[Omaha.pm] Lightning Talks from UNO on Perl! :)

[Jay Hannah]

Thanks again, Robert, for the invite! It's great to hear other people 
talking about Perl stuff without flying to OSCON (which I highly 
recommend).

If anyone's coming next week and didn't come tonight this might help:
- "Where: PKI 252" means the Peter Kiewit Institute, which is here:
   http://www.pki.nebraska.edu/whatispki/map.php
   Room 252: Go in the main entrance, up the stairs, around to 
triangular atrium, and room 252 is on your right. There will already be 
students in there, you can just wander in and sit anywhere at 6pm.
- All the parking lots say you need a permit, but they're not busy and 
I didn't get a ticket so I guess I'd just recommend you park away from 
other cars anywhere and you'll probably be fine. (Ahh... memories of 
Iowa State parking nazis are flooding back to me.)

My misc $0.02 about the presentations tonight, for discussion if anyone 
is biting:

- It would be cool to know how to write a Firefox extension, though the 
tour of the hundreds you can  download was pretty slick.
- I talked briefly to Patrick about his GD::Graph stuff. I showed him 
our GD::Graph / RRD stuff quick and he said that "we use it a lot at 
work." A tour of that would be slick. Is Patrick on this list?
- "Using Perl on a Gumstick PC" was way cool. If Nicholas would show 
one of those tiny things booting at a Perl Monger meeting that would be 
awesome! Is Nicholas on this list?
- Javascript form validation
   - Yes, Javascript is a great tool for a ton of client side control 
stuff. One of the times you wouldn't (solely) use it for validation is 
when you're validating data entry against a database. You can JS that a 
field entry is one of 3 or 5 or even 100 possible values, but you can't 
use it when you've got a database of 1/2M possible entries on the 
backend.
- Perl in Bioinformatics
   - If you want the full detail that talk brushed over simply read here:
     http://www.bioperl.org/GetStarted/tpj_ls_bio.html
- Perl/Jsp for CGI
   - To paraphrase the presenter, "Perl is too fat/inefficient. Use JSP 
instead."
     - AFAIK J2EE JSP is fatter than mod_perl. I'd gladly benchmark that 
if anyone wants to pick a fight with me and take the JSP side. -grin-
   - "Perl doesn't do threading."
     - Perl does do threading (perldoc perlthrtut). I've never 
needed/wanted to use threads (in production), but you certainly can. Is 
someone wants to pick a fight with someone smarter than me then I'll 
buy the beers for the winner. -grin-
   - Language holy wars are fine (and sometimes fun!), but they should 
really begin from someone stating one or more facts, not just their 
opinion. And there should be a war, not just someone talking for 5m and 
then sitting down. I was soooo well behaved tonight. I even clapped. 
-grin-
- Perl CGI Mad Libs
   - Maybe it'd be fun to tie that thing to a dictionary and see what 
happens?
- ColdFusion costs $1500-$3000, but it's worth it.
   - Perl is free. It's definately worth it. Maybe it's worth more. 
-grin-
- Multiple Style Sheets
   - That's pretty slick, I didn't know Firefox did that. Can I declare 
my own stylesheet on my client and tell Firefox to use MY stylesheet 
for every page on the Internet? I could add my photo as a bgimage for 
the entire Net?
- Acme::Drunk
   - -laugh- I love Acme::* lightning talks. Philip should definately 
get lots of extra credit if he WAP enables that thing, and should get 
an honorary degree if he codes a VRU onto the front of it.
- Perl C and Java modules. "There are probably a thousand modules on 
CPAN!"
   - CPAN's 9,126 module distributions:
     http://www.cpan.org/modules/01modules.index.html
   - "Don't reinvent the wheel. Just download it from CPAN."
     - Or if you do, at least try to re-invent a better one. -grin-
- mod_perl
   I agree: mod_perl rules!

j