use Perl

The event was sadly marred by two exceptions, ENOGLORIOUSLEADER, and ENOBELHAVEN. larsen was kept behind at work and arrived around 11pm, while even more tragically, Belhaven Ale has disappeared from the James Pub, never to return. (Apparently they don't do enough business in Italy to make it worth their while delivering, which is a crying shame, as it's one of the few places I know where you could get a decent pint of bitter).

As well as usual suspect Mattia, we were joined by valdez and Riccardo from Dada, doubled the number of students (Spire and mithenks) and had a surprise visit from davidebe who had traveled from Bologna and wandered the streets of Florence before arriving at the same time as larsen.

The P-word was mentioned, though rarely, with conversation focusing on

• The 3 types of recorded messages at train stations. (loquendo is apparently good for the speech synthesis side of things.)
• SSH tunneling for idiots (me)
• Standards, HTML and CSS in Firefox and IE
• The Italians may care about Slow Food, but the British care about Beer.
• Wireless and the thick walls of old houses in Bologna and Rome
• Sneakernets
• SMS
• J2ME, and a notepad for phones
• Google's Summer of Code
• .odt, and hippy professors. Openoffice almost good enough to use at at version 2.0
• .ps a standard my arse.
• HTML optional declarations
• Writing an operating system in Perl for fun and er.. fun
• the Perl Rescue Team!
• Tripods, flashes, and the "startled rabbit" effect
• Networks running on ENEL (the Italian national grid) - which still sounds like sci-fi to me
• How to pronounce Margaret Thatcher (and why some people wish we didn't)
• Hacknight
• Catch 22 (not as well-known a phrase in Italian, not sure how it's translated - "Clausola 22" ?)

Plus various other stuff that I either didn't catch, wasn't interested in, forgot to note down, or can't read my notes for... comments welcome. Ah, yes, I recounted a story which involves larsen, an unexpected time change, mobile phones, an Italian hotelier, and my mother. And (according to IRC) a Malaysian tiger, but I'll come back to that another time.

Update 12 May: Spire gave me permission to host his photos of the meeting.