The Perl Review

The Perl Review, Spring 2008

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:11:51 GMT

Issue 4.2 (Spring 2008)

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)

The Perl Review, Fall 2007

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:05:35 GMT

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)

The Perl Review, Winter 2007

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:03:08 GMT

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)

Perlcast interviews brian d foy about TPR 2.3

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:55:59 GMT

Perlcast interviews brian d foy about The Perl Review version 2.3.

Found Perl, now a Flickr Photo Pool

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:51:54 GMT

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.

Schwern's Shirt, now on Flickr

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:46:34 GMT

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.

The Perl Review Date Format Challenge

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:56:51 GMT

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.)?

The Economics of Newsstands

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 08:35:59 GMT

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.

RSS for interviews

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:48:03 GMT

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...

New book review news; guideline links

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 23:31:21 GMT

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:

I'm disappearing for a bit

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:30:01 GMT

It seems that every time I put out a new issue I have to leave town for a couple weeks. I don't think the two are related. Travel is just too busy this year. Add to that finishing up the Alpaca book and I've had a pretty busy week. I'll be back in the middle of December.

The Perl Review 2.1 ready for download

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:21:37 GMT

I'm sending out the email announcements as I post this. Once you get the new password, you'll be able to download the latest issue of The Perl Review.

In this issue:

Seven Sins of Perl OO Programming -- chromatic
Hash Anti-Patterns -- Alberto Manuel Simões
Haskell for Perlers -- Frank Antonsen
PerlWar -- Yanick Champoux
books reviews, commentary, news and more...

Some of you neglected to renew, but I won't bug you in email anymore. To find out more about the sampler on the cover, you'll have to renew that subscription.

If you haven't subscribed yet, now's the time because I have to raise prices next year when the US postal rates go up.

We're on Perl.com, and a lot of other places

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:49:13 GMT

We now have a permanent link on Perl.com. We're way at the bottom, but that's okay.

I went looking for other mentions of TPR on O'Reilly sites and found that they have cited many of our book reviews.

We even have some of our book reviews cited on Amazon.com.

Reviewer opportunities

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 18:54:32 GMT

We're looking for reviewers for Activestate's Komodo and OSoft's ThoutReader. Let us know if you're interested.

It's renewal time!

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 18:52:18 GMT

The next issue of The Perl Review comes out in a couple of weeks, so it's time to renew if you've already finished your first year subscription!

This may seem odd for some who just recently subscribed, but with the magic of time travel we let you pretend that your subscription started much earlier by allowing you to choose which issue to start your subscription. You may have subscribed yesterday but selected to start with issue 1.0 (Winter 2004), meaning that your issue ran out with our last issue, 1.3 (Fall 2005).

I've found that most new subscribers like to get most of the back issues at first, and it's worked out rather well for us. Now that we're starting our second year, though, I have to figure out how to make that work so people don't have to renew right away. I'll have to add a two-year subscription, I think.

Renewing subscribers

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 01:44:10 GMT

I've been reading lot about magazine renewal rates. A lot of publications seem to be happy to get 25% renewals, and they actually spend a fair bit of money to get that. Ever wonder why you get some many magazine renewal letters in your postal mail?

For TPR, since I don't have a lot of money, I simply used email. The target audience is certainly technology-adept, so that's not so bad. So far I've sent out three renewal emails. One was the week before OSCON, and I got about a 45% response for that. That's already good for magazines, but not quite the 98% renewal rate TPJ had in its first year. I sent out a second email two weeks after that, and another one over the weekend. I think I'm floating somewhere around 75% renewal right now.

I have a list of all of the people who haven't renewed (it's an SQL view ;), and a lot of them should have and I would be surprised if they don't. Although email provided me with a virtually free way to get that 75%, I also think email has a tendency to get lost. First, if the subscriber can't deal with it right awy, it joins the long queue of messages that get ignored forever. Second, it has a pretty good chance of being blocked by a spam filter. Third, some people might get so mucch mail that they just don't get to ever see it. I do send each mail individually since each contains a persoanl renewal code, so I'm not blasting out spam to any user at each domain.

I am considering sending out some postcards to the hold-outs. I figure that will cost me about $50, which means that I need about four renewals to make up for it. If I get four renewals, that's paid for. I'm also going to try emailing people directly. It certainly helps when other people talk about TPR. I notice a big spike in renewals when Ovid talked about his upcoming Logic Programming article.

There's another trick to getting renewals: special promotional subscriptions. Magazines give you a special rate for a limited time then hit you up for the full price as quickly as possible. It's all part of the ad-selling game. Advertisers want to know how many "qualified subscribers" you have, which means how many people actually want your magazine enough to pay for it. Getting people to be full subscribers raises those numbers.

TPR is a bit different because I don't aim to make it an audited magazine, meaning that no one is going to come in and put a stamp on our books saying they verified our subscriber base. I'm not in it to sell advertising (let's see if I'm saying the same thing in three years). So far I've only taken advertising from people the Perl community already loves and trusts. Most of that is just filling up the other full color pages that come along with the cover.

"Computer Science Major Publishes Book on Perl Testing"

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 05:18:34 GMT

TPR got a mention in Northeastern's tiny article about Ian Langworth.

Curiously, they dropped every name they could find, except mine. Oh well. :)

Review PrimalScript IDE

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 04:27:51 GMT

Anyone want to review PrimalScript, Sapien's IDE? It says it has Perl support.

Matching up records

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 12:19:36 GMT

I now have a big stack of emails confirming renewal transactions, and I need to shove those transactions into my local database so people keep getting their magazines.

Most of them are pretty easy because they are keyed on their unique ID in the database. A lot of people skipped the link I sent them and went to the subscription page directly, so I have to match up those with what I see in te database.

So far it works like this and handles 95% of the records:

Get all the matches by name
1. With one match, we're probably done
2. With no match, try different parts of the name (last, first)
3. With multiple matches, we need to match something else too.
From the name matches, compare email addresses. If they match, we're done.
At this point we probably have several candidate matches.
Look at parts of the address (country, city, address). If the first two are matches, we're pretty sure we have a match.
Look at the email if we might have a match and compare the user portion to the new email and the stored email. Do the same for the host portion. This is just to raise the confidence level a bit.

This leaves about 5% that I need to check by hand. It's the first time I've had to go through with this so I'm being very cautious. Thank god for test suites.

It's renewal time

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 06:58:29 GMT

Now that we've made it through the first year, it's time to get people to renew. I've sent out renewal emails, but I'm guessing 10% of them will never make it into an inbox. Spam has just about ruined email for anything.

If you've already received four issues, it's time for you to renew, and you can use subscription form and subscribe again.

Either way, I have an interesting task ahead. Since I don't store any personal information on the Pair.com servers that power our website, and we never store credit card information or do recurring billing, I get to match up the renewals with existing subscribers. It's easy to know which transactions are renewals, and each email I've sent has a link with a query string that I can link back to a subscriber. However, people might not follow the link but go directly to the webiste, or all sorts of other things that don't let me see that code. We'll see how that goes.

In related matters, I was rewriting the code bits that parse the email I get so I can shove all that stuff into the database. I was doing fancy things with ergexen, then Template::Extract, and some other things, and although it was a lot of fun, it was a big waste of time. Since I really just wanted to suck it into another program, why not send it as a ready-to-use data structure? It's easy enough to freeze things and unthaw them later. I still see my nicely formatted template, but at the end I include the Perl ready data. Besides the trivial parsing to isolate that, I'm ready to important things into the database. Things can be too simple to be seen sometimes.

Review "Pro Perl" and "Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook"

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:03:58 GMT

Anyone want to review any of these books? Let brian know soon. The article deadline is at the end of the month.

Pro Perl (Apress)
Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly)
Learning Perl, 4th edition (O'Reilly)

I finally meet Eric Maki

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 15:44:58 GMT

I finally got to meet Eric Maki, TPRs designer, in person. We went through the current issue and looked at a lot of the design things we might want to change, and we also have an idea for an upcoming project I'll have details later.

If you haven't seen the latest cover (Summer 2005), get yourself an issue. It's so nice that we're going to make posters of it.

I'll be on Perlcast soon

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 15:42:49 GMT

After a long day at YAPC where I taught a 4-day Learning Perl course in a single day, and then a 5 hour boat dinner cruise, Josh McAdams of Perlcast interviewed me about The Perl Review. I'm not sure when he'll publish it.

The cool thing is that Josh is moving to Chicago. I might be able to get on Perlcast a bit more often. :)

The Best Software Writing reviewer

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 04:14:42 GMT

I got an advnace copy of The Best Software Writing from Apress. It's a collection of writings compiled by Joel Spolsky. Anyone want to take a whack at reviewing this for the next issue?

In the mail today

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 18:13:14 GMT

The Perl Review Summer 2005 issues should be in the mail today. The printer was screwing around again. They've been a disaster. You know the sort of people: they can't just do something without sending four emails back and forth, each with some new reason why things can't happen right away.

Ugh. My apologies everyone.