use Perl

I got home yesterday from a week in Melbourne. Overall, I'd say "Well done!" to the organisers. It was informative and it was fun - what more could I ask for.

Damian's keynotes were great and his lightning talks were in a class of their own - thank goodness I was immediately before him rather than immediately after :-) Two of his three lightning talks involved him singing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. The first was unaccompanied, but for the second he was backed by a cheesy MIDI track which I understand made its way to Melbourne via Alaska where a perl script was used to adjust the tempo to something Damian could manage.

Of course there were tons of other speakers. Anthony Baxter from the Python world was a revelation. Paul Fenwick's Perl talks were thorough and well presented. Becky Alcorn's talks on using JavaScript by writing Perl were also intriguing (and well delivered). There were plenty others I enjoyed too, but unfortunately, I missed Scott Penrose on controlling hardware from Perl - it looked fun.

If you missed my lightning talk or want to try out the code I was talking about, I've put up (annotated) slides, code download and even a movie here.

I'm looking forward to OSDC2005 and hoping to see a few more New Zealanders there.