Users Groups, Conferences, and Workshops

Announcing the 9th German Perl Workshop

The 9th German Perl-Workshop will take place from Wednesday, 21 Feb. 2007 to Friday, 23 Feb.2007 and you are invited to submit proposals for talks or tutorials. We will happily accept proposals for interesting talks related to Perl.

Dates Set for YAPC::NA 2007

The dates for YAPC::NA 2007 have finally been established! The Houston.pm group and YAPC::NA 2007 organizers are pleased to announce that next year’s YAPC::NA will be Monday, June 25th through Wednesday, June 27th, at the University of Houston. You can also visit the YAPC::NA homepage at www.yapc.org—America for updates and information.

New Users Group

The Vlaanderen.pm group was formed last month and are beginning to organize at vlaanderen.pm.org .

Perl In Print

State of The Onion 10

Larry Wall’s State of the Onion 10 is now online on Perl.com. This talk was presented at OSCON 2006.

Perl Review Fall 2006

The Fall 2006 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have alread received an email telling them all about it. You can even buy TPR on the newsstand now if you shop at Powell’s Technical Books in Portland.

In this issue (besides the cover showing the Larry Wall action figure by ArtCard Mike):

• Google’s Summer of Code — Jim Brandt
• pmtools — Mark Leighton Fisher
• Parrot Magic Cookies — Jonathan Scott Duff
• Agent-based Programming in Perl — Guinevere Nell
• ETL Nightmares — Thomas MacKenzie
• and more!

Google Code Search

Google has released a code search at www.google.com—codesearch . The code search will allow you to search the source of publicly available code. Strangely, it seems that only a portion of CPAN is actually indexed though.

Modules of Interest

Possibly Yet Another Web Framework

Bigtop 0.18 has been released along with some movies demonstrating its capabilities. Bigtop is a language for describing the data of a web application. Usually this data will be stored in a relational database. Once you have a description of your data, you can generate a web application from it. This includes all the pieces you need like: the sql statements ready for feeding to your database command line tool, the httpd.conf you need to Include in the httpd.conf on your system, the modules that will handle the web requests, the models that make the database tables look like classes, etc. Search for BigTop on CPAN to find out more.

Parting Words

The Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006. Nick was once the Pumpking for Perl 5 and is also a key contributor to the Tk and Encode modules. For more information, please see the Perl Foundation Blog entry at news.perlfoundation.org.

Perlcast is back with an interview with chromatic, the author of the book “Perl Hacks”. In addition, O’Reilly will giving away copies of Perl hacks to some lucky Perlcast listeners. You can be entered in a drawing for a chance to win a copy by sending at email to perlcast+hacks@gmail.com.

• Interview Audio
• Perl Hacks
• chromatic’s RSS

Some of you might remember that months ago Perlcast had a Perl News Summary series of Podcasts. Well, we’re taking another shot at it, only this time with a guest news anchor. Who could it be? None other than one of Perl’s most prominent figures, Randal Schwartz!

Randal will be making regular appearances as the Perl News source. You can also hear more from him at the Geek Cruises Podcast.

• Podcast Audio

Perlcast talked with brian d foy about the latest issue of The Perl Reivew.

• Interview Audio

For a while, the comment spam got out of hand and so I shut off all blog comments. Since then, a few listeners have requested that I turn comments back on. Comments are turned back on now. You no longer need to be registered to post comments; however, all comments will be held for moderation. I’ll try to approve them as fast as I can, but if it takes a day or so to get your comment on the site, please forgive me.

In other news, Perlcast has been quite for a while. I’ve been in the process of swapping out jobs and machines and didn’t queue up quite enough podcasts to last the gap. Hopefully I’ll have a show up tomorrow. And, don’t worry, I have a few more interviews scheduled to happen.

Thanks for listening!