use Perl

Okay, so I've spent the last few days being a little freaked by the fact that I appeared on the front pageof use Perl;

Now this wasn't freaked in a bad way, more total suprise that a quote from a journal of a self-confessed non perlie should turn out to be someone's favourite. Must mean I'd done something right.

pudge ++

More stuff later including:

YAPC::Europe - The Afterglow
Learning Perl - finally!
Having Randal as a house guest

"Hello, my name's Neil and I'm at the stage of asking numpty perl questions"

Well, YAPC::Europe is over, great conference, superbly organised. Mucho thanks to everyone involved.

But before it all came to an end, we had the auction. Lots of books and t-shirts were sold, and some silly items were put up as lots. Signed pictures of Buffy and Willow did very well, but top item was the right to decide the date of london pm meetings which after much sillyness went for 800 guilders to the consortium headed by Greg McCarroll! As Dave Cross said in defeat, "It's only a date".

So that's it for this year... until next time... goodnight and thanks for listening.

Security aware programming with Perl was very interesting. A good source of material for the oft asked question... "So what exactly is so wrong with Formail?"

This was followed by quick dash downstairs to get to pdcawley's 12 Step Perl programme. Much hilarity followed, helped in part by the projector displaying the contents of #12step from irc.rhizomatic.net, which was being added to live by people both in the talk and elsewhere. Highlights were probably davorg's Symbol::Approx::Sub confession, abigail's 800 line regex, the poor french guy who's girlfriend thought he was cheating on him when he was spending so long on line learning perl and, actually no a confession, abw releasing a new version of Template Toolkit and announcing it on channel!

The afternoon has seem me attending Wax On Wax Off by richardc and 2shortplanks which was really fun. Programming teaching using karate movies! Nuff said.

Now I'm in Security Bloopers which is about how bad we've all been at keeping our stuff secure whilst at the conference. Time to be very afraid.

Hi, my name's Neil... I bought Learning Perl 2 years ago and I'm still not past Chapter One

Wow! What a great talk! Stephanie showed some really cool stuff, quite a bit of which made the audience think twice about trusting what they see over a network.

The slides for the talk can be found at http://www.itsx.com/talks/yapc2001/

Next up - Security-aware programming with Perl

Just been to a very interesting keynote by Hugh Daniel on The Current Tragedy of Common Free & Open Source Quality which covered some very contentious subjects, none of which I'm going to list here as it could get use.perl closed down :-)

Hugh is speaking at HAL2001, so if you are going to that do try and catch his talk.

Next up - Perl as a Hacking Tool by Stephanie Wehner.

Day 2 of the conference finished with beers in the bar and some interesting discussions.

We decided not to venture on the organised pub crawl but instead have a quiet night at the hotel. Had dinner with a bunch of fellow london pmers, more interesting conversation ensued including discussion on the viability of Schwern's CPANTS idea. Service was so slow the hotel gave us free drinks but the food was okay.

Retired to the bar and entered discussion with jns, Dean Wilson and Michael Stevens about the lack of documentation of how to write tests and testing and how to go about having a perl documentation repository. Seeing as I don't (yet) do perl, it was good exchange with lots of good ideas. Now to see if anything can be made of it.

Decided to crash relatively early (10:30pm), but I understand some people were still going at 3am, some of whom have talks to give on Day 3 and in at least one case, still had their slides to write. Oh boy!

Sitting in the O'Reilly Room listening to Brian Ingerson's Inline talk. First heard this last year in Seattle but it's moved on quite a bit since then. Still going completely over my head but I can at least appreciate why it's cool.

One of the guy's who helped Brian a lot was another Neil. It's really weird hearing your name and then realising it's not refering to you.

Excellent talk, full of really weird stuff. Applause from the audience at the appropriate moments, though the reaction to PERL was suprising, I'd have thought more people would have heard of it.

No more talks for me today... time to chill out by the bar.

Just been to my first talk at YAPC::Europe - Skud's presentation of e-smith (http://www.e-smith.org)

Excellent little product, not too technical a presentation (Skud kept asking if anyone had any perl questions) and definitely worth a check out.

A quick break (for me anyway) now follows and then I'm off to Ingy's Polluting Perl talk... I might not understand much of it but Brian is a very entertaining speaker.

Sitting in the canteen you can hear the laughter and applause from the lightning talks in the O'Reilly Room. Probably a good sign.

Up a little earlier this morning, made breakfast just after 8am... had to catch the CNN headlines to find out the details of the bombing in London last night (BBC News Online).

Decided to skip the keynote (reports were it was "disappointing") and having checked the schedule, the first session I'm interested in is Skud's talk on emsith which is straight after lunch. So for the morning it's hanging out in the canteen and on irc (irc.rhizomatic.net, #london.pm and #ye-ora-room).

Well, Day One was fun... spent the entire day in the canteen chatting and being pointed at as the 'wireless guru' :-) Just because I pimped WiFi cards to half of london.pm people seem to think I know what I'm doing... if only they knew the truth!

The evening was the london.pm monthly social meet, we had fun, didn't get thrown off of the tables at the bar, managed not to upset the waiting staff and watched lightning storms on the way home... all in all quite a quiet evening by our standards.

A swift beer back at the hotel bar and it was off to bed (for Natalie and me at least).