By Curtis Jewell

You may have heard about a new and larger Perl distribution for Windows called "Strawberry Perl Professional". The idea behind it was known as "Chocolate Perl". You may have heard that name, too. What does that mean for Strawberry Perl for Windows, and for Perl in general?

Don't worry, Strawberry Perl will still be maintained. In fact, Strawberry Perl Professional would not be possible without Strawberry Perl as it has been for the past few years, and is directly installable on top of Strawberry Perl. The ideas behind Strawberry Perl and Strawberry Perl Professional overlap, but are subtly different.

Strawberry Perl is made for the "intermediate-to-expert" Perl programmer (although even newbies can use it), who is likely to be coming over from Unix and is needing to write Perl scripts and modules in the Windows environment. The goal is to be as close to the Perl experience on Unix as possible, and with a minimum of problems, while still staying native to Windows.

The goals of the modules that Strawberry Perl includes, therefore, are:

1. To be able to install other Perl modules easier, whether from CPAN, from .par files, or .ppm files.
2. To include hard-to-install modules (the databases, and the cryptographic toolchain).

Strawberry Perl Professional is made for the Perl programmer of any (or even no) experience writing Perl in or for the Windows environment, and includes in addition:

1. Modules that significant segments of the Perl community use on a regular basis (BioPerl, Catalyst.)
2. Modules that help improve the quality and readability of the Perl code being written, and make releasing Perl programs and modules easier.
3. Graphical programs to assist in maintenance and debugging of Perl code, viewing Perl documentation, and installing Perl modules.

To this end, Strawberry Perl Professional includes Padre as an IDE, and also includes a graphical CPANPLUS shell and Plain Old Documentation viewer. It also includes most of the modules in Task::Kensho, and more links to websites for the Perl community, especially relating to the installed modules, and introductions to programming Perl.

If you want to test out the first alpha version of Strawberry Perl Professional, read the announcement (so you know what you're getting into) and then go to the Strawberry Perl beta page and download and install it. Suggestions for improvements, and bug fixes to the component modules, are certainly welcome - I've already been given quite a few.

Curtis Jewell has been helping build and write Strawberry Perl for Windows for the past year, and also reports bugs and sends patches to other Perl projects.

I've been following stories about Roger Ebert's new voice, which a company has made so that they can apparently plug it into his Mac. In his appearances on camera, the voice he's been using is the Mac "Alex" voice. What other voices does your Mac have? Here's a Perl one-liner to play them.

From the Terminal window, paste this in at the prompt:

perl -le'for (@ARGV){m{/(\w+?)\.SpeechVoice};' \
  -e'$_=$1;s/([a-z])([A-Z])/$1 $2/g;' \
  -e'print qq{say -v "$_" This is $_};}' \
  /System/Library/Speech/Voices/* | sh -x

On my Mac, "Organ" isn't found, but I don't know why.

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

• What's going on with San Francisco Perl Mongers? (blogs.perl.org)
• Contributing is easy: A first-timer talks about adding to CPAN (blogs.perl.org)
• Help keep the world safe from SQL injection: (perlbuzz.com)
• How to learn how to get help in Perl (use.perl.org)
• The Perl Foundation wants your input on grant proposals for 2010 (news.perlfoundation.org)
• Why Ruby is prettier and Padre changes the Perl community (use.perl.org)
• Manage your Perl modules with git (effectiveperlprogramming.com)
• Call for papers for YAPC::NA 2010 in Columbus. Theme: Modern Perl 5 (news.perlfoundation.org)
• Famous Perl One-Liners Explained part 5: Text conversion and substitution (catonmat.net)
• The Italians like ack, too (cattlegrid.info)
• Bash completion for perldoc (blogs.perl.org)
• cpanminus, the new CPAN shell superstar (marcus.nordaaker.com)
• RT @chromatic_x Kudos to *many* active #perl 5 porters for the successful 5.11 release series: (ur1.ca)
• Testing a DB-intensive app (blog.urth.org)
• More news on the TPF wiki overhaul (use.perl.org)
• Do you still program in Perl? (reddit.com)
• Benchmarking is for losers, Profiling rulez! (blog.urth.org)
• Damian Conway's been posting a series of columns on vim: (blogs.perl.org)
• Testing and looging with Dist::Zilla (rjbs.manxome.org)
• Safe.pm 2.25 fixes security hole (blogs.perl.org)
• Serving production web requests with the Catalyst development server (blog.afoolishmanifesto.com)

A while back, I put up bobby-tables.com as a repository for showing people the right way to handle external data in their SQL calls. Whenever someone pops up on a mailing list or IRC and they're building SQL statements using external tainted data, you can just refer them to the site.

In the past few days, I've spiffed up the site (with design help from Jeana Clark) and added pages on Perl and PHP. I need more examples, though. It's 2010, and there's no reason anyone shouldn't know about parameterized SQL calls.

The site source is hosted on github, so if you have any contributions, please fork it and let me know about your applied changes, or you can email me directly.

Thanks!

P.S. In the next few days, I hope to fire up some redesign on perl101.org, too.

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

• Famous Perl One-Liners Explained, Part IV: String and Array Creation (catonmat.net)
• Run invdividual Test::Class methods in vim (blogs.perl.org)
• A regular expression tip every day from @regextip (and not just Perl regexes)
• A few resources for women in open source (itworld.com)
• The next QA hackathon: What do you need? (blogs.perl.org)
• YAPC::NA 2010 dates announced: June 21-23, 2010 (news.perlfoundation.org)
• Pod: Now with sane web links (justatheory.com)
• Creating mailing labels with PostScript::MailLabels (blog.worldlabel.com)
• Ten ways to destroy your community (coffee.geek.nz)
• Conferences on the cheap (blogs.stpcollaborative.com)
• Perl 5.11.4 available (xray.mpe.mpg.de)
• Using Perl to find best Wii bundle pricing (blogs.perl.org)
• Now's the chance for North Americans to easily get to a Nordic Perl Workshop (blogs.perl.org)
• What is Moose? (perltraining.com.au)
• Pretty Perl (blogs.perl.org)

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

• Decoding climate change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth (radar.oreilly.com)
• Musical chord analysis with CPAN (use.perl.org)
• Schwern on a pet peeve of mine: Numbered test file abuse (use.perl.org)
• eumm-migrate - easy way to migrate to Module::Build (use.perl.org)
• Readable Perl (blogs.perl.org)
• CPAN's greatest hits: Path::Class (use.perl.org)
• Spreadsheet::WriteExcel now supports embedding charts (blogs.perl.org)
• Cool things in Perl 6: Subsets (blogs.perl.org)
• Ovid has written an INI file parser in Perl 6 (blogs.perl.org)
• Schedule for Perl Oasis 2010 in Florida posted (perloasis.org)
• Movable Type 5 released (movabletype.com)
• YAPC Europe Foundation has published its financials (use.perl.org)

Go run to the announcement about Devel::NYTProf v3.0. Marvel at the code profiling goodness.

Highlights include:

• Ability to profile opcodes, which means...
• NYTProf can now profile slow regular expressions
• More detailed stats on BEGIN blocks
• Treemap of subroutines
• Tracking of which subs called which other subs
• Graphing of sub calls
• Improved report output
• Ability to merge profile runs, such as when a process spawns other processes like mod_perl code does.

Already I have found that my regular expression compilation is taking 6% of the runtime in my sample runs in ack. I had no idea.

Just amazing. Go try it now, and buy Tim Bunce and the other contributors a beer.

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

• How to import Gravatars into Gmail with 121 lines of Perl (dagolden.com)
• RT @davorg From Amazon.com: After viewing "Data Munging With Perl" 61% of customers buy "I Drink For A Reason" (@davorg is the author of the book)
• ack 1.92 is now out (betterthangrep.com)
• Why learn Perl in 2009? (news.ycombinator.com)
• Screencast about ack from @yerhot (fosscasts.com)
• Presenting Module::Starter 1.54 (use.perl.org)
• Make the pragmas stop! (justatheory.com)
• A collection of Perl one-liners (blogs.perl.org)
• Skud on how developers can make things easier for CPAN users unfamiliar with developer tools (infotrope.net)
• The problems with CGI (blogs.perl.org)
• SVK was end-of-lifed back in May. It was fantastic back when. (use.perl.org)
• Is Perl 5's object system really that bad? (use.perl.org)
• use Config; # discover your path (use.perl.org)
• Perl Foundation has a new Perl events mailing list (news.perlfoundation.org)
• lists.perl.org has been overhauled and updated (blogs.perl.org)
• Perl 5.11.3 now available (use.perl.org)

These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.

• blogs.perl.org is a new, modern blogging platform for the Perl community (blogs.perl.org)
• Michael Peters gives thanks for some special folks in the Perl community (use.perl.org)
• Peteris Krumins explores secret Perl 5 operators (catonmat.net)
• Dave Rolsky talks about his Markdown parser, Markdent: (blog.urth.org)
• Using PUT and DELETE methods in web apps (blogs.perl.org)
• Tests are divine (blogs.perl.org)
• Perl advent calendars galore (perlbuzz.com)
• mirod releases a new version of xml_grep2 (blogs.perl.org)
• Introducing gitalist, a modern Git browser written in Perl (blogs.perl.org)
• Posting to CPAN from Github (blogs.perl.org)
• GitPAN's first success: Recreating the history for Pod::Simple (use.perl.org)
• Why use Kephra? (use.perl.org)
• Recap of Eric Whilhelm's Perl Foundation grant to overhaul learn.perl.org (news.perlfoundation.org)
• Using Perl to scrape the web (ssscripting.blogspot.com)
• Peteris Krumins publishes 30 projects on github (catonmat.net)
• cope, a command-line program colorizer in Perl (stuff.cytzol.org)
• The Perl way of avoiding repeated code: (blogs.perl.org)

By Matt Follett

It's the time of year for Advent Calendars and it looks like the Perl community isn't disappointing this year.

Perl Advent Calendar

The first day talks about using Package::Alias to alias Mouse to Moose.

RJBS Advent Calendar

Ricardo Signes' calendar to showcase things he has been working on. His first entry is about Sub::Exporter which looks very powerful.

Catalyst Advent Calendar

Perl 6 Advent Calendar

This one starts off with setting up Rakudo, so it requires very little prior knowledge.

SysAdvent

Tips for system administrators

All of these have RSS feeds, so they'll be easy to follow. Have fun!

Matt Follett is a developer in the Informatics team at The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine, where he works on high-throughput DNA sequencing projects. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri at Rolla, where he majored in Computer Science & Computer Engineering. He has worked for Monsanto, Boeing, and Beck Automation as a software engineer. He was the head of the 2009 St. Louis BarCamp. He currently resides in St. Louis, where he heads the local chapter of Perl Mongers.