use Perl

I managed to talk Dan Brian into giving my Perl and XML tutorial. And by "giving" I mean "finish writing and then present" :-). He uses XML every day, and is a much better choice of presenter than I am. He's also much less likely to give wildly outrageous opinions that are completely unsubstantiated in fact. Not, uh, that I have a tendency to do that.

I also began to line up Perl Gurus. Now that we know who will attend and who will not, I can approach people and say "mind if we lock you in a small room with a horde of your most fervent admirers?" A guru session is where we put someone who Knows Stuff in a room for you to ask questions of. It's an informal few-on-one situation, and has been well-received in the past. Mark-Jason Dominus's guru session has been "Ask Me Anything" for the last few years, and he's successfully dealt with a lot of very odd questions.

I've also all but put the Emerging Topics track to bed. This track was a room we left empty until close to the conference, so we could have some interesting stuff. Oh boy, will we have interesting stuff. Dave Stutz, project leader for the Microsoft/Corel effort to implement the common language bits of .NET on Unix, is going to talk about that work (to some pointed questions about shared source, I imagine). I've got a surprise follow-up to that, but I can't tell you what it is until the people involved go public. But it's going to kick ass.

I've got talks on the latest sendmail doodads, on bioinformatics (so if you're wondering what it's all about and what skills you'd need to be worth a lot of money in this hot field, definitely turn up to that), on Intellectual Property (by Bruce Perens, no less!), Jabber, the RedHat database, and much more. The emerging topics track was Tim's idea (probably borne out of frustration at not being able to put interesting stuff into the conference at the last minute) and it's worked out really well. I think it's going to be a staple at our future conferences.

Only 25 more days! We extended early registration until the end of this week, by the way, so if you've been kicking yourself for missing the discounts, you still have a day or two! Also, if your company would like to send a bunch of people but is cringing at the cost, send me mail and I'll see what I can do to help you get there. You've got a Perl guy in the conference group, you might as well use him :-)

--Nat