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I agree, perl medic is a great book, influential in encouraging and developing good habits.

Peter will be speaking, though not on the same topic, at YAPC:2005, June 27, 28, 29 in Toronto. There's a whole day's worth of workshops on perl6, including PUGS, most of a day on testing, as well as threads on DBI, CGI, and lots of other workshops. Register now! At $85US for registration, it's the best bargain you'll find this year.

If you are planning to attend, Book your hotel room soon. The host hotel is only guaranteeing room availability till next weekend. There's a huge conference coming to Toronto a few days after YAPC, so the hotel wants to start making rooms available for early arrivals. Not that all the rooms will disappear the first day, but you wouldn't want to be disappointed, would you?

This thing keeps getting mentioned on all my LUG lists: http://www.yapc.org/

• 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.

I had that explained to me in person in an excellent, unrelated presentation at YAPC 2002 by Mark-Jason Dominus when he failed to follow his own advice.

This is all just a plot to get tickets to YAPC::Europe
And a damn good one too, i'm going. Hope we'll get some scoop on this too
One year has passed since the last YAPC and they defenately confused me enough to make me want to hear The Damian explain it to me all over again, or anyone who understands it for that matter ;)
Funny how he won over the complete hall of coders using only two words: "less chars"

YAPC is an umbrella organisation which helps organise cheap, community Perl conferences. This year we have conferences in locations such as Paris, Israel, Boca Raton and Ottowa, and releated workshops in Bonn and Copenhagen. The namespace collision is intentional.

At Yet Another Perl Conference this year there was a book auction to raise funds for Perl development. Tons and tons of O'Reilly, Manning, and other books, and not just Perl books. It was interesting to see where the interests lay. There were plenty of wisecracks and groans for Java, Python, and PHP books. (I picked up Learning Python for $10.) Interestingly enough, there was intense interest in the Ruby books, and no wisecracks. Went for a higher than average price, I believe.

Basically at the end of the event he presented the "We've had free wireless access for the entire event , and we sniffed this many plain text passwords flying across the open" talk. Silly, silly people.

SSH is your friend.

Firstly, this year's YAPC::Europe is in Munich, and is on the week before the "Oktober Fest". Now, I am sure a few of the attendees at the conference will want to go to this unfortunate event, but not the majority. So the Munich.pm people have set up the conference for the busiest and most expensive time of year (accommodation and travel-wise). They are asking people to make reservations now. Excuse me? The conference is over half a year away. I don't want what I'm going to be doing in September, do you? The theme of the conference is some silly quasi-intellectual "Science of Perl" nonsense. Surely the theme should have been Perl 6? Apparently not....

Secondly what the hell makes the Perl Foundation think they're going to get enough money? In nearly 2 months they've barely got enough for one grant, let alone 3! I despair. (And before you ask, I did make a contribution).

I know these comments seem a bit harsh, but please don't mod this down. I think I make valid points, and please forgive the tone since this is just annoying me so much.

Firstly, this year's YAPC::Europe is in Munich, and is on the week before the "Oktober Fest". Now, I am sure a few of the attendees at the conference will want to go to this unfortunate event, but not the majority. So the Munich.pm people have set up the conference for the busiest and most expensive time of year (accommodation and travel-wise). They are asking people to make reservations now. Excuse me? The conference is over half a year away. I don't want what I'm going to be doing in September, do you? The theme of the conference is some silly quasi-intellectual "Science of Perl" nonsense. Surely the theme should have been Perl 6? Apparently not....

Secondly what the hell makes the Perl Foundation think they're going to get enough money? In nearly 2 months they've barely got enough for one grant, let alone 3! I despair. (And before you ask, I did make a contribution).

I know these comments seem a bit harsh, but please don't mod this down. I think I make valid points, and please forgive the tone since this is just annoying me so much.

Damian has set the bar very high in this regard--see the start of his 2002 schedule, and read his 2001 diary to see how much he gets around. While I doubt Larry and Dan will be travelling internationally as much as Damian, we do want them to visit user groups outside their home town.

In an ideal world, a conference would pay Larry to be Larry. Unfortunately, you might have noticed that this world isn't ideal. Larry has to pay his own way to conferences, just like everyone else.

--Nathan Torkington

#! /usr/bin/perl

use Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun;

###### mI'wa'DIchvaD 'eratoSHeneS HeghqaD #####

<mI' tIn law': > yIghItlh!
mI'tInwIj laDDaqvo'Hal yIlaD nob!
mI'wa'DIchmeywIj cha' mI'tIn chen nob!
{
mI'wa'DIchmeyvaD { 'oH gheD chuv! } mI'wa'DIchmey tIwIv yInob!
gheD <<\n>> ghItlh!
} gheDvaD mI'wa'DIchmeyvaD yInIH yInob teHtaHvIS!

Yet Another Society(YAS) has put together the Yet Another Perl Conference for a couple of years now, which is low cost perl conference. It might be worth looking at what they have done with Perl and see if it could be applied to Apache.

In any case, it's not like joining, say, ICANN, to be done from the comfort of your keyboard.

So, I suspect we're not all going to run out and do it. But, we can support some folks we trust to do so. My first thoughts are to ask Mr. Gilmore and/or Bruce Perens, if IBM's left hand would let its right oppose these doings. Noise won't help here, but a combine in the form of that supporting Damian Conway's Perl work should be possible. Can one of our existing organizations (YAS or SPI [if there's still anyone home at at the latter]) pick up the banking effort?

For myself, I pledge to donate USD100 to such an organization for this purpose. Are there seven others willing to step up to the plate? If so, we've got a membership in hand.

You have to dig a bit to find this...

If you want to contribute to the Damian fund, you can pay online with a credit card at:

http://registration.yapc.org/

• Packages are distributed in PPM format, which as far as I can see are quite separated from the CPAN model which has been so effective for the Perl community
• The Perl Power Contest (sponsored by ActiveState) requires the use of ActivePerl, rather than encouraging generic Perl solutions
• With Gurusamy Sarathy (of ActiveState) looking after the Perl 5.6 release (and doing a great job, I might add), the 'official' binaries for both Win32 and Linux are now ActivePerl packages
• They are partnering with M$oft in many projects. This just makes me uneasy, given M$'s history.

• Scripts I write will run on almost any platform I come across, as long as I avoid direct system calls and avoid assumptions about file system structure
• I know that if a problem has been tackled in Perl, it's solution will be available on CPAN. And furthermore, I know that I can use the CPAN module to install it with just one command.

A European YAPC (yapc::Europe) is also being planned, but as it'll be in London accomodation will cost way more than the conference fees :-(

A European YAPC (yapc::Europe) is also being planned, but as it'll be in London accomodation will cost way more than the conference fees :-(