Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in The Perl Review's LiveJournal:

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Monday, December 15th, 2008
7:00 am	The Perl Review, Winter 2007 Issue 4.1 (Winter 2007) Table of Contents Simple Web Access—Alberto Manuel Simões (first page) Parrot Status Report—Jonathan Scott Duff (first page) Mapping Op Codes—Eric Maki (first page) CPANdeps—David Cantrell (first page) HTML Slides—Grant McLean (first page) Alter Egos—Anno Siegel (first page) (Comment on this)
Friday, September 5th, 2008
3:20 pm	The Perl Review, Fall 2007 Issue 4.0 (Fall 2007) Table of Contents Templating My Output—Alberto Manuel Simões (first page) Making My Own CPAN—brian d foy (first page) Programming Parrot—Jonathan Scott Duff (first page) Komodo Test Drive—Jim Brandt (first page) Named Captures in Perl 5.9.5—brian d foy (first page) (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
7:09 am	The Perl Review, Spring 2008 Issue 4.2 (Spring 2008) Table of Contents Compiling My Own perl—brian d foy (first page) FMTIEWTK About Closures—Johan Lodin (first page) Expecting Perl—Mark Schoonover (first page) Perl and Undecidability—Jeffrey Kegler (first page) The Year in Perl, 2007—brian d foy (first page) (Comment on this)
Monday, August 13th, 2007
3:38 am	Perlcast interviews brian d foy about TPR 2.3 Perlcast interviews brian d foy about The Perl Review version 2.3. (Comment on this)
2:47 am	Found Perl, now a Flickr Photo Pool Found Perl is section of The Perl Review's website where we posted pictures of Perl paraphernalia or the word "Perl" in the wild. We started it a long time ago, and were very slow in updating it when people would send in photos. Now "Found Perl" is a photo pool on Flickr. Instead of sending them to TPR, just add them to the pool. (Comment on this)
2:34 am	Schwern's Shirt, now on Flickr The Perl Review's website has had a section on Schwern's Shirt, the orange monstrosity that brian d foy bought at the charity auction for The Perl Foundation at the 2004 Open Source Convention. Now we've moved the section of the website to a Flickr group for Schwern's shirt. This way, anyone can add their photos of Schwern's shirt to the group. Instead of being infrequently updated on the website, people can add them as soon as they upload them to Flickr. If you don't have a Flickr account and don't want to create one, you can still send them to The Perl Review by mailing them to editors@theperlreview.com. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
3:07 am	The Perl Review, Summer 2007 The Summer 2007 issue of The Perl Review is out, and it's a special edition for the YAPC::NA sponsored by LiveText (who are looking for good Perl programmers in the Chicago area). This issue's cover is some of the conference detritus I've collected over the years. The Summer 2007 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. In this issue: Managing Modules Without Going Crazy -- brian d foy Carp & Friends -- Alberto Simões The Perl Debugger -- Richard Foley Tk Mega-widgets -- Charles Colbourn and other stuff We're always looking for people with good Perl stories to tell to, and you can submit an article idea. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 1st, 2007
3:08 am	The Perl Review, Spring 2007 The next issue of The Perl Review is out, and it's a special edition for the Nordic Perl Workshop! Not only that, the PDF-only price is now only $7. Subscribe now to beat the price increase for US postage rate increases in May. The Spring 2007 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. In this issue (besides the cover showing Gary Blackburn's license "PERL GOD" license plate), there's: History of the Nordic Perl Workshop—Jonas Nielsen New Features in Perl 5.10—Renée Bäcker Dynamic Object Reconfiguration—Peter Scott Adding Transactions to DBM::Deep—Rob Kinyon Parsing with Parse::Eyapp—Casiano Rodriguez Leon can() You Do It?—brian d foy and other stuff (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
3:12 am	The Perl Review now 60% off We've cut the price for online subscriptions to The Perl Review to $7, and made the PDF-only subscription available to everyone, including subscribers in the US. People who subscribed to the web-only edition in the last couple of months will have their subscriptions extended by a year. Normal print subscription prices will stay the same as long as the Postal Service keeps their prices the same. The online-only version was really something we wanted to offer to international subscribers and eventually change to a print version. After researching the possibility of printing in three different countries in the European Union, we discovered that the same thing kills it: postage to other countries. The very slight savings in postage in the EU is offset by higher printing costs for lower print runs and a lot of extra work to come out the same as sending it from the US. We are looking at ways to get the print copies to international customers though. We have two and a half years of back issues (10 in all) and those magically fit together into a single Global Priority Flat Rate envelope that we can send to most countries for $US9.50. That brings the price to just below the $1.11 postage to send a single copy in the US, which is the basis for our prices. To make that work we need to rejigger the subscriber database a bit to recognize the different subscriber model, but that's actually fun work once we have the time for it. :) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
3:17 am	TPR's Perl Community Google Calendar I've created a Perl Community calendar on Google Calendar. I've wanted to do this sort of thing for a long time to help track that stuff for The Perl Review's print listing. I've given up on writing my own calendar application. Google Calendar has a decent interface that I don't have to support, and it provides feeds: XML, iCal, and HTML. I'll do some more work to make nice URLs and so on, but for now it's there. I can add people as editors, although I expect that as with anything in the community, there will be a couple of people looking for the events and entering them. I don't want to make a lot of work for people organizing conferences, so just make sure I know about the event so I can add them (which really means post them to use.Perl as a story for the front page). I'll pull from the events in the calendar for that section in TPR. There are some other online calendars for Perl too. Most notably is the one for the Lisbon Perl Mongers. Many other Perl Mongers groups have calendars too. If you know of any others, please let me know. I'd like to devise some sort of aggregator to merge things into a single calendar. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 1st, 2006
3:20 am	The Perl Review 3.0 (Fall 2006) It's the start of the third year in print! The Fall 2006 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. You can even buy TPR on the newsstand now if you shop at Powell's Technical Books in Portland. In this issue (besides the cover showing the Larry Wall action figure by ArtCard Mike): Google's Summer of Code— Jim Brandt pmtools—Mark Leighton Fisher Parrot Magic Cookies—Jonathan Scott Duff Agent-based Programming in Perl—Guinevere Nell ETL Nightmares—Thomas MacKenzie and other stuff (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, July 21st, 2006
3:26 am	The Perl Review interviews Curtis "Ovid" Poe Earlier this summer, I interviewed Ovid about Perl Hacks, grants from The Perl Foundation, logic programming, and various other things. Ovid put me off my game by promptly replying with detailed answers that messed up my whole editorial process of nagging and badgering, so it's only my fault that you had to wait so long to read it. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 20th, 2006
3:57 am	The Perl Review, Summer 2006 (Special YAPC Chicago Edition) The Summer 2006 issue of The Perl Review comes out June 1. Check your email for your renewal notice if you're at the end of your subscription! This issue is a special edition for YAPC::NA Chicago sponsored by LiveText (anyone need a job? They're hiring :), and featuring on the front cover a photo collage of the Chicago skyline created by Eric Maki and Daniel Allen using freely usable images from Flickr and GD. Too bad I can't show you pictures on use.Perl. It's really a wonderful cover, and after reading their article you'll be able to make your own. Perl::Critic—Josh McAdams GUI Development with wxGlade—Johan Vromans Programming Parrot—Alberto Simões Photo Collages with Perl—Eric Maki and Daniel Allen Peter Scott's review of Perl Hacks Community news, views, and more... (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
4:02 am	The Perl Review interviews Allison Randal The Perl Review interviews Allison Randal about being an O'Reilly editor, running (formerly) TPF, creating Parrot, and her latest venture, Onyx Neon Press. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 13th, 2006
4:05 am	The Perl Journal passes away CMP decided to stop publishing The Perl Journal, which they has recently moved to a completely HTML form. I'll certainly miss TPJ. Jon Orwant published my first two Perl articles, and the magazine certainly did a lot for the community. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006
6:53 pm	The Perl Review Date Format Challenge I just posted this challenge to Perlmonks, and it's the first TPR code challenge, I guess: David Pogue had a momentary lapse of judgement when he proclaims in his blog that the date sequence 01:02:03 04/05/06 will only happen once in all of human history. Besides the obvious gaffes of date formatting (which one is the month and which one is the year?), the red herring of leading zeros (to make the minute and second stand out), and so on, no one who's seen this has made the comment that calendars say whatever we want them to say and the numbers are only special because we set the calendar up that way in this one case. What about the Chinese, Hebrew, and Muslim calendars? So this seems like a good challenge to publish in The Perl Review: using the Perl Date modules (or not, I guess), in how many different calendars and formats can you make this sequence? What else is special about those days (are they a weekend, fall on a full moon, have a solar eclipse, etc.)? Read more about it on Perlmonks... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
11:12 pm	The Economics of Newsstands Powell's Technical Books in Portland (that's the one on 33 NW Park Avenue) is going to carry The Perl Review. It's our first newsstand distribution. I had to set a newstand price. The deal basically works like this: bookstores keep most of the profit. Magazines make money when the single-issue buyers turn into subscribers. After Powell's cut, which we set at 40%, and my costs, $2 an issue, I have to figure out a price that also motivates people to give the money to The Perl Review directly instead of the book store. That's why you see big discounts for magazines when you subscribe: that's the real price, and everything else is markup. The Powell's price ends up being $5, which is 50 cents more than the subscription price. That's not to say that newsstands are bad. It's like better-than-free advertising since it sits on the shelf and I cover my costs plus a little more for every issue sold. Forget about absolute numbers for a moment. At my price point, if they sell 75% of the copies, I break even. That would be fine with me because any copy sitting on the actual magazine display means people see that issue. Some might subscribe later even if they don't buy it. Now that I have a price point, I have to figure out the right number of issues. That's something I just have to guess. I left 16 copies of the Spring 2005 issue, but I also have to consider that I sold about 10 at the Intermediate Perl book signing. We'll see how that goes. Now, a good magazine accountant has to keep track of the actual number of newsstand sales too. As much as I'd like to pretend that we sell every single copy, the Post Office wants to know where all the issues went to verfiy that we abide by all the periodical rules. It's not enough for the newsstand to simply tell me what they sold. They certainly aren't going to tell me they sold everything when they didn't since that's money out of their pocket. They can't really tell me they sold nothing because that's money out of my pocket. If you're a late night person living in a city, you might have seen a bunch of guys tearing off the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Instead of sending back the unused copies, they send back the cover (and they do that for books too). Every cover they don't send back is a sale that they owe me money for. You might think those unsold issues represent lost money, but they really don't. They are a sunk cost, meaning that I would have spent that money regardless of the sales. That starts way back at the printers when I have to decide how many issues I want. That number includes all subscriptions, complimentary copies, samples to user groups, and all the issues I'll need to fulfill orders for back issues. Not only that, but the more copies I print, the lower the incremental cost (the cost per each copy). Each printing job has a fixed overhead for the job preparation, machine set-up, and so on. That's the make ready. I end up printing many more copies than I need, partly to amoritize the make ready. Not selling at the newsstand is slightly better than not selling while sitting in boxes in the office. At least people see them at the newsstand. Remember that magazines make money on subscriptions, so that's the goal. I don't care about selling more at the newsstands. If someone subscribes because they see an issue on the newsstand, the profit from the subscription pays for about three unsold newsstand copies, so five subscriptions from people seeing the issue at Powell's would make up for no sells. That's just breaking even, and nobody makes any money. That also means I'm spending $6 to get a new subscriber. If you're already despondent, you don't want to read about distributors. Most bookstores don't want to deal with every individual publisher. They'd have to keep track of a separate deal for every magazine. Instead, they want to deal with a single source in the same way they deal with books. I know my costs, and I know the newsstands cut, and I have a price point that I can't change to much because people won't buy it at too high a price. If I use a distributor, perhaps to get into the big chain book stores, they are going to want a big cut too. I'll end up either breaking even or losing money on every newsstand copy, and I'll want to convert that to a subscription as soon as possible. That's why you see so many wonderful subscription cards in the magazines. So far I've just talked about money from sales. We can also sell advertising, which we do for the special friends of the Perl community. Since magazines know they are going to lose money at the newsstand, they make up the difference with paid advertising. Ever wonder why magazines such as Wired are mostly advertisements? That's making up for the money they'll lose on the newsstands. Remember when I talked about keeping track of the number of copies sold? Advertisers want to know those numbers. They don't care how many copies the newsstand bought. They care about the number of copies that shoppers bought. That sets the rate at which the magazines can sell ads. More eyeballs equal more dollars. There's a separate industry of companies that audit magazines to verify the numbers. That's even more money that gets sucked away. The short story? Subscribe to the magazines you like. It's the only way they can survive. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 16th, 2006
11:36 am	RSS for interviews Last year, I started including interviews with Perl people on The Perl Review website, but I didn't add a feed for that. Now I have and it's on RSS page. It was actually Aristotle over at use.perl who pointed out the missing feed by scraping the site and creating his own. The web site is actually a directory processed by Template Toolkit, so what I really need to do is add indexing support as ttree goes through the directories, then spit out pages as it does that. That sounds like a magazine article... (Comment on this)
Friday, January 13th, 2006
4:07 am	Perlcast with brian d foy on TPR Winter 2005 jmcada writes "Time for another Perlcast interview. This one is with a return guest, brian d foy. In this interview, we talk about the Winter 2005 Issue of The Perl Review." (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 4th, 2006
3:20 pm	New book review news; guideline links Every issue I get a couple of book reviews that don't quite cut it. Techies tend to present too many sides of the story: rather than express their opinion, they equivocate by pointing out all the holes in their own opinion. In short, they are entirely too nice. Being nice isn't a bad thing, but what people really want out a book review is a recommendation. "Should I buy this book?" It doesn't matter if people agree with you as long as you are fair to the book. After that, people want to know the particulars: who, what, when, where, and how. So far, The Perl Review has taken reviews from several different people, and very few people have provided multiple reviews. That worked when we were first getting started, but now I think we need something different. Since book reviews are about opinions, and the reader doesn't have to agree with the reviewer, I think readers need to know the reputation and leaning of the reviewer to make their own decision. For instance, my wife doesn't agree with movie-reviewer Roger Ebert, but based on his negative reviews she knows which movies she will like. At the same time, she knows the certain people on LiveJournal likes the same sorts of movies she does, so she can trust them. In line with all that, I think I'm going to move towards recurring book reviewers, and do more to establish their reputation. That also means that I want to get a couple of reviewers who think about books differently so I can give more readers someone that thinks like them. I've approached a couple of people, and we'll see how it turns out. I've added two guides I hadn't run across previously: O'Reilly Media's Book Review Tips Slashdot's Book Review guidelines (1 Comment |Comment on this)