White Camel

It's over a month since I've posted anything here. Sorry about that. For the first half of August I was in Italy. The first week, I was speaking at a conference in Pisa and after that we spent a few days in Rome and Venice. I took more than a few photos and they're slowly making their way onto my Flickr page. They should all be up there in a week or so (although, having said that, I still haven't sorted out the photos from last year's holiday in the Baltic).

Rather pleased with the way this photo of the Colosseum came out. But given a half-decent camera, an ancient monument and the Italian flair for lighting there probably wasn't much that could go wrong.

Not quite sure what happened to the rest of August though...

Sometimes it's good to just take a new idea and hack on it for a couple of hours to see what happens. That's what I've done this evening.

I've been using Songkick for a while. Songkick is a web site that tracks users' attendance at gigs. I've been tracking the gigs I've been going to as well as trying to fill in over thirty years of old gigs.

I've known for some time that Songkick has an API, but until yesterday the API has been for invited partners only. But yesterday on Get Satisfaction they announced that it was now public.

The public API doesn't do that much yet. There are only four documented calls. But it's already useful and I'm sure it will gain more functionality quickly.

And this evening I've spent some time writing a very simple Net::Songkick module. This is really just a proof of concept, but I've got big plans for improving it. And I can already write a useful program like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::LibXML;
use Net::Songkick;

my $user = shift || 'davorg';
my $sk = Net::Songkick->new({
  api_key => $ENV{SONGKICK_API_KEY}
});

my $xml = $sk->get_upcoming_events({
  user => $user,
});

my $xp = XML::LibXML->new->parse_string($xml);

foreach ($xp->findnodes('//event/@displayName')) {
  print $_->to_literal, "\n";
}

If you have any interest in gigs then I highly recommend Songkick to you. And if you like attending gigs and hacking Perl (although not necessarily at the same time) then why not give Net::Songkick a try. All you'll need is an API key from Songkick.

There's a Github repository too; if you feel like hacking on it...

After a long period that I was giving only on-site classes finally I decided that it might be time to start offering the "public registration" classes as well.

It is a lot more work to organize such class as I need to be in touch with several customers and there were cases when people cancelled their participation in the last minute but recently several companies indicated that they would like to send 1-2 people to such class so I hope it won't be that hard

The syllabus of the Fundamentals of Perl training is on the web site of PTI but actually the whole material can be found on my web site.