Jon Åslund

Erwan Lemonnier started the second day by showing Log::Localized, a module, which doesn’t show your logs in your native language, which I thought first, but lets you locate where an error is by tuning the verbosity of logging in different parts of your code. He was followed by Jerker Montelius who showed us how to use and why he uses Mason.

Tom Hukins had a talk today too, with many pictures, this time about how easy it is to use Class::DBI, as opposed to writing SQL in your code.

Before lunch Autrijus taught us how to hack in Haskell, which Pugs is built with. Good 45 minute introduction, but I am still confused when I think of monads.

After lunch there was the battle of web frameworks/toolkits. Marcus Ramberg described Catalyst, perhaps a bit too thorough, then quickly created a book database application from scratch. Jesse Vincent talked excitedly about his new (yet to be released) project called Jifty, which looks very cool.

While Catalyst lets you use any component you can think of for the model and view, Jifty has already decided that. On the other hand, it means even less configuration. If Jesse’s plan holds, Jifty will be out this christmas. I am looking forward to it.

Jonas BN talked about Module::Build and danced to a song, sung by drunk Danish children, while waiting for make test to finish.

Jos Boumans gave the talk What CPANPLUS Can Do for You. For a long time, there has been some vague promise that CPANPLUS will be able to create Debian packages. Now it can. Take a look at http://debian.pkgs.cpan.org/

The last session was the lightning talks. Jos told us why he hates Module::Build, Anton Berezin showed how to do the thing CPANPLUS did for Debian packages, but for FreeBSD ports, and most notably, Autrijus gave the true lightning talk, Visual Basic Rocketh (more specifically version 9), where he had much to say and thus had to speak very very very fast.

Many of the talks were interesting, some were boring as in “this should probably have been a lightning talk”, or badly executed (don’t worry, I submitted oral bugreports), but I learned of new things from every talk.

Benjamin Holzman talked about optimizing perl programs with C. He mentioned Judy arrays. Never heard of them before, but they looked very cool.

Tom Hukins demonstrated easy ways to screenscrape the web when you really have to, using WWW::Mechanize and XPATH. One neat tool was the shell XSH, which you can use to test XPATH expressions and inspect XML documents.

Lots of headnodding from my side during Christian Borups character set talk. I have lived through the scary experience of having a badly encoded Polish spam crash a mail parser, because of a bug that made perl eat all available memory in about 5 seconds.

The very charismatic Autrijus Tang introduced Pugs. Perl 6 is love. Autrijus has a nice way of doing presentations. He is sitting down, you can’t really see him if you are sitting in the back, but it doesn’t matter because you can hear him and it’s easy to follow his Lessig-styled presentations.

Claes Jacobsson showed how to use PPI to parse perl code, and mentioned among other things Perl::Critic, which is built with PPI and warns you when you break coding standards outlined in the Damian Conway’s book Perl Best Practices.

Stig Brautaset introduced Froody, yet another way to do remote procedure calls with web standards. Just build a nested hash of the things you want to send/return and Froody takes care of the rest, like validation and the actual sending and receiving. There is yet another schema language, but it is very easy to understand since it doesn’t deal with very constructs. For instance, an array is defined by writing the same element twice. It kind of looks like an example of what you would send.

The end of each talk ended with “Do you have any questions?” which always was answered with another question “What version control system do you use?” The right answer was of course SVK, the distributed version control system created by Chia-liang Kao (clkao) who was at the conference and gave a talk about it. There are lots of similar tools out there, and it might seem like much wasted effort that everyone are doing their own thing, but as I lurked the #rev-ctrl channel a bit, I noticed there are actually a lot of collaboration between the authors, as in sharing of code and ideas. “If that new idea of yours works out well, we will steal it”. Looking forward to see the Precise Codeville Merge in action.

We were supposed to have a video conference with another Perl conference in Hungary but the video conferencing program was made from software so it didn’t really work and we had to skip that part.

Artur Bergman ended day one with a talk about how to speed up perl and especially threading by using the well known optimization technique COW - copy on write. Perl threads today are portable, but very slow to create, and there is no speed benefit at all using them. The only good reason is if a problem is easily solved with a threading model, where it is easier to think with threads, which doesn’t seem to be that many problems at all. The drawback of this idea would be a few extra cpu cycles for pointer dereference, which is quite cheap, but the win would be no unnecessary and expensive memory copying.

The first day of the Nordic Perlworkshop 2005 is over. Had a great time. Too tired to write anything now, my brain is filled with “quantum superstition” and there is more tomorrow. For now, look at the pictures, either in my gallery, or at flickr, where they are a bit more annotated and commentable.

I spent the evening listening to an interview Wil Wheaton did. One of the things he mentioned was that he thought that the hurricane Katrina might have changed things, the way people think, and that suddenly, or at least for a while now, focus on celebrities are beginning to return to a more sane level.

One of the good things out of this is, Britney Spears had her baby and nobody cares, and nobody should care!

That was news to me, which kind of drives his point home. Even though I rarely follow any news source, outside what seaps into the blogs I read, I usually know all too well about Britney Spears and her life. And yeah, I listened to that show for 90 minutes and all I can remember right now is Britney Spears. Sorry Wil and Chase!

Anyway, the reason I do remember it so clearly is because in the pilot episode of the new tv series Threshold, Brent Spiner’s (yeah, you see how my brain works?) character Nigel Fenway mentions exactly this:

Do you think people give a flying fart about science? The day the Mars Rover landed, what was the top story in the news? Britney Spears Married in Vegas! Given the state of the world today, a little alien intervention might just be what the doctor ordered.

Although some of us are actively trying to forget her, and I must say the outlook is positive, she is still there in the back of our minds. Somewhere there is a reference to her which makes it impossible for us to forget. That’s just the way our minds work, or at least mine.

This leads me very smoothly into the lyrics I found at robot101. In fact, this whole blog entry was just a setup so I could show you this. The ref count song:

Oh baby, baby
How was I supposed to know
This memory’s from the heap
Oh baby, baby
I shouldn’t have let it go
And now its out of scope, yeah
Show me where I should have called free
Tell me baby ’cause I need to know now, oh because

My memory leak is killing me
I must confess, I still believe
When all my objects are hard to find
Give me a count
Ref me baby one more time

Friends outside Stockholm and especially those outside Sweden have asked me what it looks like where I live. So even though I had some much needed cleaning to do, I went out for a stroll and took some photos of my neighbourhood. I like it very much. Too bad I have to move out in December. Anyone out there with a nice apartment for rent?

Old Roland TB-303 synthesizer software ReBirth RB-338 is given away for free. It’s times like these I miss not having a computer, running Windows. I kind of understand why even new audio programs are not released on Linux. Supporting many systems is annoying, also Linux audio is still shaky. Of course, I probably won’t have time to play with it anyway, but I remember fondly the times, when I created really crappy tunes with my Amiga.

Jono Bacon (from Lugradio) writes about about Linux for videoproduction, promoting the great tools we now have, the framework GStreamer and the video editor PiTiVi. I am however more looking forward to DIVA, another video editor, also using the GStreamer framework, but written in Mono instead of Python and with a more clearly stated goal of being compatible with the Gnome HIG. It’s very interesting to follow the development of DIVA at the author’s blog. May the best video editor win!

I put up some photos from Lexx-o-rama 2005. Some random favorites:

During the weekend, I’ve been at Lexx-o-rama, which is a tiny scifi con/meetup, that takes place in Gothenburg every year. As always, I had an excellent time and I will write all about it, but another day. Now I really have to go bed, because I am completely drained of energy and have to go up early for the math studies. Meanwhile, you can read about a sweet dream I had. Sweet, as in kick ass sweet, not sugary goodness, even though it had moments like that as well.