use Perl

A beautiful morning, and we start the day with Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, who is presenting a talk entitled "Random Hacks", where he explains that he hacks Perl, applications, and services. Quite random, as he wrote it last night at 3am. All the best speakers hack slides at the last minute! He's talking about Web 2.0, the read-write web, with RSS and REST. A neat demo was MSN Messenger (which can save the chat log file in an XML format) -> blog (using XML::LibXML and XMLRPC::Lite). He also showed off a Flickr -> TypePad image mover, demonstrated with this image, which shows off the power of using multiple modules from CPAN. He's covering the same topics as in my talk later on today, such as generating Amazon adverts or using the new Yahoo! web services to search images in Y! and Flickr at the same time, showing authority vs folksonomy. He also talked about iTunes, iPhoto and Rendezvous, demoing a mixture of Net::Rendezvous and Net::DAAP::Client (to discover and download All I want / The Offspring from my laptop!). He hinted that he's working on Net::AirTunes, a Perl port of JustePort, to stream music to an Airport Express. This was an excellent talk, full of neat demos.

A quick char-sui bun later, and Tsung-Hsiang Chang presented "SpamAssassin and Perl". Apparently he hates spam, like the rest of us. He covered the background, how to set it up, what rules are used, how to define your own rules, and a few tips and tricks. A fairly comprehensive talk, and god knows I'd be completely lost without SpamAssassin (I got more spam during his talk than he gets in a day!).

All the speakers were then on a panel about "Running an open source software project", where autrijus asked us all to name a handy tip. Mine was "underpromise and overdeliver". Now for lunch, and clkao took me to Din Tai Fung, an excellent Taipei-style dimsum restaurant with broth-filled dimsum. Oh, and we had some weird ice dessert.

Then it was time to give my presentation on Exploiting Other Enterprises' Web Services, which was very amusing to give. Given that we're in Taipei, all the English talks are translated live. clkao was translating for me, so at the beginning we switched roles and I translated for him. The talk went well: 07:04 @autrijus argh, acme is too entertaining.

Jesse then continued talking about RT, sketching out ideas for the future. Maybe something like RTML, but using a graphical editor. "XML makes me cry", he says. His big plan is "RT everywhere". He then showed off small UI improvements from overnight.

Autrijus presented Perl 6 The Ultimate, where he explains the different features of all the historical versions of Perl, eventually leading up to demos of Perl 6 and explanations of new Perl 6 features (simplified sigils, pre- and postfix functions, rules and more), Parrot and the creation and wonderful growth of Pugs (scary committer graph). It's truly impressive how far Pugs has managed to go in such a small amount of time.

Overall, a very enjoyable conference. It was nice to finally meet miyagawa. Most of us are off to the seaside for the next few days to do some serious hacking. Fear!