I am a sailor, you’re my first mate
We signed on together, we coupled our fate
Hauled up our anchor, determined not to fail
For the hearts treasure, together we set sail

With no maps to guide us we steered our own course
Rode out the storms when the winds were gale force
Sat out the doldrums in patience and hope
Working together we learned how to cope

Chorus:
Life is an ocean and love is a boat
In troubled water that keeps us afloat
When we started the voyage, there was just me and you
Now gathered round us, we have our own crew

Together we’re in this relationship
We built it with care to last the whole trip
Our true destination’s not marked on any charts
We’re navigating to the shores of the heart

Chorus 2x

– Johnny Duhan

Here’s a video of Christy Moore and Johnny Duhan talking about the song and singing it together.

Dublin.pm

Aidan Kehoe and I had a very small but interesting Dublin.pm meeting that night. Their first since 2004! Our wide-ranging discussions that night included me trying to understand what led Dublin.pm to flounder instead of flourish. I think a key factor was the (implicit?) expectation that members should make technical presentations.

Living in the west of Ireland there aren’t enough local Perl users (that I’ve found so far) to have a viable Perl Mongers group. So I setup the Limerick Open Source meetup instead.

Here’s what worked for us: We sit around in a quiet comfy hotel bar and chat. Naturally the chat tends towards the technical, and laptops are produced and turned around to illustrate a point or show results of a search, a chunk of video etc. There’s no set agenda, no declared topics, and no presentations. And yet, I think it’s fair to say, that everyone who’s come along has learnt interesting (albeit random) stuff.

I’d like to hear from perl mongers, in groups of all sizes, what kinds of balance between the social and technical aspects of Perl Mongers meetings works (or doesn’t work) for you.

OSSBarcamp

At OSSBarcamp I gave a ~15 minute ‘lightning talk’ on Devel::NYTProf in the morning, and a ~50 minute talk on Perl Myths in the afternoon.

The Perl Myths talk was a major update to my previous version, now over 18 months old, incorporating lots of updated graphs and other fresh information.

There is so much happy vibrant productive life in the Perl community that updating the presentation has been lovely experience. I keep having to revise the numbers on the slides upwards. There are lots of great graphs and they’re all going upwards too! (Many thanks to Barbie for the great new graphs of CPAN stats.)

I’ve put a PDF of the slides, with notes, on slideshare. Best viewed full-screen or downloaded.

I made a screencast but I think I’ll hang on to that until after I give the same talk, updated again, at the Italian Perl Workshop (IPW09) in Pisa in October — I’m really looking forward to that! I’ll make another screencast there and decide then which to upload.

After OSSBarcamp last week, and before IPW09 in late October, I’ll be flying to Moscow, visa permitting, to give a talk at the HighLoad++ (translated) conference. I’ve never been to Russia before so that’s going to be an amazing experience!

In recent months, and especially while researching for this update, it’s become clear to me that the Perl community is both functioning well and growing more conscious of its own role and value.

But are the various components of “the community” sufficiently visible?

You’ll often hear expressions like CPAN is the “jewel in the crown” of Perl. To the extent that’s true, it’s the Perl community that we have to thank. CPAN feeds the community, and the community feeds CPAN – at an ever increasing rate. (Those graphs currently include the current incomplete month, so often show a sudden but unrepresentative drop in the final value. That’s being fixed.)

When I read stories from those new to the community like this, or this, I think Larry’s vision expressed in 2000 (and echoed in 2004 by Nat) of “the community’s rewrite of the community” has come to pass.

But for every user in the perl community there are countless more perl users outside it. Unaware of other perl users near them, either physically or virtually. We need to find ways of reaching out to those users and encouraging them to join our various communities (Perl Mongers, PerlMonks, IRC channels etc. etc.).

On The Map?

So, back to my Perl Myths talk… To help convey the scale and geographic spread of the perl community I’m including this map of the locations of Perl Mongers groups:

When I zoomed in on Europe I could see that there was no marker for the Dublin Perl Mongers. Now I know that the Dublin group is barely active, but it is alive and should be on the map. So that got me thinking “how many more Perl Monger groups are alive but not on the map?”.

Please go check the map for any perl monger groups you know of and, if you can’t find them, email the admin for the group (you can find the email address at http://www.pm.org) and ask them to update their details to include the location. Also, if possible, email the approximate location to pm.org yourself so they can be added to the map ASAP. (I’d be especially grateful if more markers could be added for groups in sparse areas of the map!)

In The Calendar?

To help convey the scale of activity within the community I include this graph of conferences, workshops, and hackathons (thanks to BooK for updating it for me):

Notice the dip in “Other conferences” in 2009? Perhaps the rise in 2008 was an aberration, and 2009 has returned to the underlying trend. Or perhaps some smaller events, like workshops and hackathons, might have been missed, in the same way that Perl Monger groups might not be ‘on the map’.

So I’m looking for help in checking that all perl workshops and hackathons in 2009 have been noted.

The underlying data for the graph can be found in a YAML file here. Or, instead of rummaging though a YAML file, you could look at this calendar. I’ve already checked that all entries matching ‘workshop’ or ‘hackathon’ are in the YAML file. What I’d like you to do, is check that any workshops or hackathons that you’re aware of are in the calendar. If not, let me know.

Thanks!

It needs updating though, and that’s where you can help…

It’s a strongly fact base talk with lots of graphs, numbers, and references. A lot has happened in the Perl community since I wrote the talk over 18 months ago!

Lots of the information needs to be checked and updated. The jobs graphs are easy, as are the basic CPAN numbers.

I’d like to get updated versions of: the graph of CPAN uploads (slide 23), test counts for perl 5.10.1 (slide 44), the graph of cpan-testers reports (slide 47).

One item that’s not in the slides, which were written in Feb 2008, but is in the screencast made later at OSCON (at 7:00) is the statement that “One quarter of all CPAN distributions have been updated in the last 4 months! Half of all in the last 17 months!” That’s an impressive and important statistic but it need updating. I think I got that from Schwern’s excellent “Perl is unDead” talk, but I don’t know how he got the figures or, more importantly, how to update them. (And schwern.org seems down so I can’t get the slides.)

At OSCON I also talked about myths relating to Perl 6 (again, not in the old slides, but starting at 19:20 in the screencast). I’d like to cover Perl 6 when I talk in Dublin in September, but the status of Parrot and Perl 6 has changed in the last 18 months even more than Perl 5. So I need help with good sources of hard data for Parrot and Perl 6, similar to what I have in the screencast but updated.

More generally, I’m also looking for new sources of information — hard data about the vigourous health of perl and its community. Have you seen any relevant talks/slides or blog posts you can recommend?

Can you help with any of the above?

Thank you in advance!

I wouldn’t mind if the page had clear attribution, but it doesn’t. In fact, at the bottom it says “Author: hoanatwho”.

That doesn’t feel right. Especially as many of my posts, and probably many others from Planet Perl, use the first-person pronoun “I”.

Why does this matter? A couple of months ago Merlin Mann wrote a long but excellent piece that explains why far better than I could.

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And — if and when I choose to give away the things that I make — nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

Merlin discusses, with his typical style, the motivations of those who make their work available for free, and the perils of presuming to understand their motives. Although written mostly about bloggers it seems very applicable to authors of Open Source software. For me it echoes how I feel about coding and, to an extent, the freedom that Perl give me to express my thoughts.

If you have a blog I recommend you at least make the licence for reuse clear. My blog has a “Terms of Use” link in the sidebar that refers to Creative Commons “Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0″ license.

Looking at the Planet Perl page I see it has no licence. Perhaps that should be fixed — even if only to say that the license of the feeds being aggregated must be respected.

My wife suggested I take some time-out for myself. After the rough few weeks I needed a boost, so I did…

I’m just back from a wonderful two day retreat organized by Timothy and Eva from the Kalyana Centre for Mindfulness in Co. Kerry.

The retreat was held in silence, practising Kum Nye, a Tibetan Buddhist movement practice. It was lead by Matthias Steurich — a rare opportunity to practice with him in Ireland. It was wonderful. Just what I needed.

The location was beautiful. A large house overlooking Inch Strand in County Kerry in the West of Ireland. I took this photo on my iPhone on one of my walks along the beach:

I’ve enjoyed my time with Shopzilla, met some great people, and worked on some challenging problems. I’m especially grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to develop and release some very useful Open Source software: Gofer, DashProfiler, and especially NYTProf v2.

When I started with ValueClick back in 1999 it was a small company. Over the years I was with them it grew rapidly, both from within and via mergers. When I left in 2006 it had become a very large company. For me Shopzilla was always a very large company.

I really like to make a significant positive impact where I work. I believe I did that at ValueClick and Shopzilla, but it’s always easier at a smaller company. There’s far less inertia to overcome.

So I’m delighted to be working now at a small company with a great team, product, technology, approach, and growth: TigerLead.com

I’m not keen on job titles, but I needed to put something on my LinkedIn profile. After exploring some options I settled on “Entropy Minimizer”!

I’m also delighted to be working with the PostgreSQL database, at last, as I’ve not had a chance to work with it before. (Although I used to be good at tuning Ingres, the distant forerunner of PostgreSQL, back in the days when RDBMS were novel and we thought a 50MHz cpu was fast.)

Then I discovered Tripit. Now I simply forward confirmation emails as they arrive to plan@tripit.com – something I could easily automate. My iCal automatically sync’s with a feed from tripit that has much more information than I’d ever enter manually, including links back to tripit.com for the full details. That then syncs to my iPhone so the information is always at hand. Perfect, and perfectly simple.

As I’ve found the service very useful over many months and many trips, I recently sent tripit invites to a bunch of people, mainly Perl folk. Many joined. A few pointed out that they already used dopplr and wondered if tripit was the same. I didn’t know, so I took a look.

I signed up with dopplr and was happy to see that, like tripit, I could forward confirmation emails to dopplr. So I forwarded the flight and hotel emails for my upcoming London Perl Workshop trip. Just like tripit, dopplr parsed the emails and worked out I was making a flight from Shannon to London and staying in a hotel in London.

That was all it did, though. It hadn’t noted my confirmation codes, flight times, hotel address. It had remembered nothing that would be useful to me.

All it had done was noted that I’d be in the same city as a few other people I know who use dopplr. tripit does that, but also let’s me control who sees which trips and who can collaborate with me on trips.

I did a quick search and found another review that reached a similar conclusion. It seems that dopplr are better at publicity, but tripit has the features I find genuinely useful.

To give it tripit a whirl, all you need to do is forward some recent confirmation emails to plan@tripit.com – you don’t even need to signup first.

An ordinary domestic weekend kind of a day, but blessed with great weather and no engagements for any of us.

A chance for me to catch up on many of the long neglected house and garden chores, and for our family to enjoy some chilled-out time around the house.

We’ve been burning more wood on the fire recently and the chimney was overdue a sweep. So I blocked up the fireplace with a bin bag and some foam, then climbed on the roof and swept down from the chimney pot. It was my first time sweeping a chimney and this method made it very simple. I just left the fireplace sealed up for a few hours for the dust to settle before opening it up and shovelling out the shoot along with the old ash.

 

My wife had seen a recipe for “Hedgerow Jelly” by Elisabeth Luard in a magazine, so she, and our two daughters, walked out down the local lanes to find the ingredients: 1kg crab apples or Bramleys; 250g blackberries, 250g sloes or bullaces or damsons, 250g rowan berries or elderberries, 125g hawthorn berries (haws), 125g rosehips (wild or cultivated), plus about 2 litres of water and about 2kg of granulated sugar.

(Our eldest daughter decided to take photographs of the process, which ultimately led to this blog post — I normally rarely post about home life.)

Meanwhile, after clearing gutters and sweeping the drive, I was working down by the lake front thinning out some trees. A few months ago we had a group of big old trees one corner of our garden cut down. Mostly pine with some silver birch and hazel. (You can see in the photo the large pile of wood I still need to chop, chop, chop.) That gave us a view of the lake again. Something we’d lost over the years since we moved in as the trees have grown up and bushed out.

Having got that narrow view of the lake I wanted to extend it through the trees to the right by thinning out their lower branches.

The summer weather in Ireland has been pretty poor the last few years. We seem to get a few lovely weeks in spring, then summer is a mostly washout with grey skies and regular showers. Then, just after the kids go back to school, we get a few bright weeks again—the Irish “Indian Summer”—around September/October. Fabulous days like today.

There’s a reason Ireland is so green. It rains. A lot. Especially in the west were we are. Despite the bright sunshine today the grass was squelching under my feet. The logs need to be stored or they’ll rot over the winter. I shifted a few wheelbarrow loads today and started clearing a space off the grass to store them.

A friend and I wielded axes a few weeks ago so we’ve a reasonable stockpile of split logs now, which I finished stacking today. I’ve been told the wood gets harder to split the longer its left, and I don’t fancy trying to split logs on dark wet winter nights, so I guess I need to keep at it.

Back indoors the domesticity continued with our eldest daughter making the topping for an Apple Crumble.

Our eating apple tree is still recovering from the pruning I gave it last winter (it’s first for many years) but our cooking apple tree seems very happy this year.

Yum!

That was the glossy edited version of the day. The uncut version includes me falling off the ladder into the lake, our youngest daughter having a tantrum and throwing handfuls of apple crumble onto the floor, and me pouring scalding hot Hedgerow Jelly over my hand. Ahh, domestic bliss!

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

A challenging statement. Having seen the lecture now I can understand why it has been so popular, and is so important. I came across it recently and felt it was worth sharing.

You can watch it on YouTube here as a series of bite-size 9 minute clips.

(After that you might like this unrelated take on applying risk management.)

“2 days of conference, 2 simultaneous tracks, more than 30 talks, 120 attendees, 20 sponsors and many international guests”

The whole event ran very smoothly thanks to a great team lead by Gianni Ceccarelli, Francesco Nitido, and Enrico Sorcinelli. I’ll echo the compliments of one attendee “Complimenti sinceri agli organizzatori! Bravissimi! Tutto perfetto!“

I gave short talk on Gofer on the Thursday, and then two 40 minutes talks on Friday: Perl Myths, and Devel::NYTProf. I hope to upload screencasts and slides next week. The talks were all recorded on video so I imagine they’ll be uploaded at some point. I’ll add links here to them when they are.

The majority of the sessions were in Italian so, since my Italian is practically non-existant, I had plenty of time to work.

Or at least try to. The one disappointment of the trip for me was the apparent poor quality of the Italian internet. Using mtr I’d regularly see over 20% packet loss within telecomitalia.it and interbusiness.it from my hotel room. Occasionally over 50%. It got much better at night, so I’d do more work then. At the conference venue the Italian academic network (garr.net) also regularly had over 20% packet loss at its link to the internet. All this was, of course, outside the control of the organisers.

The “corridoor track” at perl conferences is always good. I had a chance to talk to Rafel Garcia-Suarez (and meet his lovely wife and new baby son), Matt S Trout, Hakim Cassimally, Michel Rodriguez, Marcus Ramberg, and many others.

I had opted to take a very early fight so I’d have a day being a tourist in Pisa before the conference started. The weather was beautiful and I had a lovely time strolling though the streets of this ancient city.

I didn’t take my camera with me, but I did take my iPhone so I was able to capture a few snaps as I strolled around and climbed the tower. (Yes, it really does lean in a disconcerting “it must be about to fall down” way. All the more dramatic when you’re up close and can appreciate the massive scale of the tower.)

For several years now I’ve been giving talks at conferences and workshops. I’d generally upload a PDF of the slides somewhere, or at least email them to anyone that asked. I’ve now added a special page on the blog where I can list all the talks I’ve given. That now acts as a single location to find all my talks and links to slides any related materials. (It’s currently a work-in progress. I’ll be filling it in from time to time. Any major updates will be accompanied by a blog post.)

Slides, no matter how good, miss much of the real event. No ad-libs, no questions and answers. When writing slides I’m always caught between the desire write little, so the audience can pay attention to what I’m saying, and to write lots, so people reading the slides later still get a reasonably full picture.

There’s also the problem of notes. I often use ‘presenter notes’ on the slides to give extra information. Both to myself, if I may need it while presenting, and also for links to data sources and credits for images used. I’ve uploaded some talks to slideshare.net but I have to include a separate version with notes (which is useful for download and print, but almost unreadable in their viewer.

I tried making a video of a talk on a camcorder. The results weren’t great. Grainy, noisy, hard to read, and massive video files.

Then I decided to try using screencasting software. I bought a great wireless USB microphone and the amazing ScreenFlow screencasting software. Now I can to capture everything in fine detail and edit it easily afterwards.

Great. Now what? I needed somewhere to host the (very large) videos. I looked around and tried a few, like vimeo, but wasn’t happy with the results. Vimo, for example, transcode to quite a low resolution and don’t let viewers download the original.

Eventually I found the wonder that is blip.tv. A whole laundry list of great features. If you produce videos of any kind, give them a look.

So, now I have my own TV channel.

Strange world!

Of the commentary I read, Breda O’Brien in the Irish Times rang most true for me.

I crossed the country to see the concert in Dublin on Friday night. I’m struggling against the urge to write a stream of superlatives. Others can do that better than I.

Got your tickets yet?

I’ll be speaking about something Perl’ish, naturally.

The “Perl Myths” presentation I gave at IWTC earlier this year turned out to be a hit. (At least, it was after the event. There were less than ten people in the room at the time, including me! Perl clearly isn’t a hot topic among Irish web developers.)

My blog post, with embedded slides and video, has topped 7400 hits, plus another 3000 or so views on slideshare.

I’m upgrading my methods for this next talk. I’ve bought a great wireless USB microphone and the amazing
ScreenFlow screencasting software to capture everything in detail.

So I’m going all high-tech. No more “camcorder perched on a chair at the back” for me!

It’ll be a good trial run for OSCON where I’m speaking in July.

So I have a blog, yet I know not what I’ll use it for, nor what parts of my self I’ll choose to log.

You’re welcome to join me on this meandering journey. Though the map is not the territory.

Until recently the journey hadn’t meandered far from technical topics. Some chocolate, a mention of Cubs and Toastmasters. All safe topics. All likely to be expanded on in future, especially the chocolate!

In my previous post however, Introversion, I stretched the envelope further by sharing some more personal insight into my self. That was an interesting experience. Feeling my way up to the boundary of what I was comfortable for me to blog about at this time.

If you have a blog you must make choices about what to say, and what not to say. Just as in real-life conversations. Only with a blog you don’t know who the audience are. How do you, bloggers, make those choices? Where do you draw the line?

I guess the answers must relate to the bigger question of Why Blog? I don’t have an answer to that question yet. I think I mainly blog to share. To give insight into my life, thoughts and experiences in the hope that it may be useful to others. I also blog to log. To create a record to look back on.

After some further though I added a postscript to that Introversion post:

Postscript: I paused a day or so before posting the above, wondering if it was wise. Wondering, especially, if it was likely to be misunderstood. Now, after a couple more days, I think it’s worth adding a little postscript.

I approach my self and my life (mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual) with the same curiosity and interest with which I approach my work. The engineer part of me wants to know how it works. How I work. How the pieces of my life fit together.

… let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others,
[this] is really the very best thing that a man (or women) can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living …”
—Socrates.

A common misconception about the word “introvert” is that it means someone who’s shy, withdrawn, afraid of crowds, or lacking in social skills.

If you’re an introvert, like myself, I think you’ll find it interesting and helpful. I certainly did.

If you’re not an introvert then I’d still recommend it. It gives some valuable insight that may improve your understanding of, and communication with, the introverts in your life.

I took the quick Kiersey Temperament Sorter test at keirsey.com that Joe links to. I’m always a little skeptical of these kinds of tests that depend on answers to difficult to answer questions. Anyway, it labeled me an “Artisan, Composer“, for what it’s worth. The description seemed a good fit, mostly.

That’s an ISFP Myers-Briggs type. My wife thinks I’m probably an ISTP. Being my wife, and a psychotherapist, she might be right.

I find the Enneagram more interesting as a personal personality type indicator, partly because it acknowledges a range of personality development, from health to unhealthy. As well as gifts and aptitudes, we all have some unhelpful thought patterns, areas we’d like to improve, issues we struggle with. Most personality measures gloss over these.

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Enneagramm certainly has its critics, but I recognize my self in the description of my type. My fears and my desires, my angels and my devils.

My type may, at best …

Level 1: Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.

or, at worst …

Level 9: Seeking oblivion, they may commit suicide or have a psychotic break with reality. Deranged, explosively self-destructive, with schizophrenic overtones. Generally corresponds to the Schizoid Avoidant and Schizotypal personality disorders.

I’m not close to either of those extremes. But I recognize both of them.

“By enhancing one’s self awareness with the help of the Enneagram, one can exercise more choice about one’s functioning rather than engaging in patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in an automatic, habitual, unconscious way”

Go find your self!

Postscript: I paused a day or so before posting the above, wondering if it was wise. Wondering, especially, if it was likely to be misunderstood. Now, after a couple more days, I think it’s worth adding a little postscript.

I approach my self and my life (mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual) with the same curiosity and interest with which I approach my work. The engineer part of me wants to know how it works. How I work. How the pieces of my life fit together.

… to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others, [this] is really the very best thing that a man (or women) can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living …”
—Socrates.

It really started with BarCamp Galway then OpenCoffee Limerick and Blogger Coffee Limerick. Along the way I came across meetup.com and created The Limerick Open Source Meetup. That’s not really taken off yet, but I remain hopeful.

In fact our first meetup is tonight, prompted by Anton Manering joining recently.

• 70% Irish handmade dark couverture by Ó Conaill
• 66% Caraibe Grand Cru by Valrhona
• 75% Equador Grandi Cru by Baratti & Milano
• 68% Dark Fruit and Nut by Divine
• 70% Irish Exotic Chilli by Wildes

Too much information?

Toastmasters is an amazing organization: “220,000 members in 11,300 clubs in 90 countries, offering a proven – and enjoyable! – way to practice and hone communication and leadership skills”. It works, it really does, and I’m especially blessed to have a wonderfully friendly club nearby. I’d recommend it highly to anyone – especially if you need to do any kind of presentations.

So anyway, toastmasters has helped me improve my skills in various ways over these last few years. Tonight I discovered it helped me with the local Cub Scouts.

I’ve just started helping out. Tonight I was asked to teach the Recovery Position to a series of groups of 6 or so lively 8-11 year olds. Thrown in at the deep-end!

I had about 10 minutes with each group to try to get the basics across in a way that would make an impact and stay with them. I got them to rotate being the unconscious person and the helper, and dramatised the point that by doing it the right way even the smallest of them could roll over the heaviest of adults.

It only dawned on me afterwards that it was a little like the Table Topics game we play at the start of every Toastmaster meeting: Convey a message with a clear structure and impact in a short space of time.