Re: Geolocation services: what's good, what's not?
On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 12:49:17AM +, Sam Kington wrote: The new EU VAT rules require us to work out where a customer is so we can charge the right VAT rate. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplying-digital-services-and-the-vat-mini-one-stop-shop/vat-supplying-digital-services-and-the-vat-mini-one-stop-shop Not quite. They require you to collect at least two pieces of *evidence* of where a customer is, not incontrovertible proof. The customer's billing address is obvious, and we can get the issuing bank and country from our credit card supplier if they don't do something stupid and pay with an American Express card. What about IP addresses, though? What do people currently use for geolocation? I'd just use any plausible free GeoIP database I could blag a copy of, or even just query whois.ripe.net and parse out the country: field. Unless you're wilfully negligent, this should be sufficient. It already sounds like you're going way beyond the minimum level of checks acceptable, so I wouldn't worry too much.
Re: in town 28-30 nov - emergency meetup?
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 04:29:10PM -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: [...] Why don't any of the reviews of these places talk about wifi? Ugh. Because almost nowhere offers it, and of those that do, it's usually beneath contempt. 3G actually works in the UK, and wiped out the nascent wifi industry years ago. 3 UK has some very aggressive pricing on pay-as-you-go 3G data that makes it utterly pointless to bother trying to use public wifi. For less demanding users, it's cheap enough to replace fixed-line broadband at home as well.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London.pm August Social - Thurs 7th August - The Old Fountain, EC1V 9NU
On 31 Jul 2014, at 17:07, Michael Jemmeson michael.jemme...@gmail.com wrote: The Old Fountain 3 Baldwin Street EC1V 9NU Ahh, the boozer right next to the office. I might just manage to make this one :)
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London PM Social Tonight @ Shooting Star Liverpool St E1 7JF
On 8 May 2014, at 11:37, Sue Spence virtually...@gmail.com wrote: London Perl Mongers and Broadbean cordially invite you to enjoy sponsored drinks tonight. [...] The bar staff have no idea who London Perlmongers or Broadbean are, and nobody recognisable is here!
Re: BT Wifi turns off SSL for Google Search!?
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 12:18:52PM +, Smylers wrote: [...] If they're happy for me to make encrypted searches over their network and equipment in my own home, why should they have a problem with my doing that at a bus stop? I doubt that they're happy about you making encrypted searches, but rather that they know that they wouldn't get away with MITMing your home connection in such an overt manner.
Re: London.pm approved drinking venues?
On 18 Mar 2014, at 17:56, Kevin Falcone ke...@jibsheet.com wrote: An old favourite that I still like near where you'll be is The Star in Belgravia http://www.star-tavern-belgravia.co.uk/ Based on a multitude of suggestions I'll be at the Star this Thursday (21/3) around 7pm. I'm planning to meet at least one other perl hacker there, if anyone's in the area and fancies a pint and some conversation, let me know. I'm already here and have bagged a table at the back. The staff haven't heard of London Perlmongers. Apparently we didn't make a large enough impression the last time round :) I'm quite enjoying this pint of Diamond Geezer.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Damian Conway Speaking at London.pm: Monday, 10th March
On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 11:09:34AM +, Dominic Humphries wrote: I'd buy DVDs! :) You perhaps underestimate how expensive such DVDs would be. This is not a mass-market BBC Worldwide release selling a million copies at ten quid a pop.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London.pm Dim Sum, Wednesday 3rd March, Docklands
On 4 Mar 2014, at 21:48, Dave Hodgkinson da...@hodgkinson.org wrote: [...] Anyone want to do the West End on Thursday? My current fave is Joy King Lau round the corner from the Prince Charles. Oh, go on then :) I've just biked rather a long way back home from Canary Wharf and as a result I'm already hungry for more! Shall I announce it?
Re: London.pm approved drinking venues?
On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 10:21:16AM -0500, Kevin Falcone wrote: I'm going to be in town running RT training alter this month, and I remember there being a list of 'pubs london.pm uses for events' that was helpful in finding good places to have a drink. Me too, although it was but a dim recollection and I'd never gotten round to actually looking for it until you reminded me. I've completely failed to find it on london.pm.org this time around. Am I just being blind or I have I misremembered the resource? It appears to have been deleted when the site was given a revamp in 2009/10-ish. The most recent cached copy appears to be this one: http://web.archive.org/web/20090729074128/http://london.pm.org/meetings/ That's probably my cue to submit patches to the web site to add the list of meetings and also bring it up to date.
Re: London.pm approved drinking venues?
On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 04:59:28PM +, Fred Youhanaie wrote: [...] I was about to suggest tagging the pubs on randomness.org, but someone has already done it :-) http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Category_London.PM_Favourite_Pubs I've also gone and back-filled this with a few of our favourites from 2013.
Re: smutty british expression?
On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 01:56:43PM +, Sue Spence wrote: On 13 Feb 2014 09:55, Dominic Thoreau domi...@thoreau-online.net wrote: [...] You'll generally get change from a fiver for *a* pint, but not two. ... Today I learned that a pint cost about 20p when HHGTTG was written. The ONS provides all sorts of interesting price data in this spreadsheet: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/cpi/consumer-price-indices/december-2013/consumer-price-inflation-reference-tables.xls Given Douglas's unique approach to deadlines, the final manuscript would have been delivered to the BBC in March 1978, several hours before broadcast :) The back of my fag packet reckons that RPI has risen 5.20 times since then. So had beer been tracking RPI, it would be just £1 now. (But we all know that the government figures are a load of bunk and real-world inflation is much higher than the claimed couple of percent.)
Re: Perl 6 what can you do today
On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 02:04:43PM +, Steve Mynott wrote: http://video.fosdem.org/2014/K3201/Saturday/Perl_6_what_can_you_do_today.webm Unfortunately, the file you requested is not yet available on our mirrors. Please try again later. Actually quite a lot. Including making it all parallel by adding two words. It's only one word in Scala :)
Re: Recommended IDE...?
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 08:38:43AM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 4:27 AM, Dave Cross d...@mag-sol.com wrote: Every few years I try installing Eclipse and EPIC and then look on appalled as my machine grinds to a halt. Trade in your gold cat for a computer with an SSD drive. It's night day with Eclipse. This here machine *has* an SSD, but because it has a mere two cores and 8GB of RAM, Eclipse is still hateful.
Re: Recommended IDE...?
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 10:18:14AM -, Andrew wrote: Looking to try using an Integrated Development Environment. Why? What problem are you having that you expect an IDE to solve? The features I find most compelling in IDEs is background parsing to immediately spot syntax errors and be able to auto-complete or otherwise spot typoes or confusion about what type a method returns. However, this only really works with statically-typed compiled languages such as Java. Perl is very much the antithesis of Java and you don't really get these benefits. They also provide various hot keys and shortcuts to perform test compiles, VCS integration and whatnot, but that's really only of marginal benefit. Is there an industry standard everyone uses and I should get familiar with, or will any do? Pretty much every Perl developer I know uses Emacs and/or (n)vi and a shell prompt, on some kind of Unix (typically Linux or MacOS). Windows is broken and has an unusable shell, so it comes as no surprise that IDEs are more popular on that platform. My previous experience is with NotePad and TextWrangler. I've Windows98SE and OSX 10.5.8 [Leopard] ;-), and use both in tandem via a KVM switch, XD. If your hardware is contemporaneous with your operating system, it's not going to be powerful enough to run a modern IDE. Might I suggest you try GW-BASIC? :)
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers December Social - 2013-12-05 - Royal Oak, SE1 4JU
Hi, We are once again venturing South Of The River, to a venue that is surely in the London.pm lore as a pub that we successfully drank dry about five years ago. It's the Royal Oak in Southwark, moments from Borough Tube on the Northern Line (and not Royal Oak on the Hammercircle!) The Royal Oak almost doesn't need explaining, but for those who are unfamiliar, it is a no-nonsense Harvey's pub that does good beer and solid food, and arguably one of London's epic pubs. Royal Oak 44 Tabard Street London SE1 4JU http://www.harveys.org.uk/pubs-tenancies/find-our-beer/the-royal-oak-2 http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Royal_Oak,_SE1_4JU http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/28/2814/Royal_Oak/Borough Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: Database Design Advice
On 8 Nov 2013, at 19:33, David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk wrote: [...] Because you might need to know which of two events at 2013-11-08Z19:31:04 happened first. Sure you could use microseconds or whatever to get better resolution, but all that does is make the problem less likely, it doesn't make it go away. You also normally want sort order to be consistent. If you have two records where the sort field is the same, the order they come out is going to be unpredictable. That's just a specific example of the general problem where one desires a stable sort by a non-unique column. The simple solution is to just add more columns to the ORDER BY until the tuples *are* unique. The primary key is an obvious choice of tie-breaker if you don't care about the order so long as it's consistent.
[ANNOUNCE] Sponsored London Perl M[ou]ngers November Social - 2013-11-07 - Kings Arms, SE1 1YT
Hi, Since I got good feedback from various Perlmongers who were there - I was sadly ill and couldn't attend - we are going to return to the Kings Arms. It is a quiet traditional pub tucked away in a side alley just off Borough High Street, which perhaps explains why it remains free from the milling hordes which plague the other pubs round Borough Market. It's between London Bridge and Borough stations. (450m and 300m away respectively.) But what could be better than a decent pint in a good pub? That's right, free drinks! Christine Wong of Square One Resources is once again generously sponsoring our bar tab. As before, please don't forget to introduce yourself and thank her. Note that despite the standard blurb below, this pub does not serve food in the evening beyond the usual bar snacks. If arriving early, you could pick up something from Borough Market. Alternatively there are a few eateries in the area you could go to before or after the social. (The) Kings Arms 65 Newcomen Street SE1 1YT http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?King%27s_Arms,_SE1_1YT http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/22/2291/Kings_Arms/Borough Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: ORMs du jour?
On 21 Oct 2013, at 15:33, Abigail abig...@abigail.be wrote: [...] My recommendation for ORMs: don't. http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Computer+Science.aspx I've only skimmed that article, but it seems to make the fairly common assumption that OO means Java-style OO, and because ORMs fit badly with his notion of OO and how it might be mapped to a relational model, all ORMs are bad. Much of the blog post can be basically summed up by the languages I use are too verbose, error-prone and inflexible that an ORM does not win me anything[0]. Which is something I quite agree with. Perl's is *not* like those languages, and DBIx::Class is not like those half-jobbed messes that Ted has apparently been burned by in the past. The people who built DBIx::Class have done a really excellent job of building something rather special. [0] Ted's LinkedIn page tells me he's basically a .NET programmer who has also touched Java and C++.
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers October Social - 2013-10-03 - Sekforde Arms EC1R 0HA
Hi, We last did the Sekforde in March of this year, and it went down well, so we're doing it again for October. It's about five minutes walk from Farringdon station. As per March's announcement, it remains a quiet little backstreet pub that serves a range of Real Ales and food. Ominously, it also has a whisky shelf with some interesting bottles. The Sekforde Arms 34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA http://www.youngs.co.uk/pub-detail.asp?PubID=333 http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Sekforde_Arms%2C_EC1R_0HA Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: Cancelled Event: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers October Social - 2013-1... @ Tue 1 Oct 2013 15:30 - 16:30 (simon Quain)
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 02:14:00PM +, simon.qu...@gmail.com wrote: This event has been cancelled and removed from your calendar. Just in case anybody is confused, the social has *not* been cancelled. Mr. Quain may well have removed it from his calendar, but I recommend the rest of you all add it to yours!
Re: Cancelled Event: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers October Social - 2013-1... @ Tue 1 Oct 2013 15:30 - 16:30 (simon Quain)
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 03:56:43PM +0100, simon Quain wrote: [...] Hugely embarrassed lurker on the list. Apologies to all. I tried to add it to my google calendar. It was added incorrectly so I removed it. Google's services are a bit Special like that... Apologies again. Perhaps I will have to come on Thursday after all... Don't forget to claim your free newcomer's beer!
Re: Could use some hotel/travel help
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:20:08AM +0100, Smylers wrote: [...] We'll also be spending a couple of nights in London in November, where we found a Premier Inn quoting £189 for 1 night, which is crazy money for a budget hotel. That'll be because they're pricing for business travellers spending somebody else's money. Look for a BB near a Victoria or Northern Line station in Zone 2 so you can easily get to Euston without too much faff. You can get a room for £40-50 per night in Clapham, for example.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 09:34:01AM +1000, Kieren Diment wrote: On 20/09/2013, at 9:21, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: If you are so passionate about seeing new niche Perl books written as you are making out, you had better fire up your editor and get cracking. Many publishers prefer msword ;) You can export Word format files from Scrivener :)
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 19 Sep 2013, at 12:21, Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: [...] - it would be more apparent how little money is sometimes available for the effort of writing a book I don't know the exact figures, but it's roughly a four figure sum for a reasonably successful Perl book. And given that one is having to resort to Kickstarter because no publisher will touch it does not bode well. To write such a book involves many months of work. In comparison, somebody skilled enough to write said book could also go contracting and make the same amount of money in a few weeks. It's a fair comparison, since writing books is also effectively contracting. I would very much like such a Kickstarter to be a success, but realistically it is likely to tank.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 18 Sep 2013, at 21:03, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: On 18/09/2013 18:48, Peter Corlett wrote: Dancer and Mojolicious are lightweight, DBIx::Class only slightly less so, and are not separately enough material for a full-sized book. At best, you're talking a 100 page print-on-demand labour of love. I've come across no less than 3 Sinatra books so why should a Dancer book be considered lightweight? Sinatra is a library used for constructing web frameworks. Oh, and look, I see Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm book right there on my shelf. Sure, it's an awful book, but I bet at least two of those Sinatra books are as well. Mojolicious and Moose *have* such a book, and although I can't find the ISBN for the Moose book, Mojolicious's is http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/3848200953/improtripe-21. I don't think a book published purely in German is that relevant. People who speak Mandarin, Hindi or Spanish no doubt have much the same opinion of books published purely in English. [...] The and Perl makes all the difference. If I'm a new developer choosing a language and I see RESTful APIs with Python/PHP/Ruby and nothing from Perl it may influence my choice of language even if there is a chapter tucked away in a Catalyst book somewhere. Whether it's marketing or not, Ruby and Python are taking the initiative, as I see it, by producing plenty of books which combine the language with another technology. You may not like it but it seems to interest developers. I didn't ask which books you would like to exist to sit unsold in bookshops on the off-chance they might influence other people's opinion. I asked which books you would buy with your own money. As it happens, I own a copy of REST in Practice. I fished it out of my to read pile and given it a quick skim. The handful of examples within are in C# and Java, but it's not called RESTful APIs with C#/Java for a reason: this is a book about REST itself and some of the common RESTful protocols, not a programming textbook. That you apparently desire this book to also include a tutorial on the various Perl APIs so as to spoon-feed the exact answers says more about you and/or your opinion of other developers than the state of the Perl publishing market.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 19 Sep 2013, at 20:39, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: [...] Again, it's not about me. It's about what's out there in other scripting languages and how that affects mindshare for new Perl developers. The REST example was used only to make a point. The fact that you can get by on RFCs and 15-year-old CGI books is irrelevant. A lot of new developers look at what's on the (virtual) bookshelves and get a sense of which languages are more active. So what? The Perl community is not a cult or dotcom hell-bent on growth. If somebody new discovers Perl and uses it, that's great. If they don't, I'm cool with that too. You clearly disagree. I'm also cool with that. However, your petulant whinges on this mailing list aren't going to achieve anything, except perhaps to add your name to a few killfiles. If you are so passionate about seeing new niche Perl books written as you are making out, you had better fire up your editor and get cracking. Or to use an infamous Perl acronym, STFUAWSC. Except C stands for copy.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 18 Sep 2013, at 13:14, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: [...] Something's gone wrong. Is it that publishers are not interested in publishing Perl books or that Perl authors aren't writing about interesting and specific applications of Perl? No, it's because pretty much all of the books that can only be written about Perl have already been written. What's left is of such minor appeal that no sensible publisher will touch it. If you don't agree, do feel free to give the titles of a few hypothetical Perl books that you would be prepared to pay £30 for. Given how many published writers there are on this list, you may even provide suitable inspiration!
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 18 Sep 2013, at 17:20, gvim gvi...@gmail.com wrote: [...] OK, here goes: Your list of books mostly splits into two distinct groups. The first group are books which are primarily about Perl technologies: Web Development with Dancer Web Development with Mojolicous Object-Oriented Perl with Moose Data Processing with Perl and DBIx::Class The Modern Perl Cookbook Dancer and Mojolicious are lightweight, DBIx::Class only slightly less so, and are not separately enough material for a full-sized book. At best, you're talking a 100 page print-on-demand labour of love. Mojolicious and Moose *have* such a book, and although I can't find the ISBN for the Moose book, Mojolicious's is http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/3848200953/improtripe-21. Material on DBIx::Class is rolled into other books at an appropriate level, e.g. Ovid's Beginning Perl (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1118013840/improtripe-21) introduces it, Jonathan Rockway's Catalyst (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1847190952/improtripe-21) covers using it with Catalyst, and so on. The hypothetical Modern Perl Cookbook is a layering violation. Perl Cookbook is a collection of short hints and tips on how to do simple tasks. Modern Perl is how to architect a large system. That's two separate topics, and thus two separate books. Which already exist. Then you have books where you've taken some other topic, and just stick with Perl on the end: Agile Development with Perl Moose RESTful APIs with Perl HTML5, Javascript Perl Network Programming with Perl (maybe an update from Lincoln Stein) Scientific Programming with Perl What does the and Perl add to the material? It may as well say and Intercal for all the good it does. Analysing Big Data with Perl This is also just a with Perl title, but merits picking out. Big Data is a nebulous term of art much like Web 2.0 is, and roughly means the fashionable technologies we're using with a big layer of marketing slathered on so people don't realise it's mostly hot air. Perl isn't part of the Big Data clique. Conversely, when Perl is used to solve the exact same sort of problems, it's not called Big Data.
Re: Perl publishing and attracting new developers
On 18 Sep 2013, at 18:26, Kent Fredric kentfred...@gmail.com wrote: [...] Maybe an interesting, and uniquely disruptive topic for a book could be You don't know Perl ( or something along those lines ), a book with a similar intent to Modern Perl, ... but targeted explicitly at people who think they know Perl, but aren't really part of the perl community, people who learnt Perl from reading horrible scripts that have been copy pasted around the internet. I've certainly been toying with writing something like that for fun. The working title was The Bullshitter's Guide to Perl. Which obviously needs some work in itself. It would probably also gore a few sacred cows here.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers September Social - 2013-09-05 - Kings Arms, SE1 1YT
Remember, this is tonight! On 2 Sep 2013, at 18:45, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: [...] (The) Kings Arms 65 Newcomen Street SE1 1YT http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?King%27s_Arms,_SE1_1YT http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/22/2291/Kings_Arms/Borough
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers September Social - 2013-09-05 - Kings Arms, SE1 1YT
Hi, This month, we're going South Of The River to yet another new venue, the Kings Arms. It is a quiet traditional pub hidden away in a side alleyway just off Borough High Street, just moments from the rammed pubs around Borough Market. It is about equidistant between London Bridge and Borough stations. Myself and another Perlmonger had several remarkably good pints of Harveys Sussex Best in there last Thursday evening. It is one of their permanent ales, and no doubt something many of us will attempt to drink dry this coming Thursday. Note that despite the standard blurb below, this pub does not serve food in the evening beyond the usual bar snacks. If arriving early, you could pick up something from Borough Market. Alternatively there are a few eateries in the area you could go to before or after the social. (The) Kings Arms 65 Newcomen Street SE1 1YT http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?King%27s_Arms,_SE1_1YT http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/22/2291/Kings_Arms/Borough Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
September social
Hello, fellow camel-fondlers, I haven't made an announcement for the upcoming social on the 5th of September because I've not booked or even selected a pub yet! I'd like to offer up my shortlist for you to vote and/or comment on. King's Arms, SE1 1YT (London Bridge): http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?King%27s_Arms,_SE1_1YT This is a nice little boozer that I blundered into on Thursday. It does a cracking pint of Harvey's. And unlike all of the pubs around Borough Market, it was not only not utterly rammed, but quiet and pleasant. The downside: They don't normally do food in the evening. I understand they could come to an arrangement. The Sultan, SW19 1BN (Collier's Wood) http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Sultan,_SW19_1BT This is my local :) An excellent pub, and the only Hop Back pub in London. In six years of drinking there, I've had exactly one bad pint. Or rather, one that was merely OK rather than perfect. Permanent fixtures are Hop Back's GFB, Summer Lightning, Entire Stout. There's a rotating guest which is either a Hop Back or Downton Brewery ale. As to the downsides: again, it has no food, although the regulars just seem to bring in bags of fried things from the chippy down the road. The other major downside is that it is way out in south London in Zone 3. While I'm not convinced of its suitability for a social, some of the other London.pm folk have said that they would come to a social here. It's probably a better choice for a random mid-month weekend social. The Melton Mowbray, EC1N 2LE (Chancery Lane) http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Melton_Mowbray,_EC1N_2LE A fairly typical Fullers Ale and Pie house in central London. The location's right and it does beer and food. This pub was suggested to me because the First Thursday science fiction group meets there, and there is a bit of an overlap between our groups. http://news.ansible.co.uk/london.html has some information. They even have a funky not always the first Thursday system that puts me in mind of our Orthodox/Heretics system. So we'd be going and gatecrashing them. Gatecrashing is hardly unknown to London.pm, although it's usually random people crashing us! So this idea appeals to me somewhat. The Gunmakers (Farringdon): We know it well. Are we sick of it yet? So, feedback? Otherwise you're probably getting the Gunmakers again.
Re: Theory In Town
On 7 Aug 2013, at 19:02, David E. Wheeler da...@justatheory.com wrote: [...] The line for the Natural History Museum went far down the street and around the corner. They must be giving away candy or Just Bieber tickets or something. Nothing so dull as that. They have *dinosaurs*!
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers August Social - 2013-08-08 - Gunmakers *Marylebone* W1U 4AP
Hi, We all love the Gunmakers in Clerkenwell, right? The landlord there has often mentioned how customers confuse his pub with the other (unrelated) Gunmakers in Marylebone, so it's about time we made sure we can tell them apart and also have tasty beer somewhere new by having our August social in the Marylebone one. This pub is about five minutes walk from Baker Street station, but it's so dense with Tubes in that area that it's not much further from Marylebone, Bond Street, or Regent's Park. Gunmakers 33 Aybrook Street London W1U 4AP http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers,_W1U_4AP https://www.facebook.com/GunmakersMarylebone http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/29/29457 Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
[ANNOUNCE] SPONSORED London Perl M[ou]ngers August Social - 2013-08-08 - Gunmakers *Marylebone* W1U 4AP
Hi, Further to my previous announcement, we have had a late sponsorship offer from Toby Parkins at HeadForwards, who are kindly putting £250 behind the bar this Thursday to celebrate the 15th anniversary of London.pm socials. So there is even less of an excuse to not come and raise a jar! Toby will be present at the meeting, so be sure to thank him for your free drinks. He also tells me that he also has a number of open roles at HeadForwards, and would no doubt be delighted to discuss them with anybody who is interested. As a reminder, this is not at our usual Gunmakers, but the one in Marylebone: Gunmakers 33 Aybrook Street London W1U 4AP http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers,_W1U_4AP https://www.facebook.com/GunmakersMarylebone http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/29/29457 Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: Theory In Town
On 4 Aug 2013, at 12:54, David E. Wheeler da...@justatheory.com wrote: [...] * I see you have a social on Thursday. I could probably make it to that. Where should I go? I haven't gone and booked a pub for us yet. I'll be doing that and making an announcement tomorrow. You (all) have until then to make requests, otherwise I'll just pick the next one out of my hat. * I could give a talk some evening, assuming a space with a projector could be organized. Possible topics are pgTAP and Sqitch. [...] It's probably a bit short notice to arrange that, but maybe the organisers of the last tech meet might be able to rustle something up? * I could come for a social some other night. Two socials in one week, I like the way you think! Unless I give a talk, my wife and 8yo daughter might come along, as well. Anyone got kids she could play with during our visit? (Not many in Arles, where we are spending the summer, and then there is the language issue…) Our social venues tend to be grown-ups decompressing after with with surprising quantities of beer. While we're all a well-behaved friendly bunch and we welcome all comers, an 8yo would probably feel somewhat out of place and get bored quickly. There is of course the possibility of finding a more family-friendly venue for a non-Thursday social, but I'm not sure where to suggest.
Re: Assigning anonymous hash to a list
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 01:04:11PM -0300, Hernan Lopes top-posted: it should be the same size to do what he wants... otherwise it wont work. Why should? Perl doesn't require the LHS of an array assignment have the same number of elements as the RHS, and there are a number of use cases where you may not want it.
Anniversary
Hi, I was idly peering at my one remaining bottle of London.pm ale from 2008, and it occurred to me that we are now 15 years old. Is there anything planned to celebrate this anniversary?
[ANNOUNCE] Sponsored London Perl M[ou]ngers July Social - 2013-07-04 - Shooting Star E1 7JF
Hi, For July, we're once again going to an old haunt that we haven't visited for a few years, this time the Shooting Star. It's a Fuller's Ale and Pie House, thus immediately covering two of London.pm's favourite activities. The Shooting Star is easy to find. It's about three minutes walk from Liverpool Street station, and hides in a side street just behind Dirty Dicks which you can see from the main station entrance. There should be a few tables in the main bar reserved for us from 6pm. But what could be better than a decent pint in a good pub? That's right, free drinks! Christine Wong of Square One Resources is once again generously putting £200 behind the bar for us. As before, please don't forget to introduce yourself and thank her. Shooting Star 125-129 Middlesex Street London E1 7JF http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Shooting_Star,_E1_7JF Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers June Social - 2013-06-06 - Bridge House SE1 2UP
On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 06:28:38PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote: For June's social we are returning to an old favourite that we've ignored for too long, the Bridge House. Nestled away just to the south of Tower Bridge, it somehow avoids the hordes of tourists and does a rather excellent pint and nice food. We will be at the rear of the main bar. Don't forget, this is *tonight*.
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers June Social - 2013-06-06 - Bridge House SE1 2UP
Hi, For June's social we are returning to an old favourite that we've ignored for too long, the Bridge House. Nestled away just to the south of Tower Bridge, it somehow avoids the hordes of tourists and does a rather excellent pint and nice food. We will be at the rear of the main bar. You can get to the Bridge House by public transport by going to London Bridge station and walking east along Tooley Street, or alternatively go to Tower Hill or Tower Gateway stations and cross Tower Bridge. It's about a 7-10 minute walk in either case. There are also many busses that go right past the pub. Bridge House 218 Tower Bridge Road London SE1 2UP http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Bridge_House,_SE1_2UP Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 09:16:15AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com: We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. Just to be clear here, I suspect you mean that you sponsored the last London Perl Workshop. As I understand it, the last London Perl Mongers meeting was sponsored by a recruitment company. May's social was indeed sponsored by the lovely Christine Wong from Square One Resources. June's social has yet to be sponsored, but there's still time, hint hint ;)
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:37:08PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: [...] I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). Now I know which role you were referring to, I can follow-up on my previous post where I wrote I don't know if I've even seen your advert as you didn't say who the company is. I've certainly not had my interest piqued by it if I did. I have now seen the job ad, because I've just searched for it. Opus Recruitment Solutions sent it to me on April 30th. They sent it to an tagged email address that I only ever used on CVs submitted to job boards until about 2009, and which I now only glance at infrequently. So they're working from a very old candidate database. I did not have my interest piqued. Thames Ditton is a very inconvenient location, and the salary does not compensate for the longer commute. The advert lists PHP as very desirable which is a red flag. The agent added OPUS WILL PAY £300 TO ANYONE WHO CAN RECCOMEND A SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE in a double-size font, which showed a certain amount of desperation to fill the role, another red flag. As it happens, Opus Recruitment Solutions send me quite a few job ads. Some of the roles are even in London and correspond to the skills on my CV. But more often they do not. Sometimes they send me the same irrelevant role multiple times. And they all go to that retired address and into email purgatory. So when I wrote I'd consider firing that agent for a start, you might want to take heed. In sharp contrast, Christine Wong of Square One who sponsored our previous social actually reads CVs and makes a proper effort to contact her shortlist of relevant candidates instead of indiscriminately spamming addresses on their database. So instead of dealing with amateurs, why not call in a professional? Square One's number is 020 7208 2828.
June social poll
Hi, The start of the Gunmakers beer festival coincides with the date of the next meeting, and the landlord has already offered to reserve us the upstairs room, so I guess we're more favoured than Whisky Squad now :) However, that would make three consecutive socials in the same pub, and I suspect many would prefer a change of scenery. So, may I have your input into whether we should: a) do the beer festival at the Gunmakers; b) go to one of our other favourite haunts such as the Bridge House, Founders Arms, or the Edgar Wallace; or c) try somewhere entirely new?
Re: June social poll
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 05:36:37PM +0100, James Laver wrote: [...] Whilst option 'c' is entirely appealing, you forgot option 'awesome': have beer somewhere else followed by an ultra-heretical beer festival meet the following night. Option 'awesome' does indeed have much to commend it. I don't know whether we could also get a reservation for the Friday evening, but it won't hurt to ask. Note that the Gunmakers is also open on the Saturday, which provides us with a alternative option 'awesome'. And perhaps Greg could even make it this time :)
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 04:09:23PM +0200, Joel Bernstein wrote: Jobsite have been very definite for over a year that the job is not WFH. They are still plaintively asking for someone to come and work in their offices somewhere[0] just East of Portsmouth. Presumably they're soon either going to crack and hire a telecommuter, outsource the damn work entirely, or rewrite in Java. I've had several recruiters approach me with this role over the last few months. Each time, I've had to patiently explain to them that it's the arse end of nowhere and if they want me to do the role, it's either telecommute[1] or they pay my travelling to the arse end of nowhere rate[2], neither of which were acceptable to them. The most recent recruiter mentioned that Jobsite are finally considering relaxing the on-site requirement in the face of everybody saying Havant? You must be joking! and he'd get back to me, but of course he never did. [0]: technically more like nowhere (particularly the arse end) It's Havant, as in We Havant much chance of finding anybody prepared to commute here for what we're offering. [1] For which I'll even offer a discount over my on-site in London price! [2] Which was nearly double my discount WFH rate. Which seems fair, since the 5-6 hour round-trip commute is practically a second job in itself.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:31:52PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: On 14 May 2013, at 14:43, Ben Vinnerd wrote: [...] I live in the North West and recently I saw a contract at Jobsite in Hampshire (i.e. a long way away). I spoke to the agent and they don't allow WFH (is this the agent not allowing me? Or Jobsite?). I don't want to unleash the dogs of war and also the hyena of paranoia but this could be related to IR35 and the differences between the control/tax/etc in a services contract and a contractor employment for the agency. Is that not bass-ackwards? What looks most like disguised employment falling under IR35 to you: a) Somebody working in their own office, using their own equipment, and working whenever the hell they like so long as the job gets done; or b) Somebody going to a company's premises, using the company's equipment, and doing so every day, nine-to-five?
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:22:05PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. It seems that every Perl job advert lists a collection of Modern Perl modules, a database, and a Linux distribution, and asks for expertise in them all, and none of them stand out from the crowd. I don't know if I've even seen your advert as you didn't say who the company is. I've certainly not had my interest piqued by it if I did. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? Well... I'd consider firing that agent for a start, as it almost sounds as if he's passively waiting for candidates to turn up rather than aggressively hunting them, or perhaps he has such a poor reputation in the community that people are refusing to deal with him. Another problem is that more or less all of the good Perl hackers are already working on things they love, or at least don't despise enough, that they're disinclined to jump ship based on a bland description that doesn't sound better than what they've got already. Offering more money is the obvious motivator, but not necessarily the best. Working from home, an unusually large amount of annual leave, seven hour days, foreign travel, training, conference visits, career advancement, that sort of thing. If that's not in the job description, we'll just have to assume the job is unappreciated code monkey, sat in a horrible open-plan office eight hours a day, 232 days a year.
Re: URL shorteners (was: Re: ISNIC DNS)
On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 01:01:53PM +0100, Sam Kington wrote: [...] Getting off-topic here, but what use are URL shorteners now that Twitter converts all links to be t.co/blah ? They don't save you any space in tweets, and they obfuscate the URL you're linking to. Is link-tracking really that useful? Twitter isn't the only place where one might want to shorten links.
Re: URL shorteners (was: Re: ISNIC DNS)
On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 03:27:36PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: [...] The mention of the new-fangled IRC thing made me wonder if anyone has been perverse enough to create a link-shortener that serves things via gopher, or some other quirky protocol. Although I can see an immediate flaw in this plan - link shorteners rely on HTTP redirection codes, which I think that most other protocols don't have. Gopher can't send HTTP status codes, but it can serve up HTML files, in which you can have a meta http-equiv=refresh ..., some JavaScript, and/or some HTML saying click here. The real problem is browser support of Gopher. None of the common popular browsers support it any more. Meanwhile, Dave notes that this thread has going wildly off at a tangent from the original problem - who to use to serve DNS for an Icelandic domain. Several of us run our own DNS servers and could host it if need be.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Sponsored London Perl M[ou]ngers May Social - 2013-05-02 - Gunmakers, Clerkenwell, EC1R 5ET
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 02:43:28PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote: [...] The Gunmakers 13 Eyre Street Hill London EC1R 5ET http://thegunmakers.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/thegunmakers http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers,_EC1R_5ET Don't forget, the social is in the Gunmakers *tonight*. I understand Jeff is seting aside the whole upstairs room for us. You're all coming for your free drink, right?
[ANNOUNCE] Sponsored London Perl M[ou]ngers May Social - 2013-05-02 - Gunmakers, Clerkenwell, EC1R 5ET
Hi, This month we return once again to the Gunmakers in Clerkenwell. Again? I hear you all cry, We love the Gunmakers a lot, but want more variety in venues. There is however an excellent excuse this month: Greg McCarroll has arranged sponsorship, and specifically requested we meet at the Gunmakers. Christine Wong of Square One Resources is kindly providing a generous tab so we may quaff copious quantities of free beer. She doesn't bite, and won't give the hard sell, so please do come early and thank her! The Gunmakers 13 Eyre Street Hill London EC1R 5ET http://thegunmakers.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/thegunmakers http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers,_EC1R_5ET Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: PDF creation?
On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 07:43:11AM -0400, Mark Fowler wrote: In a few weeks I'm going to want to be creating PDFs from Perl, something I haven't done in a few years. What's the recommended approach these days? My *favourite* approach, which is almost certainly not the consensus answer, is to generate a LaTeX document (e.g. using Template.pm) and then run that through xelatex to generate a PDF. This does however require you to learn how to drive LaTeX and how to trawl CTAN etc for useful packages. (FWIW, pretty much all of the useful LaTeX packages are already in Debian.) I know I'm going to want to create the document from scratch, not fill in a template, and I'm probably going to want multi-line text and basic drawing (a horizontal line or two) The template in this case would be the LaTeX preamble that pulls in and configures all of the packages you use in your document. You get multi-line text, tables, page reflowing and all sorts of other goodies for free.
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers April Social - 2013-04-04 - Gunmakers, Clerkenwell, EC1R 5ET
Hi, This month we return to what must by now be be the de facto London.pm local, The Gunmakers in Clerkenwell. We have reserved a couple of tables in the back room with a transparent roof, which should be quite pleasant now it's light until nearly 8pm. The Gunmakers 13 Eyre Street Hill London EC1R 5ET http://thegunmakers.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/thegunmakers http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Gunmakers,_EC1R_5ET Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Re: A stranger arrives in town ...
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:00:50PM -0400, James E Keenan wrote: [...] I'll be arriving LHR on the morning of Sat Apr 6 and staying in London at least through the morning of Tue Apr 9. (I don't have to be in Lancaster until the evening of Thu Apr 11.) Is there a designated Emergency Social Meeting Technician (ESMT) who could make some arrangements? S/he can contact me off-list as needed at the sending email address. I'm also following #london.pm, though that's mostly after midnight London time. That suggests the evening of April 8th is optimal. The Gunmakers is an old London.pm favourite who would be more than pleased to have a few dozen thirsty Perlmongers turn up and liven up the usually-dead Monday trade. Shall I warn the landlord?
Re: New perl features?
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 04:20:48PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: On 18 Mar 2013, at 16:00, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote: You'll need to write in French, though. And get paid in Euro. Couldn't we just write loudly in CAPS? Yes, however with that 20th century stereotype of British tourists, expect to be paid in garlic, stripy jumpers, Gitanes and Gallic shrugs.
Re: New perl features?
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 12:28:18PM +, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote: Is there a cookbook (no, not a manual) of shiny, useful new features in perls since 5.8.8? Are the lists of new features and examples in the various perl5NNNdelta man pages enough?
Re: More advice about becoming a freelance Perl programmer
On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 01:05:16PM +, David Cantrell wrote: On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 06:54:31PM +, Peter Corlett wrote: [...] Don't typecast yourself as a Perl developer, as that just limits what roles you can do. If you can do Perl, you can quickly pick up Python or Ruby, for example. (Or Scala if the JVM/.NET is your kink.) I disagree, a bit. If you can do perl you can pick up *the basics* of python or ruby etc pretty quickly. To become as productive as you are in perl (well, OK, I don't know AJ - to become as productive as someone with a few years experience in perl) will take a lot longer. You need to learn the quirks of the language, the toolchain and its quirks, where to get libraries, how to work effectively with libraries, and of course what libraries to use and how to tell a good quality library from bad without wasting time by trying to use them. I agree entirely. There was an implied go and learn the languages then cast your net wider, rather than just making scattergun pitches for random jobs and then picking up a copy of Visual Parrot For Muppets In 24 Nanoseconds if one succeeds.
Re: More advice about becoming a freelance Perl programmer
On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 02:31:48PM +, Ben Vinnerd wrote: On 6 March 2013 18:54, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: Don't typecast yourself as a Perl developer, as that just limits what roles you can do. It depends on who you're trying to market yourself/your company to. Some companies are specifically looking for a Perl developer, therefore it's a good idea to use the word Perl in the title. Other companies might not give a crap about what their product/website/whatever is coded in, so you'd perhaps use the title e.g. Web Developer or Software Application Developer. So what? The CV and/or other promotional material can be customised for each potential client to emphasise those skills that the client is most interested in. Or in the case of job boards where everybody sees the same CV, upload a different CV to each board as a crude A/B test.
Re: More advice about becoming a freelance Perl programmer
On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 04:34:30PM +, AJ Dhaliwal wrote: [...] I hope someone can kindly help me with these questions 1) How can I go about finding work? Don't typecast yourself as a Perl developer, as that just limits what roles you can do. If you can do Perl, you can quickly pick up Python or Ruby, for example. (Or Scala if the JVM/.NET is your kink.) Sign up with the job boards. Jobserve and CWJobs have been the most useful for me. Jobsite and Careers 2.0 from Stack Overflow haven't found me anything useful yet, but are low-effort. Monster was a spam magnet and an utter waste of time. Consider using tagged email addresses so you can see where the leads are coming from, or at least don't sign up with your primary email address. Find other tech groups that may be relevant, such as GLLUG and DJUGL. Join the lists, go to the meet-ups, and network. London.pm has a social tomorrow, and as a newcomer you get a free drink. Now there's an incentive! 2) What should I charge per hour? How long is a piece of string? Look at the advertised rates on the job boards for roles that fit your skillset, and adjust to taste.
[ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers February Social - 2013-02-07 - Sekforde Arms, Clerkenwell, EC1R 0HA
Hi, As the newly minted Booze Minion, I am pleased to announce a new-to-us venue for the social. It's the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell, a quiet little backstreet pub that serves a range of Real Ales and food. Ominously, it also has a whisky shelf with some interesting bottles. We have the downstairs at the back of the pub. The Sekforde Arms 34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA http://www.youngs.co.uk/pub-detail.asp?PubID=333 http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Sekforde_Arms%2C_EC1R_0HA Standard blurb: Social meets are a chance for the various members of the group to meet up face to face and chat with each other about things - both Perl and (mostly) non-Perl - and newcomers are more than welcome. The monthly meets tend to be bigger than the other ad hoc meetings that take place at other times, and we make sure that they're in easy to get to locations and the pub serves food (meaning that people can eat in the bar if they want to). They normally start around 6.30pm (or whenever people get there after work) and a group tends to be left come closing time. If you're a newcomer or other first timer (even if you've been lurking on the mailing list or on IRC) then please seek our Glorious Leader Tom out - we have a tradition that the leader of this motley crew buys the new people a drink and introduces them to people.
Booze Minion
Hi, It has been mooted that I should take over as Booze Minion, and I'm amenable to the idea. Are there any particular objections to this? Ilmari? Tom? Anyone else? Assuming there are none, I shall tentatively propose the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell for our next social. I'm not sure we've ever had a London.pm social there, but it's always been a hit whenever I've suggested it for non-Perl related drinking.
Re: French invasion
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 01:50:33AM +0100, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote: [...] After giving it a little more thought, Monday Feb 25 seems like a better option. We don't have a place and time to meet yet. Friends don't let friends pick a pub at random! Try the Nell of Old Drury: http://www.nellofolddrury.com/
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Reminder: Croyden.pm, this Thursday, 14 Feb
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 02:39:14PM +, David Cantrell wrote: An gentle reminder, gentle folks, that Croyden.pm will be meeting at the Dog Bull, Surrey St, Croydon, CR0 1RG, on Thursday 14 Feb. That was an excellent choice of pub. We should do that more often. But can you pre-warn them next time so they have more pies on the bar? :)
Re: London.pm Server for Mailing List and Web Site
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 08:44:08AM +, Tom Hukins wrote: [...] The server running this jail is very old, so Exonetric have also provided us with a much newer FreeBSD 8 jail that various people have done some work on migrating us to. I suspect that the lack of volunteers is that there aren't many people with experience with that particular platform, and this isn't overlapping with the set of people willing to spend CFT on maintaining the server. Were it running Debian, say, you'd no doubt have plenty of volunteers, myself included. Perhaps you might want to consider following up on those offers of alternative hosting? :) (Heck, a whole dedicated low-end server at Hetzner is under £250/year and could be easily lost in my hosting bills.)
Re: Assign method call to hash value?
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:36:21AM +, gvim wrote:
[...]
Yes, I'm aware of the scalar function but still not clear why assigning
$r-method as a hash value doesn't invoke a scalar context in the first
place.
Because creating an anonymous hash with { ... } imposes list context on its
contents. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to, for example, conveniently do
$foo = { %$bar, blargh = 1 } to copy a hash while changing one key.
Re: PHP community
On 16 Jan 2013, at 16:25, Daniel de Oliveira Mantovani daniel.oliveira.mantov...@gmail.com wrote: [...] When you are dealing with dumb people like PHP dev's you can write whatever you want and do money, is like church. This sentence no sense. You appear to be attacking PHP developers. Sturgeon's Law applies to PHP and Perl developers alike. The only reason you're seeing a lot of terrible PHP in the wild because it's a wildly popular language with a low barrier to entry. I have seen many horrific things done in Perl by people who thought they were smarter than they actually were. (See Dunning-Kruger effect.) In the specific example I have in mind, the code would have been a whole lot less broken if it was written in PHP instead because the more restrictive language wouldn't have encouraged the author to try something quite so silly. It would have also performed better. This is why Java is popular amongst people herding middling developers. It won't let the buggers create a mixin of java.arms.Bullet and java.legs.Foot :)
Re: [ANNOUNCE] REMINDER: London Perl M[ou]ngers December Social - 2012-12-06 - The Sutton Arms, Barbican, EC1M 6EB
On 6 Dec 2012, at 15:16, Dave Hodgkinson daveh...@gmail.com wrote: [...] Also, nice pub. You lot who haven't turned up are missing out on some cracking beer and a great evening. So hurry up and join up!
Re: 25 Years of Perl
On 20 Nov 2012, at 13:37, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: [...] That davorg chap is awesome :-) We've all known this for years, but didn't want to flatter your ego too much by saying so :)
Re: Proprietary Sybase DBI/DBD module
On 30 Oct 2012, at 16:32, Chris Jack wrote: [...] IMHO mysql got itself scrwed for all time when it was acquired by Oracle. How better to control what features get added to a low end competitor. At the same time, you're dissuading development on other open source databases by having something with already good functionality. PostgreSQL and SQLite are both excellent open source databases that are still actively developed.
Re: Hotels for the LPW
On 25 Oct 2012, at 09:00, Mark Keating wrote: I have been asked by a couple of people for hotel recommendations in and around the LPW for this year. Traditionally we have always left people to their own devices and the sites like TripAdvisor and Booking.com, but since I have been asked and i know there is a vast wealth of knowledge and experience on this list i thought I might throw the question to the masses. As noted elsethread, people living in London tend not to need hotels in London so are the least-qualified to say which are good. I await, with anticipation, your gracious responses. I have a spare double bed and a sofa available in Shepherd's Bush, which obviates the need for two hotel rooms.
Re: In London this week... meetup?
On 1 Oct 2012, at 20:14, Cosimo Streppone cos...@streppone.it wrote: [...] It's my first time in the UK, and I thought it'd be nice meeting up. Wednesday or Thursday evening would be best for me. I'm flying back to Oslo on Friday. Apart from the social that has already been mentioned and is strongly recommended, I note that the Gunmakers has a beer festival and that seems a good place for a pre-social drink on Wednesday...
Re: Home Network Issues
On 9 Sep 2012, at 13:34, Dave Cross wrote: [...] $ ping 192.168.1.64 PING 192.168.1.64 (192.168.1.64) 56(84) bytes of data. From 192.168.1.67 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable From 192.168.1.67 icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable What host is 192.168.1.67? The one you're pinging from? Run arp -a (you may need to be root) to have a look at the ARP tables. It should show something like this: # arp -a ? (172.27.164.44) at incomplete on eth0 ? (172.27.164.73) at e8:06:88:79:93:ef [ether] on eth0 ? (172.27.164.98) at 40:3c:fc:04:07:5a [ether] on eth0 ARP is a broadcast protocol for discovering the MAC address of the Ethernet device for a given IP address, and that command dumps the table. In that example, I pinged 172.27.164.44 which doesn't exist on my network, so nothing responded to the ARP request and it shows as incomplete. The other addresses do exist, and you can see the MAC addresses. You should also see your default gateway's MAC address (probably 192.168.1.1 or perhaps 192.168.1.254), or you wouldn't be able to connect to the Internet at all. Your router may well be filtering ARP requests, even between switch ports. This shouldn't happen on a real switch, but perhaps the SOC has multiple Ethernet ports on it and it was cheaper to implement a switch in software and somebody cocked it up. If the software really is that bad, it's probably best to treat it as highly suspect and turn off as much as possible, then drop a £40 broadband router in front of it. These aren't generally much better - they contain software, after all - but at least the Netgear one I use for this exact purpose has a hardware switch and Wifi bridge between its ports marked LAN, and I ignore the port marked Internet that the software mangles. Or you can use a dumb switch - I have one free to a good home here - and plug a standalone access point such as an Apple Airport into it. (The Airport does cost twice as much as the Netgear, but it's not just because it's got an Apple badge on it. It really is a much better access point.)
Re: Brainbench perl test?
On 5 Sep 2012, at 17:35, Abigail wrote: [...] No. Well, it filters out the wannabees. It doesn't recognize the serious coder. If, given the Fibonacci sequence, or a similar recursive formula, and your first instinct is to solve it with recursion or iteration, you aren't serious. Isn't the *point* of this to be a simple test to quickly filter out the no-hopers? I'd hope it wasn't the *only* test. Were I to be given this particular chancer-filtering shibboleth at an interview, I'd smile and comment that it's a classic interview question, and then explain that I don't have a mathematical background and thus don't know if there's a clever algorithm to find the Nth element in the sequence in less than linear time[2], but I'd research it if this was a problem that came up in real life as opposed to an interview. I am, after all, a programmer who usually hacks on server backends, not a mathematician or computer scientist. I'd then note that there are two recursive solutions, one atrocious but which most-closely models the mathematical description, and one merely rubbish that has an optimisation hack, and also a more sensible iterative solution (unless there's the aforementioned mathematical trick) and ask the interviewer which they'd prefer before making a stab at it in my doctor's handwriting on the whiteboard. The interviewer now knows several useful things me: I've been around the block enough to recognise famous problems[0], there are holes in my knowledge but I know they exist and I'm prepared to find and learn new stuff where necessary, understand recursion and algorithmic complexity and trade-offs between time, space, and code legibility[1], and will ask questions to clarify requirements rather than go off and possibly implement the wrong thing. Of course, booking.com is famously odd, so your interviews may well optimise for different abilities in their staff, and so this may not be not a good question for you. TIMTOWTDI applies to interviews too. [0] Although if they asked me to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, I would suggest they might want to interview Andrew Wiles instead. I have no idea if he's any good at Perl, but given academics tend to be lousy programmers, the odds aren't good. [1] The only reason you'd ever use the expensive recursive solution! [2] Or at least, the solution needs more mathematics than would be required for something like write a function to return the sum of integers from 1 to N, which has a reasonably obvious constant-time solution and is the kind of problem that does appear in real code.
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl M[ou]ngers September Social - 2012-09-06 - The Edgar Wallace, Strand, WC2R_3JF
On 6 Sep 2012, at 16:29, James Laver wrote: [...] ...so get there quickly because once ilmari starts drinking that's about half an hour ;-) I was particularly amused to watch one social where the sponsor was called over to the bar after about twenty minutes. I couldn't hear the conversation, but the expression said What do you mean you've reached the £250 credit limit I set!?
Re: Can I get some advice on best way to start Perl Programming
On 4 Sep 2012, at 15:04, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk: [...] But it's only a good way to get started. At some point you're better off learning from someone else. Dave Cross is a good someone else. *blush* Well, I hear nothing but good feedback from people who've done your courses :) I'm threatening to book somebody onto your next Perl School, purely based on your reputation. Do they need to provide a laptop? It's a bit unclear what the course actually entails.
Re: Which sucks least? Sky, Talktalk to BT broadband?
On 30 Aug 2012, at 10:57, William Blunn wrote: [...] If you want a technical style service, you could go for AAISP (includes native IPv6!) or Zen, though you will tend to have to pay more per gigabyte. AAISP's marginal cost per gigabyte[0] is only slightly more expensive than Zen in the day, substantially cheaper off-peak, and as good as free overnight. Zen's packages just include a large number of cheap inclusive gigabytes to be used at any time of day. So if the choice is between Zen and AAISP, you pick Zen if you expect to cane it during the day, AAISP if you do it on evenings and weekends. A typical user is unlikely to notice much in it either way. [0] For modern BT-provided access technologies. If you're stuck with a 20CN line, daytime is twice as expensive, with Be it's a quarter of the price.
Re: [OT] Prepaid mobile plans with data, possibly roaming
On 23 Aug 2012, at 07:22, Toby Wintermute wrote: [...] I'll try VPNing back to my shell account and see what happens.. can't be any slower than 3G already is.. IME, this will make HTTP *faster* because it bypasses the bloody awful transparent proxies that mobile telcos insist on using to mangle web traffic. It'll also stop said proxies from popping up the we think you're trying to visit a porn site, so we've blocked it as an excuse to try and sell you our own soft porn service page when you're visiting vile corrupting sites such as camra.org.uk.
Re: [OT] Prepaid mobile plans with data, possibly roaming
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:53:36AM +1000, Toby Wintermute wrote: [...] Now to see if I can get a 3 SIM dispatched to where I'll be staying first up in London.. :) There's no need. You can't throw a stone in London without hitting at least three shops that will sell you SIMs and top-up vouchers.
Re: [OT] Are there any Contracts roles open at the moment
On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 11:28:41AM +0100, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: [...] That smells like Lovefilm. I believe they're hiring direct if you want to sidestep agents: LOVEFiLM *are* hiring quite a few Perl developers, and there's a fat hiring bonus on offer to any staff who recommend a successful candidate. http://corporate.blog.lovefilm.com/current-vacancies I have heard agents complaining that they interview contractors then make permie offers, but this is hearsay. I vaguely recall that the interviewer did ask whether I had applied for a permie or contract role. Some contractors may well be so tempted by the benefits package and other perks on offer that they decide to apply for a permie role instead.
Re: Going to be in London this weekend
On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 04:21:59PM +0200, drf...@pobox.com wrote: Emergency social, anyone? And if so, can you recommend a good pub or something to find? Are you a closet trainspotter? London Underground is letting the great unwashed into its Acton depot this weekend. (They do this twice a year.)
Re: [ANNOUNCE] London Perl Mongers Technical Meeting 2012-04-11
On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 11:33:10AM +, Mike Whitaker wrote: [...] Joking aside - I don't think this is the kind of talk one attends because it will be directly useful in my day to day work, but rather because it's DC, and you don't get the chance very often I've seen a video of this talk, got to the end, pushed my brain back in through my ears, and decided to watch it again. The lucky people who got tickets for this are in for a treat. Coming to see it is definitely *not* a wasted journey, unless you're a boring git who is only in IT because they heard there was money in it.
Re: Dim Sum tomorrow?
On 15 Feb 2012, at 15:10, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Anyone round the West End fancy parcels of tasty goodness and Lo Bak Gao tomorrow? New World? 1pm? I'm up for that, although I note that RGL is giving a rather mixed review of it: http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?New_World,_W1D_5PA
Re: The proper way to open()
On 31 Jan 2012, at 05:18, Avleen Vig wrote: [...] This is the problem with TMTOWTDI. There should just be one way to do it. Then we wouldn't have this problem. If you want Python, you know where you can find it.
Re: The proper way to open()
On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 01:42:05PM +, Peter Corlett wrote: On 31 Jan 2012, at 05:18, Avleen Vig wrote: [...] This is the problem with TMTOWTDI. There should just be one way to do it. Then we wouldn't have this problem. If you want Python, you know where you can find it. OK, on re-reading, that sounds a little bit grumpy. TMTOWTDI is what gives us the richness and flexibility of Perl and CPAN. Standardising on One True Way and being unforgiving of deviating from that norm prevents innovation and renovation of the language. Would you really still like to be writing in late-1990s Perl instead of Modern Perl? Take TMTOWTDI away, and it's no longer Perl. Python is better than a straightjacketed Perl.
Contract checking
Hi, I have been offered a contract that is more complex than I'm used to, and wish to have it checked out. Can any of the other contractors here recommend a solicitor or other suitable legal mind to check it over and tell me what it means? Thanks in advance.
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 08:46:57PM +, David Cantrell wrote: [...] Of course, if your people are made of pure Awesomium then you might be OK with taking that performance hit because you're still coming out ahead despite your people being in Narsarsuaq and Tataouine compared to if you'd employed less awesome people happy to work with you in a damp basement in Preston. And there's another perspective: I'm prepared to offer a 20-40% discount on my usual daily rate if I don't have to waste several hours a day dragging my carcass over to an office in the arse end of nowhere. Sure, there's a performance hit with telecommuting, but 20-40%?
Re: Telecommuting
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:37:54PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote: [...] All this leads to the default being a flood of e-mail. Which everyone (and the organisation as a whole) pays for. It doesn't help that said organisations often also dictate that people only use Outlook or Lotus Notes for email. Neither tool is powerful enough to efficiently process large quantities of mail. This isn't exactly surprising, given that they're glorified electronic diaries with email bolted on as a means of sending meeting invites. A decent mail client such as [insert pet MUA here] is much more effective at processing hundreds or thousands of messages a day with ease.
Re: Beware: NET-A-PORTER
On 12 Dec 2011, at 15:04, Adrian Howard wrote: On 12 Dec 2011, at 11:49, Peter Corlett wrote: [...] And there's another perspective: I'm prepared to offer a 20-40% discount on my usual daily rate if I don't have to waste several hours a day dragging my carcass over to an office in the arse end of nowhere. Sure, there's a performance hit with telecommuting, but 20-40%? The problem is that it's not an individual's productivity that's dropping - it's the team's as a whole (assuming that it's a team project). In the case of an office in the arse end of nowhere, there's a pretty good chance that it's not just one individual who would rather work from home.
Re: Ruby?
On 16 Nov 2011, at 14:21, Peter Edwards wrote: [...] I believe there are a couple of lost souls still at BBC WS. Not me though :-D Come back, all is forgiven!
Re: Impending arrival
On 4 Oct 2011, at 08:35, James Laver wrote: [...] For the amount of time you're here, it doesn't matter, really. Get a 3 sim, put 15 quid on it and you get unlimited internet though. As always, make sure your phone supports the relevant GSM bands (I think all modern smartphones ship with support for everything, anyway these days, though I'm open to being corrected). FWIW, 3 UK is UMTS 2100 only.
Re: Where are the Perl Wordpresses, the Drupals, the Joomlas? (was Perl e-commerce?)
On 16 Sep 2011, at 08:50, Zbigniew Łukasiak wrote: It's worth noting that Wordpress was at least initially perceived to be a 'free' answer to, then dominating, Perl based MovableType. MovableType is now GPL (https://github.com/movabletype/movabletype/blob/master/COPYING) - so why it did not gain back at least some of Wordpress popularity? Shared hosting is probably the main reason - but surely not the only one. MT works on shared hosting because it drags along a whole load of pure-Perl CPAN modules as part of the bundle and runs under plain CGI. The few modules that are not included are things like DBI that you would normally expect to be provided as part of shared hosting. Otherwise, do you seriously think that a change of licence terms is going to make any difference when it's so far behind the curve? Very few people bother to look at the licence when they download and install some random freeware, and Movable Type always had a very permissive licence for non-commercial use such as a personal blog. Movable Type is a very old piece of software, and Perl has moved on somewhat. It's a load of crap by contemporary standards, but this is understandable as it dates from before CPAN really got going, and was one of the first - if not the first - large blogging engines, and pioneers don't exactly have the experience of others to draw upon. My involvement with MT has generally been to write extensions to bend it into the tool clients thought they had selected in the first place. The extensions API is rather badly-documented and inconsistent, and not a few times I've hit upon another bug and wanted to just grab my coat, go to the nearest pub, and not come back. Occasionally, some of the design decisions look really quite boneheaded, but with experience comes the realisation that it was an engineering compromise to enable some other part of it to work at all. If MT was a few years younger, it'd use things like TT and DBIC, which would make it more accessible to developers and users, and perform better as well. And it'd probably also use Catalyst which would put it back again ;) One thing I've learned from MT looking awfully like a PHP application written in Perl is that you don't want to do that. Ease of installation means making compromises elsewhere, and that's not a useful trade-off on a sufficiently-large deployment that requires dedicated hardware and a sysadmin anyway. Never mind that you wouldn't need so much hardware and somebody to babysit it in the first place if performance and security wasn't what lost out in the compromise. (MT's security record is pretty good though. This is a Perl Win.) Finally, if you're after ease of tweaking as well, MT rather fails due to its age and clunky APIs. We may mock PHP for being a bodger's playground, but Drupal and Wordpress are clearly a whole lot less bother to reskin and build extensions for, not least because there's so many more of them and they're usually free rather than payware. Why, it's often possible for a mere mortal to get something useful going without breaking out the credit card or getting expensive consultants in!
Re: Should I get my mum a Kindle?
On 20 Sep 2011, at 14:02, David Cantrell wrote: [...] So ... a Kindle. If I buy her a Kindle with 3G (it has to be 3G, cos there's no wifi network available) can I push audio content to it? Or if not, could I configure the web browser on the Kindle to have something that I control as its default page, and she can download audio from that? The Kindle is a cute idea, but its music-playing basically doesn't work and you'll set yourself up for a horrible support load again. It is also expensive to populate it over 3G, assuming that it doesn't choke on the files because it only expects text that way. So it's a non-starter. Consumer electronics are also set up with the assumption that the user knows what they're doing and will pull their chosen content into it, rather than you pushing it. So that reduces your options a bit. One wheeze you might wish to consider is to set up a podcast feed to deliver her requests. Then configure the device with the feed URL, and you've got a handy channel. iOS devices need initial activation with a computer, but can then find podcasts on their own. However, both the iPod Touch and the iPhone are small fiddly devices, and the iPod Touch also needs to get Wifi somehow. (Perhaps from a MyFi device hidden away somewhere, or a subscription to a pikey broadband supplier?) An iPad might be an idea, as there's an iPlayer app, allowing her to pick what she wants without having to wait while you download it for her. Usually the deals of getting an iPad cheap/free with a 3G data subscription are poor value (because people usually have a mobile phone already that they can tether to) but could work well in this case. Three's current offer works out at £829 for a 16GB device and Internet access over the two years of the contract. How much do you love your mother? :) (Legally, you need a TV Licence if you're watching the live iPlayer TV streams, but not for time-shifted streams, nor of course live radio. So either don't do that, or don't get caught.) There are also cheap Android tablets out there, and you can get podcatchers for them, but I can't recommend any particular one because I don't use Android. Again, they usually require Wifi or a 3G account of some kind. I've got a particularly crap example of an Android tablet in my junkbox if you want to take it away and have a play. Another possibility is a DAB radio with a record function, but that's only useful if you know in advance what you want to listen to. DAB radios also seem to all have hateful user interfaces, and setting a timer and record function on one may be just too much. As another idea that might just pay off: contact the RNIB and ask them what devices they recommend. Your mother might not be visually-impaired, but the requirement for a device that DWISOTT and doesn't have confusing crap on it is much the same.
Re: Perl e-commerce?
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 08:14:03PM +0100, Simon Wilcox wrote: [...] I refer the honourable gentleman to Matt's Script Archive. It's easy to write crappy code in any language. Sure, but that's not an interesting assertion. It's more useful to ask how easy it is to write good good in a given language, and PHP fares quite badly here. [...] PHP solved the problem of making web-based applications easy to install. Something that all the 'big brains' of Perl still haven't solved. Ease of installation leads to ease of adoption. Hence why PHP has hammered Perl into the ground for web apps. That's because said 'big brains' don't have an incentive to optimise the language towards solving that particular problem. Want them to have an incentive? The Perl Foundation awaits your large donation!
Re: SNMP ??
On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 04:38:39PM +0530, Shantanu Bhadoria wrote: Hey Folks, Is there a good guide book or reference to get started on SNMP? some link or a book that can get a person from beginner to advanced state? How much time would you generally give for starting on SNMP in Perl for a Perl veteran but a SNMP newbie? thanks! The book's getting a bit long in the tooth now, but Perl for System Administration was useful to get me up and running doing various sysadminny things including SNMP early in my career: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565926097 (In fact, I might bring my now-unused copy along to what appears to be turning into a bookswap social next month.)
Re: Writing About Perl
On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:39:57AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: [...] If a popular Linux magazine had given you the opportunity to write a 3000 word article giving a practical project-based demonstration of how Perl had moved on in the last ten years, what would you do? What would you write about? I would *not* bang on about Perl's web technologies. People interested in that are already going to be playing with the likes of Django or Rails which are perfectly good tools and Perl's tools aren't sufficiently better for most users that it's worth a switch. This being a Linux magazine, I'd focus more on system administration and tool-building, and odd ways to use Perl and Perl's tools to solve non-Perl problems. For example, there's the prename command that uses Perl one-liners to mangle filenames for renaming: I often use it to strip crap from and canonicalise filenames. TAP and prove is handy for testing non-Perl things - I use it to test some C++ stuff. POD is much less painful to write than raw nroff. ack is bloody handy. Look how much useful stuff Perl has done without having to write a line of code! Now you've piqued the readers' interest, you can save the code-writing for the second article in the series that they'll inevitably ask you to write...
Re: LPW 2011 carpooling
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:59:58AM +0100, michael lush wrote: [...] 90l fuel £100 (depending where you get it and neglecting 800 miles wear and tear on the car) Short stay saver on eurostar (~£120) 12 hours worth of driving munchies (£10+) Say, I wonder how people would have done the route before the Chunnel was built? Drive to Hook, pile on the ferry (£59 for car and driver, £12 for each additional passenger, these are single fares), drive from Harwich to London. Fuel costs should be lower given you're not driving to Belgium or France. (Me, I'd probably choose to fly AMS-LCY on VLM. The time saved by not going via LHR is worh the higher fare, plus VLM is fairly civilised as airlines go.) Given you can get a flight for ~£65 you'd need 4 people to get the price below that and even Ryanair would give you a better ride. Being dragged along behind the car on a rusty chain will give a better ride than the discount airlines.
Re: website maintenance gig available
On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 01:30:26PM +, ian.doche...@nomura.com wrote: Indeed, except that they are blocked by corporate firewalls and I would not wish to incur the wrath of the powers-that-be by trying to bypass them! Back to square one. That's the company telling you to stop posting to mailing lists from work.
Re: mutt
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 11:00:13PM +0100, James Laver wrote: [...] /j (who really thinks it's about time apple and RIM learned to write decent mail software for mobile devices) It's quite shameful for RIM, given their devices are basically designed as email terminals with a few other features added on as an afterthought. The iOS mail client is best described as adequate. It's arguably better than Outlook, which seems to be the standard MUA these days.
Re: mutt
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:11:00AM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 10:55, Peter Corlett ab...@cabal.org.uk wrote: The iOS mail client is best described as adequate. It's arguably better than Outlook, which seems to be the standard MUA these days. Looking through my address book I'd say Gmail is the standard MUA these days. That doesn't say anything about which MUAs are used, just what addresses people have. You'll need to grep your mail spool to be sure, and even then, your mailbox may not be representative of the population at large. For example, I have an @gmail.com address, which I give out to people too stupid to understand that email addresses can end in things other than .com and because I'd rather have an easy life than try to educate them. I collect the mail via IMAP and only log in to the web site out of morbid curiosity when I hear complaints about some new feature.
