use Perl

Here follows quick writeups of the talks I attended.

Jose Castro gave a "less than 10 minutes" Perl Foundation talk.

Larry Wall "Standards are meant to be broken" - A typical Larry talk, this covered many things including names, names dispatch at compile time, short names and long names. Not about the language, but more about the parser. Perl6 grammar is flexible and Perl has no core, no operators, no language, "I've been working on a "longest token matcher" for the last year", JIT lexer per language. "Perl 6 is designed to extensible, so please embrace it and extend it".

Kang-min Liu "Continuous testing". Eclipse plugin for java that runs JUnit led Test::Continuous, which checks the files you have modified and runs the appropriate tests. CPANFTW: File::Modified, Module::ExtractUse, App::Prove, Log::Dispatch.

Jose Castro "Perl Black Magic - Obfuscation, Golfing and Secret Operators in Perl" is still a very amusing talk on how to scare people.

Lunch! Sandwiches were provided, but I escaped for katsu-don nearby. Tasty!

Ingy dot Net "JavaScript Love for Perl Hackers" covered many topics: vroom - vim love for perl hackers. pQuery - jQuery in Perl (has one thing that jQuery will never have - Perl!). something to learn Taiwanese. JS.pm - storing JavaScript in CPAN.

Leon Brocard "Working in the cloud". Hey, that's my talk, and I managed to pull it off with only one line of Perl code in the whole slide deck. See the slides.

Jesse Vincent "Step 3: Prophet - A peer to peer replicated property database" was a very interesting talk and a little bit of a reply to mine. Prophet is the cool part, and as an example application there is a p2p bug tracker called sd. The hard part is self-healing conflict resolution. "svk for bigtracking". "private social networking". "Jifty, Catalyst, Rails models in future".

Chia-liang Kao "Running Perlish Small Business with Perl" was great. He made individualised buttons for OSDC.tw in Cairo. "Mass customisation". Perl hacking to make businesses run.

Makoto Kuwata "The Fastest Template Engine in the Perl World". Tenjin. Compiles to Perl templates because the templates are Perl.

Lightning talks were very amusing (and harder to write up).

Jonathan Rockway "String::TT". String overloading. Excellent.

"i love money!" yapc asia finances finances over time, -2 million yen before yapc::asia last year. 2008: positive all the time, up to 2 million yen before conference

Daisuke Murase "Open Fastladder with Plagger" - popular web-based rss reader on your computer

"How many cpan authors are there now?". Annual nipotan contest. Best kwalitee Japanese CPAN author. Acme::CPANAuthors

Takeu Inoue "Developing Amazon's dynamo in POE and Erlang" kai - yet aother amazon's dynamo obra: "Actually, writing a new database is totally the new writing a new VCS"

Perlmachine: Perl OS, including Perl floppy driver. He will write multitask version.

Text::MicroMason (::SafeServerPage)

yusukebe "WebService::Simple" - to return cute photos of cats

ingy: vroom -vroom Vroom::Vroom / zhong shell

clkao "Prototype::Signatures" - how hard could it be? B::Scared. Hacks the parser. Faster than normal sub!

takesake "HTML Binary Hacks - GIF98a Polyglot" Detecting browser by how it parses HTML without JavaScript or CSS hacks. JavaScript in GIF, Perl in GIF

A quick onigiri for breakfast and the largest YAPC so far begins, with 435 attendees.

Follow the conference on live.yapcasia.org.

Yesterday was the day before YAPC::Asia 2008 Tokyo and it was an evening of overflow talks. Which also happened to have free beer and weird snacks.

It started of with the Soozy Conference. It began with a talk on scaffold, which was really about thousands of lines of XML, flex and generating server-side Java based upon HTML.

Then there were a few lightning talks, about lift, a Scala web framework (Scala is the future), a geek magician with his playing card scanner beta, and yet another web application framework (it's too hard to write a WAF, so they spun out HTTP::Engine and HTTPx::Dispatcher). There was a quick presentation on HTTP::Engine (id:dropdb, "middleware is not a cool name") and a great Flash animation about Perl.

Then it was time for RejectConf, which talks about jQuery internals, higher-order JavaScript (wait, this is a Perl conference?) and a talk about Devel::DFire (something like DTrace for Perl).

An excellent beginning.

I've just come back from the London Python Meetup. There was an informal survey, and I was the person who had the least Python experience (although I have written a little app). Around 50 people turned up and there was free pizza and beer.

There were some lightning talks, including one on Google App Engine. Another talk was a relevation someone has bought a bunch of servers for platform testing. The lightning talks were a bit hit-and-miss and would have been much better if they hadn't tried to have slides.

The main talk was Jacob Kaplan-Moss giving details about the history of Django, mostly little anecdotes. I was surprised to hear that PyCon had almost 1,100 people this year and that in the Django talk, half of the attendees (200 people) had learnt Python in order to use Django. That's some killer app.

Perl people as are pretty pragmatic, using the best tool for the job and learning about everything. However almost every talk tonight contained a dig about Perl, it was really dishearting. Python people: grow up and pay attention to what other people are doing - you might learn something.

I've just released Data::UUID::Base64URLSafe:

Data::UUID creates wonderful Globally/Universally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs/UUIDs). This module is a subclass of that module which adds a method to get a URL-safe Base64-encoded version of the UUID using MIME::Base64::URLSafe. What that means is that you can get a 22-character UUID string which you can use safely in URLs.

Of course, only afterwards do I notice Data::GUID::URLSafe. What is the point of a Globally/Universally Unique Identifier if we don't have a unique name for the concept, eh?