This is the 42nd weekly summary of the London Perl Mongers mailing list. For the holiday week starting 2001-12-31:
Check out the London.pm website for information about upcoming meetings and events. We had a fairly quiet social meeting this week (on a Friday! Breaking with Tradition!) which was fun (Mark wrote it up, again). There may be a tech meet coming up on the 17th: http://london.pm.org/ http://use.perl.org/journal.pl?op=display&uid=968&id=1924 OK, far from being obsessed and going crazy about it, I may as well talk about it some more and tell you that I had a potential terrorist attempt to blow up the plane I was on heading off to my holidays. I feel lucky to be here. No, this isn't linked to my New Year's resolution to drink more cocktails, but it could be. Read about it: http://use.perl.org/journal.pl?op=display&uid=189&id=1787 Nat went crazy and posted the two most amusing set of emails to the list about getting us all to donate to The Perl Foundation so we can sponsor cool Perl people to do cool Perl (and Parrot) things for the next year. Give, give, give people!: http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2001-December/006967.html http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2001-December/006968.html http://www.perl-foundation.org/index.cgi?page=donate Greg (who else) "was thinking about intelligence recently". He posted about neural nets and our brains being virtual machines which are adapted to Perl hacking and so are less good at other things. Evildave had a good point that "It seems that the explanation du jour for how the brain works is always the most recent widely-understood scientific theory". Rafiq thinks that consciousness is the emergent effect of those logic circuits doing their things, but he's a Hofstadterian. Quantum mechanics may or may not play a part in intelligence. Does the brain do trigonometry? There was some argument on the definition of intelligence. Metaphors got mixed. Cognac ergo sum. Simon poached threads. Andy sums it up nicely: "It all works by magic": http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2001-December/007000.html There was a short moritorium on Lord of the Rings discussions. If you haven't seen it already, you're missing out. It's amazing. I wouldn't mind going to see it again (oh, and Harry Potter too, just to compare)... Lucy informs us that the dromedary (one humped) camel is Camelus dromedarius and the llama is Lama glame, and that the two are cousins. No, I don't know why she told us, either: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Taxonomy/wgetorg?name=Camelidae Ivor asked what Perl stands for. Either Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister or Practical Extraction and Report Language says the new OED. On of the Daves asked about how anti-spam technologies are going thesedays. Razor looks interesting, as does spam assassin: http://razor.sourceforge.net/ http://spamassassin.taint.org/ Networked games appear to be the order of the day, ranging from dopewars (server on slab.org), to XFrisk and Tetrinet. Maybe TEG: http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/~ben/dopewars/ http://morphy.iki.fi/xfrisk/ http://www.tetrinet.org/main.html http://teg.sourceforge.net/ It appears to have been a good time for silly job adverts, such as one for a Perl Trainer working 15 hours a week for 12 weeks for 900 squid in total. Yes, that's "in total". Not even our ex-glorious-leader would take this job. Now, if it was for 10x more... http://www.redpoint.org.uk/skills/bonobo.html Strange Perl idiom of the week: perl -wle 'use strict; sub id {my $id if 0; $id++} print id,id,id' or my $x=23 for 1; print $x;. These are currently both small discrepancies in Perl so don't depend on them... Andrew wins with the weirdest post (and weirdest use of Perl) award by visualising Buffy riding a Pony (run the code!): http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2002-January/007274.html http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Acme-EyeDrops Check out what all the CFT gang have got up to on IRC: http://www.astray.com/scribot/2001-12-31.html In other news: absolutely no spoilers about Buffy series 6 (or 5 for that matter) or we'll have to kill you, Tivo still rocks, "Perl programmers do it more than one way" versus perl -e 'programmers: do { $it } for (qw( the love of ), $it)', employing cheap Polish guys, grep can't be overriden -> no singing then, random Colindale dimsum type things, little stories about losing your copy of "the ANSI C Programming Language", going to see our camel again, dumrats organising an AD&D roleplaying meet, wanting things that'll be in Text::Reflow (come on Damian! ;-), copy protection on ST games vs. "The Amiga was better", VMS's file security strategy vs. "surely everyone logs on as Administrator", slagging off academics vs. slagging off the Real World, hating hackers, reading Paradox db files... Mmmm, cocktails... Leon -- Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/ Nanoware...............................http://www.nanoware.org/ ... I came, I saw, I did a little shopping
