use Perl

The Perl Foundation received two bids for the North American edition of Yet Another Perl Conference: One from conference new-comer Columbus.pm (Ohio), and one from the hosts of YAPC::NA::2006, Chicago. The TPF conference committee will consider both bids and make a decision soon.

Jim Brandt posted the Columbus bid and the Chicago bid. If you're thinking about running a YAPC, or even a workshop, those bids are a guide to the things you need to think about and plan for.

Michael Specter quotes Matt Sergeant ("chief anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs") extensively in "Damn Spam" for The New Yorker (August 6, 2007).

After the first page of the article, which mostly discusses how Richard Stallman supports the freedom to spam, I figured the article would be crap because Matt Sergeant hadn't shown up yet. He does show on page two (which is page 37 in the magazine), and ends up on half the pages. Poor Paul Graham barely gets a mention for filtering, which is slightly less than Bill Gates who said in 2004 "Two years from now, spam will be solved".

Matt seemed the only quoted person to have any perspective: it's only going to get worse, and "[e]ach time we think we have them, they respond with something new." Too bad he couldn't say "Perl" every other word :)

After a discussion on the perl-qa list, and being blessed with a few hours free time, I wrote a shiny thing, which, given a module name on the CPAN, will find all its dependencies, and their dependencies yea even unto the Nth generation, and display a nice shiny report on their CPAN-testers results.

I expect it to be useful for authors trying to decide what to depend on (you don't want to depend on stuff that itself has fragile dependencies) and also for people trying to figger out why the hell some random module won't install.

To see half the CPAN, try pointing it at Angerwhale.

The Perl 6 design team met on 01 August by phone. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

Hello all,

LA.pm is looking for speakers to give talks at one our meetings. If you are local or if you are just passing by and if you have something you want to talk about for a couple of hours with a bunch of fellow minded geeks, this is your chance to do so!.

We can host our meetings in West Hollywood, Santa Monica or Woodland Hills, wherever is more convenient to you! You can contact me at naterajj at gmail dot com

The Israeli Perl Mongers will hold their monthly meeting on Tuesday, 14 August 2007 at 18:30, in the offices of F5 at 24 HaBarzel St. in Ramat HaXayal in Tel Aviv. The meeting agenda includes a presentation by Gabor Szabo on "How Test Automation is Done in Various Open-Source Projects", and the second part of the presentation by Yuval Ya'ari on the internals of Perl's regular expression engine.

Mike Schilli writes "I've taped some of the Perl Lightning Talks at OSCON and put them on YouTube:

• Andy Lester on "ack" and why scripts should be called programs
• Tim Bunce on DBD::Gofer
• Tim Bunce on DashProfiler
• Ask Bjorn Hansen on qpsmtpd
• Julian Cash on MoveMyData
• Michael Schwern on brewing tea
• Vani Raja on YUI CSS
• Pudge with the "Perl in a Nutshell" Song

Enjoy!"

grafman writes "Graphcomp has released Perl OpenGL (POGL) 0.56, adding support for Cg and GLSL. In parallel, Graphcomp has also released the OpenGL::Shader module, which abstracts OpenGL APIs for ARB (assembly), Cg and GLSL shading languages.

Combined with OpenGL::Image, POGL provides a cross-platform 3D rendering system that simplifies image loading/processing/saving while dynamically loading the right OpenGL shaders for your user's platform/card.