Interview with Jason Stajich

A few weeks ago, Perlcast interviewed Jason Stajich. Jason is the President of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and a core developer for the BioPerl Project.

• Interview Audio


• BioPerl


• The Open Bioinformatics Foundation


• Pictures of developers and conferences

Interview with Peter Wainwright

In October, Perlcast interviewed Peter Wainwright about his latest book "Pro Perl". In the interview, we discuss the book of course, as well as, space tourism. Enjoy.

• Interview Audio


• Space Future

Questions for Chad Fowler

Later this week I'll be recording an interview with Chad Fowler, the author of "My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job". If you have any questions for Chad, post them here or send them to perlcast-at-gmail-dot-com.

Transcriptions!!!

First off, I'd like to give a big thanks to Ron Blaschke for offering to transcribe some of the Perlcast interviews. He finished the Richard Foley Interview, which you can find link locally here or at Richard's site, even in POD. Thanks again Ron, I know that many of the Perlcast listeners are happy to have this.

Questions for Bill Odom

Soon Bill Odom and I will be recording an interview for Perlcast, so here is your chance. If you have a question for Bill, post it here or send it to perlcast-at-gmail-dot-com. For those who don't know, Bill is the new president of The Perl Foundation and the author of Win32::ASP.

Interview with Richard Foley

Recently, Perlcast interviewed Richard Foley about his book "Pro Perl Debugging". In the interview Richard talks about the often overlooked Perl debugger.


The Garageband.com artist featured in this interview was the Lemmings with their track "evolution".

Interview Audio

Perl NOC

What makes Perl.org tick? Ask and Robert, of course. The rulers of the Perl NOC have agreed to be interviewed for Perlcast. Please post any questions that you have here or email them to perlcast-at-gmail-dot-com.

Slashwhat?

What do Slashdot and Use Perl have in common... well one thing is Chris Nandor. Chris has agreed to be interviewed for Perlcast, so if you have any questions that you would like to hear asked, post them as a comment here or email perlcast-at-gmail-dot-com.

Interview with Randal Schwartz

On October 26th 2006 I had a chance to interview Randal Schwartz, a key figure in the Perl community and author of countless books, articles, and web pages about Perl. In the interview, we talk about Randal's books, business, and a few Perl'isms that can be attributed to him.

Interview Audio

Perl News 2005-11-05

It has been way too long, but Perlcast is back with a Perl News Summary. Hopefully I can keep these coming out on a more regular schedule from now on.


Perl News Summary Audio


User Groups and Conferences

• Phoenix Perl Mongers Meeting


• Kansas City Perl Mongers: November Meetings


• YAPC::NA::2006 Venue Selected


• OSDC (Melbourne, Australia) open for registrations


• London Perl Workshop


• Perl Monger Census 2005


• Grand-Rapids.pm Call for Speakers

General News

• New CGI::Application Wiki Released


• Reinventing the wheel since 1995


• SPPN Camel Trophies


• TPF has new president, steering committee members


• New search engine for CPAN


• State of the Onion text


• State of the Onion audio

Perl.com Articles

• Making Sense of Subroutines


• Data Munging for Non-Programming Biologists

The GarageBand.com artist for this week is Mother Vinegar with their track "Gypusm Cave".

Interview with Chris Frenz

This Perlcast interview segment, recorded on October 12th 2005, is with Christopher M. Frenz. Chris recently authored "Pro Perl Parsing: Master parsing concepts and techniques using the Perl language.", a book published by Apress.

As a bonus, Apress will be giving away three copies of "Pro Perl Parsing". To enter the contest, simply listen to this interview and send an email to perlcast [at] gmail.com with the answer to the question: "Which is typically faster, a top-down or bottom-up parser?" Have your submissions in by October 20th 2005.

• Interview Audio

Perl News 2005-10-10

The time has finally come for Perlcast to release another Perl News Summary podcast. Links for all of the news items can be found in the listing below.

• Interview Audio


• YAPC::EU::2005 talks videos


• Perlmeme.org - a Site for Perl Beginners


• Missing Monger Groups


• YAPC::Europe::2006 - Birmingham Wins The Bid


• Parrot 0.3.0 "Alex" Release


• This Week on perl5-porters - 26 September-2 October 2005


• Annotating CPAN


• Nordic Perl Workshop 2005


• 3rd Hungarian Perl Workshop


• Making Menus with wxPerl


• Beta Broadcast 003: Good and Evil


• Optimizing Development For Fun

Interview with Andy Lester

Perlcast, the Perl podcast, back with an interview with Andy Lester. Andy is the new public relations representative for the Perl Foundation, a 2005 White Camel winner, creator of WWW::Mechanize, and an advocate for Perl Quality Assurance. Listen in for Andy's take on Perl and a little side note on Google's Summer of Code.

• Interview Audio


• The Perl Foundation


• WWW::Mechanize


• Perl QA


• Perl and SoC

UPDATED!! - Interview with Larry Wall

The original audio file had the final 13 minutes of the interview missing. The link is now updated.

At YAPC::NA 2005 Larry Wall agreed to sit down and talk a little about Perl. It's taken a while, but here is the audio. This one was interesting to record, as we were in the lobby of 89 Chestnut and picked up a bit of background noise. Not to mention, we were recording off of a single unidirectional microphone. Still, I'm pretty sure that it was focused on the right person :)

• Interview Audio
• Larry's (and fam's) spot on the web

Interview with Jesse Vincent

Well, I had to delay the release of my interview with Andy Lester for a few days, so I'm a little late getting out a replacement interview. But, better late then never. For this interview I speak with Jesse Vincent of Best Practical about his ticketing system, RT, and his new book, "RT Essentials".

• Interview Audio


• Best Practical


• RT


• RT Essentials

This one also has a contest announcement inside. Be sure to listen for your chance to win a copy of "RT Essentials".

Interview with Shane Caraveo

At OSCON 2005 I got to interview Shane Caraveo. Shane is a senior developer at ActiveState where he is the technical lead for the Komodo IDE. In the interview, we talk about Komodo and Perl.

Perl News 2005-09-26

Time for another Perl News Summary. Below are the links for the news. Be sure to check back in to catch interviews with Larry Wall, Andy Lester, and Shane Caraveo.

• 3rd Hungarian Perl Workshop


• Review of "Perl Best Practices"


• This Week on perl5-porters


• Perl Lightning Talks at EuroOSCON


• Lisbon Perl Mongers Social Meeting


• The State of the Onion 9

Questions Suggestions for Rocco Caputo

Soon I'll be speaking with Rocco Caputo, the creator and maintainer of POE, a portable multitasking and networking framework for Perl. Here is your chance to pass any questions that you might have on to me.

Adam Kennedy on PPI

Here is another interview recorded at OSCON 2005. This is a talk with Adam Kennedy about PPI, a way to parse, analyze and manipulate Perl without the Perl interpreter.

Perl News 2005-09-14

Oh how time flies by. It's been well over a week and I'm just now getting this out to you. Here is the Perlcast Perl News Summary for this week. The links to all the stories can be found below.

• YAPC::Europe::2006 in Birmingham, UK


• ABE.pm (Lehigh Valley) Meeting


• Nordic Perl Workshop 2005 - Call for papers


• Boston.pm meeting 9/13


• Perlcast: Conway Channel 2005


• Call for Papers, 8th German Perl-Workshop 2006


• Create your own "BackPAN"


• Data Center Day: Before and After


• Data Center Power Outage: Before and After


• Perl Internationalization and Haskell: An Interview with Autrijus Tang

Questions Suggestions for Bio-Perl

Sometime soon I'm going to get to speak with some of the core developers of BioPerl. I'm not exactly who all will be there, so I can't give any specific names now, but hopefully I can get at least a couple of people off of the core contributors list on the phone together. So, once again, it's your turn. Email or post your questions here.

Question Suggestions for Randal Schwartz

Hopefully in the very near future I'll be conducting an interview with Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge. Randal has had his hands in the writing of Learning Perl, Perls of Wisdom, Effective Perl Programming and Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules. He is also involved in many other aspects of the Perl world. So, here is your chance to have some input on the questions that will be asked. Shoot me an email or leave a comment.

Question Suggestions for Jesse Vincent

Next week I'm going to be talking with Jesse Vincent of Best Practical about RT and the new book that he co-authored, "RT Essentials". So, here is your chance to have some input on the questions that will be asked. Shoot me an email or leave a comment.

Question Suggestions for Andy Lester

This Friday I hope to get to sit down with Andy Lester and conduct an interview. Per request of a listener, I'm taking suggestions on what to ask interviewees. So, now is your chance. What do you want to ask Andy?

For those who don't already know, Andy is a very active member of the Perl community. He is really big into Perl quality assurance, including the Phalanx project. He has authored many modules, including WWW::Mechanize. The list goes on-and-on.

Conway Channel 2005

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention I was able to record Damian Conway presenting his Conway Channel 2005. In the talk, Damian unleashes a dozen new modules on the Perl community. Listen in to find out more.

Also, here are links to the modules that I noticed that he mentioned.

1. IO::Prompt


2. IO::Busy


3. Log::StdLog


4. Debug::Phases


5. Leading::Zeros


6. Sub::Installer


7. Regexp::MatchContext


8. Contextual::Return


9. Perl6::Export::Attrs


10. Config::Std


11. Getopt::Euclid


12. Perl6::Say


13. Smart::Comments


14. Toolkit

Casey West on JSAN

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Casey West and speak with him about JSAN, the JavaScript Archive Network. In the interview, Casey tells us why he started JSAN and how you can help out.

Perl News 2005-09-06

It is time for yet another Perlcast Perl News Summary podcast. This week, the Perl-specific news is a little light, but don't fret. There is quite a bit more Perl content coming out this week including an interview with Casey West about JSAN and a recording of The Conway Channel 2005 from OSCON.

Links for this week's Perl news summary:

• POD Indexing Project


• Toronto Perl Mongers - Audio Archive


• WebGUI Perl Code Execution Vulnerabilities


• Linux Magazine: Learning Perl


• The Perl Job site


• ACM Note on Katrina


• Perl Testing Contest Winners

Perl Testing Contest Winners

Congratulations to the Perl Testing contest winners. The winners were:

1. Len Jaffe of Columbus, Ohio, USA


2. Michael Hendricks of Laramie, Wyoming, USA


3. Peter Stuifzand of Veeningen, The Netherlands


4. Kim Ahlström of Åkersberga, Sweden


5. Veljko Vidovic of Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The questions and answers for each of the contests were:

1. 
   Perl’s documentation suggests using h2xs to create new modules. What module, that Ian and chromatic mention, is just a modern alternative for the h2xs method?
   
   • Module::Starter
   
   


2. 
   What is the full name of the protocol that Perl’s testing tools implement?
   
   • TAP - Test Anything Protocol
   
   


3. 
   Name three other languages that have ports of Perl’s testing tools.
   
   
   
   • Answers included C, Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Python. The Perl Testing authors specifically called out JavaScript, Python, Parrot/PIR, Perl 6, and C. I accepted just about anything... especially if proof was provided.
   
   
   
   


4. 
   What is the name of the project that aims to improve the tests and test coverage in Perl and improve the tests, test coverage and documentation of the CPAN.
   
   • Phalanx
   
   


5. 
   What module from the CPAN would you use to create unit tests?
   
   • PTDN recommends Test::Class, which has the highest (if any) ratings for a unit-testing module. Test::Unit, Test::SimpleUnit, Test::Assertions and Test::Extreme are others that fit the bill. Of course, since I asked which module 'you' would use, I accepted everything as an entry.
     
   
   
   
   

Thanks to chromatic and Ian Langworth for help with the questions.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 5

The time has come for the fifth and final give-away of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

This final contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following the contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Here is todays question:

What module from the CPAN would you use to create unit tests?

Good luck and thanks for listening.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 4

A little late, but it is finally time for the fourth give-away of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

For the next two days, we will be holding a contest for a copy of Perl Testing. Each contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following each contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Here is todays question:

What is the name of the project that aims to improve the tests and test coverage in Perl and improve the tests, test coverage and documentation of the CPAN.

Good luck and thanks for listening.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 3

It is time for the third give-away of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

Through Friday of this week, we will be holding a daily contest for a copy of Perl Testing. Each contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following each contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Here is todays question:

Name three other languages that have ports of Perl's testing tools.

Good luck and thanks for listening.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 2

Ding. Ding. Ding. Time for the second give-away of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

Through Friday of this week, we will be holding a daily contest for a copy of Perl Testing. Each contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following each contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Here is todays question:

What is the full name of the protocol that Perl's testing tools implement?

Good luck and thanks for listening.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 1

This week O'Reilly has provided five copies of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook for Perlcast to give away. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

Monday through Friday of this week, we will be holding a daily contest for a copy of Perl Testing. Each contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following each contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Today's question comes straight from the sample chapter available online at O'Reilly. Here goes:

"Perl's documentation suggests using h2xs to create new modules. What module, that Ian and chromatic mention, is just a modern alternative for the h2xs method?"

Good luck and thanks for listening.

Perl News 2005-08-28

A new Perl News Summary is finally out. Use Perl was active this week, so there was a lot to cover. This weeks news covers items as varied as Perl testing and PHP embedded within Perl.

Be sure to check back in at Perlcast.com throughout the week, as we are having five days of book give-aways. Details will emerge each morning this week.

Links for the news item mentioned in this summary can be found below. Thanks again for listening to to Perlcast, your Perl podcast.

• Brainbench Perl 5.8 Exam Beta Available


• Search Source Code from Books


• Perl and PHP Mashup


• The Perl Review 2.0 Hits Presses


• Parrot 0.2.3 "Serenity" Released!


• Perl Needs Better Tools


• Parsing iCal Data


• Using OpenPGP Encryption Within Perl


• Important Notice for Perl.com Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds

Interview with Chris Brooks

Recently, I got to speak with Chris Brooks about one of his latest projects, Talkr. In short, Talkr takes a textual blog and turns it into a podcast. Though the text-to-speech might not be done in Perl, there is a lot of Perl around in the Talkr system.

In the interview, you'll hear about what Talkr is and how it works, as well as, some commentary on podcasting and entrepreneurship. Take note of the introduction of the interview. It is a small sample of what you'll get from Talkr.

Interview with Peter Scott

At OSCON 2005 I was lucky enough to get to sit down with Peter Scott and talk about his new book Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code. There is a fair amount of background noise for the first few minutes of the interview, but it quickly fades into the background.

Interviewed by The Perl Review

Recently, brian d foy over at The Perl Review interviewed me about Perlcast. If you are interested, you can check out the full interview text.

As a separate plug, be sure to check out The Perl Review. The fall issue should be out soon. I was fortunate enough to get to see a preview copy and it is definitely worth the subscription. Hopefully, I can get brian on soon for a little preview.

Perl News 2005-08-16

The Perlcast Perl News Summary for this week has finally been released. News was light this week, with only four articles. Still, keep checking back during the week for two interview releases and another contest. The interviews will be with Peter Scott, the author of Perl Medic, and Scott Brooks, the creator of Talkr.

• YAPC::AU/OSDC 2005 Call for Papers


• Automated GUI Testing


• Lloyd's underwriters to cover legal risks arising from open-source use


• 2005 White Camel Awards

Perl News Summary 2005-08-07

It has been a while, but the Perlcast Perl News Summary is out again. There has been a lot going on as of late, so there was a lot of news to cover. Links to all of the articles mentioned in this summary can be found below.

• Using Perl to Manage Plist Files


• Using Perl to Manage Plist Files, Part 2


• Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 4


• Porting Test::Builder to Perl 6


• YAPC::AU/OSDC 2005 Call for Papers


• PHP, Perl and Python on the wane?


• OSCON by Geoff Broadwell


• Learning Perl, Fourth Edition: The Llama is Back--Revamped for Today's Nascent Perl Programmers


• Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook-- Using Perl's Automated Testing Tools to Streamline Your Work


• Learning Perl Reviewed on Slashdot


• Catalyst Movies

Interview with Damian Conway

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with Damian Conway and record an interview about his involvement with Perl and about his new book Perl Best Practices.

Interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic

Just barely in time for OSCON, Perlcast is finally releasing the audio for an interview done just over a month ago with Ian Langworth and chromatic about their new book Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook.

Perl News Summary 2005-07-25

This weeks Perl News Summary has been released. Links to the noted articles can be found below.

• The Perl Review interviews Ian Langworth


• DzSoft Perl Editor 5.6.0.7 Download


• "Perl Best Practices" Damian Conway's Remedy for "Intuitive Programmer Syndrome"


• An Introduction to Test::MockDBI


• YAPC::NA::2006 Call For Venues

Perlcast Interview with brian d foy

It has been long promised, but has finally arrived. Yes, the first stand-alone interview from Perlcast. This interview is with brian d foy. brian is the publisher of The Perl Review, partner in Stonehenge Consulting, and co-author of the latest version of Learning Perl Fourth Edition.

Perl News Summary 2005-07-18

The Perl news summary for the past week has been released. Stay tuned for upcoming interviews with brian d foy and Ian Langworth and chromatic, and hopefully a segment on notable use.perl journals

• 
  YAPC::EU::2005 Call For Attendees


• Lightning Talks at OSCON 2005


• 
  Ponie Snapshot 4 Released


• 
  Pugs 6.2.8 Released


• 
  Parrot 0.2.2 "Geeksunite" Released


• 
  Ten Essential Development Practices


• 
  O'Reilly ships perl style guide


• 
  Top Perl Studio 0.95 Download


• 
  There's probably a Perl module that does that


• 
  Is Perl relevant any longer?

Perl News Summary 2005-07-12

The first Perl News Summary has just been released. This is a quick look at Perl related news for the past week. For this segment, there were four articles. The links can be found below.

• Nominations for NJAPHs Open


• Building Navigation Menus


• O'Reilly rev's advanced Perl book


• Perl's Chip Salzenberg Sued, Home Raided

Also, be on the lookout for interviews. Right now, I have four that have been recorded and am working on post-production of them... hopefully I can start to release them as early as this weekend.

Thanks for listening.

Perlcast 15

Finally, Perlcast 15 was released last night. Between attending YAPC::NA last week, preparing to move, visiting sick, newborn, and long-gone relatives, and the 4th of July holiday, time has not been on my side... Still, this weeks Perlcast seems to be a good one. Along with the normal Perl news, there is also an interview with José Castro (cog) about the upcoming YAPC::EU and a talk by Dave Rolsky about DateTime.

News Links

• Sun Solaris Perl Modules Two Vulnerabilities


• Upgrading Perl (from OnLAMP)


• Data Munging with Sprog


• Annotating CPAN


• Maypole Wins Linux Journal Editor's Choice Award


• YAPC::NA::2005 Conference Proceedings


• Chip Salzenberg Sued, Home Raided


• Google Summer of Code Projects Announced

Interview Links

• YAPC::EU Website


• Cog's Journal

Phalanx Links

• DateTime


• Dave Rolsky's Website

Garageband.com Links

• Enter the Haggis


• Gasoline

Off-Schedule

Just an update... Perlcast will be a little off-schedule this week. I've spent the weekend getting ready for and then traveling to YAPC::NA. Hope to have something for you soon. Also, I'm still working on the results for contest 4. Looks like there might be a tie!!

Perlcast 14

Perlcast 14 is now available. This week features an interview with Mark Jason Dominus, the author of Higher-Order Perl.

Be sure to vote on contest 2 entries. The taglines are in the sidebar.

News Links

• Enginsite Perl IDE Beta Testing


• LAMP Article


• Race condition in the rmtree


• Format string vulnerability in the log function in Net::Server


• Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours, 3rd Edition Sample Chapter


• Understanding and Using Iterators

Interview Links

• Mark's Perl Website


• Higher-Order Perl Website


• Buy Higher-Order Perl


• Mark's Mailing Lists for Books


• Tie::File

Contest 4

Okay, contest four is all about "There Is More Than One Way To Do It". For this contest, take the string 'a string to fOrMaT' and format it so that the first letter of each word is capitalized and all other letters are lower case. I've got an example of one way to do it below. Send me all of the ways that you can do it before noon CST on June 24th. The person with the most ways wins a copy of the upcoming edition of Advanced Perl Programming.

Here is my sample:

$x = 'a string to fOrMaT';
print join(' ',(map {ucfirst lc $_} (split /\s+/, $x)));"


Here is the resulting string:

A String To Format


Good luck!

Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition - Contest 3

This contest is quite a bit easier than the last. In the code below, you get the output of 'file.da' instead of the intended output of 'file'. What is wrong with the regex? Send the repaired regex to perlcast at gmail dot com before 17th June 2005 at noon CST to be entered in the drawing for a copy of Simon Cozens upcoming book Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition.

For Windows Users:

perl -e "$x='file.dat';print $1 if($x=~/(.*).(.*)/)"

For Unix/Linux/etc Users.:

perl -e '$x="file.dat";print $1 if($x=~/(.*).(.*)/)'

Perlcast 13

Perlcast 13 is out. This is a short one, pretty much just covering the news and one Phalanx module.

News

• Independently Parsing Perl


• 3 weeks until YAPC North America


• YAPC::EU Schedule


• ActivePerl Launched on Mac OS X


• Perl Certification


• Teaching Parrot to Say "PHP"


• Playboy spreads open source software

Phalanx Module

• Net-FTP-Common

The GarageBand.com artist this week was once again Enter the Haggis with Another Round.

Mailing List

I've just set up a mailing list for Perlcast. Right now, it is an announce-only list. I had some requests for email updates of when new shows come out... guess everyone is not using RSS :)

Anyway, you can subscribe to the list if you want to get email notification of new Perlcasts and new Perlcast.com contests.

Please give me some feedback if you want me to start a Perlcast discussion list. It seems that the message board has gone dead... possibly a mailing list would do better. Email or Skype me and let me know.

Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition - Contest 2

Okay, so the first contest (which is still going on) required a little coding knowledge. This one requires nothing of the sort. Bascially, there are two catch-phrases that I have used for Perlcast:

• Perl news, Reviews, and More


• Podcasting Perl

These both pretty much stink. So from now until June 17th, email perlcast at gmail dot come with suggestions for new tag lines. After the 17th, I'll put my favorites on this site and open up voting (still working on the method of voting). Between the 18th and 30th votes will be accepted. Whoever sent in the highest ranked tag-line first will win a copy of Advanced Perl Programming.

Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition - Contest 1

The broken code for the first contest can be found below. In the code, the hash { a => 1, b => 2 } is being passed through Data::Dumper and then eval'ed back into a hash. This works fine, until strict comes into the picture. When strictness is enabled, the code fails with the error: "Can't use an undefined value as a HASH reference". How can you make this work and still keep strictness for all of the code.


perl -Mstrict -MData::Dumper -e 'my %x = %{eval Dumper({ a => 1, b => 2 })}';


Email perlcast at gmail dot com the answer to this, along with the comment that I mentioned in Perlcast 12 and you will be entered into the contest drawing. The deadline for entry is this Friday at noon CST (2005-06-10 12:00:00 UTC-5).

Perlcast 12

Perlcast 12 has been released. This is an exciting episode! There is an interview with David Wheeler of Bricolage. There is a module talk by Kees Cook. And finally, there is the first of our contests for copies of Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition.

News

• Catalyst Introduction and Tutorial


• Big Nerd Ranch Announces Perl Bootcamp with Andy Lester October 3-7, 2005


• LogicBoxes Introduces Perl API Kit for OrderBox


• Build a Perl/CGI voting system


• Google Summer of Code


• Bricolage ideas for the Google Summer of Code


• The Perl Foundation ideas for the Google Summer of Code


• Perl 5.8.7


• YAPC::NA... get those lightening talks ready

Interview
This weeks interview with David Wheeler, the president of Kineticode and lead developer of Bricolage project. Quite a few linkable items were mentioned in the interview... the one that I'm putting here is for Krang, the CMS system that David said was similar to Bricolage.

Phalanx
Kees Cook was kind enough to provide a talk about Device-SerialPort, which he is currently maintaining.

Lest we not forget that you shouldn't use Crypt-DES, but should instead turn to Crypt-Rijndael. You have be warned.

Contest
The first O'Reilly give-away starts today... the broken code for the contest should be posted shortly.

GarageBand.com
The GarageBand.com artist this week as the Lemmings with their track More.

O'Reilly Book Giveaway!

O'Reilly Media have offered five copies of Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition to Perlcast listeners. Starting with Perlcast 12, a contest will be held each week in June. Be sure to tune in and listen for how to win.

Perlcast 11

Perlcast 11 is out-and-about. I screwed up on the interview this week, so this episode is just me rambling. Still, some cool modules were covered, including a set of list utilities. Also, I finally figured out a decent way to link to CPAN modules... notice the module links below :)

The GarageBand.com artist this week was Owen Gray with his song Mumbo Jumbo.

News

• ApacheFriends.org release of XAMPP


• NewsForge article that links to an IBM article


• The Web Pro News mini-tutorials on vec and LWP::Simple


• Perl.com's how-to on integrating Perl with Word

Modules

• The first module/modules mentioned this week were the Scalar and List Utilities


• The Phalanx module for the week was DBI. A tutorial can be found here

Techpodcasts.com Hits 100k

The techpodcasts.com network has released stats for April. With 16 of the network memebers reporting a combined 100,000 distinct listeners and nearly 200,000 downloads, it seems like the network is on the rise.

Perlcast 10

Perlcast 10 has been released to the world. This week contains Perl news for the week ending on the 21st of May 2005, an interview with Allison Randal of The Perl Foundation, a little talking about scripting GMail and about trusted Perl modules.

This week I had a new mic, which helped a lot with the show sound. However, I also dropped the show bitrate down from 96 to 64. Be sure to let me know if the change is intolerable.

News
Lots of news this week. Below, you can find links to each of the topics mentioned.
YAPC::EU Registration
Call For Lightning Talks
YAPC::EU Call For Venue
Parrot 0.2.0
Perl 5.8.7 RC1
Catalyst 5.2.0
Catalyst PPMS
Intro to Perl at HTML Goodies
Creating A Wireless Access Point
mod_perl 2.0.0

Allison Randal
This week I got to talk with Allision Randal, the President of The Perl Foundation and project manager for Perl 6. Below are some links to things that we talked about in the interview.
Interview at Perl.com
Book Allison Co-Authored
Journal
The Perl Foundation
Onyx Neon

Accessing GMail
Grrr... access gmail through Perl. Here are the modules that I used and a journal entry about the experience.
WWW::GMail (Didn't Work)
Mail::Webmail::Gmail (Didn't Work)
GMail::Checker (Worked!!)
My Journal Entry On The Experience

Getting Command Line Options
I cheated and talked about Getopt::Long this week for the Phalanx discussion. On top of that, I wasn't even prepared.
Getopt::Long

Perlcast 9

Perlcast number nine has been released. I'm a little irritated with this cast. There is some background clicking noise that I couldn't stop from happening. I'm not sure what I was doing, but it hurts the sound quality... I even tried a complete second take, but couldn't make it go away. Oh well, by next week I should have my new mic setup and will have overall better sound quality anyway.

News Items Covered This Week

1. SVK version 1 has been released. svk is a decentralized version control system written in Perl. It uses the Subversion filesystem but provides additional, powerful features. In its current form, svk is a client of remote Subversion, Perforce and CVS repositories to allow for offline operation. A svk-specific server is in its early alpha testing. The Use Perl article notes that the Pugs creator uses svk for his development.
   
   • Use Perl Article
   • SVK Website
   
   


2. Perl.com has an article entitled “Inside YAPC::NA 2005”, which is an interview with Richard Dice, the organizer of the conference. I've only made it about half-way through the article so far, but it looks like there are some really cool events planned for the Monday and Tuesday nights of the conference. It looks like you might need your digital cameras and possibly a life jacket :)
   
   • Perl.com Article
   
   


3. CPAN's first European mirror goes live. They now use Geo DNS to direct all requests from Europe to a box hosted by Digital Craftsman.
   
   • CPAN News
   • Digital Craftsman
   
   


4. Slashdot has a book review of Perl Medic: Transferring Legacy Code by Peter J. Scott. The book, published by Addison Wesley, got a rating of 8 out of 10 from the reviewer, Craig Maloney.
   
   • Slashdot Book Review
   
   


5. Perlcast has been accepted as a basic member of the techpodcasts network. You can find other technical podcasts at techpodcasts.com.
   

Beginners Talk

This talk was based on a tutorial from an article by David Oswald at Perl Monks and concerns 'and' and 'or' short-circuit operators in Perl.

Perl Talk

Perlcast is going to try to talk about the modules found on the Phalanx project over the next few (hundred) casts. This week, we discussed CPANPLUS.


Interview

None this week; however, I do have a few lined up. Please let me know who you would like to hear from.

Audio

The GarageBand.com artist for this week was Scotland Barr and The Slow Drags with their song Sun Years.

Perlcast 8

Perlcast 8 is out. This weeks Perlcast covers news of Perl for the week ending on May 8th 2005 and contains an interview with Leopold Toetsch, the current Parrot pumpking.

Episode Links

• Massive Data Aggregation with Perl


• Parrot


• Perldoc


• Data::Encrypted


• Enter the Haggis: Gasoline

Also, remember to Skype me using the perlcast user or the Skype-in number 501.358.4143 with your tips, tricks, and suggestions with Perl.

Perlcast 7

The seventh Perlcast has finally been released. This is a big one running just over 25 minutes (18 MB)... ouch. Anyway, I think that everyone will really enjoy this one because I do less talking and more listening. That's right. Perlcast is proud to announce it's first interview, an overview of Catalyst with one of its maintainers, Marcus Ramberg. The IRC channel that Marcus mentioned was the #catalyst channel on the irc.perl.org server.

Also, in the news there were four stories. Links to the stories can be found here:
1) YAPC Schedule
2) Interview with brian d foy
3) Security Advisory
4) PHP or Perl?

Some of the Perl information locations mentioned include Learn Perl, the Beginning Perl book, and Perldoc.

Finally, the GarageBand.com artist for this week is Nick Evans Mowery with his song Dylan's Ride Home.

New Domain, New Site

The time has come and gone for me to piggy-back Perlcast off of my personal website. So welcome to the new Perlcast website. For now, the message board will link back to the old site, but everything else should be moved over by now.

That means that the old RSS feed will be going away eventually, so you'll need to point your podcather at the new feed when you get the chance.