This is the 41st weekly summary of the London Perl Mongers mailing list. For the very long week (yes, this has been happing a lot recently, well I blame it on hackers and the list being quiet and everything happening on use.perl.org journal entries and on IRC instead) starting 2001-12-10:
"THINGS TO DO: don't let the in-tray rage out of control." Check out the London.pm website for information about upcoming meetings and events. We've had super technical and social meetings and the next one is in the new year (probably Jan 10th, after that holiday thing and where you all give me presents, remember?), piccies: http://london.pm.org/ http://www.simonw.demon.co.uk/lpm011213/ The most important thing to happen (well, for Dave at least) is that Paul Mison has been voted in as the new London.pm leader, beating a stuffed camel (lucky, really). He has assumed leadership by offering to buy us all beer. Oh, no, that wasn't him, sorry. He's going to get everything running smoothly and embark on an Epic Quest to the Cracks of Doom. May he lead well! "We bunnies only wear our tails on special occasions." Mark has the Perl Advent Calendar up again, and good it is too: http://twoshortplanks.com/xmas/ We've published quite a few more reviews of the nice free books that we've been getting. If you've received a book and have still failed to review it then shame on you! http://london.pm.org/reviews/ "Bridget works in publishing and used to play naked in my paddling pool". The London.pm tshirts are still available, and sexy they are too: http://www.thegestalt.org/tshirts/ There was actually some Perl content on the list, which shocked us a little but was good. Michael asked quite what "$a =~ mmnipm" matched. It's not actually a match delimited with m, it's a bareword you see. B::Deparse gave us a good idea of what was actually happening, but Dave saved us by pointing out that perlop says: "If the right argument is an expression rather than a search pattern, substitution, or transliteration, it is interpreted as a search pattern at run time. This can be less efficient than an explicit search, because the pattern must be compiled every time the expression is evaluated." Struan also asked why he could do "sort $subref @nums" and not "sort $fish->{sort} @nums". Well, because parsing it is very hard basically and so Perl doesn't. Sorry. Richard also talked about the undead, or what happens when your increase the refcount of something during global destruction. Interesting stuff. "Actually, I'm all for denial. You can convince yourself of any scenario you choose and it keeps you as happy as a lark." I attempted to talk about the link between autism and Asperger's syndrome and programmers. Other people brought up dyslexia too. There was some interesting talk and you can now read the article online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers.html "What do you think about the El Nino phenomenon? It's a blip. Latin music's on its way out." Google Groups has recently opened up 20 years of usenet archives, and we've spent all our time digging through it. Important ones so far: first London.pm group idea, and first yapc::Europe idea, first TT precursor idea: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=351f0966.3749808%40news.demon.co.uk http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=slrn88977o.6ts.acme%40tigger.netcraft.com http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5k6rfl%24qfh%40aoxomoxoa.peritas.com Check out what all the CFT gang have got up to on IRC: http://www.astray.com/scribot/2001-12-10.html "Instead, I choose Vodka. And Chaka Khan." In other news: nasty hackers hacking dabox, some crazy fool making a mockery of the election process, antialised fonts, SNTP, people banning Powerpoint, web server identification (did this get anywhere, Michael?), #bioinformatics, Fun with Java Programmers, perhaps going to see Rent (did this get anywhere Redvers?), J2ME, lots of London.pm social events (dimsum, Belgos, trip out to a oriental mall, Lord of the Rings etc.), Q: How many OO Perl programmers does it take to change a light bulb? A: HASH(0x870bf8), and Perl IDEs (again): http://www.theonion.com/onion3744/java_programmers.html This summary is dedicated to Mark for his love of Bridget Jones, Leon -- Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/ Nanoware...............................http://www.nanoware.org/ ... Give me ambiguity or give me something else
