From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Sun May 1 22:18:46 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 15:18:46 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Upcoming meeting - May 11th Message-ID: <4DBE3EB6.6020805@strategicdata.com.au> Hi all, The next Melbourne Perlmongers meeting will be Wednesday, 11th of May. Does anyone have a talk they'd like to present? I will give a short demo of the upcoming AI Contest and the Perl starter bot for it. Toby From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Sun May 8 18:05:28 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Mon, 09 May 2011 11:05:28 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] May meeting - Wednesday 11th Message-ID: <4DC73DD8.9090202@strategicdata.com.au> Perl Mongers! The May meeting is almost upon us. We will be meeting at 18:30 on the 11th of May - aka this Wednesday. Speaking at this meeting will be Brad Bowman, on Data::Overlay. I will follow this with a lightning talk looking at the new AI Contest, "Ants", and the state of the Perl starter kit. Afterwards some of us will retire to The Standard Hotel on Fitzroy Street. The meeting will be hosted by Strategic Data, at: Level 2, 51-55 Johnston street Fitzroy Cheers, Toby From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Tue May 10 22:14:09 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 15:14:09 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Reminder - Meeting tonight! Message-ID: <4DCA1B21.7040200@strategicdata.com.au> Remember, the Melbourne Perlmongers meeting is tonight! Toby -------- Original Message -------- Perl Mongers! The May meeting is almost upon us. We will be meeting at 18:30 on the 11th of May - aka this Wednesday. Speaking at this meeting will be Brad Bowman, on Data::Overlay. I will follow this with a lightning talk looking at the new AI Contest, "Ants", and the state of the Perl starter kit. Afterwards some of us will retire to The Standard Hotel on Fitzroy Street. The meeting will be hosted by Strategic Data, at: Level 2, 51-55 Johnston street Fitzroy Cheers, Toby From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Sun May 15 21:58:26 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 14:58:26 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Links from last meeting Message-ID: <4DD0AEF2.9020407@strategicdata.com.au> Data::Overlay http://search.cpan.org/~bowmanbs/Data-Overlay-0.53-TRIAL/ Planning Alerts: http://www.planningalerts.org.au/ Perl AI Challenge starter bot: https://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge/tree/epsilon/ants/dist/starter_bots/perl From ickphum at gmail.com Sun May 15 23:52:46 2011 From: ickphum at gmail.com (Ian Macdonald) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 16:52:46 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Testing the waters re an anonymous salary survey at next MelbPM meeting Message-ID: Hi all, At Armaguard, we're currently in the process of hiring a Perl developer, which will bring us to 3 1/2 full time Perl developers, and I'd be surprised if we stopped there. Perl is very much our long-term choice for application development for our desktop (via wxWidgets), web (Catalyst) and back-end DP applications. One problem we're facing, and I would think we're not alone, is the issue of getting the budget to attract quality people; I think there's a tendency in traditional HR and management circles to see technical staff as a commodity-type resource, with little to be gained from extra investment. We've recently taken back control of the recruitment process from HR and started more in-depth technical evaluation during this process, but there's little point to identifying the best applicants if we can't afford them. With this problem in mind, I'd like to ask the community their thoughts on carrying out an anonymous salary survey during the next MelbPM meeting. It would be low-tech and simple; hand out preprinted A5 sheets at the door and have them dropped into a box at the end. The basic questions asked would be term (full time or contract) and salary/rate; beyond that, we'd ask for (but not necessarily expect) years of experience and area (web/desktop/middleware, etc). Our goal is to gather some evidence we can take to management here to show them what we need to be offering to attract (and retain) experienced Perl developers. I hope and believe there's nothing here to cause offense, particularly as participation is obviously optional. This is clearly not a particularly scientific survey, but hopefully any bias will work in our favour... (And if not, we'll just bury the report and pretend it never happened, in the best traditions of market research.) Thoughts? Thanks, -- Ian Macdonald Senior Software Architect Armaguard -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Mon May 16 00:33:26 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 17:33:26 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Testing the waters re an anonymous salary survey at next MelbPM meeting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4DD0D346.7070903@strategicdata.com.au> On 16/05/11 16:52, Ian Macdonald wrote: > Hi all, > > At Armaguard, we're currently in the process of hiring a Perl developer, > which will bring us to 3 1/2 full time Perl developers, and I'd be > surprised if we stopped there. Perl is very much our long-term choice > for application development for our desktop (via wxWidgets), web > (Catalyst) and back-end DP applications. > > One problem we're facing, and I would think we're not alone, is the > issue of getting the budget to attract quality people; I think there's a > tendency in traditional HR and management circles to see technical staff > as a commodity-type resource, with little to be gained from extra > investment. We've recently taken back control of the recruitment process > from HR and started more in-depth technical evaluation during this > process, but there's little point to identifying the best applicants if > we can't afford them. > > With this problem in mind, I'd like to ask the community their thoughts > on carrying out an anonymous salary survey during the next MelbPM > meeting. It would be low-tech and simple; hand out preprinted A5 sheets > at the door and have them dropped into a box at the end. The basic > questions asked would be term (full time or contract) and salary/rate; > beyond that, we'd ask for (but not necessarily expect) years of > experience and area (web/desktop/middleware, etc). > > Our goal is to gather some evidence we can take to management here to > show them what we need to be offering to attract (and retain) > experienced Perl developers. > > I hope and believe there's nothing here to cause offense, particularly > as participation is obviously optional. This is clearly not a > particularly scientific survey, but hopefully any bias will work in our > favour... (And if not, we'll just bury the report and pretend it never > happened, in the best traditions of market research.) > > Thoughts? Seems fair, my thoughts are: 1) Out of the mailing list, only a subset turn up to each meeting, depending on various factors. Varies from as low as eight to as many as ~40 (when Damian last presented). I'd say typical numbers are more like 10-12. So I think you may be better off running an online survey as you could reach many more people. 2) Given the small sample size, people might be worried about the anonymity. I mean, if you just gave these three answers: * Number years experience * sector (govt, education, business) * area(s) of work (web, middleware, systems management) Then I reckon it'd be pretty easy to line up submissions with people, especially if there are only a dozen responses. And I don't know if the number of responses will be statistically useful when broken down into such small groups. How about something that just asks: * Years of experience with Perl, select from - short (less than 2 years) - medium (between 2 and 8 years) - long (more than 8 years) * Which of the following describes you? - My primary work focus is upon Perl development. - I mainly do something else, but either work on Perl outside of work, or from time to time at my job. I also suggest that it'd be worth extending this survey into the other Perlmongers groups in Australia, in an attempt to gather a larger sample set. Toby From ddick at iinet.net.au Mon May 16 02:22:46 2011 From: ddick at iinet.net.au (David Dick) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 19:22:46 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Testing the waters re an anonymous salary survey at next MelbPM meeting In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4DD0ECE6.6060700@iinet.net.au> On 16/05/11 16:52, Ian Macdonald wrote: > Our goal is to gather some evidence we can take to management here to > show them what we need to be offering to attract (and retain) > experienced Perl developers. > > Thoughts? Maybe the data contained in http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ would be useful? The raw data is supplied as well as precanned reports. From melbourne.pm at joshheumann.com Mon May 16 16:00:09 2011 From: melbourne.pm at joshheumann.com (Josh Heumann) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 16:00:09 -0700 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Testing the waters re an anonymous salary survey at next MelbPM meeting In-Reply-To: <4DD0ECE6.6060700@iinet.net.au> References: <4DD0ECE6.6060700@iinet.net.au> Message-ID: <20110516230009.GA26065@joshheumann.com> > Maybe the data contained in http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ would be > useful? The raw data is supplied as well as precanned reports. +1 This is what came to mind for me, too. I'd have no problem participating in a survey, but the sample size here is probably more significant than any you'd get with just us. graph: http://survey.perlfoundation.org/Data-PerlSurvey-2010/R/05_work_info/index.html raw data: https://github.com/singingfish/Data-PerlSurvey-2010/blob/master/data/all_data.csv I believe the numbers are in usd (which isn't much different now, but may have been when the survey was run). J From ickphum at gmail.com Mon May 16 17:17:35 2011 From: ickphum at gmail.com (Ian Macdonald) Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 10:17:35 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Testing the waters re an anonymous salary survey at next MelbPM meeting In-Reply-To: <4DD1929D.3040103@iinet.net.au> References: <4DD0ECE6.6060700@iinet.net.au> <4DD1929D.3040103@iinet.net.au> Message-ID: On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 7:09 AM, David Dick wrote: > On 17/05/11 00:17, Ian Macdonald wrote: > >> >> >> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Ian Macdonald > > wrote: >> >> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:22 PM, David Dick > > wrote: >> >> On 16/05/11 16:52, Ian Macdonald wrote: >> >> Our goal is to gather some evidence we can take to >> management here to >> show them what we need to be offering to attract (and retain) >> experienced Perl developers. >> >> Thoughts? >> >> >> Maybe the data contained in http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ >> would be useful? The raw data is supplied as well as precanned >> reports. >> >> >> Yes, maybe it will be. Thanks David, I'll see what I can pull out of >> this and repost some more targeted and correlated info. >> >> -- >> Ian Macdonald >> >> >> Quick look shows that average (in USD $1000) for Australia is around 90, >> while limiting to 4 years or more Perl raises it to around 100. We >> hadn't reached parity last year, so these would be slightly higher in >> AUD, but there's already heaps of guesswork in these figures, eg salary >> bands are 30k wide. >> >> For me, that's probably enough for now; I think we're unlikely to get >> anything enough better than this to warrant the effort, and we might >> well get something worse and not know it. I'd guess we'd get higher >> figures if we accurately measured the PM group, but I could be wrong >> (these surveys are also self-selecting) and the accuracy is the tricky >> part. >> >> Thanks again David and Toby. >> > > You probably wanted to reply to the list. :) > No, I felt that was a deeply personal message for you, David, but if you want to cheapen it then fine. -- Ian Macdonald -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrew_dent at dentaur.com Tue May 24 16:44:05 2011 From: andrew_dent at dentaur.com (Andrew Dent) Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 09:44:05 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Perl's Birthday??? Message-ID: <004201cc1a6c$799a5790$6ccf06b0$@dentaur.com> Visual Basic has a birthday. http://tinyurl.com/3vujmsh Does Perl have a day considered to be its birthday? The Wikipedia article for Perl mentions 1987 but nothing more specific -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leigh.sharpe at gmail.com Tue May 24 17:13:44 2011 From: leigh.sharpe at gmail.com (Leigh Sharpe) Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 10:13:44 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Perl's Birthday??? In-Reply-To: <004201cc1a6c$799a5790$6ccf06b0$@dentaur.com> References: <004201cc1a6c$799a5790$6ccf06b0$@dentaur.com> Message-ID: According to http://use.perl.org/articles/07/12/17/2046212.shtml , that would be December 18. Leigh. On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Andrew Dent wrote: > Visual Basic has a birthday. http://tinyurl.com/3vujmsh > > > > Does Perl have a day considered to be its birthday? > > The Wikipedia article for Perl mentions 1987 but nothing more specific > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Melbourne-pm mailing list > Melbourne-pm at pm.org > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/melbourne-pm > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From T.Hunt at bom.gov.au Tue May 24 21:23:33 2011 From: T.Hunt at bom.gov.au (Timothy Hunt) Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 14:23:33 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Catalyst on RHEL 5.x [uncl] Message-ID: <7548A47B0E2E8643BE38DBBD8FD9CA1AD533322A6D@BOM-VMBX-HO.bom.gov.au> I have a colleague who is having trouble installing Catalyst on RHEL 5. Does anyone have experience / good how-to's? Cheers, Tim. -- Tim Hunt ph +61 3 9669 4094 From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Tue May 24 21:44:26 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 14:44:26 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Catalyst on RHEL 5.x [uncl] In-Reply-To: <7548A47B0E2E8643BE38DBBD8FD9CA1AD533322A6D@BOM-VMBX-HO.bom.gov.au> References: <7548A47B0E2E8643BE38DBBD8FD9CA1AD533322A6D@BOM-VMBX-HO.bom.gov.au> Message-ID: <4DDC892A.5020706@strategicdata.com.au> On 25/05/11 14:23, Timothy Hunt wrote: > I have a colleague who is having trouble installing Catalyst on RHEL 5. Does anyone have experience / good how-to's? Perl on RHEL has been pretty badly implemented in the past. My suggestion: download perl 5.14.0 tarball, extract, configure and install into /usr/local/ or /opt/ or something, and set your PATH appropriately. Then setup cpanp to auto-install dependencies and use a reliable local mirror, and run: cpanp i Task::Catalyst From drew at drewtaylor.com Thu May 26 02:04:40 2011 From: drew at drewtaylor.com (Drew Taylor) Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 10:04:40 +0100 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] Catalyst on RHEL 5.x [uncl] In-Reply-To: <4DDC892A.5020706@strategicdata.com.au> References: <7548A47B0E2E8643BE38DBBD8FD9CA1AD533322A6D@BOM-VMBX-HO.bom.gov.au> <4DDC892A.5020706@strategicdata.com.au> Message-ID: Or better yet, try perlbrew which takes care of a lot of things for you. Plus it allows you to have multiple versions side-by-side and switch between them for testing. Drew On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 5:44 AM, Toby Corkindale < toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au> wrote: > On 25/05/11 14:23, Timothy Hunt wrote: > >> I have a colleague who is having trouble installing Catalyst on RHEL 5. >> Does anyone have experience / good how-to's? >> > > Perl on RHEL has been pretty badly implemented in the past. > > My suggestion: > download perl 5.14.0 tarball, extract, configure and install into > /usr/local/ or /opt/ or something, and set your PATH appropriately. > Then setup cpanp to auto-install dependencies and use a reliable local > mirror, and run: > cpanp i Task::Catalyst > > > _______________________________________________ > Melbourne-pm mailing list > Melbourne-pm at pm.org > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/melbourne-pm > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au Sun May 29 23:34:08 2011 From: toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au (Toby Corkindale) Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 16:34:08 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] June Perlmongers Meeting Message-ID: <4DE33A60.4040007@strategicdata.com.au> Hello Perl mongers, The June 2011 Perl Mongers meeting will be held as usual on the second wednesday of the month - Wednesday June 8th. We'll have two great presentations for you this time. Firstly, Ingy d?t Net will be presenting "Time to Package", an overview of some of his recent work on time-tracking and packaging tools. Secondly, Paul Fenwick will be presenting a talk for which I should have a description shortly.. Ingy will be heading back stateside soon, so I suspect we'll have a few drinks at the Standard after the meeting to say goodbye too. cheers, Toby From pjf at perltraining.com.au Mon May 30 20:22:42 2011 From: pjf at perltraining.com.au (Paul Fenwick) Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 13:22:42 +1000 Subject: [Melbourne-pm] June Perlmongers Meeting In-Reply-To: <4DE33A60.4040007@strategicdata.com.au> References: <4DE33A60.4040007@strategicdata.com.au> Message-ID: <4DE45F02.5050904@perltraining.com.au> On 05/30/2011 04:34 PM, Toby Corkindale wrote: > Secondly, Paul Fenwick will be presenting a talk for which I should have a > description shortly.. Paul is going to be giving a (beta-level) talk on why your brains suck, how you can patch them, and how you can exploit unpatched wetware in others. :) Paul -- Paul Fenwick | http://perltraining.com.au/ Director of Training | Ph: +61 3 9354 6001 Perl Training Australia | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681