Charles Engelke's Blog

Real Networks sponsored the afternoon break, which featured free
Haagen-Dazs ice cream bars. It’s been at least two years since I’ve seen
anything like that at a conference. I think this is a leading indicator
that it’s time to get back in the IT sector of the stock market!

Brian Ingerson doesn’t look like most people’s image of a brilliant
programmer (at least, not mine), but he certainly is. This talk is about
Kwiki, a really neat implementation of
Wikis. I’ve installed it on a few machines, and it is quick and works well.

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This talk by Gurusamy Sarathy is subtitle “Real Life War Stories”. We
Windows users have Sarathy to thank for bring “real” Perl to us. Before
he ported the standard Perl distribution to Windows, we had to get by with
custom versions of Perl. Yes, they worked, but they always fell behind the
main version, and couldn’t use all the same add-on modules. Now Sarathy
works for ActiveState, which maintains lots of open source languages for
Windows.

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I think that blogs should allow user comments. So why doesn’t this one?

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Allison Randal is speaking about how Perl 6 is being shaped. I expect
this to be a good talk, though I regret missing about four others going on
right now, too: “Subversion, WebDAV, and Apache HTTP Server 2.0” (Ozette
will tell me about it); “DIY-IT: How Open Source is Turning IT Into a
Do-It-Yourself Marketplace” (Ricardo said he’d be there); “Ruby for Perl
Programmers” (Craig is attending); and “Automated Testing of Large Projects
with Perl” (Usha’s got it covered). This is probably the richest 45 minutes
of the whole conference; couldn’t they have spread these particular talks out more?

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Dominus is a talented and interesting speaker, and he’s giving nine 5
minute talks now.

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In her keynote this morning, Stormy Peters mentioned a recent Wall Street
Journal
article
about MySQL’s threat to Oracle. You’ll need a paid subscription to the
Journal to read the article, but one of the quotes sounded familiar to me:

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I’m not expecting to be that interested in this morning’s keynotes. The
first one is about business issues for open source in the enterprise. I’ve
heard speakers on that topic over and over and over again, and frankly, I’ve
never heard anything very deep or useful. Maybe today will be an exception,
though. The second keynote is going to be fairly interesting. I know
because I heard it a few month’s ago as a keynote at O’Reilly’s Emerging
Technologies Conference. So it’s a “rerun” for me.

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Ed Lyons of NetNumina Systems is giving this talk. The criteria for
evaluating tools won’t be features, but what’s really important:
maintainability, track record, management, integration, security,
transactions, support, availability, performance. He will weight these
according to factors he showed for 5 seconds.

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Dan Sugalski is going to assume we know what Parrot is, so he’s going to
tell us where it is. (It’s the engine that Perl 6 is being implemented on.)
The core interpreter is done. There’s the base
engine, and compile-time extensions are “dead simple”. No program-visible
architecture changes in more than a year. Calling conventions are finalized.

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Every time I come to this conference (or really, any technical
conference) I hit the bookstore. I used to like to see what was available
and buy the books while I had a chance. Thanks to the Internet, I usually
know what’s available now, but I still like the chance to leaf through the
books before buying them. And lately I’ve been buying books for my
colleagues who attend the conferences, too.

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Each year, Mark Jason Dominus hosts
Perl lightning talks. These are five minute long talks, with the time limit
strictly enforced. We should see about 16 or 18 in this 90 minute session.
They’re often fun, and a good break from the deeper technical talks at the
conference.

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