Adamantium

Larry Wall was such a nice and humble person. It was great to meet the creator of Perl and it’s BDFL.

I noticed something very interesting about the IronMan Perl Competition. Some of my friends who I really admire, are writing about stuff that only we would talk about in person before. Namely Aran “Bluefeet” Deltac and Todd “Asciiville” Presta. Now those same topics are out on the net for the world to see. Well on to my post. Here is one semi interesting thing I did last week:

Well I noticed that I often forget the Seven OSI layers (Open System Interconnection Reference Model). I came up with a mnemonic acronym to help me remember (It was fun) so i thought I would share.

For those that don’t know what they are, here is the wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

So heres how I remember them:

Papa Dreamed Newton’s Thoughts Summoned Purple Apples.

Physical
Data Link
Network
Transport
Session
Presentation
Application

In Perl 5 I never use the keyword ‘require’, BUT its like the most common Perl job interview question that I have come across lately.

Well so for a refresher “require” includes a module at runtime as opposed to “use” which includes it at compile time.

According to Perl Monger Aran (Bluefeet), the keyword require is often used with automated tests, and we should be using Module::Load instead of require in most cases. The Module::Load documentation states:

If you pass a string to require it will assume that you are loading a file, and if you pass it a bareword it will assume you are passing it a module.
Load eliminates the need for this overhead and will just DWYM ( Do what you mean ) .

I have been ramping up on my Perl 6 Regexes with the Perl 6 Regex docs at perlcabal.org and I also found a really useful resource for Perl 6 introductory tutorials here

Reporting in after a long work week without a lot of sleep. Saturday is here and it’s Rakudo time boys & girls.

Our TO.pm group ( Thousand Oaks, CA. ) has started organizing the upcoming Perl 6 hackathon. Our project is a web sponge for aggregating and displaying data from various web services. Todd Presta (asciiville.com) has kind of hit the ground running and has started writing a wget-like tool in Perl 6. Our hackathon is taking place as both an in person meetup at our Perl Mongers meeting and also an at home Github collaboration.

It’s time for me to study some Perl 6 regexes.

Thank God for Saturdays.

Want to get my hands dirty and write something in Rakudo. Thinking about suggesting we schedule a hackathon at thousand oaks perl mongers tommorow. I think we could do something fun and useful in about two four hour sessions. Will start a brainstorming session if anyones interested.

I am doing a presentation on genetic programming tommorow. Was supposed to do this as my lightning talk at YAPC::NA 10 but got behind because of work. Writing C Apache2 modules required me to do a lot of extra hours due to the learning curve .. blah

Its time for another all nighter … the mission must be accomplished.

YAPC 2009 was awesome.  Reflecting on all the presentations I watched; the most exciting talks were about Perl 6 Rakudo and Parrot by Patrick R. Michaud also known as just  “PM”.  Also notable were the Modern Perl talks concerning Moose.pm.

P.M. is a good speaker and he used to be a CS college professor on tenure. He is now working on Perl 6 and really knew how to break down concepts well . Great learning experience.