I was scheduled to give a talk on Stackato, ActiveStates micro-cloud solution, so I was quite determined to go on the second day. I did however take it slow and did not make it to the venue until 11:00, because I wanted to hear the talk by Peter Brodersen on Openstreetmaps.

Peter Brodersen is the man behind Findvej.dk, a service from the pre-Google maps of Denmark era. The map data came from Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen and was data, which previously was available for download, but now no longer is available for free.

Peter now works with OpenStreetmap (openstreetmap.org), which is a map of the world available under a Open Database License. It consists of both graphics and vector data.

Compared to Google maps its use is not restricted license-wise.

And some prominent companies and applications are now using OpenStreetMap data
- Foursquare changed to OpenStreetMap maps from of Google maps
- Apple uses OpenStreetMap data in iPhoto maps

OpenStreetMap operates with some basic data entities:
- Node – single geospatial point
- Way – ordered list of nodes, not necessarily a literal way
- Relation – ordered list of nodes/ways and/or relations
- tag – key=value pairs for all of the above

In addition a lot of meta data (speed limits, opening hours etc.), the project is open and can be regarded as a Wikipedia of maps of streets and related information.

Much of the Danish data part of the dataset are under a government license approved by Kammer Advokaten, and is compatible with Creative Commons and one others.

In general a really feel good presentation and Peter did a good job of presenting the topic. The use of OpenStreetMap in the public sector is expanding and the project is well respected and opens up for a lot of different uses, including many spin-off projects.

My fellow Perl Monger Mads Toftum did a presentation on Apache 2.4 and its new features. Apache is an awesome piece of software. Unfortunately Mads lost his presentation so the presentation was pretty basic and did perhaps not sell the new Apache version to well. Documentation on speed improvements would be nice since many of the new web servers such as nginx are very focused on this aspect.

Apache does however offer a lot of interesting features and some of the features replace old features and Apache is still a giant and contender in the web server competition. Comparing Apache to the other spiffy new web servers might let Apache look monolithic, old and slow and the release cycle and the Apache organization setup might also signal the same – this might not be the truth, but one of Apache’s future challenges could be one of image.

By the end of the day I did a presentation of ActiveStates micro-cloud Stackato, I will follow-up with a separate blog-post on Stackato. ActiveState had kindly donated a single Komodo IDE 7 license.

Being the author of the Perl module Games::Bingo I had implemented a Mojolicious based single number bingo app and deployed this on my Stackato micro-cloud. I gave the people in the room numbers and the winner was one of the organizers of CloudCamp Copenhagen. She was so kind as to invite me to give a lightning talk at CloudCamp Copenhagen, which is a part of the GOTO Copenhagen Software development conference, where I am participating anyway – so this I am looking very much forward to.

Congratulations to Maja with her Komodo IDE 7 license and congratulations to all the people involved in Open Source Days with yet another successful conference.

Looking at the code we found out that parts of it made no sense. Asbjørn provided me with a good example demonstrating the bug, so this was quickly translated to a test (BDKPHN-10) and the non-sense code and the issue could be addressed.

The release has been uploaded to PAUSE and should be available on CPAN.

Thanks to Asbjørn for reporting the bug.

jonasbn, Copenhagen

PS. this post was cross-posted from the project blog on Business::DK::Phonenumber

Task::Jenkins is a collection of distributions for continuous integration using Jenkins it installs a collection of distributions which have been identified as useful in utilizing Jenkins for continuous integration of Perl distributions, applications and code.

The key concept in the use of Jenkins for Perl is enabling the existing tool chain with minor adjustments.

The basic requirements are that you are using some sort of build system, basically you just need some way to initiate an execution of you test suite from a command line. The test suite is then expected to output to the console so the output from the test run can be inspected and the return value of the test run can be used to indicate whether the test run was a success or failure.

Using standard tool chain components like Test::Harness works out of the box.

For a tutorial on how to get started please see the wiki page on Continuous Integration with Perl.

The distribution is a Task based distribution, so it does not contain any code as such, but simply bundles existing distributions for easy handling. Currently Task::Jenkins contain:

- App::Prove

- Devel::Cover

- TAP::Formatter::JUnit

Suggestions, feedback, patches etc. most welcome,

jonasbn

PS. this post was cross-posted from the project blog on Task::Jenkins

So please read the Call for Speakers below and forward it to friends, colleagues, fellow Perl mongers and anybody who could be interested.

I am evaluating if any of my talks given to the Copenhagen Perl Mongers through the last year would make could candidates for Open Source Days 2012.

jonasbn, Copenhagen

—

Open Source Days 2012: Call for Speakers
========================================

Open Source Days 2012 is currently planned for early March 2012 and we are
looking for gifted, entertaining and technically enlightened speakers for the
conference.

The conference itself will take place the 2nd and 3rd of March and training
will be available 1st of March.

Training courses – Half or full day
———————————–

As something new we will want to try out longer training courses – half or full
day, held on the day before the conference itself.

We are looking for both subjects and instructors.

Since we expect the course participants to pay for the training, we are willing
to pay the instructor for giving the course, provided that a sufficient number
of people sign up.

Naturally the course instructors also get free access to the conference, since
we also hope to get a normal talk out of the instructor.

Normal Talks – 45 minutes
————————-

This year we will have a track with focus on the use of open source software in
newly created startups and another track with focus on green technologies.

Non-startup related talks are also of interest and we’ll try to fit them into
various related tracks.

Speakers can attend the conference free of charge and to some extent we might
be able to reimburse your travel and hotel.

Lightning Talks – 15 minutes
—————————-

Talk about anything you like. Tell us about your idea for a new project, how
you made your first Qt application or something completely different. For
lightning talks, only your imagination and the timeframe are the limiting
factors.

If you have never tried doing a presentation before, but are working on
something you believe other people might find interesting, then this is a good
opportunity to start.

Lightning talk speakers can attend the conference free of charge.

Sponsorships
————

Sponsorships can be in the range of DKK 10000 and up. Please write to
sponsor2012@opensourcedays.org if you are interested in becoming a conference
sponsor.

Your sponsorship could, for example, be used for:

* Provide a conference T-shirt.
* Provide lunch for the participants.
* Provide key hangers.
* Provide a conference bag.
* Provide a conference beer event.

Exhibition Booth
—————-

If you are interested in an exhibition booth, you can also contact us at the
sponsor2012@opensourcedays.org.

Hackerspaces and Community Booths
———————————

More information about these will follow once we get closer to the conference.

Contact Information
——————-

Please, send us a title, a short description and a short biography of yourself
to program2012@opensourcedays.org no later than January 21st, 2012.

You are also most welcome to contact us if you have any questions regarding the
conference itself. You can also catch most of us in the IRC channel
#opensourcedays on the EFnet IRC network.

Feel free to follow us on http://twitter.com/opensourcedays or
https://facebook.com/opensourcedays to get the latest news about the
conference.

For more information please have a look at http://www.opensourcedays.org/

–
Alexander Færøy

The issue was labelled: BDKFI-20. The change can be inspected in Fisheye.

The distribution will be made available via CPAN and your local mirror shortly or you can go to MetaCPAN.

Thanks to my colleague Erik Johansen for the assistance and pointer to what the problem was.

jonasbn, Copenhagen

This post was cross-posted from: logicLAB.jira.com

The two releases introduces two new policies of mine:

• Perl::Critic::Policy::logicLAB::RequireSheBang
• Perl::Critic::Policy::logicLAB::ProhibitShellDispatch

The two policies focus on addressing interaction in, which your Perl components are working. Extending on the path that was set out with the release of Perl::Critic::Policy::logicLAB::ProhibitUseLib

Both new policies are simple policies, but hopefully useful. They are already giving me good feedback and value being put to use on a Continues Integration platform Jenkins.

All should be available on CPAN by now, both as individual distributions, but also as part of the Perl::Critic::logicLAB bundle mentioned here.

Feedback and patches most welcome,

jonasbn, Copenhagen

More information, registration and talks at:

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/npw2011

I will be there and give some talks, please see the schedule.

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/npw2011/talks

I will personally not be attending because I am out of town at that time, but I really hope you will consider attending the Nordic Perl Workshop 2011 it is usually educational, enlightening and a lot fun…

jonasbn

@praxagora: Steve McConnell traces research behind claims that programmer productivity can vary by factor of 10x http://bit.ly/g1EkXk

Steve McConnells ‘Code Complete’ was a real eye opener for me. It was one of the first books on programming I have read all the recommended titles since. I did however really enjoy Steve’s book since it gave me very much needed insight into the practice of programming rather than just syntactical teaching and idioms. This tweet mentions a blog entry is interesting in regard to a discussion on sources and references. Another thing that really stands out is the comments. I would love to be able to attract that amount of qualified feedback and comments, but I guess I have to start generating interesting content at first.

@mbusigin: MongoDB is becoming a fixture in my professional life. Nothing in the past year has given me more power & control over my data.

Alternative database systems are really on a roll and have been for some time.This kind of tweet makes just want to do something with MongoDB. This really demonstrates the power of a good tweet, enough to make you curious. MongoDB here I come.

@jchris: Developer Preview of Couchbase Mobile – Apache CouchDB for iOS devices: http://t.co/hvtxdZB Discuss: http://t.co/R8I21rh

Very much in relation to the previous mention of MongoDB. CouchDB is to become available for iOS. To recap from last week, Github is a central point in this another tweet worth more time investment.

@brandontreb: Great article talking about how developers need to be more encouraging to one another http://j.mp/fdhGHD

The last tweet is to a blog post. It is not the best of blog posts, but it holds some nerve. I can only say that I agree with the original author and I retweeted because the message is good and honest. I should go and comment on the original blog post.

Keep (re)tweeting,

jonasbn

Here goes…

@chromatic: Any #perl web developers have thoughts on http://www.phenona.com/ ? Might be worthwhile…

This is a post pointing to a new upcoming cloud service, utilizing Perl. It is currently a beta, requiring that you sign-up for the beta program. It looks promising based on the technologies it lists like Mojolicious and memcached. It being a cloud service for Perl in itself is very interesting.

@souders: YSlow for Chrome is available. Great to see #wpo tools available across platforms! http://yhoo.it/g9HCdD

YSlow! is awesome and Steve Souders books on the topic of making you web sites faster are required reading for front-end developers. Seeing the tweet that the YSlow! tool making it to Chrome makes me happy, it can help in spreading good practices for web development even further.

@paul_irish: WebKit just incorporated the jQuery test suite into its own. http://goo.gl/AnbGq Testing against eachother = zarro boogs! Open source ftw!

What Paul Irish here describes as Open Source for the win, is most certainly true. The concept of test artifacts is quite interesting and imagine activating a whole 3. party test suite for your particular project, not many projects are able to do this. Hopefully this is something we will see more of in the future, especially after Github has made it so easy to fork new spin-offs of existing code bases.

@Linkedin: new post: Make GitHub part of your professional reputation http://bit.ly/ggqU3I #in

This is a tweet promoting a blog post from Linkedin. In respect to the tweet by Paul Irish mentioned in this post, Linkedin’s integration of Github as part of your Linkedin Profile is really interesting. More and more projects move to Github and Github is probably the fastest growing project hosting site. I do not have numbers to document this, but I have a hunch based on the source code I evaluate. Github has high transparency and Linkedin integrating this is quite interesting – now all we developers do is to keep our projects going, so we don’t come out looking like slackers.

That was it for now I hope I will have sufficient material to do a similar post in the future, hopefully in a week.

Feedback most welcome, like suggestions for people/companies/projects to follow.