This is the second of hopefully many weekly summaries of the London
Perl Mongers mailing list. The list has grown so popular (a hundred
messages a day is not uncommon) that I think this is
necessary. Comments welcome. For the week starting 2001-01-29:
Don't forget the London.pm website for meetings etc. The next meeting
is on Thursday 1st February at the Barrowboy & Banker. Perl gods
Mark-Jason Dominus and Simon Cozens will be joining us:
http://london.pm.org/
Oops! "it seems that Leon's summary mail has opened a bit of a can of
worms. There are a number of people who don't like the idea of a
publically advertised archive of this mailing list." This spawned a
huge thread about privacy, what a public mailing list is all about,
mutual trust, and next week's lottery numbers (2,7, 20, 23, 34,
38). Mark Fowler did a good summary (see third link). Please refer to
grep as "greg of wales" and blame Philip for all this and not me ;-)
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01618.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01631.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01637.html
A firm venue has not yet been found for the next technical meetings
(Feb 22 & 26). Note: "Tech meetings good. Learning things from sharp
people good.". Looks like people from outside London will be making it
this time. Greg attempted to dream up a london.pm sitcom.
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/maps/britain.gif
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01837.html
I remembered that SAM had hacked wvware (a tool for parsing Word
documents) to output XML. Handy for reading and parsing Word files
while avoiding Windows, so push him to roll the patches back in:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01651.html
http://www.wvware.com/
O'Reilly is considering organising an open source conference in
London. Nathan Torkington asked if October 16-19 at the Cumberland
Hotel seemed fine. Apparently finding a good venue in London is
tricky. Some of us may have experienced this already ;-)
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon2001/
http://yapc.org/Europe/
Dave Hodgkinson wondered why Sun boxes were so expensive, compared to
x86 boxes and why Sun is still in business. For: big boxes easier than
clustering, better support. Against: $$$. It turned into a discussion
about OS's, mail software, benchmarks, security, and that
documentation is a large part of a successful opensource project.
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01634.html
Dave Cross's "Data Munging with Perl" book is now officially out in
this country, with many reviewers offering to buy the London.pm head
monger a drink or two, even though he tried to video two hours of
Angel on an hour and a half of video tape. You can also get it in
ebook format:
http://www.manning.com/cross/
Apart from Template Toolkit support questions, we also discussed the
major differences between TT2, Embperl, and HTML::Template. Embperl is
HTML based, and invites you to put Perl code in your HTML, thus not
enforcing model/view/controller separation. TT separates design and
code, allowing easy creation of alternative versions of something, be
it a new look / WAP / digital TV / email / XML / PostScript. It's all
about future proofing. HTML::Template also fails to enforce this
separation. All the templating solutions compile to Perl but some are
faster than others. This may not matter.
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01816.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/modperl%40apache.org/msg15504.html
Mark Fowler asked for funky Emacs LISP code, and was introduced to
TRAMP, which allows remote editing of files via scp:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01818.html
http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/~grossjoh/emacs/tramp.html
Dean Wilson produced the first London Community News, containing a
brief summary of the London-based open source community groups. It'll
be good to mix a little and learn some stuff...
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01890.html
And finally, Simon Wistow provided a very good/poor Buffy joke to to
get everything back on topic:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg01764.html
Leon
--
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
yapc::Europe............................http://yapc.org/Europe/
... All life's answers are on TV. - Bart Simpson
