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We've got a core Mojolicious dev in the Chicago Perl Mongers, which makes it a lot easier for me trying to grok their docs. The IRC channel (irc.perl.org #mojo) helps a lot as a human-companion to the Guides.

1. LAZINESS: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.
   
2. IMPATIENCE: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy.
   
3. HUBRIS: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
   

MySQL is fast for simple queries. I've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence of mysql sucking for more complex stuff (multiple table joins, large volume sets, etc).

Example

I throw in the qualifier because, other than stuff like regular expressions and SQL, which are not Turing-complete and have blissfully narrow scopes, everything else has seen javascript-acular scope creep.

I've many times wished I was down in Columbus instead of here in Youngstown. I formed my own LUG http://www.youngstownlug.com/ after a year of driving to Akron and Cleveland for their various groups.

In short, you've got all kinds of great stuff right in your backyard that some of us would love to have.

As far as the state in general, there are FOURTEEN LUGs, Notacon http://notacon.org/ which happens every year up in Cleveland, and more Linux jobs then you would belive. Go do a few searches on the internet. I've come across dozens of places hiring Linux programmers and administrators. I know dozens of associates from various LUGs around the state whop make a living using Linux.

You mean the tourists don't come here to see our rain? I love Portland, too. We seem to have an abundance of great user groups. The Portland Perl Mongers is a great group for us Perl-lovers (and includes several Perl celebrities). The Rose City Astronomers are a really neat group of people if you enjoy looking up at night.

The recent interview with Linus Torvalds reveals a little bit about what is so attractive about this place. I've traveled a little, but there's no place like home.

Join mailinglists for other local groups in the geographical area in which you are interested. For example, if you wanted to launch a technical user group in Atlanta you might announce it to the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, the Atlanta Perl Mongers, the Atlanta .NET User Group, or the Atlanta Java User Group. Even though your new group might be unrelated to some other groups, there will undoubtably be members who are interested or know someone else who is interested. If you are concerned about posting to those groups, just contact the respective mailinglist admins to ask their opinion.

Moreover, they've written several times that SubEthaEdit leverages several OSX technologies, including both Bonjour and Cocoa, as well as makes (unorthodox?) use of open protcols like BEEP. From the sound of it, getting SEE to work without this toolkit would be very hard to do.

I'm a little more interested in support for the SEE protocol in an editor like Vim or Emacs. If they can add it, then it'll instantly be available to people using any platform at all, even if SEE never gets ported to anything else. From what I can tell, this is a lot more likely, but so far I haven't heard of anyone working on hacking up these editors to support SEE style collaborative editing. Oh well...

• use Perl; is a good place, but very informal and tends to get sidetracked into politics :)
• Your local Perl mongers group may be a great place
• YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) and the Perl conference (now part of the Open Source conference) usually have many good presentations by the truly great Perl programmers
• I have the impression that Perlmonks is pretty good, though I don't tend to use it much
• Finally, the Perl5 Porters mailing list is the real original heart of the Perl community, though I think nowadays many of those guys have moved onto Perl6 work

A list of names is also useful: material by Damian Conway, Larry Wall, Randal Schwartz, Mark Jason Dominus, Simon Cozens (Perl involvement now minimal due to career change), and persons associated with them is going to be top notch. Plug their names into Google and see what they have to say. Catch a presentation or read a book by one of them if you can. Meanwhile, there is truly a lot of junk out there. There's an article out there somewhere about "how to tell a good Perl book from a bad Perl book," which I thought was by Mark Jason Dominus, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

Finally, 90% of the useful modules you'll see recommended for use from CPAN are written by the intelligent lights in the Perl community. The time-tested modules that are now standard solutions are those that were written with high quality by good programmers.

An Enterprise OSS project that goes well will give the author plenty of business in consulting, book authoring, etc.

But what is the reward for an OSS game maker? Just fame and being hired by a non-OSS game co.?

Think about it. Games are different from enterprise software.

I'm a diehard OSS fan and developer and have been since the day I heard of it in the first place. That's why I run Brasilia Perl Mongers, that's why I've developed everything I have within the OSS paradigm. I'm just saying this to fundament my point, I'm a big fan of OSS.

Games are an optional, recreative, part of software development.

Linux himself on his book "Just For Fun" made the point clear : he loved the profit, the financial reward is important, you gotta have the financial reward.

If you build the game equivalent of Linux would you get the equivalent recognition of Linux? My point being : I don't think so.

Any links?

Read Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

Find out more (including how to sign up so you can attend) from the message I posted to the London.pm mailing list.

See you there (if not in the pub tonight).

I'm just working thought the details of the venue now and I'll post a follow up to this thread once I've sorted them out. As always, we're pleased to welcome new faces. Oh, and if anyone wants, they can pop along to the pub for our monthly social tonight.

Slashdot, your local friendly pub invite list.

I'm just working thought the details of the venue now and I'll post a follow up to this thread once I've sorted them out. As always, we're pleased to welcome new faces. Oh, and if anyone wants, they can pop along to the pub for our monthly social tonight.

Slashdot, your local friendly pub invite list.

No, Amazon uses Perl quite a bit. While that link doesn't give you much of an idea (although they've been on that site for a couple years now), I interviewed with them and Perl (and C and Linux) was most definitely an asset. (Unfortunately I turned them down for a dot-com and the rest is a lot of self-kicking.) I also had friends that were CS students at Seattle University who did projects in Perl for Amazon while in school (they were pissed about having to learn Perl).

Amazon uses Perl. A lot.

Ticketmaster uses Perl a lot too, so much so that they sponsor mod_perl development and have hired one of the main mod_perl developers full-time. And in that link you'll see that citysearch.com also uses mod_perl exclusively. Salon.com uses Bricolage as its CMS, which is mod_perl-based. The Register uses Bricolage too.

So it's possible to write large-scale and maintanable Perl projects.

No, I mean like:

Doc

Something a little more thorough.

http://www.perldoc.com/

Unit Testing

Not just wrappers, but something a little more thorough and mature like say from executable to module.

Unit Testing

Library Repository

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/
..pales in comparison to...

http://www.cpan.org/

Portability

[Acorn] [AIX] [Amiga] [Apple] [Atari] [AtheOS] [BeOS] [BSD] [BSD/OS] [Coherent] [Compaq] [Concurrent] [Cygwin] [DG/UX] [Digital] [DEC OSF/1] [Digital UNIX] [DYNIX/ptx] [EMC] [Embedix] [EPOC] [FreeBSD] [Fujitsu-Siemens] [Guardian] [HP] [HP-UX] [IBM] [IRIX] [Japanese] [JPerl] [Linux] [LynxOS] [Macintosh] [Mac OS] [Mac OS X] [MachTen] [Minix] [MinGW] [MiNT] [MPE/iX] [MS-DOS] [MVS] [NetBSD] [NetWare] [NEWS-OS] [NextStep] [Novell] [NonStop] [NonStop-UX] [OpenBSD] [ODT] [OpenVMS] [Open UNIX] [OS/2] [OS/390] [OS/400] [OSF/1] [OSR] [Plan 9] [Pocket PC] [PowerMAX] [Psion] [QNX] [Reliant UNIX] [RISCOS] [SCO] [Sequent] [SGI] [Sharp] [Siemens] [SINIX] [Solaris] [SONY] [Sun] [Symbian] [Stratus] [Tandem] [Tru64] [Ultrix] [UNIX] [U/WIN] [Unixware] [VMS] [VOS] [Win32] [WinCE] [Windows 3.1] [Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP] [z/OS]

User Community

A little more world wide and established.

http://www.pm.org/ ...in addition to the mailing lists.

So, what were you on about again?

From the parent parent parent poster. "Ruby has almost all of the power of Perl, with none of the ugliness" isn't quite a fair statement, considering Ruby is lacking or behind on almost everything else Perl is superior at. Ruby is still playing catch up, and depending on who you ask, can also be considered ugly.

<plug>javainetlocator and IP::Country</plug> are also available.

The city data are unreliable. I've posted elsewhere (link1, link2) the reasons why, but will repeat the main points here.

• All IP geolocation techniques assume the user of an IP address lives close to the company which registered the address.
• The above assumption is mostly true if you define 'close' as 'in the same country'.
• In the USA, a lot of people live in (or close to), the same city as the company who registered their IP address. This is because lots of people live in cities and use ISPs which have a presence in that city.
• Most of the world population (and US population) doesn't live in a city with major ISP presence. Their city locations aren't going to be accurate by any IP geolocation technique.
• The commercial IP geolocation vendors (quova, digital envoy) have a business reason for making city geolocation sound accurate. If it wasn't accurate, why would anybody buy their products?
• Conducting a survey that inflates the accuracy of city geolocation is easy - just ensure your survey participants live in a major US cities and you'll achieve high accuracy. One way would be to use server logs from a US financial industry website. Once you have a survey that shows high accuracy, you can sell your product to businesses whose customers don't live in major US cities
• It's extremely difficult to measure accuracy of IP geolocation (even at the country level), so if you make bold claims, no one is going to be in a position to argue.

Sure you can do the same things in other languages, at the end all general languages are Turing Machine equivalent. The difference is that Python is EASY to read (according to Master Yoda). It is bottom-up designed to be.

So it is good not only for scripting, but too for prototyping and for everything which needs to be flexible and not too much efficiency-critical. The logic of some videogames is encoded in Python, you know.

I mean, hell, you want friends, it helps to have something in common with them. Personally, I was a military brat, and the military folks tend to be much more welcoming of any new person, as they're used to being the new person themselves, but most people aren't so used to getting thrown in a new place every few years.

If you're in any professional/hobbyist/whatever organizations, look to see if there are any chapters where you're going...for those geeks, maybe a linux users group, perl mongers, whatever. There might be a lego users group, or something else where you can meet people, if that's what you're trying to do. Of course, there's also the chance that these people are obsessive freaks.

Do some research before you go... for all you know, you have relatives living in that same town, or friends from high school or college who are only an hour or two away from where you're going. Ask your friends if any of them have been there, any maybe they have recommendations on things to do, places to go, whatever. Check online ... look for a local newspaper, and see what sort of things there are going on in the town. If it's a big city, look for an independant newspaper, like the Baltimore or Washington City Papers. You might also check colleges in the area, and see what sort of events their student papers have listed.

You can also check out DMOZ by region, and you might be able to find something of interest. You might check the local phone book for independant bookstores, comic book / game shops, whatever sparks your interest.

Without knowing what sort of people you're trying to meet, it's hard to give any useful suggestions as to where to find them.

A fellow San Diego Perl Monger has written a book about Perl and the web, including a chapter about web services.

It's a New Riders book, but the entire contents are available free on the web.

A fellow San Diego Perl Monger has written a book about Perl and the web, including a chapter about web services.

It's a New Riders book, but the entire contents are available free on the web.

Good idea. More people should. It does happen:
I've organized something similar for people
I know from Phoenix Perl Mongers -
a list of books that people have that they're willing to loan out. Good luck!

The Geek Cruises certainly are great, I haven't gone on any but the list of luminaries that give presentations are impressive, and I've heard good things about them. Is the Ottawa YAPC turning into a marketing scheme at all? ExitCertified has been quite active & helpful for not only the local PerlMongers group, but also the Ottawa Unix Users' Group (OCUUG); as you'll notice from their Meetings page, they're actually held every month at ExitCertified. There's also substantial cross-pollination between ExitCertified people, the Ottawa Capital Linux Users' Group (OCLUG which hold monthly meetings just around the corner from ExitCertified, hmmm...), as well as PMs and some of the same suspicious characters can be seen at the Macintosh User's Group of Ottawa (MUGOO) (ahem, Jay et al)

These nefarious groups indeed seem to be as thick as theives. But if a firm like ExitCertified is devoting their time, office space, and personnel to so much in the local OSS/programming communities, haven't they earned the respect of our community? Just because they're an active company dosen't mean they're all bad. I wouldn't worry about the vacancies either; speakers were still being lined up for the local Open Source Weekend/Business Of Open Source Conference (BOSS) held a few weeks ago in the city and look who showed up.

Why is it that whenever someone mentions Perl, everyone has to mention how superior insert favourite language is. Does everyone feel that threatened by Perl? Do that many people hate Perl that much?

I use Perl because it lets me get the job done with little or no hassle. I like the TMTOWTDI nature of Perl, and Perl had one of the best support communities out there. There is a huge public codebase that you can draw from. And if you are building websites, there is a plethora of application frameworks and templating languages to choose from (HTML::Mason, Apache::ASP, OpenInteract, CGI::Application, AxKit, Embperl, Apache::PageKit, Template Toolkit, HTML::Template just to name a few).

What really annoys me is most of the time the complaints made against Perl are completely unfounded (like the claims made by the parent post). If someone wants me to refute the complaints made about Perl in the parent post I can, but for now I'll just end my rant here...

If you haven't used Perl before, try it, it's good!

The site is slashdotted, so I haven't been able to have a look at it. However, if I were building a geo-search engine, I'd use the WHOIS data for the bulk of the indexing work, and for providing a default location for visitors. The tweaking around the edges (changing the location of the website or page), is just icing on the cake.

No one really knows the accuracy of IP->Country lookup. There's an onlgoing thread on the london perl mongers list about this topic. Some geolocation companies state 98% accuracy, which is pure bullshit. It's more likely to be around 70%, with most of the error occuring in overestimation of US addresses.

By the way, if you want a fast IP locator, here's one that's just as accurate as any of the commercial products. I'm surprised more people don't use this sort of stuff for providing intelligent defaults for their users when filling in HTML forms.

For those Europeans among you: Damian Conway will speak tomorrow (monday) evening in Zurich/Switzerland at the ETH

I just happened to notice that Perl is being used for so many innovative research fields.

First of all Perl seems to be an excellent language for Bioinformatics, and Dr. Lincoln Stein is a leading voice in this area. Recently O'Reilly has been giving great coverage in this area.

Nanotechnology seems to be another area where Perl is getting much attention.

I believe the platform and vendor independence, absolute openness, and superb data munging capabilities of it are the main reasons for Perl's adoption in such academic research.

But, although I am an aspiring Perl advocate) and big Larry Wall fan myself, I wonder just how optimized these modules are for such intense low level work....

http://www.cynbar.co.uk/

The robot was rather clunky and took ages to serve drinks...nothing at all like the nimble robots out of Short Circuit that mixed drinks. Also, it was all very 'mix this and mix this.' None of the cool presentation you get from a decent bartender. The worst thing is that they have to have a human to take your money anyhow (something to do with not having automated alchol serving machines by law IIRC).

Don't really like the place myself...when I went in about a year back it was all covered in mirrors and hady the most tacky decor. The Anchor nearby is a much better pub, with real beer, seats by the river for the summer and warm fire in the winter in a classic hundred+ year old english pub.

In the current economic climate, travel stipends from conferences are going way down, and sometimes even being eliminated. Then there are also talks to smaller groups, which can't necessarily afford to fly someone out to see them, but would get a great benefit (and hopefully give back in some way, too) from having a visit; local Perl Mongers groups, to name just one example.

If you've had a bad experience with PERL, give Perl a try!

(Shamelesly ripped from ntk.net).

who shameless ripped it from london.pm.

Not quite what I'd consider a club on the same scale, but I've been members of two chapters of the Perl Mongers, and they're still going. They're prone to fluctuations like all groups, but they're still out there for those of you looking to pal around and talk geek in person.

(But the closest that I knew to a club were computer gaming groups -- every month or two a bunch of us would drag out computers over to a friend's house, connect to his switch [parts of his ISP were still in his house] and try to kill each other in wargames, FPS, etc. Not as much geek talk going on there, but it happened once in a while.

The leader of the project, SF Perl Mongers' own Rich Morin, is being very circumspect about it, trying to gather lots of information from experts in different OSs and distributions, and of course working on it in his free time, so the product is not there now--but if you're interested in contributing to such an effort, this would be the place to help out.

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

At Paris.pm (in France), we have devoted a page to obfuscating the expression $A++ .

Now 55 and counting.
Check the one with NO alphanumerical characters AT ALL!

Perl monger meetings, usually held once a month, are better than LUG's if you want to meet other programmers in your area.

0. Sending your application and resume

• 99 resume's from people he's never heard of who may or may not be lying.
• One guy who has been recommended by people already on his staff and who understands the job.

What it takes is a little research of a few companies that interest you and some contacts. If you haven't met somebody from a perl monger meeting or LUG working there, then just call up an engineer at the company. That is tough, I know. But you're not calling them to ask for a job, just for info. You want to find out about the open job, what skills it requires, the group manager, and the company in general. Remember, the guy at the other end is a geek just like you.

There are probably many "established" professionals in your area who would be more than happy to come in and give a presentation on Open Source in general, or Linux in particular. Check for a local Linux users group, or even a local branch of a related user group (like Perl Mongers, for exaqple). Even if the presentation is just for the teachers, it would probably be well received. If you are in the Boston area, contact the FSF. See the Linux User Group HOWTO for more info.

Oh, and a quick way to find out about Perl Monger Chapters in your neck of the woods is the fairly-up-to-date and quite-underpublicised Bath.pm Perl Monger World Map.