Tag: Shuck & Awe

Holy mackerel, use.perl.org is shutting down! Pudge is changing jobs and, as his now-previous $workplace was hosting the site, he is temporarily shutting down the site. Breath easy, though, the blog entries are not all going to disappear in a puff of smoke — the site will be put in ‘static’ mode for the time being, and there is the possibility it will reappear somewhere else.

Do you regularly scuba dive in a motley sea of other peeps’ codebase, trying to bring on surgical changes without doing too much collateral b0rking on the code formatting? If so, Steffen Mueller has a nifty trick to share with you. Using Text::FindIndent, he shows how to configure Vim such that it can magically adapts to any indentation policy.

In a turn of events so monumental that it can only possibly be a sign that Ragnarok is nigh upon us, an early adopter implementation of Perl 6 has been released. The number of blog entries that it generated is, as one might expect, quite massive. But most important is, the downloads — both for Unix and Windows — are available on Github. Don’t lose any time! Go, download, compile, and get a taste of what the new kid on the block has to offer.

First this week we have John Anderson filling us up on the Perl high drama of OSCON of earlier this week. In a nutshell the organizers provided, as it’s the tradition, ribbons to the attendees, and the Perl Mongers in the crowd got one reading Desperate Perl Hacker. The epithet, coined in an XML article written in 1997, was meant in good fun, but was received with a distinct lack of glee by the Perl hackers.

Inspired, but not completely satisfied with Camelia, the Perl 6 mascot, Sebastian Riedel came up with a new set of butterfly logos for the Perl 5/6 family. Very purty, methinks, very purty indeed.

No one is safe from the TPF Inquisition. Alberto Simões cornered Michael Schwern at YAPC and exacted a confession about the state of Test::Builder 2. No doubt threatened by the horrid torments that only torture by the comfy chair can provide, the Schwern spilled the beans.

Remember me mentioning David Wheeler’s CPAN-like project for PostgreSQL? Well, by now it has an official name — PGXN — and the ball has now been set into motion. This is going to be good.

First, Inigo Tejedor reminds us that we have until Thursday June 3rd (yes, tomorrow) to fill out the Perl programming survey. If you haven’t done so already, what are you waiting for? Stop reading this blog entry right now and go do your duty. No, seriously, go! And no peeking back until you’re done!

Curtis Jewell followed up on an old post by Adam Kennedy and checked out if shuffling things around really improve compression. From the results, there seems to be very little blood to be squeezed out of that stone. jjore came up with a very clever hack to stop the debugger when a test fails. Not only it is extremely useful, but the hack itself provides a lot of insight and food for thought for anyone attracted to the dark arts of under-the-Perl-interpreter-hood meddling.

Want to help Perl 6, and collect some booty in the process? Moritz Lenz has issued the first of a series of Perl 6 challenges. Fulfill the challenge, and get a chance to win mind-bogglingly fabulous prizes (well, okay, t-shirts for now). This week’s challenge doesn’t even require Perl 6 knowledge — it’s all about creating a website for proto.