use Perl

I worked on the track layout for the 2001 Open Source Convention in what remained of the morning, then read some evaluation forms from my Advanced Perl class (positive, yay!) and then taught the mod_perl class. For some reason this one went 15 minutes *under* the time, and I finished easily before Damian. I don't really know why -- mainly, I think, because the students didn't ask as many questions as in Seattle or L.A. Then again, perhaps it's because I've taught it enough now that I know just how to give it. I don't really know.

I had some good discussions with students in the class. Two were from an applications service provider (ASP), an industry which I'd long thought to be fictitious but apparently they do really exist. They wanted to know whether mod_perl could withstand millions of hits a day. There are some million hits/day sites, for sure, I said, but you can bet they're not serving those hits from a single Pentium 133 box in their basement. As with everything, hardware required is commensurate with hits expected. Too often I hear people frustrated with mod_perl because when they open Apache up to run with 150 child processes, their box runs out of memory. Well, duh.

I caught the end of Damian's OO class, where he presents his Klingon module. The bit I saw deals with overloading string constants so that when you write numbers in Klingon (words with lots of consonants) Perl's parser turns them into actual usable numbers. It's terrifying.

For dinner, Dan Klein, Damian, and I went up to the top of the Westin hotel here in Atlanta and had dinner on their rotating restaurant. It was surprisingly disorienting, although the food was delicious (and pricey!). The view was astouding, and we could see everything from the CNN HQ to Stone Mountain (which we decided was Atlanta's version of Ayers Rock). Mr. Visa is probably going to spank me for it, but it was a classy and fun way to end our time in Atlanta.

No improvised comedy tonight, unfortunately. Damian and I were both exhausted and on hideous early flights tomorrow. So an early bedtime for us, listening to the dulcet tones of Larry's Atlanta Linux Showcase talk (http://www.technetcast.com/).

Nat