Die Mensch-Maschine
Posted on 10th November 2011
German Perl Workshop 2011 - Speaker Evaluations
I have now sent out all the talk evaluations from this year's German Perl Workshop or more correctly Der 13. Deutsche Perl-Workshop. If you were a speaker and haven't received an email, please check your spam folders first, and let me know (barbie at cpan . org) if you don't find it. The mail will have come from barbie at birmingham . pm . org.
My thanks to all the organisers of GPW2011 and everyone who took the time to respond to the evaluations. From previous experience the speakers have very much appreciated your feedback. I would also like to extend extra special thanks to Max Maischein aka "Corion", who took the time to translate all the questions, templates and emails into German for me.
The results of the main survey will be published soon on the YAPC Conference Surveys site.
This is the first survey that I have undertaken in a non-English language, and for the most part it has been very successful. While there have been some slight problems due to byte vs character lengths (I'll save my 'why-oh-why did we ever start with ASCII and not UTF-8' rant for another day), the work Max has done to provide all the translations has started me on a path to be able to accommodate other languages.
At the moment the plan is to create a GitHub repository of all the necessary files, with language branches containing the appropriate translations. Then should anyone wish to request a survey instance in the future in a non-English language, their first step will then be to provide the necessary translations for me. It currently takes roughly a day to set-up an instance, so drop-in replacements for these files will ease the set-up process. It will also mean that as time goes on and questions get added, refined or deleted, we can replicate these changes across all languages.
I'd like to see the survey site get more use in the future, and although I'm happy to run the survey sites, with the support of Birmingham Perl Mongers, the longer term goal has always been to allow others to create their own instances. With the official release of Labyrinth this year, much of the tool set is now Open Source. I still need to release the Survey Plugin for Labyrinth and the additional command-line tools used, but getting the language translations moving will be a big step forward. Hopefully I'll have more news in the new year.
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File Under:
conference
/ labyrinth
/ opensource
/ survey
/ workshop
/ yapc
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Questions & Answers
Posted on 9th May 2011
I mentioned in my last post that I was working on a Survey Plugin for Labyrinth. The plugin is used within the YAPC Conference Survey system, which has now been running for several YAPC events over the last 5 years. I had promised to try and release the complete survey site last year, but with it being a Labyrinth based site setup, I didn't want to release it without releasing Labyrinth first. Now that's done I can concentrate on getting the Survey Plugin and the complete survey system on CPAN.
This year I will be running the YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe surveys as per usual. However, this year I am delighted to say I have also been asked to handle the survey for the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop too. Hopefully if all goes to plan, this will provide the test bed for many other workshops to provide surveys.
The Conference Surveys themselves started in 2006, and have provided some very interesting feedback for organisers. While event organisers and myself never expect to get 100% response from all attendees, the levels that we do get is absolutely phenomenal. With this kind of success, I would be very interested to see whether the same Survey system can be used by other non-Perl events. There is certainly nothing that prevents a non-Perl (or even a non-tech) event from using the system. Last year I did have a query from a non-Perl event, but the system wasn't ready for a stand-alone release, and I wasn't able to set anything up. However, this year, with a CPAN release coming soon, I am more hopeful that others might be able to use the system.
If you are an organiser for an event where you think a survey would be useful for feedback, please do get in touch. If I cannot host an instance for you, once I get a full release on CPAN, I can provide help and advice for getting your own hosting instance running.
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File Under:
conference
/ labyrinth
/ perl
/ survey
/ workshop
/ yapc
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Into The Blue
Posted on 7th May 2011
I haven't been posting recently about the Perl projects I'm currently working on, so over the next few posts I hope to remedy that.
To begin with, one of the major projects I've been involved with for the past 8 years has been CPAN Testers, although you can find out more of my work there on the CPAN Testers Blog. This year I've been releasing the code that runs some of the websites, specifically those that are based on my other major project, Labyrinth. Spearheading these releases have been the CPAN Testers Wiki and CPAN Testers Blog, with further releases for the Reports, Preferences and Admin sites also planned. The releases have taken time to put together mostly because of the major dependency they all have, which is Labyrinth.
Labyrinth is the website management framework I started writing back in 2002. Since then it has grown and become a stable platform on which to build websites. With both the CPAN Testers Wiki and the CPAN Testers Blog, three key plugins for Labyrinth have also been released which hopefully others can make use of.
The Wiki plugin, was intended to be written for the YAPC::Europe 2006 Wiki, but with pressures of organising the conference and setting up the main conference site (which also used Labyrinth), I didn't get it finished in time. Once a CPAN Testers Wiki was mooted, I began finishing off the plugin and integrating into Labyrinth. The plugin has been very stable for the last few years, and as a consequence was the first non-core plugin to be released. It's a fairly basic Wiki plugin, not too many bells and whistles, although there are a couple of Perlish shortcuts, but for the most part you don't need them. The CPAN Testers Wiki codebase release was also the first complete working site for Labyrinth, which was quite a milestone for me.
Following that success, the next release was for the CPAN Testers Blog. Again the underlying plugin, the Blog Plugin, has been stable for a few years, so was fairly quick to package and release, however the secondary plugin, the Event Plugin, has been evolving for quite some time and took a little more time. As I use both these plugin for several other sites, it was a good opportunity to bring together any minor bug fixes and layout changes. Some of these have seen slight modifications to the core Labyrinth codebase and the core set of plugins. In addition it has prompted me to start working on the documentation. It is still a long way from being complete, but at least the current documentation might provide some guidance to other users.
One of my major goals for Labyrinth was for it to be a 'website in a box'. Essentially this means that I wanted anyone to take a pre-packaged Labyrinth base (similar to the Demo site), drop it on a hosting service and be able to run a simple installation script to instantiate the database and configuration. The installation would then also be able to load requested plugins, and amend the database and configuration files appropriately. I haven't got to that stage yet, but it is still a goal.
With this goal in mind, I have read with interest the recent postings regarding the fact that DotCloud are now able to run Perl apps. This is definitely great news, and is exactly the kind of setup I had wanted to make best use of for the 'website in a box' idea. However, with several other frameworks now racing to have the coolest instance, it isn't something I'm going to concentrate on right now for Labyrinth. Plus there is the fact that Labyrinth isn't a PSGI framework, which others have eagerly added to their favourite framework. Labyrinth came from a very different mindset than other now more well known frameworks, and tries to solve some slightly different problems. With just me currently working on Labyrinth, as opposed to the teams of developers working on other frameworks, Labyrinth is never going to be the first choice for many reasons. I shall watch with interest the successes (and lessons learned from any hiccups) of the other frameworks as it is something I would like to get working with Labyrinth. If anyone who has the time and knows PGSI/Plack well enough, and would like to add those capabilities to Labyrinth, please get in touch.
The next notable plugins I'll be working on are the Survey, Music and Gallery Plugins. The former has its own post coming shortly. The next notable CPAN Testers site released planned is the Reports site. With it being considerably more involved, it might take a little longer to package and document, but it will likely be the most complex site release for Labyrinth, which will give anyone interested in the framework a good idea of how it can be used to drive several sites all at once.
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File Under:
labyrinth
/ opensource
/ perl
/ web
/ website
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Long Live Rock'n'Roll
Posted on 9th February 2011
On the 1st January 2011, I released the first Open Source version of Labyrinth, both to CPAN and GitHub. In additon I also released several plugins and a demo site to highlight some of the basic functionality of the system.
Labyrinth has been in the making since December 2002, although the true beginnings are from about mid-2001. The codebase has evolved over the years as I've developed more and more websites, and got a better understanding exactly what I would want from a Website Management System. Labyrinth had the intention of being a website in a box, and although it's not quite there yet, hopefully once I've released all the plugin code I can put a proper installation tool in place.
Labyrinth now is the backend to several Open Source websites, CPAN Testers using it for the Reports, Blog, Wiki and Preferences sites, as well as some personal, commercial and community projects. As a consequence Labyrinth has become stable enough to look at growing the plugins, rather than the core code. I'm sure there is plenty that could be done with the core code, but for the moment providing a good set of plugins, and some example sites are my next aims.
As mentioned, I see Labyrinth as a Website Management System. While many similar applications and frameworks provide the scaffolding for a Content Management System, Labyrinth extends that by not only providing the ability to manage your content, but also to provide a degree of structure around the functionality of the site, so the management of users and groups, menu options and access, as well as notification mechanisms, enable you to provide more control dynamically.
When writing the fore-runner to Labyrinth, one aspect required was the ability to turn on and off functionality instantly, which meant much of the logic flow was described in the data, not the code. Labyrinth has built on this idea, so that the dispatch tables and general functionality can be controlled by the user via administration screens, and not by uploading new code. When I started looking at this sort of application back in 2001, there was nothing available that could do that. Today there are several frameworks written in Perl that potentially could be tailored to process a website in this way, but all require the developer to design and code the functionality. Labyrinth aims to provide that pre-packaged.
I'm primarily releasing Labyrinth so that I can release all the code that drives the CPAN Testers websites. Giving others the ability to better suggest improvements and contribute. The system allows me the freedom to build websites quickly and easily, with the hardwork being put into the design and CSS layouts. With so many other frameworks available, all of which have bigger development teams and support mechanisms than I can offer, I'm not intending Labyrinth to be a competitor. It might interest some, which is great, but if you prefer to work on other frameworks that's great too. After all it's still Perl ;)
More news of plugins and sites being released coming soon.
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File Under:
labyrinth
/ opensource
/ perl
/ website
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Long Time Gone
Posted on 4th May 2010
It has been quite a few months since I last posted here. Quite a few events and projects have happened and held my attention since I last wrote in my blog. And I still have a backlog of photos and videos from last year to get through too!
I did wonder whether anyone might think that after talking about Why The Lucky Stiff in one of my last posts, that I had done the same. Well for those who follow my CPAN Testers work, will know that CPAN Testers 2.0 has been a rather major project that finally got properly underway in December 2009. It's nearing completion, and I'll cover some of the highlights in a future post. Although it's been my most consuming project over the last 6 months or so, it hasn't been my only one. As mentioned in another of my last posts, I'm writing a book about how to host a YAPC. Due to other projects taking a higher priority, this has taken somewhat of a backseat for the time being, but I do plan on getting a second draft together within the next few months. I have looked into self-publishing the book and I'm now planning to have it formerly submitted with an ISBN (the internation book numbers) and supplied via print-on-demand print runs.
Another project that has been ongoing alongside my CPAN Testers work, has been my website management system, Labyrinth. This has been the website application I have been developing since 2002, and although several other Perl web frameworks have now been developed since, to lesser and greater degrees, Labyrinth has had the disadvantage of only having 1 core developer for the past 8 years. It's not an application that will revolutionise web development and deployment, but it has very successfully worked for a number of websites I have developed over the years. After having been relatively stable for the past year or two, I'm now cleaning up the code so I can properly release it as open source. This is mostly so that anyone wishing to contribute to CPAN Testers, or the YAPC Surveys, will then have all the code available to them. If anyone wants to use it and help develop it further, that would be a welcome bonus, but realistically other web frameworks have gained so much mindshare that I'm not expecting Labyrinth to make much of a dent any more. Not that that is a problem, as Labyrinth has made deploying websites so much easier for me, that I'll just be glad to let people help on CPAN Testers and the YAPC Surveys.
Speaking of the YAPC Surveys, YAPC::NA 2010 and YAPC::Europe 2010 are fast approaching. These will be next projects to get up and running. Thankfully the code base just needs a few upgrades to the latest version of Labyrinth, and some work on skinning the CSS to match the respective YAPC sites. All being well this should only take a few days. Then I'll be looking to release this version of the code base for anyone wishing to run similar surveys for themselves. I've already had one interested party contact me regarding a conference in October, so hopefully the code will be suitable, and only the questions need adapting. We shall see.
My other major project this year, also began back in December 2009. As some readers are well aware, I am an ex-roadie. From 1989-1994 I was a drum tech, lighting engineer and driver for Ark, one of the best Black Country bands ever. Not that I'm biased or anything ;) Last year the band got together for some rehearsals and planned a few reunion gigs. With interest gaining, an album was also planned. So this year, the band began recording and booking gigs. As a consequence the Ark Appreciation Pages desperately needed a makeover. I'll write more about what happened next in another post. Ark are back, and Mikey and I are delighted to be able to be involved with the band once again.
That's just a few of the projects that have taken up my time over the last 6-8 months. There are several others that I hope to post about, with family, time and work permitting. Expect to hear a little more from me than you have so far this year.
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File Under:
ark
/ book
/ conference
/ labyrinth
/ opensource
/ perl
/ website
/ yapc
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Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Posted on 23rd July 2008
I should really have expected that interest to my site would hit overload last night, but I had thought it would cope. Unfortunately it meant I was sitting on the box, watching when the load average got too high and shutting down processes. As a result I did some quick profiling of the code using the lovely Devel::DProf, and spotted a few calls that were compelely unncessary, both as function calls and database calls. So I've quickly reworked some of the requests, and on my test machine the requests are now being processed in roughly 0.8 seconds rather than 1.6 seconds. Result!
It often takes something like being popular for you to actually take a second look at the performance of your site. Thankfully in my case, the changes are relatively minor, and have made significant improvements. I shall now be taking a better look at a few other sites I run soon, as I'm sure there are similar quick hit improvements I can make.
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File Under:
labyrinth
/ website
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Fixing A Hole
Posted on 5th February 2008
I recently made some minor alterations to the site, most you shouldn't notice, and some that are part of the admin screens. However, one noticeable part that I've removed is the Digg links. I can't really say why I added them in the first place, apart from the fact it seemed like a good idea at the time and several other sites have them too. My site doesn't really get the high end traffic that other more prolific and structured writers get, so it seemed a bit daft keeping them there when no-one was ever likely to use them. I know a few read my thoughts via their favourite RSS feeds, so obviously that has been worthwhile adding to the site, but Digg, well at least I know how it works if I'm ever asked to add to another site ;)
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File Under:
labyrinth
/ website
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A Light In The Black
Posted on 5th January 2008
Now that I'm looking to another year of the Birmingham.pm World Tour, with visits to a number of UK LUG and Perl Monger groups, LUGRadio Live (UK not US), the UKUUG Spring Conference in Birmingham, YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe, as well as possibly a few European Workshops too, I need to start think what I'm going to present. I like the fact I can go to Linux based groups and conferences and talk about a variety of Perl topics, as although I might not be an expert, I know enough to give an introduction in several areas at least. But for more Perl specific technical events, I really need to stick to what I know.
The problem is that I feel I've done enough with CPAN Testing, Phrasebooks and Selenium for the time being, and it does get a bit boring for both me and the audience if I'm repeating myself every year. I may do some update on CPAN Testing, as there are likely to be changes in the coming year, a lot of which is being worked on currently, but what else is there that I could present that would be of interest to somebody?
One talk subject that has crossed my mind has been to do something like 'Labyrinth - A Perl Success Story'. It's been commented a few times that within the Perl community we talk a lot about the possibilities (particularly with frameworks) rather than getting to the finished product. While Labyrinth might not be for everyone, it might possibly be something that works for some, and as a consequence might interest people who have been asking me what it is and why I wrote it. However, although it is related to web and content management it isn't the next Catalyst or the new Jifty. You might be able to draw similarities between them all, but there are also many differences. Labyrinth isn't a framework as such, it's not meant for high-availability websites, and it also doesn't have the large development team knocking out code and fixing bugs that the others have. It's just me. But it might have just enough functionality and usability for someone to pick it up and get a site running how they want it to work, without having to understand the magic internals of frameworks like Catalyst and Jifty. I wouldn't be talking about the internals anyway, as I would prefer to give examples of how I solved problems and interesting asides that led me to learn something new about web design. I'm just not sure enough people would find it that interesting.
Further topics that come from the guts of Labyrinth, and are things that I have been keen to see how other people solve the same problem, are user input validation and content output correction. At the moment Labyrinth handles these within the same codebase, and it works rather well. However, it seems rather the wrong thing to do, to present a talk where the code to do the job isn't on CPAN and is embedded in another system. As a consequence I've been thinking about abstracting the code out of Labyrinth and releasing it separately. It might make for an interesting discussion and may provide people with an reasonable example of how they can use one solution to treat their input and output.
I've also started thinking about doing a short talk along the lines of "My Favourite CPAN Modules". A number of people have done this in the past and at one London.pm meeting several years ago, Leon presented one that got me looking up a few modules I'd not really heard of before. It's probably a talk better aimed at local group technical meetings and maybe a Workshop if appropriate, but I've also been thinking it might be better to actually to structure several talks of this style, but with a theme. So one talk would be "The Web Edition" and feature several modules useful for website development, another "The Test Edition" feature several useful Test modules, and perhaps also "The Mail Edition" with a selection of useful email modules. I've made an attempt at this style of talk before, but got too involved with the mechanics, when really all you need is a quick flavour of what the module can do, with enough references for you to go and find out more yourself.
I still need something more concrete for LUGRadio and the YAPCs, but at least I have some ideas to work with now. If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know.
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File Under:
community
/ conference
/ labyrinth
/ linux
/ perl
/ yapc
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Welcome To The Monkey House
Posted on 14th April 2007
Why Grango? That and how do you pronounce it have been asked every so often. I'll answer the latter first. It's pronounced "Gran" as in 'granny' or 'Gran Turismo', and "go" as in "to go somewhere".
The initial question begins several years ago. When DanDan was 2, he started making references to something he called The Grango. We had no idea what he meant, but he kept trying to tell us about it. We eventually got the gist that he was trying to describe the monster in a few nightmares he'd had. It was an odd description and because he didn't know enough words at the time, he struggled to give any clues as to what the creature was. Then a while later we happen to watch a nature programme on the TV and he pointed out The Grango. It was an Orang-utan. I don't think he did a bad job trying to say what it was all things considered.
When it came round to sorting out a new domain name for some server space I wanted, it seemed an obvious choice. It turns out others had thought of the name for other reasons, but the .org domain was available. In time I'll probably give the domain to DanDan, but for now it's proved handy for my Open Source work.
Another obvious choice was the title for this piece. Remember Animal Magnet? No, well it seems all the comments for this clip all remember hearing being played most nights at Edwards No.8 in Brum :)
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File Under:
dandan
/ labyrinth
/ website
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Out Of Nowhere
Posted on 27th March 2007
It's always nice to get a project finished. I've been planning to rewrite my personal site for over a year, and finally this is the result. There's still plenty to add and improve, but at least it's finally replaced that 1998 version!
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File Under:
labyrinth
/ website
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Where's My Thing?
Posted on 26th March 2007
So here is where it begins. Not sure where this going to go, but then nobody really knows where anything goes.
I had thought to post my non-techie stuff here, but I'll probably post whatever comes into my head, so apologies for that! Expect random musings, rants and general points of interest, together with the occasional decent photo, that I manage to take as I slowly learn how to use a camera again. I used to take tons of concert photos when I was on tour, but trying to do the same with a digital camera is proving rather difficult. Still, it's fun :)
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File Under:
labyrinth
/ website
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