So Debian-NYC, mainly the DebConf10 local team, organized a workshop for people interested on Debian packaging. The nice people of drop.io offered their handy location in Brooklyn.

So this is the first attempt to bring new comers to Debian aiming DebConf10 next summer. Micah and dkg are the ones leading the workshop so far.

Pictures!

This next Tuesday October 20th, the Perl Seminar returns to New York City! This is a great effort by Jim Keenan, always trying to push the meetings and encouraging people on attending and sharing. There's usually one meeting per month and it's very well located, in midtown Manhattan, on a suite in the Ramada New Yorker hotel building facilitated by the NYPC User Group.

The first meeting will be about Git, GitHub and how you can use it on your Perl code and projects. It'll be very interesting for newcomers! More details on the original post, and make sure to subscribe to the discussion group.

I implemented a simple dependencies installer for the new Planeta Linux. I spent some time trying to find how to make CPAN::Shell::install to install modules without running the test units, it's quite simple.

CPAN::Shell->rematein("notest", "install", $module);

Kudos to mst for the pointer.

The fact that in a few years, we might not have a single person on this planet that was born in the 1800s (or before January 1st, 1900), makes me sad and depresses me.

Living supercentenarians.

As I'm rewriting the core of Planeta Linux (you can track progress here), I needed a reliable way to map a country TLD to its Spanish name. I headed to CPAN to see what was already built to do that and found out Locales::Country that looked awesome but it didn't work for me, code2country('ni') would return undef for me, plus the countries that were actually there had the encoding all fubar, so fuck it, drop it.

So I came up with Net::Domain::ES::ccTLD using the data from the Spanish Wikipedia for the countries TLDs:

use Net::Domain::ES::ccTLD;

my $country = find_name_by_cctld('mx')     # $country is 'México'
  or die "Couldn't find name.";

my $current = find_name_by_cctld('us');    # $current is 'Estados Unidos';

Why would I reinvent the wheel for this? Because it was easier and faster for me and it's all about practicality, isn't it? Plus the code is super tiny, maybe the smallest module I have in CPAN in terms of actual code.

Feel free to use if you will.

We ordered a family pack of Snow Leopard for the whole development team last Tuesday. They arrived yesterday Friday, early morning.

A few thing don't work entirely as they were, which was expectable, among other things: MacPorts starts broken (but you simply have to upgrade to the actual Snow Leopard version). Visor only works on position Full-Screen. iStat Menus simply doesn't. No support for GrowMail yet neither. And everything else does, as far as I can tell.

I will post updates on those products as soon as they happen.

I just posted a gig-based job offering on jobs.perl.org:

Description

I'm looking for a developer with interest in Web data harvesting and scraping. I'm currently developing a number of projects with this model and I cannot continue doing them alone. You will be a vital part of these fun projects: I usually enjoy doing them, you should be into that too

You can be anywhere in the world, I don't care as long as results are shown.

I'm looking for a long-term partner for this, not a hit & run.

Required skills

• I need you to understand intermediate Perl, OO-design and medium to complex implementations.
• You need to have a working skillset of regular expressions.
• Knowledge and understanding of HTTP basics is vital too. I use an HTTP sniffer + Firebug most of the time.
• A UNIX (Linux or MacOS) background would be a plus.
• Git is an extra plus. If you are into Subversion, you'd be willing to convert to Git

Desired skills

Perl modules mostly used: WWW::Mechanize, LWP::UserAgent (good understanding of it, to extend Mech), HTML::TreeBuilder, HTML::Parser (and its descents), CGI::Fast, Modern::Perl, Moose (beginning to move most of our codebase to real OO), Module::Install, Module::Pluggable and sometimes cool stuff like Catalyst, HTTP::Engine and mod_perl 2.

If you are interested, or know someone that might be, please let me know.

Peter, I have a single word for you: Moose.

A friend of mine is asking me to publish his company's job offering to the wild. I've seen the offer, what they are doing and it's a very, very nice project/opportunity, I wouldn't announce it here on my blog if it wasn't something worthwhile:

Lytix is seeking an experienced software developer with proven ability
to produce, understand and critique code in C, Java and JavaScript;
Perl and LISP are a plus.  He or she should have broad experience
working with heterogeneous environments and multiple platforms,
including BSD Unix/Linux, LAMP and other relevant F/OSS platforms.
Work will initially be project-based, but could evolve quickly into a
full-time position.  The candidate will be based in Mexico City.

I'd also add: fluent English, both written and spoken is a must. If you are interested, please drop him a line, Diego Villarreal, and avoid putting me in between.

Reading my morning load of feed news, I spotted an interesting bit on the New York Magazine travel feed:

Of course, someone's doing something wrong there, but I'd say it's their usage of XML::Feed (my guess on what they are using since the generator tag is omitted), by not dereferencing that hash reference or trying to forcibly stringify it.

Of course that comes from the feed itself:

It's awesome, and nothing new of course, that big publications and organizations are using Perl to process and offer data to users, but I find it always super cool when they make it so obvious