In a Call for Papers, the organizers ask for submission of contributions. A broad variety of topics concerning free and open source software is desired.

Contributions can be submitted in English or German and should summarize the intended talk concisely and succinctly; talks should be no longer than 45 minutes in length. Deadline for submission is June, 4th 2007.

PerlPlanet to the rescue. Because there was no other implementation of a Planet like thing and I thought it couldn’t be that hard, I wrote a replacement myself. PerlPlanet can do everything except the Hackergotchi feature while staying compatible with Planets own templates and configuration files. Turns out it is even 500 lines less, though you have to install quite a bunch of Modules, but you should be used to that by now.

Get it here.

P.S.: WordPress 2.0 Beta rocks…

Well, because Mark (the original author of Kflickr) is a little bit out of time at the moment and has a rather conservative patch policy and because I have done quite a lot of stuff in the last week on Kflickr, I decided to make this patchset public, keep it in sync with Mark’s tree and see what will happen.

So, Kflickr MT was born. In it’s current incarnation mt2 it is nearly feature complete (in context of an uploading only application), meaning that it can do photo sets and groups, photo licenses, photo rotation, bigger previews and “tags with spaces”. A couple of fixes are in there, too, plus one CVS fix from Mark for UTF8, which made it impossible to set tags containing German umlauts.

This way I hope to get some feedback and bug reports to have some better arguments for Mark to merge the stuff (and that it is actually usefull).

Here you go:

• Source (tar.bz2)
• Source (tar.gz)
• Debian Unstable i386

Tags: kflickr, flickr, kde

You scored as Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is an archaeologist/adventurer with an unquenchable love for danger and excitement. He travels the globe in search of historical relics. He loves travel, excitement, and a good archaeological discovery. He hates Nazis and snakes, perhaps to the same degree. He always brings along his trusty whip and fedora. He’s tough, cool, and dedicated. He relies on both brains and brawn to get him out of trouble and into it. Indiana Jones 63% Maximus 58% James Bond, Agent 007 58% Batman, the Dark Knight 58% The Terminator 54% Neo, the "One" 54% William Wallace 50% The Amazing Spider-Man 42% Lara Croft 38% Captain Jack Sparrow 38% El Zorro 25%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

One can implement a userspace filesystem using the whole power of Perl, and that makes it quite easy. I implemented a basic ftp filesystem this morning, which uses Fuse.pm and Net::FTP to allow read only access to ftp servers. It works quite well and was really easy, so this might be the beginning of a couple of nice userspace filesystems written in Perl. I could actually create MegasusFS….

BTW, you can download fuseftp from my wiki page.

Usage is quite easy, you can simply:

marcus@hal2000:~: mkdir kernel
marcus@hal2000:~: fuseftp kernel/ ftp.kernel.org &
Successfully logged into ftp.kernel.org
[1] 7150
marcus@hal2000:~: cd kernel/
marcus@hal2000:~/kernel: ls
for_mirrors_only  lost+found  pub  usr  welcome.msg
marcus@hal2000:~/kernel: cd ..
marcus@hal2000:~: fusermount -u kernel/
[1]+  Done                    fuseftp kernel/ ftp.kernel.org

Well, I have been looking for real Perl bindings for the SILC Client API for quite a while. The problem is that there are none. Apparantly, nobody took it’s time to write something which would allow something like:

use Net::SILC::Client;
use Chatbot::Eliza;

my $bot = new Chatbot::Eliza( );

sub on_channel_message {
    my ($self, $channel, $nick, $message) = @_;

    if ($message =~ $self->nickname) {
        my $answer = $bot->transform($message);

        $self->channel_message($channel,
                               $nick . ': '  . $answer );
    }
}

my $silc = Net::SILC::Client->new (channels => [ 'silc' ],
                                   nickname => 'NSC');

$silc->set_callback('channel_message', \&on_channel_message);

$silc->connect;

A few days ago, I stumbled over SILC.pm a Sourceforge Project which attempted to create a Perl wrapper for the SILC API. They hadn’t released any code and as the project was founded in 2002 I contacted the authors and asked if they had already done some work, because I started believing that I would have to do this myself. They where really friendly and they had code, but only wrapping some of SILCs Math functions and not really what I needed. So I started writing from scratch.

As of today, you can run the above example and it does what it has to, plus there are a couple of other events that you can handle directly from Perl. As this is my first Perl/C/PerlXS Module I believe that it is leaking memory like hell as well as there are a couple of other problems (vanishing scalars between two function calls is one of them). But it supports all important events (you can set callbacks as this whole system is event driven), lets you issue commands and send private and channel messages. What I need to do to make it a possible frontend for Megasus is that I need an other Event System (for things like fetching RSS feeds) and some other minor fixes, but the major part is done. The Event System is a little bit tricky, as I tried to use Event.pm and running the SILC Main Loop with it which crashed horibly and I’m still not really good in debugging this stuff. And of course, it is lacking documentation (there are two examples which show the main methods as well as some information about the events, but this is not really good). It’s still far away from something I’d release to the CPAN, but If you want to have a look, it’s all in the CVS on Sourceforge.

Well… 2.6.13 doesn’t seem to like my USB Stick anymore … and again the same problem: I don’t know where to report such stuff. The Kernel Mailing list is a mess and absolutely far to high traffic, I don’t know of any Linux Bugzilla Kernel developers care about and so I’m lost and have to wait for 2.6.13.1….

I just registered for OSCON Europe as a speaker. I will be giving my (now more or less famous) talk FIFFS – FIFFS Intelligent Feed Filter System. This will be my first english talk on 3 years …. we’ll see. Anyway, I found out that I need to write some books, because O’Reilly didn’t put my name on their flyers. Anyway. … I’ll bee seeing Larry, and Damian and Leon (again) and ….