[Oc-pm] Meeting Notes

[David Romano]

Last night's meet up went pretty well! Three people showed up and it
lasted for about an hour and a half. Doug Wilson, Peter Wilson, and I
introduced ourselves to one another and talked a bit about our education
and work histories. (Turns out we're all UC grads.) Doug came from
Laguna Hills, and Pete and I came from Orange. The following are some of
the things we talked about for the hour and a half we met:

    -   LotusNotes
        Doug had a problem at work where everyone had to to basic
        cut-and-paste from LotusNotes into the ticket request tracker.
        Doug wanted to be Lazy, so he decided to figure out how to use
        Perl to interact with the database and extract the information
        they were supposed to cut-and-paste. He said the hardest part
        was sifting through the Perl docs and OLE information provided
        by IBM for LotusNotes to figure out how to correctly call the
        database. When he finished the program, it made a light bulb go
        on in one of the manager's brains, and now he's thinking of all
        sort of automation tasks they can now do with his program. Yay
        Doug! Yay Perl!
        http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=617131

    -   Parse::FixedLength
        At work Pete has built some scripts (Perl and C++) to process
        the data (some that's binary) that he's given. Doug said that
        Parse::FixedLength might help him when dealing with information
        that has a lot of columns. While Parse::FixedLength is just a
        glorified wrapper around pack/unpack, it does make it easier to
        manage a lot of data separated into columns that would
        otherwise be a pain to work with when just looking at the
        pack/unpack template. Pete fired up his laptop, and we looked
        at the module on CPAN. Pete says he might be able to use it,
        which we'll probably hear at the next meeting, if not sooner.
        http://search.cpan.org/~dougw/Parse-FixedLength-5.37/

    -   How to fix the website
        We talked briefly about Tilly's posting a few days ago, which
        brought to mind how out-of-date it was. Doug has been the
        maintainer for the website over the past few years, and he
        confessed that he dropped the ball in maintaining it, especially
        after accessing content on the server changed.  It used to be
        you could just SSH in, but now it's something to do with WebDAV.
        The next step is to find out the passwords to access the site
        again, and change the content. Doug believes the passwords are
        somewhere in his mail archives, and will try to scrounge them up
        sometime before the next meeting.

    -   HOP & the Y Combinator
        I brought HOP along with Programming Perl, and we discussed the
        great ideas it contains, but lack of abstraction that the
        Iterator* modules provide. We agreed that we usually just used
        bits and pieces of what was described in the book, and morphed
        it to suit the problem at hand. Doug mentioned that if you use
        iterators and streams too much, you'll start to get memory leaks
        because the new anonymous subs that it generates won't always be
        destroyed properly by perl. This then segued into Pete's
        understanding of the Y Combinator: an recursive anonymous
        function generator that properly destroys the functions it
        generates.  Pete even said that he had implemented the Y
        Combinator in a language that's not Lisp (IIRC, Perl).
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_combinator

    -   Moose
        We talked about it being a way to do Perl 6 object-oriented
        stuff in Perl 5. None of us really had much experience with it.
        I used it for a couple projects (one of them on CPAN), but
        hadn't used many of its neat tricks. I told them the nice thing
        I liked about it was that it had type constraints, which I
        found very helpful.
        http://search.cpan.org/~stevan/Moose-0.21/

    -   Project for the group
        I brought up the possibility of coming up with a project that
        the group can work on together when we meet. Alternatively, we
        can work on parts separately, and talk a bit about our parts of
        the project when we do meet up. I guess the first step is to
        find out a project to do. I really only have two ideas so far:

        -   Play with Catalyst to work on the OC PM website. Maybe even
            use Mojomojo for our PM wiki. This would also help us get
            more experience working with databases, which Pete said he'd
            be interested in doing (as would I).
            http://www.catalystframework.org/

        -   Help out with the Pugs or Parrot projects. Right now I know
            that they're both pining for someone(s) to fill the role of
            kudra in writing thread summaries every week. If some of us
            are willing to set aside an half an hour here, half an hour
            there, we can summarize maybe just a thread or two, and
            combine them to send to the list. This would also help us
            learn more about the status of each project, too.
            http://www.parrotcode.org/
            http://www.pugscode.org/

- David

-- 
"The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had
been obliged first to learn Latin."
    -- Heinrich Heine