jQuery lovers: this little distinction got me this morning, even though I should know it already. I’d explain it here, but the linked article does a fine job.

Addendum: is it still worth using a JS abstraction library like jQuery? Yes.

I am writing this post in hopes that the next poor Google searcher… if they can search at all… finds the solution quicker than I did. Sure, it only took me about a half hour, but that’s a lifetime these days.

So my mouse stops working on the MacBook Pro. Oh, I can move it around alright. I can move it around all day and night. I just can’t frakking click. The left-click won’t work but the right-click (I have a two button Bluetooth mouse) will. It’s amazing how quickly one realizes that Right Click isn’t fit to iron Left Click’s pants in the morning, when Left Click isn’t working.

OK. This is just something wrong with that Bluetooth mouse, right? So I try the trackpad. Same behavior… I can move that cursor around wherever I like, but clicking is futile. If you think this won’t make a grown man cry, you weren’t in my basement tonight.

Luckily, my keyboard still worked. So with a little ALT-TAB I could get into my browser, tab around to the location field (thanks Chrome!) and do a Google search on this shiz.

Lots of talk about Bluetooth devices… Bluetooth devices in the next room, Bluetooth devices in the work bag, Bluetooth devices leaning up against stuff with their buttons getting pushed.

Makes sense. So I turn off the power on my Bluetooth mouse. No difference. I yank the USB piece that talks to Bluetooth mouse. No difference… trackpad still produces barren clicks. So I yank every peripheral I have connected…. firewire hard drives, USB hub, audio system, second display. NO DIFFERENCE. A ZOMBIE IS LIVING IN MY MAC AND FEEDING ON ITS LEFT CLICK LIKE BRAINS.

The solution I finally arrived at after more searching, thank you keyboard I love you, was to disable Bluetooth entirely at the command line. This is the same thing as unchecking ‘On’ in System Preferences -> Bluetooth, but trying doing THAT with Left Click pacing the picket line.

COMMAND-SPACE got me into Spotlight, where I typed “Terminal”, arrowed down and hit ENTER. Now at the command line, I typed:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth “ControllerPowerState” -bool FALSE

That turned Bluetooth OFF… sort of. That turns the preference off, but to kill any existing Bluetooth connections dead, a little more magic is required:

sudo killall -SIGHUP blued

And with that: my trackpad was restored to normal. I’m pretty happy with my trackpad at this very moment, but I’m sure I’ll start using Bluetooth devices again… with the above experience in the back of my mind.

A: However many are needed to program the new Philips iOS SDK for light bulbs…

The Perl programming language turns 25 today. Little did I know when I was 12 years old that I would learn a language being birthed at that moment, and pursue a career in speaking it.

Here is a tribute to / history of Perl’s first 25 years.

Long live!

Day 1

git

It is Monday morning, and I am attending a(nother) tutorial on git (Get Better at Git). I am fully convinced that git is a better tool than Subversion at this point; I am also convinced it’s harder to fully understand and use. How these things can both be true speaks to the complexity of managing source code. It’s pretty clear that in a highly collaborative project, git is the way to go. That isn’t to say there aren’t thousands of projects using Subversion successfully, but, mastery of git would certainly reduce the pain in reaching the same success.

But mastery of git takes time. Fluency takes time. It occurs to me that the quickest path to fluency is immersion, and taking one or two classes on git does not immersion make. I do long, at times, to work in a hardcore dev shop to become fluent in git… just as I long, yet more often, to live in Quebec City or Paris and become fluent in French.

Moose

My Monday afternoon session is on Moose, the most popular set of modules that extends Perl’s object support. As with git, I won’t write all my technical notes here… I’m just going to soak it in. Immerse myself as it were for the three hours I’ll have.

Okay I lied. I am already sort of liking Moose. When defining an object, you can label its attributes (think ‘values’) as ‘ro’ (read-only) or ‘rw’ (guess), make any of them required, and strongly type them. This is really fantastic. Honestly, I am often fairly lazy on the server side when it comes to validation, having already done the work on the client end in Javascript to try and assure the right values come in. But the client side is not completely in a developer’s controlling hands, so, it cannot be relied upon. Granted, Moose will crash your program if your constraints are violated, but I’d rather crash in such event than enter into an unexpected state.

I’m tempted to rejigger my Remedy and Pinnacle modules to use Moose, but I sort of hope I can get away with Moose::Lite. Performance won’t be much of an issue running atop FastCGI, but the dependency tree for Moose proper is massive, and I don’t want to acquire that much baggage quite yet.

But dang, Moose is neat. I love the concept of ‘advise’. This is a kind of flow control in object land. You can define what happens ‘before’ or ‘after’ a method is run, or even wrap a method with ‘around’ if you need access to its internals. The best analogy I can make is probably applicable to object orientation in general… it’s like stuffing your money deeper in your pocket so it has less chance of falling out. Substitue ‘logic’ for ‘money’.

When you have a class that inherits from more than one, it is called ‘diamond’ or ‘multiple inheritance’. It’s dodgy and error prone. Moose solves this with the concept of ‘roles’. I’m trying to wrap my mind around this, but it seems as though a role is a kind of validation for the relationship between classes. Ah: it enables horizontal code reuse (roles and classes) rather than strictly vertical (classes and sub-classes). Apparently, using roles in Moose is far more common than subclassing at all.

Moose finally broke my mind this afternoon. Much of this I’d need to work with to begin to understand.

Day 2

Modern Perl

Tuesday morning and I am pleased to be attending New Features of the Modern Perls by Damian Conway. Damian’s talks are worth the price of admission in themselves and everything else is gravy.

Something I did not know: when upgrading from 5.8, any XS modules you use need to be recompiled for any new version of Perl you move to. Damian is making a plea for Perl developers to upgrade, commenting that the Perl community will only be supporting the latest release and the previous two releases… meaning, security updates only for older versions of Perl. This means if you encounter an obscure, non-security related bug in an older version of Perl, it may not get fixed, and more importantly, module authors will be requiring more recent versions of Perl and the CPAN will move past you. He recommends targeting 5.14 at this time.

Interestingly, to preserve backward compatibility, you must enable new features explicitly in Perl versions starting with 5.10. This is to prevent new keywords from accidentally clashing with user subroutine names. But if you’re ready to move forward, you can enable all features in addition to requiring a minimum version of Perl simply with:

use v5.14

Now he’s making me want to upgrade just to use say (which is print with an implicit newline). Also, smartmatching (the new ~~ operator) is brilliant, a feature Damian invented for Perl. Another double-character operator added to recent Perls is //, the defined-or operator, which is better for setting default values (as below) than using ||, because || tests for true/false, not defined-ness.

my $number = $number // 42;

The above case would assign $number a value of 0 if it had started off that way, whereas using || would have seen a 0 as false and assigned $number the 42.

Damian on Moose: “It annoys me just enough so that I don’t want to use it.” Now, he also has a lot to say in favor of Moose, but mostly complains of the startup time and isn’t crazy about the declaration syntax.

Another very cool feature in recent Perls is named captures out of regexes… numbered captures are too easy to get wrong. Think using named parameters to pass to subroutines instead of an order-dependent array. It’s just better.

jQuery Mobile

My Tuesday afternoon session is on jQuery Mobile. It’s safe to assume that I’ll be building some mobile apps in the coming decade, and this is one of my likely tools. If I remain at the University during that time, jQuery Mobile is a *more* likely platform than native applications targeted to iOS, Android or some other emerging mobile OS. That is, unless successful alum donate a native apps development budget. But that wouldn’t be the best use of money, would it?

I’ve been following the jQuery projects (core, jQueryUI, and now jQuery Mobile) pretty closely for the past few years, and now load core and UI by default in my webstuff. Bring mobile into the mix is the logical next step. I already have an idea of the app I want to write… but have a ton of backend work to complete before I get proper access to the data I need. I suppose that shouldn’t stop me from prototyping the front end… in my free time (stop laughing).

Day 3

Day 3 begins the shorter sessions of the conference proper, following the keynotes. They had the mayor this year, who proclaimed Portland an ‘open source city’, and who made some funny jokes. There were some other semi-inspiring appearances amongst the keynotes, but as I decided to watch instead of type, I don’t have the time to relay these now.

Perl 5 Today, Tomorrow and Christmas is the first session I am attending this morning. Ricardo Signes is the current Perl 5 project lead (Pumpking), so you might call him a reliable source on the subject. He was also the guy who presented on Moose a couple days ago.

This is mostly a talk about the challenges in managing the Perl project, most of which (surprise!) are human in nature. Apparently the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list is a great place to get into an argument but not always a great place for a Pumpking to spend his days. There is a lot of talk at these conferences about ‘getting along’ in open source communities. Now he’s making an analogy I’ve often thought of, that of software coming about via ‘intelligent evolution’… a mix between intelligent design and evolution.

Next up, Programming In The Future, a look at how the craft might evolve in the next 25 years through the lens of how Perl has evolved over the past 25. This turned out to be a nit of a meandering talk, but included an interesting history of the most significant moments in Perl history, 1987 to present. It’s hard to imagine you couldn’t write a Perl module until 1994. Now he’s talking about parallel and functional programming, two somewhat advanced programming tasks that people seem to imagine becoming easier in the future, and some examples of how we do these things in Perl today.

Another yummy lunch, this one thanks to Google, and now I am in Test Driven UI Development. This is a very challenging endeavor. This talk centers on a toolset from the Java/Groovy world, but which could be applied to other platforms. I must say though: I cannot watch much of this test-driven development stuff without being secretly glad I don’t do it. I just seems like another codebase to maintain, which itself would always be breaking, perhaps saving me an error here or there, but which would in general dilute my productivity. It is interesting to see the speaker write the test before he writes the HTML for a simple form, though, complete with human readable comments… all very nice documentation. The notion of ‘testable code’ is about being able to select the elements in the DOM that you need to test, so, jQuery-like, you may be adding ids, but in this case, perhaps only to select them in the test suite. Dear me. The speaker discourages uses CSS classes as selectors in your test suite, because you may have front end developers mucking with class names. He mentions testing AJAX can be tricky, which I would have guessed, but that you can access return methods with jQuery and similar in order to check success in many cases.

To finish off the day, I’m attending The Conway Channel, another Damian Conway talk. Entertaining as expected, and I immediately went to play with IO::Prompter and Lingua::EN::Inflect, two of the modules he has updated this year. However IO::Prompter required Perl 5.10+, so… heck, why have I been putting off trying Perlbrew so I can run any version of Perl that I want? Now building and compiling 5.14.2. :)

Day 4

Thursday morning and I had been planning to attend this EFF session, but it was full. So I walked around the Expo Hall, checked out the booths, grabbed some stickers and pens, that kind of stuff.

Next up is the long awaited Taming Perl Regexes, another Damian Conway talk, in which he will is launching a tool called ‘rxrx’ that he had hinted at in the video he sent to YAPC::NA. It’s an incredible debugger for regular expressions, installable from CPAN as Regexp::Debugger. I will try to post a short screen cap of this tool at work once I get it installed.

I’m starting my afternoon with Advanced MySQL Replication Architectures, presented by some Oracle guys. So far this is high-level view of different replication architectures; I was hoping for a little how-to with some commands. Oh well, sometimes you hit a session that isn’t what you’re looking for.

Next up is Cooking Perl with Chef, which I have high hopes for. Having used Perlbrew for the first time today, I am feeling bold about tossing Perl itself around. Here are the problems and their solutions as presented:

• application-specific Perl: Perlbrew
• application-specific @INC Path: local::lib
• versioned application code: git, SVN, etc.
• versioned module dependencies: Carton
• automate the previous four: Chef (scripted using Ruby)

Chef usually requires a server of its own, but if you want to save on that overhead and only have a handful of nodes to deploy to, you can use Chef Solo. Still, I think Chef would be the last piece I’d add to this puzzle, if at all, considering that I already have a scripted deployment routine that is beginning to pull all the same levers and push the same buttons. But adding Perlbrew and Carton (which leverages local::lib) are musts. Hopefully I’ll be deploying with those within a year. We’ll see!

These last session I am attending today is What Every Web Developer Should Know About Database Optimization. This was largely review for me, but I did get a reminder that occasionally JOIN order could be important, and oddly enough, yet another warning about ORMs. Object Relational Mappers can be hell on your database, especially if you don’t give the proper cues, similar to how you’d optimize SQL, just not directly. Explain to me why I want to use an ORM, again? (I know, I know…)

At 7pm (PST of course) is Larry Wall’s State of the Onion address, the official update on Perl’s present and future, but I’m whupped.

Day 5

I skipped the keynotes this morning in favor of a long breakfast. This last day is a half day of sessions.

The first for me is another database session: Optimizing MySQL Configuration. Thus far we’re getting a list of optimizations not to try. The

mysqltuner

utility sounds worth trying out. Here’s an interesting recommendation: set skip_name_resolve to 1 and don’t use hostnames in GRANTs. It makes sense that skipping name lookups would increase performance a tad, but, it also increases your administrative overhead in maintaining IP addresses in GRANTs, since IPs change more often than names. Now we are going over the million and one configuration variables available to change in MySQL, many of which are MyISAM or InnoDB dependent (this had me detouring to a storage engine comparison since I have been using MyISAM all this time).

I don’t think I’d like to be the steward of a large database that was always needing tuning. It seems so fiddly.

Next up, some attention to the front end of things after dwelling on the back end for while: Designing HTML5 Components. Okay, this was not what I expected at all. He is using a Java framework called Vaadin (the Finnish word for ‘reindeer’) and the goal is apparently to create reusable web components. This is really yet another web framework, this one from Java land, and by reusable he means, reusable in this particular framework’s ecosystem. You write in Java, and it compiles some Javascript for each of your target browsers. Pretty slick, but you’ve got to go ‘all in’ to get the bennies.

The last session I am attending this OSCON is Instantly Better Vim. Another Damian Conway talk, a longer version of which I’ve previously attended, but let’s face it… I still haven’t adopted most of the Vim tricks he taught me the first time, and I could use a refresher.

Wow… by the end of this conference, word has gotten around about Damian’s talks. He is just too entertaining to miss. They had to get a second room and pull out the wall to accomodate his final talk. And as usual he sent me away wanting to try some Vim tricks right away.

Well, that was my OSCON 2012. As usual, a very well organized event, chock full of learning and networking opportunities, jobs for those that want them, and generalized geeky inspiration. I often find myself back in the hotel room coding, or tucked away somewhere in the conference hall, slowly exploring some of the new ideas I’ve been exposed to. Thanks to UNH for my funding.

Since 2007, I have followed the Perl community to Houston, Pittsburgh, Asheville NC, and today: Madison, WI. This is YAPC::NA, Yet Another Perl Conference, North America, and as usual I will try my best to “live blog” it for posterity.

This year, though, there is a yet higher res option available to you: the entire event will be live streamed. Rock on. There’s no substitue for being here, but the streams should be a close second.

UPDATE (6/25): They are now posting the presentation videos, in retrospect, on YouTube.

The first two days of the conference are ‘hackathon’ days; those working on open source projects together presumably do this, while others take the opportunity to socialize, work on work-work, and genrally begin to get their geek on in the company of like-minded free software folk.

Below the break, live-ish blogging. No auto-refresh; that’s on you. :)

You may also enjoy a few pictures I took of scenes I saw in Madison.

——-
Day 3 (regular sessions)

9:11pm: The conference is now over, but I just had great Hibachi at a Japanese restaurant on Madison’s State Street, complete with preparation performance and fire. Best meal I’ve had in recent memory.

5:11pm: Larry Time was a question and answer session, which turned out to be just as rewarding as a prepared speech. Larry is brilliant in a very interdisciplinary way… which may be redundant, considering brilliance might be something about integrating disparate ideas. But it strikes me that Larry Wall’s approach to designing Perl has been integral to its success, in that, he made it capable of great things while maintaining an easy, unintimidating on-ramp for newbies. This was evident in one his responses to a computer science guy, whose question I won’t embarrass myself by paraphrasing.

Following Larry was Damian Conway, who sent a prepared video in his absence. He is working on an amazing tool called rxrx (regular expression diagnostics– the name itself is genius) which actually shows you, visually, Perl’s thinking process as it attempts to match a string you provide with a regex you provide. This is nothing short of magick, and he hopes to release it by OSCON next month.

3:24pm: At long last… it’s Larry Time.

2:24pm: Time for Web Security 101. Please don’t be totally scared; I do know a little about the subject. But if you’re doing this stuff professionally, you can never attend too many ’101′ sessions on security. A tidbit you might have missed just may be shared.

I am going to bullet point these tidbits today, as many as I can keep up with:

• whitelist inputs, don’t blacklist
• no easy solutions. Security is everywhere.
• Perl has an excellent security track record, but know your tools. PHP, really, does not. (conference bias? not really)
• FILE::SPEC->no_upwards($path) to scrub input to be used for system commands. Nice. Taint mode won’t catch this on its own, it’ll just force you to have a look at the inputs in question. This one is going on the to-do.
• Bind variables to prevent SQL injections. Check.
• Interesting, you cannot leverage bind variables with LIMIT (a MySQL-ism), but since LIMIT value must be a number, this is be easy enough to sanitize on your own.
• Wow. Paul Fenwick just picked out a potential security exploit in a code example, involving the possibility of a list coming in from CGI as opposed to a single value on a param. I bow now.
• Now, XSS. Escape HTML characters on output, but not necessarily when storing it. Never output user-entered event handling, etc.
• CSRF. Block important actions that don’t come from HTTP-REFERER that is you. Not always possible because sometimes you actually wan to support remote actions. You can also use per-user-request tokens which can help block CSRF attacks, but there is a tradeoff on how long these should be valid for.
• DOS. Denyhosts and such at the host level, but stopping DOS at the network level is more effective.
• DDOS. There are appliances as well as services that can help detect distributed denial of service, because this is hard. The services will often be aware of known botnets, which can be handy.
• Buffer overflows. Use vetted, open software if it is written in C. Write your own C at your own peril, if it is internet exposed.
• Salted hashes and rainbow tables. LinkedIN, we’re looking at you. Crypt::PBKDF2 does automatic salting and multiple iterations. That’s going on the to-do. A bit of discussion on the pain in converting to new encryption, considering you can’t revere engineer even your older, weaker hashes.
• Avoid leaking information through error messages (especially in production). Bill Costa handles this nicely in a module of his that I use. Thanks Bill.

Great security war story was just told, about using mod_rewrite to reflect DDOS attacks back on the attackers.

Talk is over. Well worth attending. I got two to-do’s out of this. Worth the price of the conference alone.

1:38pm: I am now in The Lacuna Expanse. Well, not literally, because that is in a galaxy far, far away. How cool is this. A massive, multiplayer game written in Perl. They have a web client, a desktop client, an iPhone client, and a command line client. Said ‘wow’ yet?

Without sharing everything we learned about the stack this game is built on, I have to observe: games are among the more impressive technological achievements in programming. Really. Most completely wipe the floor with any business app I’ve ever seen. I guess (coding) time flies when you’re having (even more) fun.

11:30am: Next up, Baby XS To Get You Started. XS is the way to write a Perl module that is actually much faster C code. CSV_XS, mentioned below, is one of these. This is interesting because, within XS, you are not locked into pure C. You can leverage many of Perl’s niceties, you just have to use the ‘perlguts’ functions, which are not by the same names as Perl’s userspace keyword functions, but provide that same support.

XS is definitely advanced stuff, but if your journeys in Devel::NYTProf reveal a bottleneck that is Perl itself, converting that code to XS may be an option to speed things up. Inline::C actually loads XS support and dynamically links it, so you throw around C code in your scripts at will, should you be so incline… of course, in that case, you are not building a module, you’re writing one-offs.

11:10am: I am currently attending Refactoring Perl Code. He begins with the risk/benefit analysis of doing so, and the importance of a test suite if you are refactoring a large codebase. The perils of global replace are now being mentioned, such as when changing variable names.

9:55am: Now: Introduction to Performance Tuning Perl Web Applications. This could prove interesting, since my only true adventures in performance tuning involved implementing FastCGI and rewriting some narsty SQL statements. Yes, that’s ‘narsty’, as ‘nasty’ does no justice to some of the sub-selects I have attempted.

As might be expected, Devel::NYTProf has a big place in this talk, as this module has been “the only game in town” for some years now. I don’t use it yet, because I mostly support *relatively* low traffic, internally used applications.

The speaker got a good chuckle out of the crowd with this one: “Now that you have this awesome Perl profiling tool… ” Next slide: IT’S PROBABLY YOUR DATABASE. Oh so true. SQL can be narsty. He recommends pt-query-advisor for MySQL, part of the Percona toolkit. He is also mentioning having to escape your ORM (object-relational mapper) in many cases, due to performance issues, which I’m sure I have mentioned before is one of my reasons for still having avoided ORMs.

DBI tip: for large numbers of inserts and updates, managing your db commits can speed you up immensely. That is, if things like LOAD_INFILE or CSV_XS aren’t options. Those will always be faster.

He is now addressing caching, which will make your code more complex, because you have to track your data dependencies and invalidate portions of the cache in order to pick up changes… lordy lord, please don’t let performance issues ever lead me down this path. If they do however, the speaker is recommending the CHI module from CPAN to help manage this stuff.

Now, the requisite mentions of the persistent daemon environments: FastCGI, mod_perl, and Plack. Implementing FastCGI was definitely of the best decisions I ever made. Snappety snap snap page loads. Yum. I can still remember my initial joy over whatever X-Mas break I did that on.

“A boatload of RAM hides a multitude of sins.” SSDs, too. Of course, you need to know where your bottleneck is in order to throw the right hardware at it.

9:00am: After falling off the blogging wagon yesterday, here I am again to report on the final day of what has been (yet!) another great Perl conference.

First up this morning: Utils Are Your Friends. The ‘Util’ family of modules is one of the oldest, comprised of things that weren’t in Perl core… some of the ‘one more thing’ features. Perl core since 5.10 actually does contain features previously only support by Util modules, but Util still does many things that core does not.

Some extended discussion of inside-out classes now. Apparently Scalar::Util provides the tools to make this more possible. Using inside-out classes has something to do with a module author wanting to better protect the data stored in an object. The concept was invented (in Perl) by DBI author Tim Bunce.

Wow: This does not work (in all cases):

# check for number
if ( $var =~ m/^\d+/ ) {

… there is actually a Scalar::Util function to do this for you in a more reliable and way more readable way:

# really check for a number, in all exotic cases (avoiding 'false' positives)
if ( looks_like_number($var) ) {

There is also ‘set_prototype’ which allows you to override a sub’s prototype. The speaker calls into question if prototypes are even a good idea. Being able to override them makes the idea seem worse. But I’m going to admit right here that I still don’t completely grasp the pros and cons of this. I have yet to use prototypes myself.

Day 2 (regular sessions)

6:10pm: Blogging lapsed today, as I lapsed into some work that needed to be done. See you tomorrow.

11:50am: Okay, it was entirely review. But that’s ok, since I can barely focus my eyes at this point. Time for a much needed lunch break.

11:23am: And now, Intro To Writing Perl Documentation. I already know me some POD (Perl’s ‘Plain Old Documentation’ markup), but this won’t be entirely review.

11:11am: PhoneGap is a nice cross-platform, HTML5 platform. Not quite as fast or feature-complete as native development, but pretty good. This is almost certainly the way I’d go. I’d never have time for native mobile app development in my current role. Neat little demo of using an Android API key and a small Perl script to send an alert to the phone. Android and iOS do this quite similarly, we are told.

11:00am: Next up, Perl, Mobile App. Glue. Despite being smartphone-free myself, I’d love to mess with mobile apps and increase the joy of others. The Perl is essentially for web services, regarding phone apps. Perl will only run on jailbroken phones.

“PHP is Perl’s ugly, fat sister”. Ouch! (May be worth pointing out that ‘fat’ is not used spuriously, but refers to a rather bloated function namespace in the PHP language.)

He’s lapsing a bit into mobile app marketing right now.

10:57am: git will definitely be a commitment to learn, and is a fairly big paradigm shift from centralized version control systems like Subversion (SVN). Great talk though… I am certainly closer to Grokville than I was before. Maybe I can spend some time on #git IRC and hitchhike into town.

10:18am: It was a late one at the club last night, so the man snoring loudly in this git presentation will be forgiven. :)

8:57am: Git: a brief introduction is the first session I will be attending this morning. As an SVN user, I am already behind the times. Still, I’ve met quite a few folks still on SVN here. As Randal commented last night however, “those who swear by SVN, swear at SVN”. True, true.

I’ll be trying pretty hard to absorb the information at this talk, similar to yesterday’s CPAN talk, so I’m not sure how much will be written here about it.

Day 1 (regular sessions)

4:26pm: CPAN session done. That was quite a brain dump, and I mostly kept up. Am I an expert CPAN uploader yet? Not quite. But this is a great head start. I thanked Brian for the session and told him it really ought to be standard at every Perl conference. Facility with CPAN is definitely a barrier to entry for contributing.

2:31pm: Brian d Foy is now giving a hands-on CPAN authors class. I may not be blogging this much, but doing what he says instead.

1:33pm: Lunch has been had, after which I got caught up in work-work for a bit. This is pretty common for programmers here, as the world doesn’t stop for conferences.

So, I am coming in late to 29 Ways To Get Started In open Source Today. The speaker, Andy Lester, the speaker, has written quite a bit on this topic, on his blog. He is also the author of ack among other things, and the maintainer of Perlbuzz blog. He preaches how low the bar to open source contribution is, including simply submitting bug reports, doing translations, adding to existing bug reports, closing tickets, and the like.

11:31am: I am now at a session entitled The Perl from Ipanema. I am here as an Antonio Carlos Jobim fan. Only partially kidding, there. And no, I am not intentionally avoiding the more technical sessions, it’s just happening that way so far.

I’ve long noticed that Latin America is huge on open source adoption and contribution. Brasil (do English speakers really need to use a ‘z’?) is no exception. It’s the 5th largest country in the world, and the 6th biggest economy (and rising).

And now, to Perl. The language’s usage growth in Brasil has mirrored its growth elsewhere… originally a tool reached for primarily by sysadmins, and a strong presence in biochemical research. There are 13 Perl Monger groups in the country now, and growing (3 new groups this year).

‘Only’ 24% of Brasilians in IT speak any English at all, and that’s often very little. Spoken language can certainly be a barrier when trying to work in a common computer language. The speaker’s English is impeccable though.

They give free courses in Perl at universities in Brasil. Not sure how common this is, but as a fellow American pointed out, we don’t do that here.

11:02am: Next up: There’s More Than One Way To Run A Project: The Apache Way. This talk relates to some of the points in the keynote, specifically that dictatorship is not the only way. The Apache Software Foundation actually shepherds many more projects than just the Apache web server. They take of legal issues, project trademarks, marketing, project governance, and the like. In short, the Apache Foundation provides at least one model for how to effectively run a large open source effort.

Amongst all Apache Foundation-governed projects (current count, 102), the average contribution rate is about 1 commit (to version control) every 4 minutes. Pretty impressive activity there. Subversion itself is an Apache project.

Companies and organizations may donate, but they may not join. Every member of the Apache Software Foundation is an individual.

10:33am: The first session I am attending is Get More Out Of Your Meetings. This is a collection of suggestions for keeping meetings swift and productive… running them almost like lightning talks (30-60 seconds per team lead, timed, for a daily update meeting). Cancel if you need to, don’t be shy. Don’t be late. Most of the suggestions seem obvious, yet, they bear reminding. I think we all continue to waste quite a bit of time at meetings.

9:29am: Now Michael Schwern, with the keynote. He takes the podium to the tune of the Star Wars theme. He’s focusing on the gender gap in the Perl community, and in open source. Other gaps, too… but gender being perhaps the most obvious. He suggests that there are more ‘Michaels’ here than women. Funny, but likely true. He’s doing a pretty good job of alternating the seriousness of the topic with jokes. He’s now comparing Kirk and Picard, and how the world has changed between generations of Star Trek. There is rarely a second to forget that we are at a geek conference here. :)

“Perl has become an aristocracy.” CPAN module maintenance is done by dictators, who pass the baton to the next dictators. Schwern prefers a meritocracy, despite being one of those dictators. Picards (meetings, collaboration, merit) are better than Kirks (mavericks).

I hope some folks are live streaming this. I can do it no justice. Schwern is funny, on point and brilliant. Handles metaphor deftly.

9:23am: Now Karen Pauley, Perl Foundation President.

“There are very few people in the world capable of working on the Perl 5 core.” I’d believe that. That’s a lot of C. That’s a lot of backward compatibility.

9:17am: Beer on the roof of the Pyle Center tonight, sponsored by Linode. Game Night and MST3K-style Movies tomorrow, sponsored by Cpanel.

9:05am: We’re getting started. Time to thank some sponsors (more than ever it seems?). JT Smith tells us that YAPC::NA has sold out this year, as YAPC::Asia does every year, apparently. There are 446 people here. I again have YAPC staff-shirt envy, as it is a mix of the Grateful Dead / Perl Onion logo.

They have cool raffles going this year, to raise money for The Perl Foundation. I put in $5 for a chance at ‘Lunch with Larry (Wall)’. Wish me luck!

Paul Irish tends to say smart things; he does it again when considering web content accessibility.

As he concludes, accessibility shouldn’t be an opt-in proposition, it should be opt-out, if anything. Browsers should have better accessibility built in; wouldn’t the world be a better place if accessible renderings were more often the default?

Courtesy of govtech.com:

Many of you know the adage; but learning it anew can still be fun.

I had to trim leading and trailing whitespace in Perl. So:

# strip any leading or trailing whitespace
$string =~ s/^\s+//;
$string =~ s/\s+$//;

No prob.

Then I made the mistake I often make, and started thinking. Two lines for that? Please. That can be done in one line, especially in Perl. So I found this:

$string =~ s/^\s*(\S*(?:\s+\S+)*)\s*$/$1/;

Yuck! Oh well, at least it probably runs faster.

Think again.

Or better yet, Marcus, just stop thinking altogether. This one-liner idea would have made the routine both slower and less readable for the next person (notice I forgot the #comment the second time).

Here’s a cute joke my stepfather sent me; I’m not sure where to credit it, so if you know, please comment. It’s an anecdote, reminding us how great engineering looks so effortless that others suspect the engineer of being lazy. Or maybe it’s reminding us how to extort our former employer. But no need to quibble.

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired.

Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion dollar machines.

They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, “This is where your problem is.”

The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again.

The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service.

They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.

The engineer responded briefly:

“One chalk mark $1. Knowing where to put it $49,999″