use Perl

Yes, strange but true - I'm still alive after yesterday :)

Having recovered some of my strength last night, I ventured into town with some of the usual London.pm suspects. Being thursday, the earliest in the month, it was the London.pm social meeting - we were supposed to be going to de Wildeman In but you all know how things are :)

So we get down to drinking a few beers in Amsterdam and things turned to discussion of things Perl and as we largely had been to Michael Schwerns Kwalitee talk earlier on - we decided that what the world really needed was the module Test::Approx - you already know what it does, its an extension to Michael's Test::More, that adds some methods like :

          totally_shagged();

          kinda_ok();

          maybe_ok();

          close_enough_for_jazz();

          hey_it_compiled_its_gotta_be_ok();

And so forth. Skud later proposed that we should also make Test::Harness::Approx so that it could assign percentage values of ok to each of the methods and then be able to print out :

          29.75 of 30 tests passed

again you know the score. I am uncertain as to Michaels views about this.

We also get very wet in a massive storm that broke out as we were thinking of getting a cab back to the hotel - we discovered that it was difficult to get a cab from a bar in a foreign country and had to walk to the Centraal station, it rained, we were dressed for the summer and unprepared.

Anyway has anyone else mentioned that the wireless lan is k3wl ;-}

So now this is friday and the keynote speaker

Daniel Karrenberg from RIPE NCC has just finished, I have to say that I was a little disappointed with this as a KEYNOTE speech in that he wound up by saying that they had done their RIPE DB (orpiginally written in Perl ) properly and rewritten it in C++ ...

Anyhow, I'm off to sky's talk in a minute and we have all promised to talk behind his back on IRC, but, hey we'll say about that ;-}

Well its lunch time now and we are all sitting at the BIG TABLE which London.pm have colonised.

Sky's talk on POE was apparently the first one that there has been at a Perl gathering anywhere, which I found hard to believe, maybe sky ought to go on a POE Evangelism world tour.

I started to think How I Might Redesign Some Stuff At Work using a single POE server to provide state maintenance.

I hadnt really looked at Apache 2.0 at all and Gerard Richter's talk in mod_perl 2.0 was quite illuminating, about the only thing I previously knew was about the multiprocessing options. So mod_perl 2.0 could actually solve some of the things that we generally hack around when we dont want a freaking huge Apache/mod_perl process serving tiny static pages - it can start a perl interpreter thread in a server process when it requires one. Hmm, not stable this year though, bummer. Bah I'll install it on my laptop before long and have a little play.

Most of everyone has turned up now and I would say the cafe in Hogeschool is twice as busy as it was yesterday (but, hey, maybe they all had hangovers as bad as mine yesterday and stayed in their accomodation ).

It looks like the way things have crumbled is that I am going to be in the "O'Reilly Room" ( the largest of the rooms in the place ) for the rest of the afternoon - this is a good thing as it has lots of power sockets from whence I can charge my laptop ;-} . The inmates of this room have an IRC channel (#ye-ora-room ) wherein a lot of silent heckling has been taking place this morning, this might sound bad but there is a lot of "annotation" going in on there, a question raised by a speaker but to trivial to stop his flow might be raised and answered by some other attendee that actually understood what was being said.

Anyhow, this place is totally non-smoking and I am a slave to nicotine so I have to go outside for a while.

Of course I forgot that this was a laptop and I am sitting outside with the other smokers - and oh my word they are talking about improving CPAN. All good stuff but I can't see my screen out here, so I'm not going to transcribe it. Well the next talk I am going to see is Michael Schwern's CPANTS talk so I will summarize this into any discussion of that.

The weather has changed to bright sunshine which comes to me as some surprise after lasts nights deluge.

Right back to the "O'Reilly Room" ...