Hi! Please consider following me on twitter: @hanekomu.

2008年07月26日

Being lightweight

Recently I've noticed a trend towards a more lightweight way of working, playing and interacting. Here are some examples:

Yes, a lot of these observations come from getting to know the japanese Perl and open source scene a bit. Lightweight is good because it is fast, adapts quickly and is easy to recombine. In Go as well it is good to have light shape, to keep your options open.

Write a comment | Bookmark and Share

posted at: 19:53 | path: /misc | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks

Google::Chart - mooooooooooooose!

Daisuke Maki (lestrrat) has offered to take over the development of Google::Chart. That's great because there has been some feedback that I neither had the time nor the right motivation to act on. He also moosified the distribution in a branch.

Tags: .

Write a comment | Bookmark and Share

posted at: 16:48 | path: /dev | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks

Codereposcon1 and other mini-conferences in Japan

Most Perl Monger groups have meetings; some only drink; others have tech talks and then drink. But mostly the tech talks don't have a theme - anyone who wants to talk about anything remotely Perl-related can do so. Shibuya.pm has these kinds of tech talk meetings as well, twice a year, and I'm told they attract an audience of more than a hundred people.

But the japanese Perl (and Ruby and JavaScript etc.) hackers also have other kinds of meetings. They could be called themed mini-conferences, taking place only during one evening. The talks there are short, about ten minutes each, and focus on the evening's topic. So far there have been several such mini-conferences: plaggercon, catalystcon, soozycon (five, various topics), xsnite and now codereposcon1.

About a dozen japanese open source hackers met in an apartment; they had their laptops (lots of MacBooks) and a beamer. The talks were obviously about CodeRepos, the vast svn repository for all things open source in Japan.

But the world knows about it because Mizoguchi Coji (coji) records the talks, both slides and speakers, using picture-in-picture, and streams them on Ustream. Later during the evening and night he uploads the videos to Nico Nico Douga. The videos belonging to one such gathering are grouped together on a page on techtalk.jp, like on this one for codereposcon.

There are also loads of pictures from the evening on flickr, tagged with "codereposcon1". Some speakers keep their talk slides on CodeRepos as well.

If you need to register an account on Nico Nico Douga, then Google can point you to several pages that tell you how to do it.

Tags: , .

Write a comment | Bookmark and Share

posted at: 12:53 | path: /misc | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks

Keeping the changelog and module versions in sync

I've reverted all of my distributions back to a relatively normal style. That is, I'm no longer generating the POD during make time. Other people generally didn't like it, and while it was convenient, it added an extra layer of complexity and had quite a few prerequisites.

I've also reverted all the Changes files from YAML back to plain text. Because this is still very much structured, it can be converted between YAML and plain text fairly easily using Module::Changes.

The working style I've adopted right now is to record changes in the Changes file and defining a new version there without changing the $VERSION variable in every module. So I wrote a script that keeps the moduiles' version number in sync.

The script is on CodeRepos and will be released to CPAN as part of Dist-Joseki at some point. You can either tell it to use a given version number: version -v 1.23, or to use the most recent version mentioned in the Changes file using version -c. It will go through all files in the distribution and update every $VERSION line it finds.

Write a comment | Bookmark and Share

posted at: 00:52 | path: /dev | permalink | 0 comments | 0 trackbacks