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Shibuya.pm will have its 9th technical meeting and the topic of the meeting is XS. No, I'm not joking and all the talks are somehow about XSUB stuff. Let me quote some talks:

1. My First XS (hirose31)
2. Welcome to Perl5 Internals (Daisuke Maki)
3. Inside Ruby.pm (Goro Fuji)
4. PerlMachine (wakapon)

PerlMachine is a crazy project that is a minimal linux kernel that is designed solely to run perl. He reimplement most perl built-in functions in XSUBs and link them directly to the kernel functions he made. So I assume it's like lispmachine for Perl.

It is quite exciting that PerlMachine and Ruby.pm talks are done by students from University of Tsukuba. Perl has a bright future! :)

I can't make it to the meeting because I'm back here in San Francisco (so this is the first Shibuya.pm meeting that I can't attend) but I'm sure there will be ustream. Looking forward to it!

Everyone at YAPC::Asia recognizes Dan Kogai as a big contributor to the organizers because he offers his great condo (a.k.a Hotel DAN) to hackers from overseas and also makes the place open for hackathoners. This year Larry and Gloria Wall, jrockway, Yuval, clkao, ingydotnet and Jesse stayed at his place.

I should now mention that I equally thank Marty and Karen Pauley for hosting Jose (cog), Casey West and Michael Schwern. Karen also demonstrated her awesome typing skills by transcribing Larry and Schwern's keynote. I believe that was really helpful to most Japanese audience to grok what they are talking about.

Thank you.

I just started writing my slides midnight before the conference (which is very usual) and trimmed the number of modules I talk about down to 10. I think the talk went really well, especially my evil script to authenticate the wireless access using WWW::Mechanize :)

http://www.slideshare.net/miyagawa/20-modules-i-havent-yet-talked-about/

YAPC::Asia 2008 just started and is in its full swing.

For those who cannot make it, we have a stream available on http://live.yapcasia.org/ thanks to our streaming sponsors.

Enjoy!

YAPC::Asia has become huge. This year we've got 550 registrations and I think this is one of the biggest YAPCs ever.

However, our organization team has been getting smaller year by year, maybe because we knew we can do this. I live in San Francisco, USA and remotely organize the conference for this 2 years, just like any other project managers do for a project. That means, the real tough work has been done by our staff in Tokyo (I think it's too early to name and thank them since the conference has not even started)

That said, I'd like to hand off this conference to someone else, since I don't have a plan to get back to Japan anytime soon.

We're looking for the organizers for YAPC::Asia 2009. It could be any other individuals or preferrably Perl Mongers group in Asia. We've been writing things down what's needed to run this conference and already started writing Post-Mortem document so that this conference could be even better next year. I could still help configuring Act site, doing public relations to guests (if needed) etc. that I can still do remotely.

Drop me an email (miyagawa at gmail.com) if you're interested. Hopefully we can announce in the closing ceremony in this YAPC::Asia (May 15-16), and people will stop asking me about "When and where is YAPC::Asia 2009?" :)

The schedule of YAPC::Asia 2008 is now out. We have full of interesting talks for 3 tracks on 2 full days. Pretty exciting.

We also started the call for Lightning Talks today. Propose yours to speak for 5 minutes whatever you want.

Based on the voting from attendees, we decided the 2nd round of accepted talks. Now we've got 53 talks and they all look so interesting! Go check the list on the schedule page.

We'll announce the program next week with "Personalized Schedule" functionality built on top of Act hopefully with this weekend Hackathon!

YAPC::Asia 2008 organizers would like to thank Eric Cholet, the author of ACT for the great conference organizing software that powers most of YAPCs and Perl Workshops.

To show the appreciation in the hacker's way, I'm flying to Paris, France next weekend (April 25-28) funded by YAPC::Asia possible profit, to work on Act feature enhancement.

We plan to work on these things because we want them for YAPC::Asia:

* OpenID provider support
* Better Japanese names display (i18n)
* Embed videos and slides (YouTube, Google Video, Slideshare etc.) in talks
* Personal Scheduling (Who is attending to which talks) like Sched.org or icalico
* Online check-in API (Who actually showed up when)
* Promotional code / coupon for discounted payments

We (at least, I) prioritize implementing these because the trip is funded by YAPC::Asia but if there's anything you think is missing for Act, I'd love to hear. Remote participation (#act on irc.perl.org during the weekend) would be welcome too!

YAPC::Asia 2008 website got a redesign, along with the announcement of sponsors and the initial set of talks (currently 33 talks and more to come!).

We have Larry Wall and Michael Schwern as keynote speakers this year. Tickets will go on sale on March 25th Tuesday local time. There's been YAPC::Asia tradition that 300 tickets go sold out in a week, so don't miss it.