If you have a Perl-related news item you'd like to share, you may post it in the Perl Newssection.
Please try to avoid duplicating news; but pointers (with summaries) to important stories on other sites are acceptable here.
In time for christmas (depending on your time zone and definition of christmas) I'd like to draw your attention to the Perl 6 Coding Contest 2011.
5 tasks await for the eager contestant, with varying difficulty. Those who want to explore interesting problems and use or learn Perl 6 are very welcome to try their hands, and have a chance of winning 100€ worth of books from Amazon.
"Forget the Great Wall of China - I can see CPAN from up here and and that thing is huge!"
- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut
CPAN is big. In fact it's so big you almost need a map. Well I'm happy to announce that now there is one! I present for your entertainment and edification - the Map of CPAN.
The Map of CPAN is really just meant to be a bit of fun. Search sites like
search.cpan.org and the shiny new metacpan.org exist to help you find what you’re looking for. The Map of CPAN allows you to find things you weren’t looking for. Zoom in on things that catch your eye.
Explore patterns. Follow links and dependency chains. Discover stuff. Surprise
yourself. It’s about serendipity!Try it.
Today, during their end of the year event, Booking.com announced their donation of
EUR 100,000 to the Perl5 Maintenance Fund. This is on top of the donation of USD 10,000 that was announced during YAPC::NA 2011. And more than double the USD 50,000 that was donated three years ago.
TPF president Karen Pauley and former perl5 pumpking Jesse Vincent were present to receive the cheque.
Hands up who is frustrated that mainstream Linux distros rarely contain the latest stable release of Perl?
Today I installed the current alpha release of the next Ubuntu LTS Precise Pangolin. I was pleased to discover that the included version of perl is 5.14.2
This is especially significant because Ubuntu 12.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release which will be recommended for servers, and will get 5 years of support till April 2017. By that time Perl 5.14 will be quite old, but those of us in the perl community who are supporting Ubuntu server installations in 5 years time will be thankful that it is not an even older release.
Edit: Just to be clear, I do not speak for Ubuntu, so this is not official, just my observation.
May your next 50 years be at least as pleasant and interesting as the past ones!
You will be wandering through them maybe with less physical strength and vigour, but with more wisdom and insight. May your labouring be as valuable as it has been since, and to the benefit of yourself and all those who cross your ways. And may you remain a highly honored member of the perl community, which you helped building, for the benefit of all of us.
I'm pleased to announce that the PerlNights Public BETA is now open over at PerlNights.com
Written in aXML, PerlNights is both a demonstration of the aXML software, and an attempt to provide a new social network for Perl where innovation will be encouraged, not stifled.
Not all the features are complete yet, and there may still be bugs lurking in the code, however I don't expect it to take long before the site is 100% operational.
I'm a little surprised no one posted this before me, but over at Slashdot, there's an article about the latest version of Mojolicious being released. Haven't used it myself, so I have no input on its utility, but the folks at Slashdot who are familiar with it seem pretty excited.
When you want to deploy an application and its dependencies, and don't want to risk an incompatibility problem in case some CPAN modules have new versions, Tatsuhiko Miygawa wrote Carton. It looks really nice, see the presentation!
