It's the first of December again, and thus time for the advent calendars.

So far I know of

• Perl Advent
• Perl 6 Advent
• Perl Dancer Advent Calendar

If you know of more advent calendars, please tell me and I'll add them to the list.

Well today on The Perl Weekly a way was demonstrated using Gtk3::Webkit.

See Scraping javascript pages by vti

• LPW 2012 comments
• LPW signup/schedule

Sereal - A Binary Serialization Format

I don't know about you, but after the, um, delay between 5.8 and 5.10, I'm excited about new releases :-)

  Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking
  machine.  When it was finished, he gave it a coat of white paint,
  trimmed the edges in lavender, stepped back, squinted, then added a
  little curlicue on the front and, where one might imagine the forehe
+ad
  to be, a few pale orange polkadots.  Extremely pleased with himself,
  he whistled an air and, as is always done on suh occasions, asked it
  the ritual question of how much is two plus two.

  The machine stirred.  Its tubes began to glow, its coils warmed up,
  current coursed through all its circuits like a waterfall,
  transformers hummed and throbbed, there was a clanging, and a
  chugging, and such an ungodly racket that Trurl began to think of
  adding a special mentation muffler.  Meanwhile the machine labored o
+n,
  as if it had been given the most difficult problem in the Universe t
+o
  solve; the ground shook, the sand slid underfoot from the vibration,
  valves popped like champagne corks, the relays nearly gave way under
  the strain.  At last, when Trurl had grown extremely impatient, the
  machine ground to a halt and said in a voice like thunder: SEVEN!

    -- Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad, Trurl's Machine

We are happy to announce Perl 5.16.2, the third stable release of Perl
5.16.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.16.2 from your favorite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

[download]

SHA1 digests for this release are:

  674380237fa5a44447c6531e15bd3590d987e4b4  perl-5.16.2.tar.bz2
  9e20e38e3460ebbac895341fd70a02189d03a490  perl-5.16.2.tar.gz

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" locate
+d in
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Perl 5.16.2 represents approximately 2 months of development since Per
+l
5.16.1 and contains approximately 740 lines of changes across 20 files
from 9 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers. The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.16.2:

Andy Dougherty, Craig A. Berry, Darin McBride, Dominic Hargreaves, Kar
+en
Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Peter Martini, Ricardo Signes, Tony Cook.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

We expect to release Perl 5.17.6 on November 11, 2012.  The next major
stable release of Perl 5, version 5.18.0, should appear in May 2013.
[download]

Update: 5.16.2 delta pod

I've put together an animation of 18 months of CPAN growth (1.5 years in 1.5 minutes) as illustrated by the Map of CPAN.

• Read the announcement
• Go straight to the movie

In breaking financial news:

The bank launched PERLS VI as a replacement for the $1.46 billion Perls IV

It seems the CBA have invented yet another backronym for Perl: "Perpetual Exchangeable Resaleable Listed Securities".

On the behalf of the developers and contributors team, I'm pleased to announce that DBD::Firebird v1.11 , a DBI driver for the Firebird RDBMS server is released.

This release brings many changes.and bugfixes .

* Test::Exception is required 
* On freebsd Threaded perl is required you have to re-install perl from ports and you have to select the config option that says 'build a perl with threads'
* Test database to use UTF8 charset and enable UTF8 for the connection
* Fix CHAR lenght when using multi-byte character set Fixes Github Issue #32 (RT#76506)
* additional debug when finishing already finished statement
* avoid double destroying of statement in auto-commit mode with DDL Fixes Github Issue #30 (RT#72946)

The development is on GitHub at: https://github.com/mariuz/perl-dbd-firebird And the mailing list is here

Thank you,

http://www.cpan.org/

I am working on a Gtk3 Perl tutorial and would appreciate some feedback and comments on the code examples. This is an amateur effort largely designed to teach me Gtk3/Perl, if it is helpful to others thats a bonus.

Anyone willing to give some constructive feedback will find the first few chapters at https://github.com/kevinphilp/Perl-gtk3-Tutorial

Thanks

Its back :) http://www.citrusperl.com/citrus_perl/2012/08/citrus-perl-5161-released.html

Now also hosted on http://sourceforge.net/projects/citrusperl/files/

And Cava Packager 2.0.80 Released

This year's Plat_Forms contest is coming up soon (too soon!) Anyone want to join in the fun and compete against other Perl teams and languages?

Details: http://perlnews.org/2012/08/plat_forms-deadline-2012/

Remember, back in the day, when Piers Cawley did regular summaries of the discussion on Perl 6 mailing lists?

Perl 6 discussion is now almost all on the freenode IRC channel #perl6. Lots is going on. A weekly highlights summary might be useful, at least to current sixians, and perhaps beyond.

So, I've just done #perl6 highlights; week ending 2012-08-18 as a starter. I plan to keep doing this weekly for a while.

Just ran across this in a blog and I just want to share a great example of how to use the Statistics::Descriptive Perl module. I use this module in all of my reporting functions for clients.

http://perlgems.blogspot.com/2012/05/computing-descriptive-statistics-with.html

  Don't you know?  You never split the party
  Clerics in the back to keep those fighters hale and hearty
  The wizard in the middle, where he can shed some light
  And you never let that damn thief out of sight…

    -- Emerald Rose, Never Split The Party

We are pleased to announce Perl 5.16.1, the second stable release of
Perl 5.16.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.16.1 from your favorite CPAN
mirror or find it at:
[download]

SHA1 digests for this release are:

  14955f9869eef5029fea7fcc48d0b2afabb16d1e perl-5.16.1.tar.bz2
  60f2b81e3ffaff3030962ccbc02cd04f91f69ad5 perl-5.16.1.tar.gz

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" locate
+d in
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Perl 5.16.1 represents approximately 2 months of development since Per
+l
5.16.0 and contains approximately 14,000 lines of changes across 96
files from 8 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers. The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.16.1:

Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Father Chrysostomos, Karl
Williamson, Paul Johnson, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Tony Cook.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

We expect to release Perl 5.16.2 around November 1, 2012.

-- 
rjbs
[download]