Re: [OT] American Heretics Elections

[Hakim Cassimally]

2008/8/28 Pedro Figueiredo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 9:13 AM, David Cantrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> "The Thursday after the first Wednesday" would seem to indicate that we
>> think there might sometimes be one or more days between the first
>> Wednesday and its following Thursday.
>>
>
> changing it to "the day after the first wednesday" would avoid this.

But then a quick scan of the instructions might leave you thinking "Wednesday".
It's useful to have the word "Thursday" in there, even if it's redundant.

osfameron

Re: Perl is dead

[Hakim Cassimally]

2008/12/4 Philippe Bruhat (BooK) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 08:45:02AM +, David Dorward wrote:
>> Léon Brocard wrote:
>>> Did anyone go to the London Perl Workshop this weekend?
>>> About 200.
> Aren't most Perl events (more than 20 worldwide in 2008, more than
> 10 already announced for 2009) only reaching people *within* the Perl
> community?
>
> "Not dying" also means reaching new and young programmers that will
> continue to use Perl when we live on pension.
>
> How do we reach people outside the community after having spent so much
> time talking to ourselves?

The LPW did have a tutorial track: I believe that was targeted firstly
at the students of the host university?

Similarly the Italian Perl workshop had a "beginner" track which had
tutorials and general interest talks, all in Italian, distinguished
from the expert track, which included some talks in English.  I think
the approach worked - certainly I think the first-time attendees
outside the perl community were in the majority.  Getting "new blood"
seems to have been an explicit goal for the workshop, and seems to
have worked very well.

osfameron

Re: Perl is dead

[Hakim Cassimally]

2008/12/4 Philippe Bruhat (BooK) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> And then there are the more "public" conferences, targeting a broad
> audience of programmers, professionals and users.

Good point: I'm planning to give a brief talk on Perl at
https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarcampLiverpool this weekend.  There are
lots of these low-budget miniconferences happening all over the world
so may be a very good venue to get a few short talks on cool things in
Perl into the public view.

osfameron

Re: # and believe me, Perl is still alive... still alive!...

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 12/9/08, Tim Sweetman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> The idea with branding is a bit like "user experience design". You
> claim that your remit is very broad, including everything about how
> the thing in question (the Perl language, the overground network,
> whatever) is perceived by its its users, but then, in practice, you
> just concentrate on sticking logos on things. If that involves
> sticking cheap looking stickers on Silverlink-branded trains, that's
> fine. If that involves creating a whole new category of train,
> "overground", which corresponds to nothing that the customer (or
> passenger) can make sense of, so be it.
>
> To put it another way: the emperor is butt naked, and freezing his
> arse off.
>
> On 9 Dec 2008, at 11:31, Nigel Hamilton wrote:
>> Branding is important for idea packaging and transmission. A brand
>> simplifies sending a message and in these agile, ajaxian times
>
> To paraphrase Ian Hislop: If these are agile times, I am a fruit tree.
>
>> where people
>> are suffering from attention poverty Perl needs a way of attractively
>> packaging some of its more hairy messages.
>
> package Message::Hairy;
> (etc)
>
>> I'm really glad to see Perl6's branding strategy in action. It's a
>> great
>> idea to make Perl the umbrella brand as it gives room for sub-
>> brands to
>> grow: rakudo, pugs, elf, (smop - needs one) etc. and it also hedges
>> risk.
>>
>> Just look at the way the Apache and the Mozilla foundation manage
>> branding.
>> There is a clear umbrella mark (the feather, mozilla) but there's
>> room for
>> complimentary sub-brands (lucene, firefox respectively). So I think
>> the Perl
>> foundation is on the right track with Perl(R).
>>
>> Although I think there are two further things that would help:
>>
>> * A Larry-approved strapline for Perl - what is it? why should I
>> use it?
>> what itch does it scratch?
>> * An assignment of "perl.com" back to the Perl Foundation [1]
>
> * Perl 6 actually being able to do stuff
>
> * A Perl user group that didn't just insult n00bs when they turned up
>
> * A culture surrounding the language that didn't privilege obscurity
> over sensible engineering
>
> (I know, crazy stuff)
>
> ti'
>

-- 
Sent from Google Mail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Re: # and believe me, Perl is still alive... still alive!...

[Hakim Cassimally]

2008/12/10 Hakim Cassimally <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On 12/9/08, Tim Sweetman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> --
> Sent from Google Mail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Looks like my Nokia has gone crazy and is imagining left-softbutton
clicks out of nowhere.  Guess which application I have as my default
shortcut...
(Sorry for the noise)
osf'

Curry tonight: Manchester 19:00ish Oxford Road (and distributed)

[Hakim Cassimally]

As part of London.pm's distributed curry evening, some of us will be meeting at

   Manchester, Oxford Road station
   19:00 ish

And from thence heading to the "curry mile" of Wilmslow Road in Rusholme.
I'm thinking possibly to:

http://www.restaurantsofmanchester.com/indian/darbar.htm

If you'd like to come, reply to this email or ping osfameron or joel
on irc.perl.org #london.pm

Alternatively, you may with to consider other locations for the
distributed curry evening such as:

   Southall (ping Kake)
   Penfold's house (I suspect this is limited to Penfold and family though)
   ...  any others I've missed?

Enjoy curry tonight :-)

osfameron

Re: Curry tonight: Manchester 19:00ish Oxford Road (and distributed)

[Hakim Cassimally]

2008/12/11 James Laver :
> Distributed curry is definitely a winning idea.

Indeed!  Next time: live video/irc linkup? ;-)

After madcap dashes to Manchester from Liverpool and Chesterfield, we
had a pint of the only real ale we could find in a pub off the curry
mile (the Albert), then had a decent meal at Darbar.  Not too spicy
but rather nice.  Sadly, we failed to indulge in tasty indian sweets
due to trains not leaving late enough.

osf'

>
> Ours was quite tasty and rather cheap for a meal out in london (even when
> you factor in we had two bottles of wine between 3 of us).
>
> Only downside is we failed to find excellent beer within easy reach of the
> station.
>
> How were the Manchester and Penfold's-house curry meets?
>
> --James

Re: Perl Christmas Quiz

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 12/12/2008, Paul Makepeace  wrote:
> SPOILERS contd

> >> 3) Write a Perl function that takes two references to arrays and returns 
> >> the intersect of them. If an entry appears n times in array 1 and m times 
> >> in array 2, the output should list that entry min(n,m) times. Bonus mark 
> >> for one line solutions.
>  >
>  > use Set::Scalar;
>  > sub intersect (\...@\@) {
>  >  my ($a1, $a2) = map { Set::Scalar->new(@$_) } @_;
>  >  my $intersection = $a1 * $a2;
>  >  return $intersection->elements;
>  > }
>
>
> This isn't a set question though. Sets have unique membership,

The question isn't specific about how the output should look if it a
key doesn't appear in both arrays, or if n==m.  But here's my attempt:

sub uniqc { my %seen; $seen{$_}++ for @_; \%seen }
sub intersect {
my @lists = map uniqc(@$_), @_;
my $all = uniqc map @$_, @_;
return { map {
my $key = $_;
my @vals = grep $_, map { $_->{$key} } @lists;
my $val = @vals == 1 ?
$vals[0]
  : do {
join '-' => (sort {$a<=>$b} @vals)[0,-1];
};
  $key => $val;
} keys %$all };
}

# to test:
my @x = qw/ bar  foo foo  baz /;
my @y = qw/ bar bar  foo  /;
say Dumper(intersect( \...@x, \...@y ));

__END__
$VAR1 = {
  'bar' => '1-2',
  'baz' => 1,
  'foo' => '1-2'
};

Re: Perl Christmas Quiz

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 12/12/2008, Peter Corlett  wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 01:18:24PM +0000, Hakim Cassimally wrote:
>  [...]
>
> > The question isn't specific about how the output should look if it a key
>  > doesn't appear in both arrays, or if n==m.
>
>
> It does. It asks for the "intersect", which is the set theory way of saying
>  "those elements that appear in both sets, and no others".
>
>  Here's my attempt:
>
>  sub intersect{my%x;$x{$_}++for(@{+shift});grep{$x{$_}&&$x{$_}...@{+shift};}

Gah of course: though you missed the min(n,m) requirement. So
sub uniqc { my %seen; $seen{$_}++ for @_; \%seen }
sub intersect {
my @lists = map uniqc(@$_), @_;
+{  map {
my $key = $_;
my @vals = grep $_, map { $_->{$key} } @lists;
@vals == @lists ?
do {
my ($min, $max) = (sort {$a<=>$b} @vals)[0,-1];
($key => $min==$max ? $min : "min($min,$max)");
}
: ();
} keys %{ uniqc map @$_, @_ }
}
}

Re: Perl Christmas Quiz

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 12/12/2008, Peter Corlett  wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 02:15:49PM +0000, Hakim Cassimally wrote:
>  > On 12/12/2008, Peter Corlett  wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >> sub intersect{my%x;$x{$_}++for(@{+shift});grep{$x{$_}&&$x{$_}...@{+shift};}
>  > Gah of course: though you missed the min(n,m) requirement.
>
>
> Are you sure? Really sure?

Ah, the problem statement makes more sense rereading it... serve me
right for trying to rush it during lunch ;-)

osf'

Re: Perl Christmas Quiz

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 15/12/2008, Avleen Vig  wrote:
> On Dec 15, 2008, at 10:04, "James Laver"  wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Avleen Vig  wrote:
> > > On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Chris Jack  wrote:
> > > > 3) Write a Perl function that takes two references to arrays and
> returns the intersect of them. If an entry appears n times in array 1 and m
> times in array 2, the output should list that entry min(n,m) times. Bonus
> mark for one line solutions.
> > > >
> > > In the spirit of sharing, I offer this solution, from your neighbours
> > > in the Python community:

> > > :-)
> > Using other languages is really cheating.
>
>  Well duh. There were alreay multiple Perl solution out there. And I didn't
> know a better one.
>
>  Plus I just wanted to be a snob with my four-line solution.

In the same spirit (and once pndc had corrected me on the spec...
d'oh!) I attempted in Haskell... but pretty much failed at a compact
solution:

import Data.List
minIntersect :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] -> [a]
minIntersect a1 a2 = let gs = group .sort
  in aux (gs a1) (gs a2)
  where aux is'@(i'@(i:_):is) js'@(j'@(j:_):js) =
case (i `compare` j) of
EQ -> (zipWith const i' j') ++ (aux is js)
LT -> aux is  js'
GT -> aux is' js
aux _ _ = []

On the plus side, I think the nested @patterns give perl's line noise
a run for it's money :-)

osf'

Re: Perl Christmas Quiz

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 15/12/2008, Hakim Cassimally  wrote:
> On 15/12/2008, Avleen Vig  wrote:
>  > On Dec 15, 2008, at 10:04, "James Laver"  wrote:
>  > > On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Avleen Vig  wrote:
>  > > > On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Chris Jack  wrote:
>  > > > > 3) Write a Perl function that takes two references to arrays and
>  > returns the intersect of them. If an entry appears n times in array 1 and m
>  > times in array 2, the output should list that entry min(n,m) times. Bonus
>  > mark for one line solutions.
>  > > > >
>  > > > In the spirit of sharing, I offer this solution, from your neighbours
>  > > > in the Python community:
>
> 
>
> In the same spirit (and once pndc had corrected me on the spec...
>  d'oh!) I attempted in Haskell... but pretty much failed at a compact
>  solution:

Aha!  Haskell has an 'intersect' function... though it doesn't quite
do the min(n,m) thing, as it shows *all* the repetitions in the LHS.
Still, if you look at its source, you can get the following one-liner
(which is possibly less efficient than my original?)

  minIntersect xs ys = let g=group.sort in [ zipWith const x y | x <-
g xs, y <- g
  ys, head x == head y ]

osfameron
--

Re: Perl Christmas Quiz

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 15/12/2008, Robin Barker  wrote:
>  My haskell solution:
>
>  import List (delete)
>  intersection :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a]
>  intersection [] _ = []
>  intersection (x:xs) ys = if elem x ys then x: (intersection xs (delete x ys))
> else intersection xs 
> ys

Nice!  And instead of explicit recursion we can tweak to a fold with
an accumulator that contains a pair containing the ys still left and
the result so far:

intersection xs ys = snd $ foldr aux (ys, []) xs
where aux x acc@(ys, r) = if x `elem` ys then (delete x ys,
x:r) else acc

osf'

Re: Mobile broadband

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 19/12/2008, Dave Hodgkinson  wrote:
>  On 19 Dec 2008, at 05:57, Simon Cozens wrote:>
> > Anyone got any experience of mobile broadband providers? Any good ones,
> > good deals, horror stories,
> don't-use-this-if-you-have-a-Mac stories,
> > etc.?
>
>  I have the Huwawei E220 dongle on Vodafone on a Mac. It works.

I had the same dongle with voda for a bit: I suspect my dongle may
have been faulty, as it only worked intermittently on Windows
(sometimes didn't mount the auto-connect application correctly),
barely worked on Linux with the hackish unsupported connect script
voda semi-officially supply (I was too stupid to work out the wvdial
incantations on my own). Also, it barely had any reception in the
hills just above Gatwick airport.

I did try it briefly on Mac (it didn't work, but tbh I didn't try very
hard, sent it back to voda, and changed to a B&B that did free wifi
instead).

> I pay  *mumble* a month for 5G.

Sadly _Dave confirms that this isn't Yet Another mobile broadband
standard but a data transfer limit.  Er, unlimit.  Or whatever.

--
osf'

North West England Perl Mongers - Manchester Technical meeting 5th May

[Hakim Cassimally]

And now, a brief public broadcast message for our members in Northern
Notlondon  ;-)

The northwestengland tech meet is in Manchester this evening from
18:30.  Details in Ian's message below,


osf'

-- Forwarded message --
From: Ian Norton 
Date: 2009/4/23
Subject: [GeekUp] North West England Perl Mongers - Manchester
Technical meeting 5th  May
To:

Hi All,

Breaking with our (granted short lived) tradition, this months meeting
will not be the last Wednesday of the month but will instead be on
Tuesday the 5th of May, mainly due to the Nordic Perl Workshop and
venue booking.

This months North West England Perl Mongers technical meeting is in
Manchester at the Manchester Digital Development Agency
(http://www.manchesterdda.com/directions/) starting at 18:30.  All
three talks will be around the 20 minute mark.

Object oriented database design in PostgreSQL.
Matt Trout, Shadowcat Systems

 Applications often need is-a as well as has-a relationships in order
to properly model the business domain.  This talk describes:
   - The two common approaches to this, known as "single table
inheritance" and "multiple table inheritance"
   - The pros and cons of each approach
   - Implementation of both with full relational integrity and
database validation of the model
   - Using postgresql views and triggers to provide easier query
interfaces to both
   - Automating the generation of these views and triggers using a
simple Perl script

Converting 16k user mailboxes from MBOX to MDIR++
Ian Norton, Lancaster University

 Converting a legacy mail system has many challenges, turn that into
fifteen year old data and upwards of 16k mailboxes and you have quite
a substantial headache.  On a system melting under IO load and
providing an ever decreasing level of service, we needed to dig it out
of a hole and fix it properly.  With no major outage.  While people
were still accessing their email.

Functional Pe(a)rls v2 (now with Monads!)
osfameron
(NB: this is an updated version of my LPW talk, with more on Currying
and sections)

 Yes, functional programming is useful in Perl already but it isn't
always pretty. I'll show a selection of techniques from FP languages,
and also ways to make them pretty and Perlish. Including:
  - lazy lists
  - currying
  - monads
  - list comprehensions
  - pattern matching
  - functional IO

 We'll use some shiny new Perl toys (like Devel::Declare) to help us
get convenient syntax for these techniques.

The meeting will be followed by drinks at The Salisbury pub next to
Oxford Road station
(http://manchesterbars.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/the-salisbury/) from
around 20:00.  Someone will be carrying a Pingu if you're trying to
find us!

Further details along with directions can be found on the North West
England Perl Mongers web site
(http://northwestengland.pm.org/meetings/004.html).

Remember, North West England Perl Mongers covers the largest
geographical area for any Perl Mongers group in the world!  If you
want us to bring the camel and penguin to your area and you can
organise a venue, please do let me know.

Please forward this email to friends, colleagues or lists that you
think might be interested.

Regards, Ian.

Re: Italian Perl Workshop 2009

[Hakim Cassimally]

2009/5/29 Stefano Rodighiero :
 5th edition of Italian Perl Workshop (IPW 2009).
>
> The conference will be held in Pisa, at the "Area di Ricerca"
> (Research Area) of the CNR (National Research Centre) on 22 and 23
> October 2009.

Pisa is easy to get to from the "London" airports (Gatwick, Stansted,
Luton hahahahaha) and a number of notLondon airports too - Brum and
Liverpool for example.

Last year's English track included talks from mst, Tim Bunce, rgs,
Marcus Ramberg (and me ;-) so I hope some London.pmers get around to
submitting something.

And, to keep this on topic, as mst said of Pisa [1]:

  Don't underestimate the double malt beers either :)

osfameron

[1]: http://www.perl.it/blog/archives/000614.html -- scroll down a bit
for the quotes in English

"London" airports Re: Italian Perl Workshop 2009

[Hakim Cassimally]

2009/5/29 Nicholas Clark :
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 03:43:13PM +0100, Hakim Cassimally wrote:
>> 2009/5/29 Stefano Rodighiero :
>>  5th edition of Italian Perl Workshop (IPW 2009).
>
>> Pisa is easy to get to from the "London" airports (Gatwick, Stansted,
>> Luton hahahahaha) and a number of notLondon airports too - Brum and
>
> I think you mean Gatwick, Luton and "Cambridge South".
> Luton is nearer than Stansted, and is no harder to get to. (If not easier,
> for example the trains run 24 hours a day to it.)

Ah!  To be honest, the "hahahaha" was because I used to live near
Luton, and the "London" name for it still makes me chuckle.

I do remember us driving to Stansted arport back in the day, mainly me
and my little brother whining at our dad when he got lost somewhere in
the twisty roads around Much Hadham and Little Hadham...

osfameron

Help bring autarch to the Italian Perl Workshop

[Hakim Cassimally]

Now there are lots of reasons you should all come to the Italian Perl
Workshop [1], including the culture, the wine^Wbeer [2], nice weather
and all that.  Then there's the English track, which this year
includes Tim Bunce, Jonathan Worthington, Thomas Fuchs (Javascript
prototype etc.), Amy Hoy/Fuchs (usability/product design).  And...

... Dave Rolsky (autarch) is interested in speaking (yay!) but we need
to pay his airfare from the US... so, he'll be offering a 1 day course
on Moose

 - probably Wed 21st October (day before the workshop)
 - price circa 100 Euros
 - if we can't get enough participants, then we can't afford to bring
Dave to Europe :-(
 - full details [3]

Dave has never been to Europe... this is a rare opportunity, so please
do sign up for it to make it happen.  Buy a ticket!  Buy several!
Remember that Pisa is easy and cheap to get to (if you can stomach
Ryanair/Easyjet.  Just easy otherwise) from London and Notlondon.

Cheers,
osfameron


[1] http://perl.it/workshop/
[2] No really.  The double malt beers at Orzo Bruno are scrumptious
[3] 
http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/06/21/news-on-ipw2009-dbi-perl6-javascript-and-dave-rolsky/
 http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ipw2009/news/422?language=en

Forza london.pm!

[Hakim Cassimally]

I was horrified to notice that london.pm is currently only the
*second* best represented mongers group at the Italian Perl Workshop
(Oct 22-23)

   http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ipw2009/stats

That's a mere 4 of us, versus 5 crazy Romans... something must be done!

osf'

Re: Help me become a Londoner!

[Hakim Cassimally]

2009/11/19 Denny <2...@denny.me>:
> On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 12:37 +, David Cantrell wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:20:34PM +0100, Gianni Ceccarelli wrote:
>> > - is there a no-interest, no-fees, everything-on-the-web bank that can
>> >   be trusted (at least a bit :) ) with my money?
>>
>> You'll have to go to a brick-and-mortar branch to open the account, but
>> Barclays fits the bill, and is the least bankrupt of the big names.
>
> I use Smile, which is the online brand of the Co-operative, who are one
> of the few banks with an ethical policy (and, as with the building
> societies someone mentioned earlier, no shareholders driving corporate
> greed).  Their onlinebanking works very well, even in Firefox on Linux,
> which I understand is not the case with some other banks.

I use Nationwide.  Their online banking works with Linux/Firefox and
OSX/Safari, and they are slightly less evil than a bank (they're still
a building society).  On the other hand, they don't seem to use the
fast payments system, which means that my salary/transfers would often
arrive 2-3 days later than other people's.

Oh, and I use HSBC for business banking, the online thingy seems to
work fine on Linux.  Can't vouch for their personal online banking
though.  (They do use fast payments though, I believe).

osf'

Re: Mini-LPM Crossword Warmup (Re: help - looking for a crossword compiler (human or computer))

[Hakim Cassimally]

2009/12/14 Andy Wardley :
> On 12/12/2009 20:24, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> However, as a warm-up to the main event, I present my mini LPM crossword
> based on the few clues I thought up yesterday evening while trying to avoid
> Celebrity Pop Factor Dancing Sausage Machine Generic Entertainment Program
> on Ice.
>
> The answers are all things close to LPM's heart.

That's a fairly big clue ;-P  Nice clues though,

osfameron

Re: london.pm xmas xword

[Hakim Cassimally]

2009/12/31 Richard Foley :
>  I know the Araucuria and Custos crosswords from
> the Guardian (showing my age here)...

Araucaria though is still going strong... he must be coming up to 90
years old, but he's still probably the best of the Graun compilers.

osf'

Re: london.pm xmas xword solution and winner

[Hakim Cassimally]

2010/1/4 Smylers :
> Aaron Trevena writes:
> Which is definitely the _letters_ of "Santa Claus", but not exactly in
> the right order ... who did your proof-reading?!

I attempted... and pointed the slight disordering out (it being,
admittedly, one of the few questions that I understood ;-)
osf'

Re: Brazilian PM looking for a job in London area

[Hakim Cassimally]

2010/1/11 Solli Honorio :
> Fellows
>
> My name is Solli (a Brazilian Perl Monger) that is going to London to get my
> English improved.
> As a part of tactics to get fluent English, and has a
> entire British life experience, I'm looking for a part-time job
> (limited by student visa) in the London area.

Hi Solli, welcome to the UK this Spring :-) and good luck with the
English and the job.

> I will be in London from March, 11th to June, 20th. If your company is
> hiring or somewhat interested on offering me a job, my profile is available
> at http://www.linkedin.com/in/shonorio.

You'll also maybe want to look at:

   http://jobs.perl.org/
   http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/jobs

to see what's coming up.

[Chris]: I'm going to guess your reply was intended to be helpful?
(I have to guess, quite hard, to read it as anything other than rude ;-)

osfameron

Fwd: [Conferences] YAPC::Europe 2010 Call for Papers closes on June 15th!

[Hakim Cassimally]

Hello!

Just to remind everyone that you have about a week to submit talks for
YAPC::EU::2010 in Pisa!

http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ye2010/call_for_papers.html

osfameron

-- Forwarded message --
From: Michele Beltrame 
Date: 3 June 2010 23:00
Subject: [Conferences] YAPC::Europe 2010 Call for Papers closes on June 15th!
To: conferen...@yapceurope.org


Hello all!

Just a reminder: YAPC::Europe Call for Papers closes on *June 15th*.

Hurry up! :-)

Michele.

--
Michele Beltrame
http://www.italpro.net/ - m...@italpro.net
Skype: arthas77 - Twitter: _arthas
___
Conferences mailing list
conferen...@yapceurope.org
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Re: Broadband and webcam tedium

[Hakim Cassimally]

> Just get them an iPhone 4 thingy?

Doesn't that only allow videoconferencing with other iPhones?

osf'

On 12 June 2010 10:43, Leo Lapworth  wrote:
> On 12 June 2010 10:13, Edmund von der Burg  wrote:
>> Like a fool I offered to sort out my parents-in-law with a skype
>> connection so that they could coo at the baby remotely.
>>
>> And now I find myself needing to get the broadband* and the
>> webcam/speakers/mic setup needed for a Dell running XP.
>
> Just get them an iPhone 4 thingy?
>
> http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html#facetime-video
>
> Lots less hassel for you - although doesn't mean they'll have a decent
> net connection so you might still want to get them broadband + WiFi
>
> Virgin cable works well enough for me - but you are then limited about 
> suppliers
>
> Good luck!
>
> Leo
>

Re: gifts for geeklings

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 6 October 2010 11:47, Dave Cross  wrote:
> On 10/06/2010 11:22 AM, Steff wrote:
>> On 6 October 2010 10:35, Michael Lush  wrote:
>>>
>>> Christmas is coming (not to mention birthday) and I've got to come up with
>>> main presents to get my boy (will be 12  we've already done the usual
>>> suspects Wii,  DS, phone, camera, LEGO Mindstorm and he has enough LEGO! )
>>
>> FWIW one of my favourite presents as a child slightly younger than
>> your son (but which I continued to enjoy at least until his age) was a
>> Merit electronics kit. 
>
> These days that would probably be some kind of Arduino kit.
>
> http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=335

If you're looking for Arduino stuff, my office-mates in Room29 cannot
spea highly enough of oomlaut's customer service:

   http://oomlout.co.uk/

(and see also http://www.howduino.com/ )

Cheers,
osf'

> Dave...
>
> --
> Dave Cross :: d...@dave.org.uk
> http://dave.org.uk/
> @davorg
>

Re: Inviting speakers to LWP

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 11 October 2010 11:29, Zbigniew Lukasiak  wrote:
> Looking at the presentations list from the latest LWPs I did not found
> any from outside of the Perl world.  Is there any tradition of
> inviting interesting non Perlers to the conference?

The Italian Perl Workshop 2009 did invite Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy
(from the Javascript and Usability worlds).  And we did attempt to
invite a well known Functional Programmer to YAPC::EU::2010 -- they
couldn't make it due to other commitments, but we were really pleased
to get Scott Chacon from github just sign up spontaneously.

Inviting non-Perl speakers is a great idea and I'd like to see more of
it.  As with all community things, the best way to see it happen would
be to either get involved in organizing said conferences and volunteer
to source interesting speakers, and/or provide or find the sponsorship
required to tempt them to speak ;-)

osf'

Re: Someone needs to take jwz aside...

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 7 June 2011 16:22, Matt Sergeant  wrote:
> As someone else who has written a bunch of popular perl stuff over the
> years, I'll chime in here too - I write a lot less open source stuff these
> days, but when I do I'm looking much more to JavaScript. The language is
> actually about as good as Perl (some areas better, some worse), but the
> implementation, the interpreters, are just WAY faster.
>
> https://github.com/baudehlo/Haraka

Javascript proponents always used to say that the language would scrub
up quite nicely if browser vendors actually bothered to work on it!
And of course, being a much *simpler* language than Perl, it's not
surprising that it's been possible to apply some great optimisations
on it.  Some more details and write-up on your actual benchmarks would
be really interesting.

While Javascript-the-language is lovely (as you say, better in some
respects, worse in others, than Perl), that's only one part of the
story.  I've not followed Javascript-the-platform that closely (i.e.
anything much beyond jQuery) - what's your experience been like,
working with Node and other libraries?

Perl->Javascript is a really interesting migration path I'd not
considered, and I'm not sure "it's faster!" would convince me on its
own -- we all know there are faster languages than Perl.  But... JS
does have a significant advantages over, say, Perl->Haskell, as
Javascript is so widespread and therefore has many(devs, projects,
jobs).

osf'

Re: Puzzle

[Hakim Cassimally]

> woolfy, book, ash, cog- use.perl/irc nicks

Specifically orgas of YAPC::EU perhaps?  Amsterdam, Paris, Riga,
Braga/Lisbon respectively.
osf'

On 28 August 2012 19:42, Simon Wistow  wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 07:13:53PM +0100, Smylers said:
>> For the rest of the points we still need to state what the connections
>> are for t'other 3 groups.
>
> woolfy, book, ash, cog- use.perl/irc nicks
> Acme, Email, Getopt, Date - top level namespaces on CPAN
> comm, clang, ping, bash   - Unix commands
>
>

Re: cpan you have to see

[Hakim Cassimally]

Hi Alex,

I'm sorry that you've had a bad initial experience of CPAN and now of
this mailing list.

On 12 December 2012 17:21, Alexej Magura  wrote:
> As for my rt replies, what did you expect I was gonna say: 'Oh, my bad I
> wrote the worst module in the world and you're the king of all; here let me
> just remove it real quick.'?  Think again.

The RT commenter who wrote:

"This isn't python's pypi where everybody is encouraged to upload for
fun whether useful or not. Only upload something if it will be useful
to others."

is entirely wrong.  CPAN flourishes not despite the fact because we
accept all code, regardless of quality, but *because* of it.

Though it looks like your CPAN code has a few rough edges, many of
them can be resolved quite straight-forwardly, and I see you've
already had some helpful advice on how to do that from Edmund, Gareth
et al.

Best,
Hakim

Re: Perl School 4: Database Programming with Perl and DBIx::Class

[Hakim Cassimally]

Hello,

On 6 February 2013 07:18, Dave Cross  wrote:
>
> Perl School 4 is this Saturday (9th Feb). It's an introduction to
> DBIx::Class.
>
> It's a full-day course for £30 and it takes place at Google Campus in
> London.

Golly, that looks almost absurdly reasonably priced!

That's not just compared to the commercial training companies with
small groups, dedicated building overheads, lunch, computer equipment
etc which if I remember rightly would be maybe £500-1000 a day?

But even assuming that Google Campus has a community, grassroots
focus, and is therefore offering cheap/free room, that you have a
larger classroom size, and save money by having them all bring their
own laptops, £30 seems fairly competitive against similar courses run
by Manchester MadLab's Omniversity.

osf'

> There are still a number of tickets available.
>
> Would you benefit from an introduction to DBIC? Or is there someone you work
> with who would benefit from an introduction to DBIC?
>
> Sign up at http://perlschool.co.uk/upcoming/
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave...
>
> --
> Dave Cross :: d...@dave.org.uk
> http://dave.org.uk/
> @davorg

Re: Scope of variables in a function

[Hakim Cassimally]

Andy,

I believe your problem is:

my $x = 'FOO' if $condition;

This only declares the new variable if $condition, so it ends up having
surprising, static-like behaviour, which you probably shouldn't rely on.

Rewriting to:

   my $result;
   $result = 'FOO' if ...

gives your expected result.

osf'

On 1 June 2013 17:43, Andrew Beverley  wrote:

> Could somebody explain why the following code prints "barbar" rather
> than "bar" please? I am trying to understand why the $result variable in
> the search function retains its value the second time the function is
> called.
>
> Up until now I had thought that variables in a function defined with
> "my" would be empty each time the function was called, so this has
> caught me out.
>
> The code is just proof of concept: I realise that it could be written
> more efficiently!
>
>
> sub search($)
> {
>   my $in = shift;
>   my $result = "FOO" if $in =~ /foo/;
>   $result = $1 if ($in =~ /^(bar)/);
>   return $result;
> }
>
> print search("bar");
> print search("none");
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andy
>
>
>

Re: Scope of variables in a function

[Hakim Cassimally]

Definitely agree that this should be deprecated.

[Andrew]: there is nothing wrong with wanting to use a conditional in a
declaration.  You can do it like this:

my $x = $condition ? 'FOO' : undef;

or like this

my $x = do { if ($condition) {  'FOO' } };

osf'



On 1 June 2013 21:40, Andrew Beverley  wrote:

> On Sat, 2013-06-01 at 21:08 +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote:
> > On 1 June 2013 20:59, Andrew Beverley  wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, 2013-06-01 at 20:33 +0100, Anthony Lucas wrote:
> > > > Relying on its _contents_ is what you shouldn't be doing. There' a
> > > > difference.
> > >
> > > Okay, in which case I reckon there should be a warning when trying to
> > > use the contents, when the declaration hasn't happened because of the
> > > condition ;-)
> > >
> > Although the code you published didn't have 'use warnings;' on it, so I'm
> > suspecting most people thought it wouldn't be there (silly, I know)
>
> Yes, I should have explicitly stated that. I've already learnt the
> lesson of not putting that in my code ;-)
>
>
>

MySociety Hacknights "Meet people, eat pizza, change the world"

[Hakim Cassimally]

Just to let you know that MySociety* will be hosting hacknights at the ODI
from Wednesday 17th July, and hopefully weekly after that.

"No agenda and no talks; it’s just a chance to spend some time showing what
you’re working on, swapping ideas and getting advice from other people
interested in the fields of civic technology and open data."

That, and free pizza.  MySociety uses a variety of programming languages
including Perl (also Python, Ruby, Node, etc.) so it would be great for
some Perl programmers to show their faces there :-)

http://lanyrd.com/2013/mysocial/
http://www.mysociety.org/2013/07/04/mysociety-hack-nights-meet-people-eat-pizza-change-the-world/

Best,
osf'

* lovely people, who I'm currently working for.

Fwd: mySociety weekly civic tech hack nights

[Hakim Cassimally]

I mentioned MySociety's hack nights on the list before, but just to let you
know that the evenings are going strong, and it would be great to see more
mongers attend and show what you can do with Perl for civic hacking.

There's no single project or language focus, it's all about getting
interested hackers to meet and discuss and work on things that interest
them, and see what happens!

Some of the projects so far do interact with MySociety's tools -- scraping
Leveson to import it into SayIt, or working on a front-end to contextualise
campaigns for WriteToThem.  But others are completely standalone, like
community-building in post-conflict societies and mountain rescue in Wales.

More details below!

osf'

-- Forwarded message --
From: Myfanwy Nixon 
Date: Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:18 AM
Subject: mySociety weekly civic tech hack nights
To: open-governm...@lists.okfn.org


Hello all,

mySociety are running weekly hack nights at the Open Data
Institute,
with an emphasis on civic tech and open data.

You'd be very welcome to join us - every Wednesday night from 6:00 to 9:00
pm. Full details
here
.

Re: Assigning anonymous hash to a list

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 30 July 2013 19:54, gvim  wrote:

> Can anyone explain why this works:
>
> my $ref = {a => 1,  b => 2, c => 3};
> say $ref->{b}; #  Result: 2
>
> ... but this doesn't :
>
> my ($str, $ref) = 'text', {a => 1, b => 2, c => 3};
> say $ref->{b};   # Result: Use of uninitialized value
>
> Seems a little inconsistent.


It's not inconsistent.  Just because your language can do assignment
doesn't mean it can do destructuring bind.

As it happens, Perl *can* do destructuring bind.  You want parentheses
around the list though:

my ($str, $ref) = ('text', {a => 1, b => 2, c => 3});
say $ref->{b};

(Your line parses the hash reference in void context, as you'd see if
you're using warnings.)

osf'