This is the 43rd weekly (hmmm, biweekly more like, eh?) summary of the London Perl Mongers mailing list. For the week starting 2002-01-14:
Check out the London.pm website for information about upcoming meetings and events. There's a technical meet on Thursday 24th January at Codix, with talks: "Beginning to Program Parrot Assembler", "Idiotic Perl", "Long Numbers in Perl 5", "Advent Calendar Recap". The next social meet is on Thursday 7th February at the Cittie of Yorke. Vous etes taxi, taxi ou taxi sympathetique?: http://london.pm.org/ http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/codix.html http://london.pm.org/meetings/locations/cittieofyorke.html Conference joy: yapc::Europe call for papers, and details of next year's Open Source Convention (including The Perl Conference) are up, along with talk proposals. Vous pouvez attachez votre seinture svp?: http://yapc.org/Europe/2002/call-for-papers http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2002/ Most important Perl news of the week: Apocalypse Four is out, detailing more of Larry's design for Perl 6. Paul has finally caught the new vision. Most important discussion of the week has been what to call the new ^=~ operator. Suggestions so far: the topcat / firework / rat / squirrel operator. Don le non de notre orginisation monsieurs: Cobra: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/01/15/apo4.html http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2002-January/007749.html Some of us went to a discussion on Patterns in Perl organised by Nigel Wetters which was quite interesting. That is to say, there was some disagreement on what patterns are really used in Perl. There's probably another soon: Alerte generale!: http://patternsinperl.com/ http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1503/ddj0005vs/may00.htm Ivor asked how to create on the fly callbacks from code which is in strings: "Normally, with on-the-fly code, you just eval it to get what you want. Here, I don't want to run it, but to generate an anonymous code ref". The solution is to use 'sub' and return a subref in the eval-ed string: my $coderef = eval ("sub{$codestring}"); $@ && die; Pouvez-vous me sauvez la vie? Non. Mark asked about debugging. He has some code which warns somewhere, and wanted a stack trace: $SIG{__WARN__} = sub { use diagnostics; die }; Ivor also asked if threads really work in Perl. The answer is, well, kinda, not really. However, threads will work properly for the not-yet-available-but-sometime-real-soon-honest Perl 5.8. nemesis asked how he could tell the difference between when his Perl program was called via a CGI or directly. Answer: $ENV{GATEWAY_INTERFACE} probably. Greg got worried about scriptkiddies scanning his DSL-connected box. Most people would just use ipchains to drop their IP or complain to the ISP. Or, more likely, use a cheapo box as a firewall (smoothwall may do the job, although its developers aren't very friendly, although we don't like wingate much). Et bien ca vous laisse le temps de prendre les journaux ou meme un petit cafe. Andrew Savige is a very crazy man. You *have* to observe the prettiness of his post. And then run it under Perl and be amazed. It is quite cool, but he's not winning another prize for it ;-) Je suis pas "a poil". Je suis "en serviette": http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2002-January/007759.html Can everyone make sure they keep their CFT monitor up to date. Nicholas has updated the lyrics to a certain Eagles song: http://2799.org/random/cftmonitor.cgi http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/2002-January/007599.html Check out what all the CFT gang have got up to on IRC: Elle fait plutot un jolie bruit pour un taxi: http://www.astray.com/scribot/2002-01-14.html In other news: talking out mothra, making a Dr. Who episode during yapc::Europe this year (well, we can't decide who wants to play the Master), a mulled wine recipe, colo decisions (looks like Mailbox are still the cheapest/best), more dotbombing (mostly false), random silly crypto stuff, more Buffy spoilers, spam, silly Acme module of the week: Acme::Your, getting jobs as Python coders, quite a bit of talk about Python actually (eg "Python is a bit like Perl with all the sharp edges filed off") and Ruby (but it has no CPAN), silly code formatting arguments, rt.cpan.org being really really useful for reporting bugs in CPAN modules and beer: http://beverage.allrecipes.com/AZ/Glhwin.asp http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Acme-Your http://rt.cpan.org/ Chauffeur de taxi c'est pas mon vrais metier, Leon -- Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/ Nanoware...............................http://www.nanoware.org/ ... "Apple" (c) 6024 b.c., Adam & Eve
