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[roch-pm] Meeting Notes

Brian Mathis
Thu, 30 Nov 2000 19:32:37 -0800

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Here are the notes from Wed night's meeting. I've also updated the
web site with them.

Please note, we are having a Holiday Dinner on Thursday, December 14,
7:00pm, at the Empire Brewing Company. Any friends and SO are
invited. Please RSVP to me by Tuesday, December 12 so I can get a
head count.

- --
Brian Mathis
Direct Edge
http://www.directedge.com

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Title: Meeting 11/29/2000 - Rochester Perl Mongers

Meeting 11/29/2000 - Rochester Perl Mongers

 

Meeting Notes:

  1. Attendance:
    1. Bob Walton
    2. Tony Whyte
    3. Brian Mathis
    4. Jonathan Tomer
  2. Trying out a more formal meeting type with an agenda
  3. Reviewed last meeting’s minutes
  4. Web site update: the mailing list is now being archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/.  There is a link to our archive on the mailing list page at http://rochester.pm.org/
  5. The O’Reilly books Programming Perl, 3rd ed and CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd ed were available for members
  6. New O’Reilly fall catalogs and discount coupons available for all members
  7. I’ve requested the O’Reilly book PC Hardware in a Nutshell, waiting for it to come in.
  8. Went over recent Perl news from http://use.perl.org/.
  9. Presentation on debugging Perl programs using ptkdb (a Tk based perl debugger) and perl –d, the command line debugger, by Jonathan Tomer.  The presentation was very informative.  Topics covered included some debugger basics, as well as how to specifically use the Perl debuggers, both command line and Tk interface, and how to use emacs to integrate your development environment with the debugger.
  10. Discussed a holiday dinner party.  We will be having a holiday gathering on Thursday, December 14, 7:00pm, at the Empire Brewing Company in the High Falls area.  Friends and significant others are welcome to attend.  Please RSVP to Brian Mathis with the number that will be attending by Tuesday, December 12.
  11. Next meeting Tony Whyte will be discussing Perl & SSL.

 

Recent Perl News (from http://use.perl.org/):

ScriptViewer Allows Script Browsing Without Web Server (http://www.angorasoftware.com/)

ScriptViewer is a freeware Windows application allowing someone to surf CGI scripts (PHP, Perl, etc) pages without the need of a webserver. The intended use is for stand-alone materials like CD-ROMs and for testing pages without loading or connecting to a web server. It works by firing off the scripting engine, then showing the result in an embedded MSIE browser.

 

New Articles:

·         Simon Cozens writes about programming GNOME applications with Perl (http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/gnome.html)

·         Doug Sheppard's first in a series of articles for beginners (http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/begperl1.html)

·         Michel Rodriguez on Perl and XML (http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/10/11/perlxml/index.html)

·         Mark-Jason Dominus' latest, a critique of the Perl 6 RFC process (http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/perl6rfc.html)

·         (along with Jarkko Hietaniemi's response). (http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/jarkko.html)

 

ActivePerl Wins Web Techniques Award (http://www.webtechniques.com/wtawards/2000/index.shtml)

In the Web Techniques 2000 Web Tools Awards, ActivePerl from ActiveState won the Readers' Choice award for Programming Tools.

 

The judges felt ActivePerl managed to convince Perl developers to begin building sites with Active Server Pages. Readers were most impressed with the product's ability to develop within an ASP environment and still have access to what made Perl popular in the first place: pattern matching and regular expressions, the Perl built-in functions, and a vast library of free or low-cost Perl modules to use in your code.

 

New Perl Book Looking for Critics (http://www.geeksalad.org/pdd)

Clinton Pierce writes "I'm off writing a second book for MacMillan. The first one did really well, and was well received by the Perl Community. For this book, I'm going to open things up for criticism again since it worked so well last time. This site has the background information on the book, and everyone is welcome to look over my shoulder."

 

Run Scripts Over the Phone (http://phone.sourceforge.net)

AntiPasto writes "phone.sourceforge.net now allows you to configure URLs that you can later execute via a toll-free 800 number accessible in the United States. When you enter your unique number for a URL, an http_get request will be issued, thus executing your PHP, C, Perl, ASP, etc scripts."

 

Review of Programming Perl (http://www.linuxjournal.com/)

Check out the December issue of Linux Journal for a review of 'Programming Perl, 3rd Edition'."

 

Debugging Perl (http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/l-pl-deb.html?dwzone=linux?open&l=335,t=gr,p=dbgperl)

Gnat points us over to developerWorks, an IBM site, where there is an article on debugging Perl.