Congrats to Jrockway on releasing Angerwhale. Angerwhale is a filesystem-based blog with integrated cryptography, built on the Catalyst framework.

You can get angerwhale on CPAN.

Even tho we haven't got the holy buzz of Rails, people seem to be putting up new Catalyst-powered sites all the time. I'll try to mention some as I hear of them in the future, here's a couple to get you started

www.discvrevolt.com

21:17 <bert_> it is for independent artists to be able to easily sell card at 
              their live shows, and fans use them to dl songs from our site 
              when they get home...
21:18 <bert_> site went from concept to production in 3 months...
21:18 <bert_> you guys here helped us through the rough part, none of us had 
               used catalyst before this...
21:18 <bert_> we really appreciate your help

Let's get dugg

This is a neat blog powered by a new Catalyst-based blog software called Typeface. Typeface is downloadable right now, so feel free to check it out.

I held a lightening talk on monday called 'DBIx::Class from 1.000 feet' at the Extreme Programmers meetup in Oslo. The audience was mostly Java programmers, so I didn't go too much into detail, but I thought it was a nice oportunity to show them that Perl isn't dead. :)

Here is the slides if anyone's interested.

I've been following 'Joel on software' for a while, and read some of his books. He's been a pretty uneven read, interesting at times, frusteratingly stupid at others. However, after his recent posts I consider him no more than a trolling windows programmer. I found this comment by Dave Cross pretty acurate.

That is why I've followed the trend of some of the commenters on my previous post. I've removed his blog from my bloglines subscriptions. I also used the oportunity to unsubscribe from his annoying friend Eric. So this is the last piece of attention he'll get from me.

Bye Joel, have a nice life.

Nice hits for perl search

I like to program Perl. Sure, I'm not saying it's a perfect language, it's got it's flaws and quirks, for one, the roll your own object model included in Perl5 leaves something to be desired. It's also possible to write quite unstructured and unreadable perl, but then I think sites like The Daily WTF has shown us that you can write cryptic and hard to maintain code in pretty much any language. To me, modern perl code is a pleasure to maintain. It's also a fact that Perl has one of the finest suites of tools for writing tests in existance. We've got everything from documentation coverage tests to www-mechanize tests. Just look for yourself.

Also, I agree that you can write code that runs faster in C and C++, given that they are closer to the machine. It takes longer to write it tho. I don't find it's a given that more highlevel strongly typed languages like Java and C# runs faster than Perl, but it is still a given that it takes longer to write. Perl also makes it really easy for me to integrate those lightning fast C/C++ libraries when I require speed. For instance, I really enjoy using Search::Xapian, the Perl bindings to the Xapian search engine. I remember doing that kind of stuff with JNI back when I was coding Java, and it was an absolute nightmare.

Perl 5 has existed for about 10 years now, and it seems people have decided that means it's obsolete, fit for the museum, no longer suited for production use. They conveniently forget that other languages like C and C++ has been going strong for much longer, and that Java is just as old. It's not like there hasn't been any development of Perl5 in the last 10 years either, we're up to 5.8.8 now, and it's come a long way since 5.0. CPAN is getting more module submissions than ever before, and we've got several strong MVC frameworks, including Catalyst and Jifty, competing in the same market as Rails. There are also several top sites on the net like Slashdot and Amazon built on Perl.

That's why it pisses me of to no limit that Joel figures he can write off Perl as one of "an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything". Want to talk about the gigantic ecosystems you need to develop web applications? Show me any other language that has anything even nearly as gigantic as CPAN's 10474 modules for doing anything from Reading your iTunes library to Talking to your enterprise SAP system.

I`ve finally found the tuits to upload the last batch of photos from YAPC NA in Chicago. You can check them out here.

Here's another batch of photos from YAPC NA in Chicago.

just a quick notice to tell you that the the site I've been working on this spring, iusethis.com, now is running in public beta... I will tell you more about what it's about later on, but for now, just check it out for yourself(Naturally it's catalyst driven)

Right, here's a repeat of yesterday's laptop tab cleanup, now from my work computer.

• That's what the internet is for - A tragedy/comedy about Ishmael and the network
• Hooked on work porn - nine out of ten danish men surf porn during work hours (Norwegian)
• Preikestolen / Pulpit rock - We're planning to go there in two weeks.
• Planet London.pm - A plagger planet installation covering london.pm bloggers
• www.andywardley.com - Homepage of the Template Toolkit author, looking pretty snazzy.
• reanimator - Animate the flow of regular expressions. Totally awesome!

Here's some stuff that seems memorable from my tab cleanup:

• Unicode Explained - A seemingly comprehensive volume from O'Reilly about the stuff that makes me curse most during my day.
• Inquisitor beta - Ajaxy search engine interface, superfast and pretty neat.
• POE::Component::Generic - Make blocking stuff non-blocking for use in the POE framework.
• Albie's Weblog - The blog of ambs, a Portugese perl hacker and one of last year's YAPC organizers.
• 10 uses for an unwanted England flag - From the BBC.
• Hiveminder beta announcement - From Jesse Vincent @ Best Practical. The guy behind RT and Jifty.
• Cory follows Mark and  Switches From Macs   - Another strike for the retardo movement.

Nothingmuch has made a collection of moose pictures from YAPC NA. It's a real must see.

I've recently been working with Moose, Stevan Little's "I can't believe it's not perl6 OOP' module. In the end, we decided to wait with it in Catalyst until 5.8, because of difficulty in remaining backwards compatibility with Class::Accessor, Class::Data::Inheritable and friends. It's a pity, as I'm really looking forward to get rid of some of these, due to their unfriendly approach to perl error reporting. (No, die inside the constructor is not a good approach to telling the user he passed the wrong kind of arguments.)

Still, I am very impressed with what the module can do, and the maturity of the implementation, and have already been using it outside of the Catalyst project. The reason I feel  confident using Moose as a OOP system is that it's based on a  mature meta object system, Class::MOP. If you want to know more about it, Chromatic of perl.com has written a nice review of Class::MOP here.

Looks like there will be a Plagger Talk at Oscon this year. Wish I could be there. Plagger seems to be very shiny, I've been playing a little with it lately. It's also going to get RSS Event support, which will be very interesting with the advent of GCal.