canspice.org

I missed the beginning of this, so here’s just some notes and braindumps.

for $wq qw wq qw {
  print $wq;
}

…prints:

q
q

You can do things like @list = <Damian Matthew Lucifer Conway> and have it just work.

sub RESPECT { print "@_\n" }
(R.E.S.P.E.C.T)->('find out what it means to me');

Oh god.

sub *{'='} = sub { print "@_\n" };

or

*= = sub { print "@_\n" }

Damian is an evil evil man. You can change the name of anonymous subroutines:

my $anon1 = sub {
  local *__ANON__ = "Bruce";
  carp "We'll just call you Bruce, okay?";
};

That’s the only bit of useful stuff in this talk. Here comes some more useless scary stuff: while ( $count –> 0 ) {. $hash<-{$key} is a substitute for an empty string.

You can slurp a whole file in a single line: my $content = readline!open!((*{$!},$/)=\$file); — I think that’s right.

And that’s a wrap!

I was originally going to go to Greening the Conference Circuit because these conferences are environmentally unfriendly, but decided to go to something tangentially-related to what I do. Satellite science is kind of close to astronomy, I suppose… There’s another astronomy-ish talk in the next slot that I’m not sure if I’m going to go to or not. If this one turns into an ADASS-like presentation, I’m not going to the next astronomy talk.

Curt Tilmes works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He hasn’t started yet, but he’s showing us nasaimages.org and the Earth Observatory. Tip for presenters: show people pretty pictures off the top like Curt is doing.

Acronym: EOSDIS is Earth Observing System Data Information System. EOS is Earth Observing System. MODIS is Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer.

3.2TB per day of archive growth, total archive volume is 4.9PB. Distribute 4.2TB/day to end users. MODIS orbits 14 times a day. Spits out a lot of data to level 2 processes, which get chopped up into level 3 products (tile basis, smaller, takes out clouds if it can).

Ooo flowchart, yes this is an ADASS-style talk.

Ozone processing is done with OMIDAPS, thirty years of data.

Core system was designed in the 90s. Modular system to allow for many different projects. Used latest & greatest design methodologies and languages (DCE, C++). Requirements developed years ahead of system deployment. Many instances were planned, and several are still running very successfully today. to save money the decided to use commercial off-the-shelf software: Sybase, Tivoli, HP OpenView, Autosys… MODIS design team decided to come up with the “MODIS Emergency Backup System” built out of Perl and Linux and other things like this that they could use to process the data, just in case the big system was late.

They stuck with Sybase, but went for Apache, Linux, Perl… 80-processor Origin 2000 with 40GB of RAM, 1TB disk (in 1998/1999). In 2002/2002 they moved off a big machine to a bunch of two-processor Linux hosts, added 35TB for forward processing and 28TB for reprocessing. Now they have about a petabyte of disk, tapes are phased out…

They’ve moved quite a lot to open source: SGI to Linux, Sybase to PostgreSQL, C++ to Perl, Apache to Apache/mod_perl/Mason, ClearCase to CVS (and later subversion), DDTS to Bugzilla.

At this point I had to go out to pee, and when I got back I got interviewed by O’Reilly News again. Alas.

The final day of OSCON 2008 is upon us, and it kicks off with a keynote address by Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT Center for Civic Media titled “Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors“. If we’re talking about control over technology, we must first understand that technology is powerful. Developers of technology have a huge amount of power. This gives them a profound control over users. Developers understand this, but most users don’t understand that that well because they don’t understand the technology as well.

Good technology should be invisible, like eyeglasses. You don’t look at the eyeglasses, you look at the world. This is why people are surprised when an ATM crashes and they see a Windows error interface — the operating system is normally invisible to them.

OneNewsNow has a hidden intermediary that is only visible when it gets things wrong: witness when Tyson Gay set a US record in the 100-meter dash. ONN has a script that replaces certain words for others — in this case, replacing ‘gay’ with ‘homosexual’. Thus their AP feed contained a story about Tyson Homosexual winning the 100.

Check out the Revealing Errors Blog.

Next comes Dawn Nafus of Intel talking about “Three Challenges“. There are three areas of rapid social change where there are real contributions that technology as a whole can make.

Challenge one: The world is awash with large datasets. How do we give life to them? Answer: avoid the ‘add GPS and stir’ trap. There’s this misconception that adding data is the same thing as adding context.

Challenge two: Global crisis in food and water. Fuel prices have skyrocketed, food prices have skyrocketed, food and water supplies in developing and third world countries are no longer secure. 50% of the world derives its income from agriculture.

Challenge three: Strength the global growth in technology producers, not just consumers. Technology production is unequally distributed. Technology adoption (in relation to economic strength) is taking off in eastern Europe, China, South America, and parts of Africa.

After Dawn is Sam Ramji from Microsoft with a talk titled “Open Source Heroes“. Well, the title doesn’t seem to be right, he’s talking about Microsoft’s future with open source. Kicking off with a history of platform trends — started off with applications running on single machines, then the internet came along, and then along came web apps. In the future, we’ll see software+services, the programmable internet. Open Source will continue to be there as well.

Microsoft has had their fingers in many bits of Open Source projects, from Linux and Apache to Ruby and Java. They submitted their license to the OSI. This section really looks like Microsoft trying to say how good they are with Open Source.

OH BOY BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: Apache Software Foundation is welcoming Microsoft as a platinum sponsor.

A few promises: “I will engage openly and honestly with you every time.” “I’m dedicated to having the tough conversations.” “We will solve the next generation of technology challenges by participating and contributing together.”

Tim Bray from Sun is up now, talking about a “Language Inflection Point“. Whare we programming in? C, Java, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Perl… Should you do things in Perl, Ruby, or Python? In C++? (we hates it, it makes our eyes burn) In PHP? PHP has some interesting trends, and there are a number of good apps written in PHP (WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal). “I would rather drive nails in my head than write a real application in PHP.”

Does language design matter? PHP doesn’t have good language design, but it works.

Should you do things in Java? “A lot of what is happening in languages now is unpausing the nuclear winter that Java imposed on the programming language space.” - Ted Leung

Tim is starting to have real problems with Java. “I don’t really have time to write thirteen lines of code to have four that do anything.” One of the legs of the Java tripod (JVM, APIs, language) can be replaced with other languages: Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and others.

Should you do things in C? It’s old, it doesn’t have new features like newer languages, but Tim says “C is flawless”. There are all kinds of things written in C: operating systems, databases, other languages, web infrastructure…

But what about other languages like OCaml, Erlang, Groofy, Fan, or Scala? And what about static or dynamic typing? There are good things that static typing gets you, but there are also good arguments for dynamic typing.

And last up is Jeremy Ruston from BT Design giving a talk titled “Learning From Airports“. BT wanted to learn about the innovation happening at the edges of the open source community, so they acquired TiddlyWiki, which is the project Jeremy worked on before working at BT.

There are a lot of things at airports that don’t have anything to do with the actual taking off and landing — shopping, restaurants, hospitals… Airports have single sign-on (boarding passes). The participants in the platform are trusting the platform itself for identification. Gate systems are standardized to allow all planes. Airports are very consistent in their signage.

Jeremy tried to apply this airport analogy to BT. He talked a bit but didn’t actually explain this, other than saying that they’re transparent on osmosoft.com.

Edit: The Q&A is a “beat up the Microsoft guy” session. First question: Will Microsoft stop beating up on open source re: software patents? Second question: Samba was around for at least twelve years before Microsoft helped — can we expect this kind of behaviour in the future? Third question: OOXML standards debacle where MS used their power to buy national standards community to push through an inappropriate standard — can the open source people within Microsoft change the corporate culture? Fourth question: something about patents. Blah blah blah.

The title of Larry’s talk is “Rules that are meant to be broken”. He says that he’s breaking his rule of giving funny talks, and there’s only one joke in the whole talk, and that wasn’t it.

He wants us to break Perl by coming up with new syntax for it.

People keep asking him “if you had to do it all over again, what would you change?” Two answers: nothing and everything. Perl 6 is the “everything” answer.

In Perl 6 regexes are a sub-language, not strings (as they are in Perl 5). Perl 6’s goal is to be a collection of many languages.

But in Perl culture we’re not told how to think. After all, TMTOWTDI.

Larry proposes that we deal with derived languages sensibly. Instead of copy-and-paste, use polymorphism.

I think I’m losing the plot here, so I’m going to pay attention to the talk now. Sorry!

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!