use Perl

Yet another OScon entry so I'll try to keep it short. I see that Matt has added his pictures online. If you weren't there this should give you a good feel of what the conference was like as there are many pictures involving drinks.

It was cool to have Robin around as it was pretty tight for him to come this year. It was also really cool to have expenses covered by the company so I would not have to cut corners like last year when I did not have a job. It was even cooler to have us being moved from the Best Western to the 10th floor of the Sheraton by the ever-so-helpful Nat. Now, that was really it. Robin & I managed to meet with Simon St. Laurent, our editor for the SVG book. Ronal Bourret was there too and was a good laugh. We hung out a lot with the usual gang: Matt and Heather, Kip, Eric, Geoff and the missus, Stas and Michel. I also got to meet people I did not know, DJ and the Jabber crew.

Talks went pretty well. The SVG Tutorial went very smoothly with reasonable attendance (about 35-40 people) and what seemed like great interest. The SVG Animation session was really cool too. It must have been the fourth time I was presenting it so it was bound to go down well. People seemed to really dig my little demos. The Batik talk went ok considering I did not know much about the internals of the project and have never worked with it much. Lightning Talks were really nice too, and with a funny moment during my "Flash Sux, SVG Rox" talk when I was (rightfully) bitching about Macromedia's attitude towards SVG and this Macromedia guy stood up and said who he was working for. I'm already thinking about what I should do for next year, hopefully one session in a different track than XML. I hope to do a tutorial on SVG components if SVG has been going well til then, and it should do.

How many people had new iBooks? I knew I was one of them, and I know a few people who got one either during the conference or right when they got back home. The iBooks look amazing and OS X rocks (even more with Jaguar just around the corner), so I kind of figured out why everybody was going for one. I got the OS X Missing Manual and Cocoa books from the O'Reilly bookstore. Hopefully next year you will see our book there too... and you'll get it, right?

See all of you there next year!

-- junior

Springtime often brings a nice crop of great records. 2002 is no exception it seems. Here are a few recommendations (don't mind me):

• Tom Waits - "Blood Money" and "Alice"
• Wilco - "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"
• Bright Eyes - "There Is No Beginning to the Story"
• Pedro the Lion - "Control"

And there is more coming! Oh lush...

-- junior

If I spent more time writing in my use.perl journal I would probably rant a lot about the absence of a decent SVG animation tool. Well, it seems the wait will be over soon as SVG Studio is taking shape (PDF document). Looking at it, it resembles the Flash authoring environment a lot, which is good and bad. Good since Flash developers and designers should not find it too difficult to get a taste of SVG using this tool, and bad because the Flash interface is not necessarily the nicest out there, Adobe LiveMotion being much more straightforward I think. But the arrival of this software can only be great news! Go SVG go!

-- junior

Planning on going to XML Europe 2002 in Barcelona? Then I guess I'll see you there since I will be co-presenting two (two!) SVG tutorials with Dean Jackson, the SVG 1.1 and 1.2 specifications editor at W3C, and also two SVG sessions. If you - dare - attend all of these then you'll probably get to know a good deal about the great technology that is SVG. I'll cover the most advanced interactive stuff, oh, and hang out at the beach. Barcelona really is my favorite place on (what I've seen of) Earth, so not the worst place to be if you like XML and SVG...

-- junior

I just got confirmation that I will be presenting a talk on SVG (what else?) at the French Flash Festival. It takes place at the French National Museum of Modern Art (Centre Georges Pompidou) in Paris on May the 25th. I think this is very cool that the organisers offered an SVG presence there. Hope that all you french-speaking people living around will come, it's all free, and we will sure need all the support we can get! See you there!

-- junior

You've probably seen a link to this already, but anyway, here is Jaguar, the next update to the beloved Mac OS X. I made the switch to a Mac very recently and am really happy about it... This just shows that I am right in expecting even more! Go Apple go!

-- junior

Hi there fellas, it's been a while. I still don't know if it makes a lot of sense for me to write a journal on use.perl since I don't do Perl so much, but since many of the people I like actually own a journal I thought I would give it another go.

It seems that for two years in a row at this very time (ie when the weather starts getting better) I have been feeling the same about working: I just want to quit. Well, not necessarily quit but just not work and take a nice long break. It just seems very ambitious to work when the you realize you are spending so much time away from the bar downstairs where they happen to have the nicest terrace around. Ha well... At least I'm starting working from home next week, so it will be an extra 90 minutes doing someting meaningful!

-- junior

It was bound to happen I guess... I took advantage of the lunch break today to go to the nearest Fnac and purchase one of those nifty iBooks with OSX. If there is one thing I don't expect to regret, it must be this. I am even writing this from my shiny white keyboard. Got the Airport thingy although I probably won't be using it until OScon. Need to order shedloads of RAM from Crucial and then I'll be ready to rock. My SVG stuff will never look the same! The only thing missing here is a .NET port so I could use this as my sole computer... ah well!

-- junior