A key part of my plan for Upgrading from Perl 5.8 is the ability to take a perl library installed for one version of perl, and reinstall it for a different version of perl.
To do that you have to know exactly what distributions were installed in the original library. And not just which distributions, but which versions of those distributions.
I’ve a solution for that now. It turned out to be rather harder to solve than I’d thought… Continue reading
I’ve just been updating the page where I keep links to my presentations and noticed that, not only had I not updated the section for the 2009 Italian Perl Workshop, but I hadn’t even uploaded the screencasts I’d made.
So, with apologies for the delay, here’s my entry for IPW09, with the links to the uploaded screencasts:
I had a great time at IPW08 and was delighted to be invited back for IPW09, which was another great success. My contributions were two talks. The first was called “DBI Oddmenti” and covered DBD::Gofer (16 minute screencast), DBI::Profiler (7 minute screencast), and DBDI a key component of a future DBI for Perl 6 (5 minute screencast). The second was “State-of-the-art Profiling with Devel::NYTProf” (40 minute screencast).
With 30 talks from 20 speakers on 2 tracks, IPW09 was another success for the Italian Perl Association, which was formally incorporated at the event. I’m confident that YAPC::EU 2010 is in safe hands.
I’m really looking forward to YAPC::EU. We’re combining the conference with our family summer holiday. We’ll be staying in a cottage in the village of Calci a few miles outside Pisa.
Last weekend I went up to Dublin to speak at OSSBarcamp. I took the train from Limerick on Friday so I’d already be in Dublin the following morning, without having to get up at the crack of dawn.
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.
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!
I just added a concluding slide to my updated Perl Myths talk. Having comprehensively debunked some myths with hard facts about perl and its ecosystem, I wanted to end with a slide that summarized some truths.
I liked the slide text so much I wanted to share it with you:
Perl:
has a massive library of reusable code
has a culture of best practice and testing
has a happy welcoming growing community
has a great future in Perl 5 and Perl 6
is a great language for getting your job done
for the last 20 years, and the next 20!
It would make more sense after seeing the talk, but I think it stands well on its own as a summary of Perl.
I’m going to be speaking at the OSS BarCamp in Dublin in September. Given the likely audience I think my Perl Myths talk would be a good fit.
It needs updating though, and that’s where you can help… Continue reading
I’ve had a great week at OSCON. The talks are excellent but the real value is in the relationships formed and renewed in the “hallway track”. I’m honoured and humbled to be able to call many great people my friends.
My talk on Devel::NYTProf seemed to go well. This year I covered not just NYTProf and the new features in v3 (not yet released) but also added a section on how to use NYTProf to optimize your perl code.
Here’s a quick summary, with links to the slides and screen-cast, and outline what’s still to be done before v3 gets released (getting closer by the day). Continue reading
I spent a very pleasant few days in Pisa, Italy, last week. I’d been invited to speak at the Fourth Italian Perl Workshop. The workshop was a great success. In fact calling it a “workshop” is selling it short. It’s more of a mini-conference:
“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.)
It felt strange when I first set up this blog. What would I write about? Who would care?
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!
I gave a updated version of my earlier Perl Myths talk at OSCON this year. It includes updated numbers, updated job trend graphs (showing good growth in perl jobs) and slides for the perl6 portion that were missing from the upload of the previous talk.
Two versions of the slides are available: one with just the slides on a landscape page, and another with slides and notes on a portrait page.
I also have a screencast of the presentation which I hope to edit and upload before long. (I’ll update this page and post a new note when I do.)
This is a collection of links to things discussed, or just mentioned, at OSCON that I found interesting enough to note. Hopefully one of a series for OSCON 2008, as time allows.
These items are from a great talk on “A Streaming Database” by Rafael J. Fernández-Moctezuma at PDXPUG day.
Hancock is a C-based domain-specific language designed to make it easy to read, write, and maintain programs that manipulate large amounts of relatively uniform data. In addition to C constructs, Hancock provides domain-specific forms to facilitate large-scale data processing
The CQL continuous query language (google)
Borealis is a distributed stream processing engine. Borealis builds on previous efforts in the area of stream processing: Aurora and Medusa.
CEDR is the Complex Event Detection and Response project from Microsoft Research.
Google Protocol Buffers “allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice”.
Which seems like Thrift which is “a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between langauges”.
Not this... 