This is the third of hopefully many weekly summaries of the London
Perl Mongers mailing list. The list has grown so popular (a hundred
messages a day is not uncommon) that I think this is
necessary. Comments welcome. For the week starting 2001-02-05:
Don't forget the London.pm website for meetings etc. The next meeting
is a technical meeting on Thursday, February 22th when Matt Sergeant
will be talking about AxKit.
This year's yapc::Europe has now been announced, with all the regulars
giving talks no doubt:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02119.html
http://yapc.org/Europe/
Dave Cross attempted to sort out the great London.pm Mailing List
Confusion, and got sidetracked rather cleverly by Jonathan Stowe
("Yeah, can I have a pony ?") into an irc #perl obsession. By the way,
in addition to the mailing list there is also a London.pm IRC server
at london.rhizomatic.net, channel #london.pm (btw dodgy connectivity
recently):
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02014.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02028.html
Damian Conway is coming at the end of the month, and we may well be
hosting it in... the Conway Hall!
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02080.html
http://www.ethicalsoc.org.uk/conway/hall.htm
Should the general public be able to program? Jonathan Peterson
reckons (amongst others) that they should, and that "Perl for Dummies"
kind of books should be encouraged. Others disagreed, saying that bad
programmers tend not to realise how bad they are, which is bad and
dangerous, and that bad habits are hard to unlearn. A car and oil
metaphor got taken way too far. Books with errors got mentioned.
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02025.html
Mark Fowler and Shevek talked about garbage collection, which is crazy
deep magic:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02072.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02077.html
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
An interesting thread happened describing interesting jobs people had
before entering the Perl world. Best ones so far include working in
Iceland in fish factories ("The Artic Ocean is way cool!") and offal
processing.
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01928.html
Some discussion about the location of this month's meeting (which was
fun) occured. It was basically quite noisy, expensive, and not very
central. People are looking at alternatives. The discussion meandered
into talk about Wong Kei, a Chinese with legendary bad service.
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02011.html
On Thursday, a London.pm Heretic Meeting happened in a lovely pub with
a nice warm fire by the Thames. For the uninitiated, a Heretic Meeting
happens when the first thursday of the month is the 1st. Heretic
meetings thus happen on the 7th, and are organised (?) by Greg and not
Dave. This'll happen again next month...
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02074.html
A little discussion on Midgard lead onto a new Perl Application server
wotsit, currently being discussed on the Template-Toolkit list. It
also contains Yet Another Perl Object Persistence Framework.
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02091.html
http://www.midgard-project.org/
http://openinteract.org/
http://openinteract.org/spops/
Getting rapidly back on topic, Mark Fowler discusses the poor/good
Buffy film. This thread evolved into why film trailers contain all the
jokes in the actual film, or sometimes even more:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02105.html
Simon Wistow is still looking for moose, and presents "Dada Dodo Does
Four Char Word Ouli Perl". #london.pm is also getting a bit of a crazy
place for Ouilipo stuff:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg02118.html
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/simon/four/
And finally, we now know how famous Perl authors such as Dave Cross
spend their day:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01982.html
http://bbspot.com/News/2001/01/perl_god.html
Leon
--
Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/
yapc::Europehttp://yapc.org/Europe/
... 3 out of 4 Americans make up 75% of the population
