use Perl

The first Free and Open Source Conference ("FrOSCon") takes place on June, 24th and 25th 2006 in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany.

Organized by a commited team, it aims to become a significant event for free software in the Rhineland. The conference is hosted by the faculty of Computer Science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.

In a Call for Papers, the organizers ask for submission of contributions. A broad variety of topics concerning free and open source software is desired. Particularly welcome are contributions about programming languages, free software on the desktop, security, systems administration and networks. Aspects of free software in busincess and industry are also a focus of the conference.

Contributions can be submitted in English or German and should summarize the intended talk concisely and succinctly; talks should range from 45 to 60 minutes in length. Deadline for submission is March, 15th 2006.

FrOSCon will offer Developer Rooms (just like FOSDEM does) to Open Source projects. These projects can use the rooms to organize developer meetings as well sub-conferences dedicated to their project. Projects that have already registered a room or are interesting in doing so include: Gentoo Linux, GNOME, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, OpenWRT, PHP, and Wikipedia.

Ok, I'm in a really bad mood right now.
What I wanted to do:
Get a list of all X apps (executable names, window tiles, somthing like that) running on my current virtual desktop.
What I did:
First fatal error was that I figured my Window Manager might now. KWin :-(. So I thought ask him, using DCOP.
I needed about an hour to find out that:
1. DCOP.pm is nearly nowhere linked
2. Debian has source only packages (aka kdebinding)
3. DCOP.pm just lifes in KDE CVS and in this packages, nowhere else.
Then I started to hack and....
Maybe I'm too stupid, maybe today is not the day to Google, I don't know. But I couln't find any usefull DCOP examples which where longer than 5 lines and didn't open a window in Konqueror. KWin apperently has no DCOP function for giveMeWindowList and there is no easy (or google findable) way to call the task manager applet, though it knows, cause it show them.

So I'm out of this... hating my desktop environment.

There is a big conspiracy in the Perl World, trying to keep me from all major conferences and teasing me while doing so.

Want proof?

This year:
YAPC::NA in Buffalo, I'm in Europe, but in Toronto just one month later (for studying, so till the end of the year), YAPC::EU in Belfast, during the time me being in North America.

Next year:
Don't know about YAPC::EU yet (but I bet they'll schedule it so that I have Exams, or whatever) but YAPC::NA is here in T.O. (I won't be there unless I win the lottery).

See, the Camel God just hates me.

...a man must have done in his live:
        - plant a tree
        - build a house
        - write a wiki :-)

So I've done my own wiki, mostly because I used one that was simple but PHP, I wanted a feature, so I rewrote it.

TriplWki can do anything TipiWiki can do plus:
        - user authentication
        - POD output :-)

I know that user authentication is against the idea of a wiki, but I use it more or less as a CMS, so I wanted to make sure that I'm the only one who writes into it.

And it has a <sourcecode> special tag, which is replaced by its sourcecode, so it is really free software (online editing of the source is not yet supported :-).

wiki.thiesen.org

I just had a look into Debians Popularity Contest (popcon.debian.org) and it seems that Perl is one of the most popular packages:

#rank name inst vote old recent no-files (maintainer)
1 base-files 5672 5358 81 233 0 (Santiago Vila)
2 debianutils 5672 5283 48 341 0 (Clint Adams)
3 dpkg 5672 5345 45 282 0 (Dpkg Development)
4 findutils 5672 5310 240 122 0 (Andreas Metzler)
5 grep 5672 5370 219 83 0 (Ryan M. Golbeck)
6 gzip 5672 5349 138 184 1 (Bdale Garbee)
7 perl-base 5672 5323 44 305 0 (Brendan O'dea)
8 tar 5672 4908 595 169 0 (Bdale Garbee)
9 util-linux 5672 4667 447 558 0 (Lamont Jones)

The number 5672 means installations and these are all top 9 packages with the highest installation number. Before people install anything else, they have a Perl !

(The first Kernel Image on that list is at rank 1996)

Oh my god.

I survived the German Perl Workshop, mostly with writing a drop in replacement for TipiWiki because I use it but didn't want to hack some authentication stuff into a PHP script.

I spend the rest of the time having really much fun with all the interesting people there and listening to plenty of good talks. Most of them where better than mine. Note to myself: next time use images and more time to prepare the talk. Jos and Autrijus did a lot of coding on CPANPLUS, so my Curses Shell will be really broken with the next release. This leads to my biggest problem: I just don't have enough time

Ok, today are the finals of the European Football Championships, tomorrow we visit a strange place with our BioMed class. BTW, I'll do some exams in about two weeks, therefore I should actually spend some time on doing stuff for that.

Far more important than that is to rewrite CPANPLUS::Shell::Curses to use the new backend and finish up JZuul till the exams.

As I said, there is just not enough time. BTW, I'll leave for Toronto at 24. of August

Ok, I'm horribly tired but I survived my talk and yesterday evening's social.

The talks already started again and I'm trying not to fall asleep.

The 6th German Perl Workshop started today. I'm giving a talk on Curses::UI this afternoon and I'm currently (more or less) listening to Leo's Parrot talk.

I'm a little bit out of sleep but I think that will get worse. We had a early arrivals dinner jesterday and Jos told me that I now can do a clean rewrite of C::S::C because CPANPLUS 0.050 will change everything.

All in all its a nice starting day.