Lightning talks are five-minute presentations about virtually anything related to Perl. They’re supposed to run for an hour and a half, so there should be plenty of speakers and plenty of topics.
First up is David Wheeler talking about testing your database with pgTAP, which is a bunch of stuff that is pretty much Test::More for PostgreSQL. Perl tests and SQL tests all in one bundle.
Next up is Eric Wilhelm with the 2008 The Perl Foundation Summer of Code update. There’s a lack of Perl in universities — 40 mentors, only 12 proposals, and 6 funded slots. The number of proposals needs to increase. This year’s projects are: flesh out the Perl 6 test suite (Adrian Kreher), wxCPANPLUS (Samuel Tyler), Native Call Interface Signatures and Stubs Generation for Parrot (Kevin Tew), Incremental Tricolor Garbage Collector (Andrew Whitworth), Math::GSL (Thierry Moisan), and… uh, did I miss the sixth?
Next up is Fred Meyers who works at USA Today, talking about what would be missing from the newspaper if Perl stopped working: bar code, news snippet for each state, AP “results at a glance” for election info, best selling books info, TV Nielsen ratings, week’s top stocks, stock tables, sports standings and results, upcoming games, box scores, team stats.
Next up is Michael Schwern, talking about “Who’s Afraid of 2038?” Remember Y2K? Total mass hysteria that didn’t happen. Now we’re home free. Right? Nope. “Critical and Significant Dates” In 2038 the Unix epoch is going to end — using 32-bit signed double floating point numbers. To fix this in Perl, Schwern suggested that there’s no reason for a Perl programmer should care what the underlying system uses. Schwern can solve the 2038 problem with code at svn://svn.schwern.org/svn/y2038
Next up is Brad Fitzpatrick who works at Google. He’s talking about the Google App Engine and how he’s going to get Perl implemented on it.
After Brad comes Paul Fenwick to talk about autodie. Error handling in Perl sucks. Typical error handling code (or die ...) is longer than your code. Wouldn’t it be nice if we can get Perl to generate errors automatically if e.g. your open failed? There’s the Fatal module, but it’s ugly and horrible. autodie is pretty much the same, but it’s lexical and it gives you better error messages. You can put use autodie inside an eval and then use a given/which to figure out which statement inside the eval failed. It can be subclassed too!
Now comes some guy who didn’t say who he is, talking about Net::SMTP::ESMTP, a modern email client.
Brook Wilcox is talking about a module called Devel::REPL and Continuity, which kind of gives you a Perl shell in a browser.
Jerry Gay is going to write a Turing-complete language in five minutes using Parrot. And he did! Well, he didn’t type it all live as that would’ve taken too long…
And now someone else is going to wrap this language into an Apache module — in five minutes. Live demo! And it culminated with the first LOLCAT sighting of OSCON.
Now comes Tatsuhiko Miyagawa talking about Web::Scraper. Lots of screen-scraping going on, mostly with LWP and regexps. Bad! Fragile, hard to find bugs, unmaintainable. Use Web::Scraper instead. DSL-ish syntax, CSS selectors and XPath, DOM and Unicode handling. Comes with a command-line interface. Looks really cool and useful.
Chia-liang Kaw is up talking about the Secret of Success of Open Source: plagiarize. An homage to Tom Lehrer. Well done!
Now comes the swearing portion of our show: “Fuck, the Fucking thing is Fucked” by Jos Boumans. RIPE is one of the five Regional Internet Registries. Jos Boumans works for RIPE, in case you’re wondering about the connectin. IPv4 is finite and is running out of space: IPv4 D-Day is 22/05/2010. So deploy IPv6 then! That was the plan, but plans don’t match reality. But nobody wants to move to IPv6 because nobody is using IPv6.
Now Elizabeth Cortell with “Pulp Perl” — O’Reilly’s other publishing line. ORA is famous for “anvil books” that don’t really rake in the cash. Pulp Perl is the most fun you can have reading with two hands. (spoof on pulp fiction novels and magazines with a Perl theme)
Adam Kennedy is up next, and he’s from the future (Australia). Adam likes first principles. About five years ago he wanted to find out if he could find a way to make Hollywood movies suck less? Since he can’t change Hollywood, he had to change himself. He’s going too fast so I can’t type to follow along. Alas. Oh, takeaway statement: do not watch trailers.
And now pudge with a singalong. Woo!
[tags]oscon, oscon08, perl[/tags]
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