Garden Of Blog

Notes from Yet Another Perl Conference:: North America, in Pittsburgh. These conference posts are being mirrored from Software @ UNH in case that site ever goes away.

3:03 pm: Lightning talks have concluded. Some closing words at this point from various folks and organizers, and feedback from attendees. It seems the 8am sessions were poorly attended, so next year they’ll likely start at 9am. Good call.

Well, it’s mostly a wrap. Thanks for reading.

2:35 pm: Matt Trout is pushing Perl evangelism via blogging about it. Rousing lighting talk. Consider it done, Matt.

2:29 pm: Todd Olson is talking about the value of sunshine and supplementing with vitamin D3 if you live in the northern hemisphere. He’s addressed his own deficiencies in this way. Nothing to do with Perl but I have the urge to get out of this dark auditorium and into the sun.

2:18 pm: a slide of Joe Camel, cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, with the word “Perl” underneath. Next slide: “Hook ‘em while they’re young.” Hilarious. This guy is evangelizing Perl over verbose languages like Java, especially in regards to introducing young people to programming.

2:11 pm: now a plea from one of the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) guys to submit documentation and other patches, which he will handle and protect the pumpkings from. Obviously there’s some stovepiping in the community but it doesn’t seem all that bad.

1:58 pm: there’s a guy talking about programming a serial device over telnet, to which he has attached an LED which is now blinking whatever he chooses to type in Morse code. Cute. I’d love to do hardware stuff.

1:30 pm: Yes, the lighting talks are going way too fast for me to cover. There was just an interesting one about Perl support in vim. It’s funny when the 1-minute bell rings and the speakers start to stutter through the last 60 seconds.

12:51pm: The afternoon will close out the conference with lightning talks. This would translate into lightning typing if I didn’t feel groggy from lunch. Results may vary.

11:25 am: Actually the Enlightened Perl thing appears to be more about pure evangelism for Perl in the business community.

11:09 am: now for a talk about Enlightened Perl, a new organization concerned once again, I assume, with promoting Perl best practices.

10:46 am: now a sort of fluffy talk on how the speaker uses Perl to manage a large newsletter. This is the sort of talk that makes me think that I should maybe give a talk.

10:37 am: ok, covered the most basic saving and retrieving data from an object stuff. I suppose I could do this by hand or maybe I should look into DBIx::Class after all. I’m just not *needing* objects that badly in systems of the size I write. Does anyone want to convince me otherwise?

10:32 am: Leonard is somehow avoiding talking about OO thus far.

10:22 am: now a session on OO Perl with Leonard Miller, one of the Frozen Perl people.

10:11 am: Duh. What I was missing was that the monitoring service is for their own application servers which you are presumably already using to host your stuff. Cloud. Right. I’m back.

10:02 am: Robin Darby is from Amazon and showing us CloudWatch which seems to be a system performance monitoring service. There are Perl modules you can use to pull the data. Seems like a lot of work when there are things like Nagios. I might be missing something.

9:54 am: waiting patiently for the session called “Perl: Cloud Glue?”.

9:37 am: I am in a session on YAML. It’s a data-centric markup language, that doesn’t really have markup. It’s sort of the Python of markup languages.

Notes from Yet Another Perl Conference:: North America, in Pittsburgh. These conference posts are being mirrored from Software @ UNH in case that site ever goes away.

3:37 pm: for some reason they are running two sessions instead of three right now, meaning they are both standing room only. The guy talking about social networks is beating around the bush. Your reporter grows tired…

3:09 pm: now a talk about legacy apps. Unfortunately I am having trouble understanding the speaker, which seems almost an apt metaphor for trying to understand the code in inherited legacy apps.

2:36 pm: all in all a pretty balanced, though bawdy, talk by Matt Trout. My final impression is that Perl 5 is reaching a critical mass and we need Perl 6 sooner than later, at least if the quest for good standards is to reach any kind of fulfillment.

2:20 pm: he’s pushing Catalyst (another web application framework) now. Ah… it’s his project. It all makes sense now.

2:17 pm: now he is dissing on CGI::Application and how the plugins are a bit of a “free for all”.

2:07 pm: another meme kicked off in “The Mythical Man-Month”: Second-System Effect.

2:04 pm: Matt Trout is giving a pretty funny and philosophical talk.

1:57 pm: now attending a session entitled “Catching a ::STD” which is a pun on the Perl 6 standards doc (well actually a module) maintained by Larry.

1:51 pm: Recession alert: there are some very talented unemployed people here.

1:49 pm: I’m probably crusty or resistant, but, it seems like POE and Moose are sledgehammers for finishing nails as far as what I am needing. These things were designed with large systems in mind.

1:21 pm: now attending a session on POE::Filters.

11:31 am: second recommendation for Devel::NYTProf this conference. I think I might check this out. Project was started by the New York Times and is now maintained by Tim Bunce.

11:26 am: this is turning into a Moose session.

11:19 am: now a talk about XML::Toolkit.

11:02 am: Jim makes the point that you can’t program the office workflow without support from above. Grassroots workflow efforts don’t work. I’ve found that to be true as well– adoption needs to be forced for certain applications to work.

10:50 am: not sure that Workflow.pm is for me, I’d probably just roll my own. None of these scenarios are tough to code on their own, IMHO. Maybe I’m missing something.

10:36 am: finally, code!

10:34 am: still no code. This guy is obviously smart and coping as well as he can in some hellish corporate sweatshop. Code though? He’s probably been told not to show code in presentations by his business people.

10:26 am: Jim Brandt is being descriptive about business workflows but I want to see the code.

10:18 am: The email talk is over; onto a talk about business process management with Workflow.pm. This will either be eye opening or completely off base.

10:14 am: I wonder if I will remember this presentation after being burned by email two or three more times and finally take this guy’s advice.

10:10 am: now he’s selling me on Email::MIME::Kit. We’ll see, I guess. I am about to open the email can of worms again on the SSR application.

10:05 am: starting to fear that I shouldn’t be using Email::Send. Ricardo is selling me on Email::Sender.

9:57 am: Ricardo Signes is talking about his on and off romance with handling email as a Perl programmer. Now he is mentioning some of the common modules that are used.

9:54 am: just got out of chromatic’s standing-room-only talk on “Modern Perl”, which is an effort to make Perl 5 the best it can be. They added another talk on the topic due to the interest.

I expected a rusted-out carcass of a town, but as a couple of elderly natives commented on the shuttle, it’s turned into a college town over the years. The place feels vibrant and happening. There are bad neighborhoods but I haven’t seen them, just friendly college slums jammed with girls in summer dresses, bringing bags of bottles from the weekend’s parties to the curb.

Notes from Yet Another Perl Conference:: North America, in Pittsburgh. These conference posts are being mirrored from Software @ UNH in case that site ever goes away.

5:29 pm: The last session I was to attend was the least interesting (to me) of the day, and since it was standing room only, I bailed for the hotel. I was burnt anyhow. Good day though.

4:08 pm: It’s tempting to try and get mod_perl6 running on the Perl 6 server we have at UNH. I might wait though considering I have other things depending on Apache on that server– and if that ain’t broke… no need to fix it.

3:51 pm: Now it’s Jeff Horwitz on mod_perl6.

3:31 pm: Patrick’s back at it with specifics on how to contribute directly to the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation. Many Perl 6 functions are written in Perl 6 but may require optimization if they turn out slow. This seems like dressing in front of a mirror.

2:47 pm: Patrick is done with the regexes talk. Now for a break and to decide whether to stick with Patrick for the afternoon, or check out a session on command-line Perl. I’m tempted to stay with Patrick.

2:37 pm: Is this stuff happening in other languages? It seems like these new features are fast approaching the high level on which the brain itself works. So much of the work is done for you. How can a language be rated on how high-level it is compared to others?

2:22 pm: Perl 6 regexes are subroutines and can be named. They can also be used in other regexes. And by the way since I can’t type the examples as fast as I’m being shown them, Patrick’s slides will be available here soon.

2:17 pm: old and busted: =~. New hotness: ~~.

2:02 pm: on to regular expressions with Patrick.

1:52 am: starting to think Perl 6 should be classified as a performance enhancing drug for programmers. I can’t believe how terse and powerful this stuff is. They should call it Perl 7, it’s got that much more.

1:47 pm: passing parameters to Perl 6 subroutines is going to be heaven. Named parameters are optional by default but may be made to be required with an exclamation point in the subroutine signature. Yummy.

1:36 pm: Patrick Michaud is giving us a Perl 6 101. Sigils are *part* of the variable names in Perl 6. Ruby-like method syntax is really helping a lot of statements to become more concise.

11:32 am: Lunchtime. The part of the conference intended not to bust my brain has officially ended. No more keynotes.

11:30 am: Yaakov is talking about how to get involved in the Perl community.

11:20 am: Jerry Gay is reiterating the promise of using different languages within the same process on the Parrot VM.

11:13 am: Larry’s keynote, which consisted entirely of showing us Perl 6 error messages, is over. Parrot guys next.

11:09 am: old and busted: <STDIN>. New hotness: $*IN.lines

11:07 am: ’strict’ is on by default in Perl 6.

10:45 am: In Perl 6, ‘comb’ is just like ’split’, except you say what you want, not what you don’t want.

10:37 am: Larry Wall is talking about Perl 6 error messages and why it’s hard to read programmers’ minds. And how the need for sane error messages feeds into language design and vice versa.

10:30 am approx: opening keynote by Richard Dice of The Perl Foundation was mostly about budget, grants, etc. There was also a mention of how active the European and Russian Perl communities are, and a new Perl org in Japan.

I started a new blog at work. Some of the things I would normally post here in the ‘geek out’ category might end up there. For instance, I’ve started playing around with Perl 6, which is quite exciting. Can you feel the excitement? I knew you could.

My good friend Kathi has made her wonderful mac ‘n cheese for us a couple times, and has now generously shared the recipe. Yum!

• Grate 1 stick of Cracker Barrel Vermont Sharp Cheddar.
• Boil a little more than 1/2 box of elbow macaroni according to the directions
• in another sauce pan, add olive oil (or butter if you prefer) and garlic (1/2 fresh garlic or a tablespoon of minced garlic) and brown on low heat
• lower the heat to low and add 1 jar of Classico 4 cheese sauce or the one with garlic in it (alfredo sauce)
• add the grated cheddar to the sauce and stir until creamy (be careful not to let it burn)
  Add sauce to the drained pasta
• pour into an baking pan and spread evenly
• top with French’s fried onion ring things
• bake until bubbly

I would like to remember last night’s double overtime win against the Charlotte Bobcats. Ray Allen sank a three to push double OT, then sank two at the very end to win it. Abby and I were in heaven. This was the best game of the regular season.

This weekend I spent some time clearing away ambitious saplings from my blackberries. I have a large pruning tool which is perfect for the job, good for anything up to two thumbs thick. This year, I chose the right time for this task… before the snow cover melted off… which made the saplings easily visible as they poked straight up through the crusty blanket alongside my bowed, thorny brambles. Last year I waited longer to battle my berries’ competition, and in the spring undergrowth I picked up a good case of poison ivy.

I think the berries have been spreading the last few years, all around the utility pole that guards our driveway, and up and down one side of the drive. I haven’t measured our berry output yet. We also have a smaller number of raspberries and strawberries volunteering every year, which I take as an excellent reason to put off mowing at least until the strawberries are past.

• It becomes possible
• It becomes easy
• It becomes foolproof
• It disappears

Correspondingly:

• feature added
• feature enhanced
• bugs fixed
• fully automated

The title of this article says it all: “Study Finds The Pious Fight Death Hardest“.

I am fascinated.

… is writing about me again.

I have been following this trend for some time, and the only thing that surprises me is that it’s not happening faster. The “please tell me what to think and do” days belong to another millennium.

I am a little worried, however, that we’ll be just as willing mental slaves in a more secular culture, if the dynamics of power-wielding haven’t changed so much as the metaphors we use to describe them. Instead of “saints and sinners” we’ll just have “high performers and low performers“… all of which are words that tell us how happy our authorities are with us at any given moment. I don’t feel like anyone will be truly “saved” until there is nobody left to please but ourselves.