use Perl

As you might know, The Perl Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code this year. I work at the University at Buffalo and it turns out the release manager for FreeBSD, Ken Smith, works here too. So we decided to get together and hold a FAQ session for any students who might be interested.

If you're interested, it's on the UB North Campus, NSC 210, 4-5 PM today (Tuesday, 3/25).

For some reason, I had it in my head that there were issues with perldoc.perl.org like spotty performance or something. Don't recall why I thought that, but recently I saw a posting that it had been updated with the perl 5.10 docs. I recently needed to look up something for perl 5.8, but figured I'd give it a try.

It's great and very fast! Fully google searchable Perl documentation!

Here's the link for the 5.8 docs:

http://perldoc.perl.org/5.8.8/

Chicago.pm has stepped up to be first group in recent years to bid for a repeat YAPC, and in close voting they nudged out Columbus for the opportunity to do it. Jonathan Rockway will be the head organizer, with support from previous Chicago organizers Josh McAdams and Pete Krawczyk.

Both groups submitted strong bids and it was a tough choice.

Watch for more announcements with final dates and other details. See you in Chicago!

It's 7:54 AM EST on a Thursday morning and www.oracle.com is showing this message in plain black text on a white screen:

First, I can't believe oracle.com is down. How is that possible? It must be the application code because Oracle is unbreakable, right?

But I'm just as amazed at how bad that error message is. Not even formatted with an Oracle logo. I don't even know that I'm really hitting Oracle. Then again, when your system is unbreakable, why would you spend time formatting error messages?

The deadline for submitting your venue bids for this year is approaching. I know there are some folks out there working on bids, so don't count on us going into overtime.

The due date is August 1.

You can find more details in this year's call and the previous call.

In case folks don't read the TPF blog, I need someone to help me out with a script that grabs info from the Perl calendar on Google calendar. I've got it started, just don't have the time right now to polish it.

It's that time of year again--we need your bids in to host YAPC::NA in your town next summer. Most of the details for a bid are in my post from last year. Same rules apply this year.

To re-iterate a few points:

• If you plan on bidding, folks from your group should really attend YAPC::NA this year to see how things work and maybe even help out.
  
• Get your bid ready early and we'll give you feedback before the due date at the YAPC BOF.
• Venue requirements are available and bids from previous years are available in the TPF Blog. Last year all of the bids were very good, so they are a good resource.
• Details on running a YAPC are available in the TPF project on Google code.
• As with previous years, the bids will be made public in the TPF Blog after the due date.

Send any questions and completed bids to the TPF conferences group: tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org

Cross-posted from the TPF blog as a reminder, we're looking for next year's intrepid organizers for YAPC::NA.

One key point: if you bring your semi-complete bid to YAPC this year, we'll review it at the YAPC BOF for free!

If you have a Mac and you need to merge some files, you might want to check out this utility that comes with the free developer tools:

/Developer/Applications/Utilities/FileMerge.app

Basic merge functionality, but it's simple and gets the job done.

As if patching every computer in our infrastructure wasn't enough, we had to run special scripts to 'fix' our Outlook calendars because the DST change has really confused them. It boggles my mind that we run something supported by a company the size of M$ and they can't make this a simple patch update.

On top of all that, the script we had to run messed up my handy-dandy perl script that pulls calendar events out of Exchange and puts them in iCal for me. I originally found it here: vcalxical

So I got to spend the last hour hacking away at that script to weed out all the malformed data the M$ script put in my calendar events. Sheesh. As if I don't have better things to do. I really wish there was a way to charge back to M$ all the time we lose because of their substandard software. Can't someone put out something to replace Exchange? When will Chandler be done?