Codesworth

Software Freedom Day Singapore 2010 - Call for participants

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 07:02:00 +0000

The Free and Open Source Alliance (FOSA.sg) would like to call for participants for Software Freedom Day Singapore 2010. This one-day event, a celebration of the best of the Singaporean open source community, will be held at the National Library Plaza, Bugis, on September 18 this year.

We are looking for individuals, groups, organisations, or companies with an interest in the free and open source movement who would like to set up booths during this exhibition. Your booth can be on any open source related subject, from open content to business ideas, from open hardware to computer gaming. Your booth may also be a part of one of the four pavilions we are organising this year: "entertainment", "mobile computing and telephony", "productivity", and "social networking". If you are interested in showcasing your achievements and promoting open source to a large audience, please sign up now.

We are also looking for volunteers to help us in every stage of the planning and execution of this event. If you would like to help us design posters, manage websites, organise events, handle logistics, or would like to provide any other help whatsoever, please sign up as a volunteer.

As always, you can find out more about the event on our website at http://www.softwarefreedomday.sg/ or e-mail suggestions, ideas or comments to planning@softwarefreedomday.sg. We hope to hear from you soon.

See you in September!

An early draft standard for the Test Anything Protocol

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:23:00 +0000

The Test Anything Protocol (TAP) is Perl's standard test result communication language, used by tools like prove (1), libraries like Test::More and applications like Smolder. If you you've ever installed a distribution from the CPAN, it almost certainly ran tests which emitting TAP. If any of your own Perl distributions provide the make test or ./Build test capabilities, you're probably using it yourself.

A proposal to formalize the Protocol as an IETF RFC have been circulating since 2008, and - after some work in fits and bursts - there's a pretty decent draft up on the TestAnything.org wiki. I'm really excited about this; not only will a formal everything-defined-perfectly specification make it easier for TAP producers and consumers to be written in other programming languages, but a solid standard will form a firm foundation upon which more advanced TAP syntax (such as the many ideas here) could be built.

The draft writing has been happening in fits and bursts, but I think we're getting close to completion now. Please have a look at the RFC draft (either as plain text or on the wiki) and tell us where we should focus our efforts. You can get in touch either directly on the Wiki (be bold!) or on the IETF TAP mailing list, or just leave a comment here.

WWW::Mechanize for uploading files

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:18:00 +0000

The WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook doesn't have an example program for file uploads. So - if you need to quickly upload a file to a server with Perl - here's how you do it:

Please let me know if you have any feedback on this example.

Software Freedom Day Singapore 2009 in this weekend!

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:51:00 +0000

I'm absolutely overflowing with excitement: Software Freedom Day Singapore 2009 is just around the corner! Come down to any - or all! - of the three events we've organized for your pleasure. The informational day targeting SMEs and system integrators is on Friday; Saturday will see public events at the National Library Building at Bugis, organized by some of the coolest open source groups in Singapore, and the technical sessions, covering a wealth of interesting events and providing the perfect place to geek out of a Saturday afternoon. And thanks to our fantastic sponsors, each and every event is completely free! (You do have to register for the Friday event, though.)

If you're on Facebook, you can let your friends know by sharing our Facebook event! Hope to see you there!

Software Freedom Day Singapore 2009 - you're invited!

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:16:00 +0000

The Free and Open Source Alliance, Singapore would like to invite you to take part in Software Freedom Day Singapore 2009. We have a number of events lined up for you next month on September 18 and 19 at the Singapore Management University, Bras Basah and the National Library Building, Bugis, and we hope you'll be able to join in.

We'll have events all day on both days. On Friday (September 18), we'll be organizing a series of talks at the NLB, providing an overview of setting up and using free and open source software in business, government and education, aimed primarily at a non-technical audience. Saturday (September 19) will see two simultaneous events: at SMU, we'll have tutorial sessions on the use of open source tools and techniques, aimed specifically at a technical audience. At the same time, we'll have booths set up at the National Library Building's plaza to introduce members of the public to the benefits of open source, the wide range of powerful, reliable tools available for free, and to the participants, both companies and groups, involved in the open source community in Singapore. Event overviews are available; detailed schedules will online as soon as they're ready.

Please get in touch with us if you'd like to take part. We're especially eager to get open source groups to come down to the NLB plaza on Saturday to present themselves to passerbys, geeks and non-geeks alike, and to advertise your particular area of interest within the open source galaxy to all our visitors. While we'll definitely try to cover as many bases and organize as interesting an event as possible, I'm sure your expertise, knowledge and enthusiasm will make all the difference in turning curious onlookers into interested participants - and maybe the open source users and contributors of tomorrow.

We need all the help we can get, particularly in volunteers, ideas and marketing. If you'd like to help out, cheer us on, promote us to your friends or family, or support us in any other way, you can find out more at the FOSA website and the SFDS website, or on our mailing list. This would also be a great time for you to meet FOSA.sg and give us your ideas and suggestions on how we can best work towards the common interests of open source groups and communities in Singapore.

See you in September!

Perl as a subprime language

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:39:00 +0000

scrottie wrote in a recent use.perl post that:

[..] the only reason companies hire Perl programmers to write non-trivial programmers beyond the scope of system administration automation is because Perl programmers are inexpensive and submissive. They do what they're told, don't talk back, don't require acknowledgement, don't make a stink about things like testing and security that management doesn't care about nearly as much as deadlines, they don't aggressively negotiate on their salary, they agree to absurd timetables and requirements, and they routine suspend their better judgment to attempt whatever management has proposed.

[..]

[..] Writing a thousand times more Perl than Java in the past few years, I'm still more marketable as a Java programmer to a degree that far exceeds the relative demands for Perl or Java programmers. Only fundamental attitudes can account for this.

Reading this along with Iftekhar's suggestion that Perl is perceived as (cheap) glue in the programming market and what renodino wrote way back in 2006 about low wages for Perl jobs got me thinking about Perl's perception in the marketplace, and I think I might've had it wrong all along.

Those of us extolling Perl's virtues on geek websites like Slashdot or Reddit constantly face get the age-old refrains - read-only programming, not sophisticated enough (compared to functional programming languages, for instance), far too sophisticated (compared to Java, for instance), primitive OO facilities, a list a mile long. On pro-Perl websites and blogs, this turns to nervous fretting about our core strengths: TIMTOWTDI, but how many WTDI should there be; we have to change our syntax, we must keep our syntax consistent; we need proper OO systems, we need to stick with the überpowerful bless system. Many of these suggestions are important, and all the discussions definitely are, but I wonder if they might be hiding the larger issue, rather like the whole "I hate enforced leading whitespace" tends to overshadow other benefits and downsides of Python.

So I've always assumed that it's a feature fight we're losing - we can't give new users a simple OO system, or "class" keywords, or any of the other features people want to see included in Perl core. But let's pull back a second - we've got a language with Ruby's regular expressions, proper closures, Python's terseness and conciseness, a powerful and flexible module system, and a wealth of brilliant features hidden away for when they're needed - AUTOLOAD, heredocs, quote-like operators, sigils (!), and separate operators for strings and numbers (seriously, how brilliant is that? That might be my favourite Perl feature ever.). Forget about CPAN and the Perl testing culture and the community, and we still have something which is plenty useful, incredibly exciting, reasonably cutting edge and ridiculously lovely. Why, then, are we looked down upon?

I have some ideas, but they're far more ridiculous than anything I've proposed here, so I'll stop here for now. Please give me any feedback, suggestions or corrections!

Singapore Perl Mongers Meetup #1 "Adagio"

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:26:00 +0000

The first (ever?) Singapore Perl Mongers meetup took place last week at the Mind Cafe, Prinsep Street, Singapore, and later at the cafe/restaurant right next door. Ten Perlers showed up, and despite a few initial problems - no fixed plan, the cafe was too cold and noisy, and the "organizer" (me) was late - we got going quite well, with Patrick Haller giving us off-the-cuff talks on standardizing a Perl runtime and getting Bash to assign to the right. We then moved next door, and the conversations on the table headed towards Repraps, using theremin as user interface devices, the meaning of "well regulated militia" in the US Constitution, and why Canberra is the mail-order porn capital of Australia. Everybody seemed to have fun, and the conversations and Mongers hung around long after the meeting was supposed to have ended; hopefully, this kicked off Singapore.pm with a bang!

(A very few) Photographs are up on Flickr.

Thanks to everybody who showed up and made this meetup such a success. I'd like especially to thank the staff at the Mind Cafe, Prinsep Street who valiantly found space to fit everybody who showed up (twice the number I was expecting!). If you're in Singapore or nearby and have any interest in Perl, drop by at our meetups! Notifications go out on our mailing list; all other details are available from the Singapore.pm website.

This is all new to me

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:08:00 +0000

But if anybody needs it, here's a public key that can be used to validate me.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin)
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=6f4t
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

I have no idea how you'll convince me to use it, though. In person?

Where's the prizes? Here's the prizes!

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Okay, very random (and very quick), but here goes: Damien Learns Perl, one of the best Perl Iron Man blogs around, asked where the prizes are. Seemingly on cue, garu came out with my very own Iron Man blog prize: a fantastically small, incredibly well-written advocacy guide to Perl. This is the sort of thing we should all be printing out and handing out at conferences, or going cubicle to cubicle with - a short, succinct, to-the-point summary of all of modern Perl's strengths. Brilliant!

Bundling an Amazon EC2 Linux instance into an AMI

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:27:00 +0000

This is really more of a checklist than a guide, so please don't use this unless you know what you are doing! You can find Amazon's own version of this checklist in their documentation.

You should create this image in /mnt, since this is where all your instance scratch space is mounted. So change the directory to /mnt and make a new directory at /mnt/bundle.
You will need to know your Amazon user id. It's your AWS account ID without dashes - your Account page should have Account Number XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. Your user id is that number without the dashes.
You will need your EC2 private key and certificate to create the bundle. If you've lost yours, you can retrieve it (or generate new ones) at Access Identifiers in your account page.
Upload the EC2 private key (pk-AAA...ZZZ.pem) and certificate file (cert-AAA...ZZZ.pem) onto your server's /mnt/bundle folder. You'll use an SSH client to upload these files.
Warning: Do not upload these files anywhere except into the /mnt/bundle area - your private key will otherwise be bundled into your new AMI, allowing anybody who starts it control over all your Amazon EC2 services.
You will now need to use the ami-bundle-vol tool to bundle your instance. You might need to install this tool separately, but if you used one of the default Amazon AMIs, it might already be pre-installed.
From the /mnt/bundle directory, run:
```
# ec2-bundle-vol -k pk-AAA...ZZZ.pem -c cert-AAA...ZZZ.pem -u <your user id> -d /mnt/bundle/ -p a-descriptive-name-for-your-bundle 
```
It'll take a while to finish. Once it's done, you should have a /mnt/bundle/a-descriptive-name-for-your-bundle.manifest.xml. This is your bundle manifest.
You'll probably want to upload this bundle to Amazon S3 now. To do this, you'll need your Amazon S3 access keys (available at your access identifiers page) and the ami-upload-bundle executable.
To start, from /mnt/bundle run:
```
# ec2-upload-bundle -b the-s3-bucket-to-use -m a-descriptive-name-for-your-bundle.manifest.xml -a < your Amazon S3 access key > -s < your Amazon S3 secret key >
```
All the part files will then be uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket specified.
Finally, you will need to register your instance with Amazon. The easiest way to do this is through the Amazon EC2 console - go to the AMIs page, click on Register New AMI, and enter the AMI manifest path as the-s3-bucket-to-use/a-descriptive-name-for-your-bundle.manifest-xml. And you're done!
You can also do this through the command line tools by using ec2-register.
Once you're sure your new AMI has been properly set up and is ready for use (and you can't really until you spin up a new EC2 image based on it, can you?), you can delete the /mnt/bundle directory.

Iron men and women of Perl

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:30:00 +0000

Plotting and blogging Perl's resurgence.

The Iron Man Blogging Challenge for Perl is on, and I'm going to submit this blog to it tonight.

The challenge itself is a really good idea - you see Perl is going to die! posts every few months, and inevitably good ideas are raised, vigourously discussed, and then vanish in a pop of deficit effort until they are raised again. The brilliant thing about the Blogging Challenge is that the work which needs to be done is perfectly distributed. I may go months without a post (unlikely; I've got atleast one draft sitting in my Blogger right now), but somebody else won't; not only will they spur me to write again, but you (and who are you? A Perl connoisseur? A newbie in search of answers?) will always have something interesting to read, much of which is fascinating reading. Little drops can flood a field.

I also like that the Enlightened Perl Organization is being very realistic about its goals. It obviously doesn't think it's going to reverse the (Google) trend, but just wants everybody to write more. And by everybody, they mean everybody: all languages, all skill levels, all interests welcome. The Iron Man planet is already a fascinating cross-section of Perl community interests - testing, tools, HOWTOs, success stories, Perl 5, Perl 6 and Parrot. And on they come, one after another after another: inspiration, ideas, solutions, questions, answers and modules. Just two weeks into the competition, the raindrops have already turned into a downpour.

Will the volume of posts be maintained? I hope so; many of the "contestants" are regular bloggers in their own right, and Iron Man is just a convenient way to collate all their posts. But the long tail of short tales will be the most interesting - the complaints and victories of those learning the language for the first time, the first tentative posts about Moose or Catalyst or other new forces in the Perl world, even anecdotes about long ago Perls and even older problems. These posts will also be an opportunity for the community - usually said to be locked in its own echo chamber - to look at itself in a mirror and dispassionately examine its strengths and weaknesses.

I hope particularly that this leads to more people writing material which might eventually make it into CPAN documentation (particularly the cookbooks), into HOWTO articles or best-practice summaries, and leads to a monsoon shower of content for Perl's many fantastic wikis.

Let it rain.

Zen and a system of templates

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:21:00 +0000

Found this on Dave Cross' Perl Teach-In lesson:

Data + Template = Output: Template Toolkit
Template + Output = Data: Template::Extract
Data + Output = Template: Template::Generate

What music is Perl?

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:02:00 +0000

Larry Wall writes about Perl and its relation to art.

Why I code in Perl, pt 1

noreply@blogger.com (Gaurav) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:45:00 +0000

Because how many languages can have discussions like this? Note the reference to 1 Corinthians 12:14-26 halfway down the thread.