use Perl

Last night was our monthly social. A few dropped out due to illness and decorating, but we still had a fair number. The pub even gave us the whole of the Club Room to ourselves. We discussed topics such as the new Birmingham CPAN Leaderboard, perldoc.perldrunks.org, indexing, javascript, a filming day for the Birmingham Bid Movie, talks for the next technical meeting, all rounded off with a great game of Fluxx.

JJ was disheartened that he has a long way to catch up now on the leaderboard, but he shouldn't worry too much. It'll be a long time before I ever get on the front page of search.cpan.org. He's even managed to get mentioned on Wikipedia. Someone apparently thinks the domain name for JJ's perdoc site is very inappropriate. All I can say is they've obviously never met Birmingham Perl Mongers! There is a crew of rock fans in the city, who used to go under the name of The Birmingham Drunks, so The Perl Drunks seems quite a fitting tradition to carry on.

Thoughts on the search mechanism for perldoc.perldrunks.org were discussed, and Steve hit on a novel idea, that JJ is now rather excited about. The thought of what to index is quite complex as the index shouldn't be so big that it negates the use of having it. The whole idea for doing the site and search, is that we wanted to put it all on to the CD that we are planning for the YAPC::Europe conference (if/when we get it). Previous organisers have had CDs to give away, but have mostly just been the latest releases on CPAN. We wanted to do better than that. So we have planned lots of goodies for the CD.

Speaking of the Birmingham Bid, we still need to complete the movie. We now have the script and some of the filming done. Additional static slides have been done, and just need hooking to the final movie. However, we need to set aside a day for us all to meet up and finish it off. We're looking at the bank holiday weekend, so hopefully it'll be good weather for us. DanDan will be in tow, and will probably get an early start in his acting career ;) If there are any amusing outtakes we'll have to send them to You've Been Framed and get an extra £250 for the funds.

I now have several speakers lined up for our technical meetings for the next few months. This month we've got a mixed bag of ideas, both fun and practical. Next month I've persuaded Andrew Ford (of refcards.com fame) to come and give a tutorial/talk on XS. I groan when I saw the title, but then again its probably the best title for a talk I've ever seen; 'XS Baggage: All At C With Perl'. In May, all being well, we'll have some of the Belfast guys over to see us. We'll be aiming to return the favour later in the year and visit them.

And onto the games of Fluxx. Once again I managed to pull a few fast ones and ended up winning 3 games, as did JJ. Brian aims to have the Fluxx server up and running for Braga, but it still needs some documentation and testing.