[Oc-pm] June 20th Meeting Notes

[David Romano]

Last week's meeting was held at Panera and had four attendees: Ben
Tilly, Pete Wilson, V.J. (didn't catch the last name), and me. Sorry
for getting this out a few days late. My memory of what was discussed
is now a little fuzzy, but here's a bit of what I remember:

    -   Pythagorean Theorem
        At first it was just Ben and me, and since he has a background
        in mathematics and I'm going to be a high school math teacher,
        we talked a bit about math. One of many interesting things that
        Ben talked about was a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. The
        proof is at the first link below , which is based on a more
        elaborate proof by Euclid (the second link). I actually hadn't
        seen that proof before, but it made sense when I looked at it. I
        now have another proof I teach (thanks Ben! :-)
        http://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/index.shtml#9
        http://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/index.shtml#69

    -   Interweaving SQL and Perl code
        I had brought along Perl Hacks, which I'm currently working my
        way through, and Ben looked at its discussion of using SQL from
        Perl. Hack #23 suggests to create a subroutine for each
        different query, and tuck away all those subroutines in a SQL
        package. Ben explained a different way of managing SQL code in
        Perl, and that is by writing chunks of SQL statements, storing
        them in scalars, and combining them as appropriate. He said he
        found this very useful when working with complex queries.
        http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/
 
    -   GPS and General Relativity
        Pete is a data analyst for a company in Anaheim, and his job is
        to analyze extreme amounts of data from GPS devices his company
        manufactures. Ben mentioned that GPS is the only real-world
        application that takes into account the general theory of
        relativity. I had just read the ABC of Relativity and was
        still a bit patchy on what the general and special theories
        were, but Ben gave a good explanation (and demonstration) of
        general relativity.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

    -   Pugs and Parrot
        Ben mentioned how surprised at how far Parrot has come along.
        Parrot now passes the sanity tests (copied from the Pugs test
        suite) and they're now working on getting a workable Test.pm to
        start writing all the tests in Perl 6. Pugs seemed to lose
        steam when Audrey got sick, but one of the interesting
        subprojects has been MiniPerl6 and KindaPerl6, both headed by
        Flavio Glock. Now that Parrot is passing sanity tests, Flavio
        and Patrick Michaud (the Perl 6 pumpking, AFAIK) are teaming up
        to work on getting a full Perl 6 implementation. I have a
        somewhat up-to-date installable package of Pugs available for
        OS X (ghc, parrot, readline are all bundled too).
        http://www.parrotcode.org/
        http://www.pugscode.org/
        http://www.unobe.com/files/osx/

    -   Lingua::Romana::Perligata
        It exists. If you're leaving a company you hate, you might
        consider rewriting your code using it. At least that's what one
        of Ben's acquaintances thought of doing.
        http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50/

    -   Databases
        Pete and I didn't know that much about databases. Ben Tilly
        enlightened us :-) Ben explained the idea of relational
        mapping using a Students table, Teachers table, and Classes
        table. He stated the importance of designing tables
        orthogonally, and only adding redundant fields to improve
        performance. He also described what happens when a database
        falls over. The number of requests to update a certain record
        (or is it a certain table?) in a database is so high at a
        certain time X. Each request's continuous check to see if the
        record has been unlocked (and is now available for writing)
        overloads the server resources and the server croaks. I hope
        that makes some sense :-/

    -   Catalyst and Win32 perl
        Branching off the database talk, Pete is the the maintainer of
        an Access DB at work. He's thinking of making his job easier by
        importing it into MySQL and writing a limited front-end to it
        using Catalyst (or maybe just setup phpMyAdmin). He's been
        trying to fool around with Catalyst, but ran into some troubles
        compiling some of the XS modules some of its prerequisites
        require. I mentioned he might want to try Strawberry Perl,
        which has worked wonderfully for me. Ben suggested that if he
        goes the Catalyst route, Pete should work through the tutorials
        to get a good understanding of the framework.
        http://www.phpmyadmin.net/
        http://www.catalystframework.org/
        http://vanillaperl.com/files/strawberry-perl-5.8.8-alpha-2.exe
        http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Catalyst-Manual-5.700701/

    -   Next Possible Meeting Location
        Ben had remembered that the group had met at a good pub a few
        years back, and wants to go again. I noticed an old e-mail from
        the oc-pm archives that mentioned The Olde Ship. Pete mentioned
        a pub in Fullerton whose name escapes me (The Shipyard?).
        http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/oc-pm/2003-June/000085.html

- David

-- 
"I can do everything through him who gives me strength."
    -- Philippians 4:13