hosted before 
Today Tom “Spot” Callaway of RedHat mailed perl5-porters to say:
Today, perl 5.10.0 went into Fedora rawhide, which will become Fedora 9.
A few additional changes were committed with this release:
- Fedora is now tracking all of its patches in
patchlevel.h- The
sitedirandsitearchdirectories are now located under/usr/local, to make it very clear that files installed by CPAN did not come from Fedora packages (they still work fine).We got a tremendous amount of help from the perl 5 porters community, especially Andy Armstrong, Nicholas Clark, and Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Without your help, we would not have been able to meet the Fedora deadline.
The Fedora 9 beta release is scheduled for March 20, and the final F-9 release is scheduled for April 29, 2008.
Thanks again for all of your help,
~spot
Cool. So all the swearing at Math::Pari and staying up past midnight on Saturday was worth it. However, I note that there is some irony that of the three people named for their help, none actually use Fedora.
The deadline for Google’s summer of code applications from mentor organizations is fast approaching and I need your help to keep perl from getting left behind like it did last year. The wiki page has links where you can post your ideas for students and signup to be a mentor. Please post your ideas and signup before March 8th — to increase our chances of getting accepted, we need to demonstrate a significant pool of willing mentors and lots of potential projects to inspire students.
“In two weeks (Feb 29th), the Dutch Perl Workshop will take place in the StayOkay Youth Hostel in Arnhem, The Netherlands. This meeting is primarily targeted on Perl users in The Netherlands and Belgium.
The program is now available, and by accident about half of the talks are in English. So even if you are not able to speak Dutch, do not think our nightly wiskey BoF and games of Fluxx are a good reason to come, or if you do actually need some sleep at night, you now have a chance to learn more about Perl from renowned speakers.
Please register a.s.a.p, if you want to join, because we have to give numbers for the beds and the included free diner.”
This week has seen a turmoil of emotions surrounding Perl 6. (Just take a look at the last articles here at use.perl and perlbuzz.) This entry is just to gladly announce that in this very moment (Dec 28 2007 18:30 GMT-0200) three microarticles of the series on Perl 6 operators are in The Hot 25 list of O’Reilly Network Blogs. It may be due to other causes: I faithfully provided one article from Monday to Friday for the last two weeks; This is end-of-year time and reading habits may be different; I am not quite sure of the criteria that make blog entries appear there in The Hot 25 and maybe it’s just noise that took these articles to those positions (#5, #13, #23). But on the other hand, given that I am not that endowed for writing, I rather believe that Perl 6 still captures curiosity and attention of people out there; People do not want to lose the opportunity (to learn, use, criticize, think about, etc.) when Perl 6 is finally released. So I want to thank everyone that contributed to the current state of Perl 6-related development and to wish much fun in the future work that will bring us this long-awaited Christmas gift.
Read more of this story at use Perl.
In preparation to my talk on the Israeli Perl Workshop next week I have written 4 micro articles about some of the new features in Perl 5.10 What’s new in Perl 5.10? say, //, state Smart Matching in Perl 5.10 Switching in Perl 5.10 Regular Expressions in Perl 5.10
After over a year since the last release, it is with equal parts of pride and relief that I present Strawberry Perl 5.10, the next major release of the Vanilla Perl Project’s flagship Perl distribution. This release represents the beginning of the third generation of release code. The first generation was a simple build script, and was used to create the original Vanilla Perl distribution. The second generation moved from a simple script to a config-driven model with Perl::Dist::Builder, and gave us create the original Strawberry Perl. The new Perl::Dist::Inno takes this beyond simple configuration and provides a complete object heirachy for modeling and compiling Win32 Perl distributions.
On December 18, 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1 to the public. That means today is the end of Perl’s 20th year. On Perl’s 16th birthday, Richard Clamp gave us Perl 1. Rumor has it that this birthday, Perl5Porters is giving us Perl 5.10, the best Perl 5 yet.
The Windy City Perl Mongers are getting together for a birthday party at Miller’s Pub (134 S Wabash Ave, Chicago) at 6:30pm. Who else is hosting Perl birthday parties? Can we make it a 24 hour party rolling through all of the time zones?
Last week, the Perl Foundation announced that the Mozilla Foundation has awarded a development grant to Patrick Michaud to work on the Perl 6 on Parrot compiler. Thank you, Mozilla Foundation (especially Zak Greant and Frank Hecker.)
This grant is particularly important because it’s the largest grant of money to any Perl 6 hacker in several years. There have been a couple of other grants; the NLNet foundation made a very generous grant to Parrot a couple of years ago, which the Perl Foundation is doling out as Parrot hackers reach specific milestones. A well-known Perl-friendly development and consulting company also sponsored several microgrants for Perl 6, Pugs, and Parrot.
If you’ve read between the lines of several of my recent postings related to development, motivation, sponsorship, and scheduling (for example, Squeezing One Year of Work into Eight) you’ve probably recognized that I believe strongly that external resource constraints have slowed Perl 6 development dramatically. (Alternate phrasing: the progress of various Perl 6-related development efforts is impressive considering how few resources any of the projects actually have.)
Greg McCarroll writes “London Perl Workshop 2007 So it’s that time of year again, the nights are growing long, the mornings are growing coldand people who should know better once again decide to organize a conference. That’s rightit’s time for this year’s London Perl Workshop. So let’s get down to the details, because wehaven’t much time …
Read more of this story at use Perl.
Yeah, me too. But I’m a capitalist, so I like to see what people are writing checks for. As I’m fed up with the various unsubstantiated claims, I’ve whipped up a little graphic of job posts on Dice that will hopefully cheer you up. I’ll try to keep it updated regularly. If nothing else, it’ll give us all something to watch as we’re overtaken by our Ruby and Python overlords.
“The schedule for The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop has been posted. Two days of talk-goodness plus a hackathon! The deadline for discounted hotel rates has been extended to Monday, September 17th.”
The conference site for the Belgian Perl Workshop is online. You will find (allmost) all information about: practical info about the conference how to submit a talk how to register It won’t be possible to attend the conference without registering online. Places are limitted. So, you’ve been warned
“The PAUSE administrators are planning to do a little house keeping on the CPAN Modules List. We intend to remove old namespace reservations which have been registered with the modules mailing list but for which there never has been an actual implementation on CPAN. This will apply to all unused registrations from May 2007 and earlier. Since there are surprisingly many of these unclaimed registrations, we will send an email to every PAUSE author who has such an unused namespace asking her to contact the modules-at-perl-dot-org mailing list about the issue. Registrations for which we have not received any correspondence until December will then be made available again. If you are among those to receive such a reminder, please don’t be offended. If you are still around, it is most likely a misunderstanding. For example, people have sometimes registered namespaces with the wrong capitalization. We intend to send the reminders within the next two weeks. Thank you for your understanding.”
Read more of this story at use Perl.
“Frozen Perl 2008 will be a one-day workshop in sunny Minneapolis on Saturday, February 16, 2008. We’ve officially opened up our Call for Speakers, and we’re looking forward to your submissions. Our workshop theme is “Perl in Practice”, so practical submissions are encouraged.”
Read more of this story at use Perl.
So it is finally public, next year’s YAPC::Europe will be in Copenhagen/Denmark - I am eagerly awaiting the return of my fellow mongers who are in Vienna.
I am green with envy and I have seen the movie of the pre-conference meet up and I am hanging out in the IRC channel, but is not quite the same.
The 10th German Perl-Workshop will take place from 13.02.2008 to 15.02.2008 in Erlangen, Germany. As always we welcome proposals for talks or tutorials from international participants. See the Call For Papers for the details. The deadline for proposals is Monday, 29.10.2007.