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www.perl.org - redesign
Well, it's taken me 6 weeks of evenings and the odd weekend, but I'm proud to say the new http://www.perl.org/ site has just gone live. This is a complete redesign and content review. Hopefully it's cleaner and easier for people to actually get the information they are after. Whilst I was at it I also implemented this skin for http://dbi.perl.org/ and http://learn.perl.org/ (which needs a lot more loving now you can actually see what's there... not much). My work (http://www.foxtons.co.uk/) have donated some of my time, and also some of the designers on my team's time, without which it would have taken even longer. So enjoy!
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Testing Needed: Strawberry October 2009 BioPerl
(This is a copy of an email to the BioPerl mailing list)Dear BioPeopleSince we added a "Live Support Chat" link to the frontpage of the Strawberry Perl website ( http://strawberryperl.com/ ) we've noticed that one of the main types of visitors that we see in the IRC channel ( #win32 on irc.perl.org ) is biologists trying to install variousthings.As a result, for the October 2009 release of Strawberry Perl, we've prioritised adding support for CPAN-installation of BioPerl.Changes include a major improvement to crypto support which provides OpenSSL and support for https:// URLs, we now ship Postgres and MySQL DBI drivers in the default installation, and we have added Berkely DB support (which previously prevented us meeting the dependencies for the BioPerl distribution).I'm happy to report that we now believe we are in a position to officially support the installation of BioPerl on Strawberry Perl.Prior to the official release next week, we would appreciate testing from the BioPerl community.Release candidate installers for the October release are available at the following URLs http://strawberryperl.com/download/strawberryperl-5.10.1.0.msi http://strawberryperl.com/download/strawberryperl-5.8.9.3.msi Once installed, run Start -> Program Files -> Strawberry Perl -> CPAN ClientFrom the CPAN client command line, run "install BioPerl" and selectthe default options.Once installed, you should be able to do anything you do normally with a BioPerl install.Assuming all goes well in this release, for the next release January 2010 we plan to also produce a "Strawberry Perl Professional" distribution that will bundle BioPerl as part of the default installation, as well as a Perl IDE and other useful packages.Success or failure of the release candidate can be reported either here [the BioPerl list] or to #win32 on irc.perl.org.Adam K
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Perl 5.11.1
Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher. He proved good as his word when a rawboned major from Minnesota curled his lip in rebellious disavowal and demanded his share of the syndicate Milo kept saying everybody owned. Milo met the challenge by writing the words "A Share" on the nearest scrap of paper and handing it away with a virtuous disdain that won the envy and admiration of almost everyone who knew him. His glory was at a peak, and Colonel Cathcart, who knew and admired his war record, was astonished by the deferential humility with which Milo presented himself at Group Headquarters and made his fantastic appeal for more hazardous assignment. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.1. This is the second DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5111delta.pod" inside the distribution. You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.11.1 release from: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.1/
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Madrid Perl Mongers Social Meeting
salva writes "The Madrid Perl Mongers are having a social meeting on Wednesday October 21 from 19:30 (localtime) at El Rincon Guay, Embajadores 62, Lavapies, Madrid. Everybody is invited! Just come and enjoy some "cañas y pinchos" with us while we talk about Perl!"
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Which Perl for Win32 PCs with restricted rights?
STBEY writes "I think Strawberry Perl is absolutely great!But... What do you do on Windows machines where you do not have Administrator rights, or no rights at all to install anything, to be more precise?Such as e.g. in large companies, with very restrictive user policies?And by "installing" I mean running an installer, configuring the binary and changing the registry like Strawberry Perl does. What often DOES work on these machines though is copying files. So we need a Perl binary which will install on any drive, just by unpacking a ZIP archive, for instance.And if you don't have the rights to change the system's PATH environment variable, you need a batch script to call Perl for you, to be copied into one of the directories in the PATH, or to any directory you have write permissions to, and from which you will be calling Perl. It may seem awkward, but in return you will have a fully-fledged Perl running on your crippled PC.If this is what you need, have a look at http://www.engelschall.com/u/sb/download/win32/perl-5.10.1-win32-bin-0001.zip.(See the README.txt file in the root directory for all the gory details) The installation is simpler than it sounds.Hope this helps!Enjoy!"
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Measuring copy-on-write on Linux
http://perlmonks.org/?node=Corion asked about measuring memory allocation in IRC but I was reminded of something I've poked at recently which is measuring how much memory is copy-on-write shared between forked mod_perl processes. Thus far, when on Linux the only answer I know of is to use the exmap kernel module. The main page is http://www.berthels.co.uk/exmap/ but Dave Olszewski wrote some bug fixes for it at http://github.com/cxreg/exmap. exmap uses a kernel module to add a new /proc/exmap file. To read physical page stats, write the PID to this file, then read the results. The exmap distribution comes with a C++ and perl GTK program to interpret the kernel data. Below is what I know of the format for the kernel data.To use: $ echo $pid > /proc/exmap$ cat /proc/exmapVMA 400000 871 0 1c6e71 0 1c6e81 0 1d328... $ grep 400000 /proc/$pid/maps00400000-00457000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 722755 /usr/bin/screen The sections provided by /proc/exmap correspond to each of the chunks in /proc/$pid/maps. Each line then details a page, whether it is swapped, and whether it is writable. ( VMA $address $page_count ( $resident $writable $page_id )+)+ Anyway, just thought I'd share. If you know a better trick, I'd love to hear of it. When I next get around to improving my search servers I'll likely actually try to use this but for now this is just a tool I think I plan to use but haven't done serious work with yet.
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Perl 5.11.0 now available
jesse writes "Whispers of an "evil power" were heard in lines at dairy shops, in streetcars, stores, arguments, kitchens, suburban and long-distance trains, at stations large and small, in dachas and on beaches. Needless to say, truly mature and cultured people did not tell these stories about an evil power's visit to the capital. In fact, they even made fun of them and tried to talk sense into those who told them. Nevertheless, facts are facts, as they say, and cannot simply be dismissed without explanation: somebody had visited the capital. The charred cinders of Griboyedov alone, and many other things besides, confirmed it. Cultured people shared the point of view of the investigating team: it was the work of a gang of hypnotists and ventriloquists magnificently skilled in their art. M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.0. Perl 5.11.0 is a DEVELOPMENT release. We're making it available to you today to make it easy for you to test your software on what will eventually become Perl 5.12. This release is the result of over two years of development by a global community of developers.
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YAPC::Brasil 2009
nuba writes "We are proud to announce the YAPC::Brasil 2009, to be held from 30/October to 1/November in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We have humble goals this year: to put forth the greatest YAPC::Brasil ever, celebrate the Joy of Perl among ourselves, and tempt everyone else to join us in developing the programming language that has the happiest users! We hope to deliver expertise in all levels, from introductory workshops {say "hello Perl!"} to perlguts, SMOP, Reaction and Metaprogramming to list a few and also a good number of slots for lightning talks to encourage newcomers! Niterói holds one of the highest Human Development Indexes (HDI) of the country, and stays just a 15-minute ferry boat ride away from the famous, infamous and glamorous Rio de Janeiro. If you happen to be nearby, hop aboard and come join us! More information: http://yapcbrasil.org.br/2009 http://twitter.com/yapcbrasil #yapcbrasil09 organizacao@yapcbrasil.org.br"
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Rakudo Perl 6 development release #21 ("Seattl
particle writes "On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announcethe September 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #21 "Seattle".Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].The tarball for the September 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequentaddition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudofrom the latest source, available from the main repository at github.More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo. Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code namedafter a Perl Mongers group. September 2009 is code named "Seattle" for theenthusiasm they have shown for Perl 6 during monthly meetings, and thefeedback, encouragement and support given me for the past several years. Since the 2009-08 release, Rakudo Perl builds from an "installedParrot" instead of using Parrot's build tree. This release of Rakudorequires Parrot 1.6.0. For the latest information on building andusing Rakudo Perl, see the README file section titled "Building andinvoking Rakudo". (Quick note: the "--gen-parrot" option stillautomatically downloads and builds Parrot as before, if you preferthat approach.) Also, unlike previous versions of Rakudo Perl, the "perl6"(or "perl6.exe") executables only work when invoked from theRakudo root directory until a "make install" is performed.Running "make install" will install Rakudo and its librariesinto the Parrot installation that was used to build it, and thenthe executables will work when invoked from any directory. Some of the specific major changes and improvements occuringwith this release include: * Rakudo is now passing 15,497 spectests, an increase of 3,128 passing tests since the August 2009 release. With this release Rakudo is now passing 71.5% of the available spectest suite. * Rakudo now supports contextual variables. * Rakudo now supports the rational (Rat) data type. * Rakudo now supports overloading of many of the builtin operators, many of which are now defined in the core setting. Many have also been improved to be more faithful to the specification with respect to types and coercions. * Substantially improved support for trait handling. Most of the "built-in" traits are now defined in the core setting. * The %*ENV variable now works properly for modifying the process environment. Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated featureshave been removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are: * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line) and '$handle.lines' (all lines). * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'. The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors formaking Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute,see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.orgmailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#22) is scheduled for October 22, 2009.A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 isavailable in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudodevelopment releases are scheduled to occur two days after eachParrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. Have fun! References:[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/"
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Perl 5.10.1 released
The Perl 5 developer team is pleased to announce the Perl Release 5.10.1, the first maintenance release of Perl 5.10. The CPAN ftp multiplexor will pick a mirror close to you. You can download the source in bz2 format (11121414 bytes).
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