[Phoenix-pm] Meeting Proposal

[Scott Walters]

Meeting sounds good. For the future, I'd like to dig up a Tempe location,
perhaps Coffee Planation, perhaps a room at the Noble Science Library,
and do a downtown Tempe/ASU location. We might recruit some students
if we post flyers on those billboard things they have around campus.
Just a thought.

As for the topic of this meeting, I know I'm missing stuff, but appeneded is 
the list so far. If I get replies of presentation offers or requests, including
ones I've seen but lost, I'll update the list and the site.

Briefly, though, I'm itching to do Perl6::Contexts (introducing the object
context, reference context, numeric, and string contexts from Perl 6, now
available in Perl 5, for more concise, more error-free code!) and I promised
to do a "The Making of Perl 6 Now".

Oh, if anyone is interested, I now have an IRC<->MUD proxy that pretends to be
an IRC server so people can MUD from IRC clients. It's up on and off as I work
on it, but http://weehours.net to create a character, then /server weehours.net
to connect. Could do a presentation on that, too. And if people wait a while,
I'll have an alternative front-end to Perl, so you can run Logo in Perl 
along side your Perl 5 code and using Perl 5 modules.

If I present, we should do at least one other presentation so prevent me
from monopolizing the group.

-scott


Symposium: Mail a topic to the list - templating, database UI, etc - and ask that anyone who has done that before prepair a brief (10m) presentation on how *they* solve the problem. Kurt, in a previous email, suggest several topics like this that each programmer does their own way - it would just be a matter of picking between them. How one person does something has limited merit, but a smorgasbord of solutions has far more. Next time after this meeting, a series of 2, 3, 4, or 5 10m "how I solve this" presentations and took the rest of the time with social/contest, we should do okey. "Something that everyone rolls their own of" discussions: Kurt said, "Sounds good; another might be file-transfer/file-synchronisation scripts. If I had a dollar for every file-transfer script I've hacked together, I'd... well, I'd have well over $15 ;)"

Coincide meeting with Slashdot meetup, Java users group, PHP UG, Linux UG, etc. Essentially, socialize ourselves with other programming language user groups and free software user groups in town. It has been suggested that this be done as bonus or alternate meetings in addition to our current schedule, beyond the two meetings a month we're sustaining now.

More contests: Most people show up without laptops, but I like the idea of little code challenges in general. The ICFP was lots of fun this year - write a client to control a robot that shuttle packages around and push other robots into the water. Its a bit much for an hour or two assignment, but avoiding rote chores like fetching web pages is good sense. Perhaps breaking people up into teams and taking along a few extra laptops. Perhaps follow the Iron Chef - "todays theme ingredient will be global substitutions with the execute flag!". Solutions need not be done using Perl - the Perl community has just as much to learn from solutions in other languages as ones done in Perl. Whether the assignments are to write programes designed to compete based on usefulness or obscurity, live people writing code on the stop is exciting =) Kurt: "*grin* I like the Iron Chef idea.. "Next challenge, Sienna Camel says you must code using only characters found in hex!" (0-9 & A-F) Besides, some of these could very well be a 'write it at home' kind of thing, and people can team up if they like or go it alone."

Sienna Camel: Specific version of coding contests: like Iron Chef: program with some theme - lack of paranthesis, do something that a module normally does, demonstrate the best use of a module, and anything else we can think of. Anything with a theme that is judged subjectively.

Peer help hour: code reviers, bug workarounds, debugging, brain storming, resource location, and so forth will be provided at no charge as part of the standard meeting format, even when PM joins other user groups. Just bring your question or listing and mention to Doug or whomever else has hair in strange places and it'll be scheduled in.

Bring-in-a-module: assign everyone to show up with a CPAN module that may or may be known to the group but they found interesting for whatever reason. It could be something that everyone seems to know about but you that you wish you knew about earlier, or it could be something in Acme::, or it could be some interseting module floating around elsewhere. Useful, silly, mind bending or just plain cool, everything goes. You don't have to actually bring the module in, just briefly describe what it does, why you like it, and what it's called.

DougMiles suggested http://search.cpan.org/src/AUTRIJUS/Games-AIBots-0.03/doc/aibots.html which sounds awefully cool to me. I'll have to play with this to see what it has in store for us. See Games::AIBots - ScottWalters

ScottWalters promised a 3rd part of the FuzzyLogic series, this time an expert system.

ScottWalters has some interesting Segway-like control code in C. The theory is really nifty. Could be a presentation basis.

Coro - ScottWalters is dieing to do a Coro presentation. Coroutines are essentially cooperative threads. Compared to an event driven system, you don't have to return out to yield the CPU, so programs have normal structure, with while loops and subroutines rather than a series of tiny subroutines. Perl 6 will feature coroutines in core, and Perl 5 has an excellent CPAN module adding them. Coro is easier to use, safer, easier to grasp, and far more stable than threads on Perl 5. (The Web scraping presentation used Coro, but there's another Coro presentation in the works that uses it for network servers in replacement of POE. Maybe he'll get lazy and just use the fingerd and Perl-shell examples from Perl 6 Now.)

http://perldesignpatterns.com/?GodObject - ScottWalters wants to do a presentation on code refactoring. The GodObject discussion is a good introduction to useful OO programming for an OO novice. People experienced with objects in Perl who have never worked on a large program will take their knowledge to, er, the next level.

Perl 6 101. 'nuff said. - ScottWalters (This presentation was done as a series, but the series will probably be re-run.)

ScottWalters wants to show how to make an upload progress bar in Perl.

ScottWalters wants to show off his stealth-DNS idea -- to avoid bandwidth associated with repeatedly denying RBL'd spammers, check for RBL *before* returning the authoratative DNS information for your mail server -- don't even give them your IP address!

ScottWalters wants to do a presentation on his Perl6::Contexts module. The presentation will introduce the new reference, number, string, and object contexts in Perl 6, and how they make Perl much clearer, more powerful, more expressive, and generally saner, and how much of this is now available in Perl 5 thanks to this module.

ScottWalters wants to talk about the process of writing a technical book, and his particular adventure in doing so.

ScottWalters would like another stab at his presentation on constraint systems, a topic from Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs.

ScottWalters could do a redux of his TinyWiki presentation.

Someone did a Perl Best Practises (Book) presentation.

Brock did his ICFP presentation.

Intro to OO has been requested. ScottWalters is willing to do the presentation -- unless someone intercepts! 

On  0, Craig Frooninckx <medicldr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>    I won't be able to make this meeting (I teach on Tues and Thr
>    nights).  I'll try to find a way to send the PBP and Programming Perl
>    (I think that was the other one).  Remember the proceeds of the
>    auction are going directly to the Perl Foundation.
>    On another note, I know an instrcutor at GCC, which may give us the
>    option of GCC-North as well.
>    
>    On 9/2/05, Brock <[1] awwaiid at thelackthereof.org> wrote:
>    
>      Lets meet at CounterCulture ([2] countercultureaz.com) on Tue
>      September 13,
>      2005 @ 7:00pm. I have two books to give away (Perl Best Practices
>      and
>      Advanced Perl Programming 2nd Ed) and we have a second copy of Perl
>      Best
>      Practices to auction I believe. Topic suggestions welcome, and I'll
>      come
>      up with a list once I see that people can actually make it to this
>      time/location.
>      Counter Culture is located at 2330 E. McDowell Rd, Phoenix, AZ
>      85006.
>      That is near McDowell and 24th St. They are open 24x7 and have
>      pretty
>      nice chairs/tables and free wireless.
>      --Brock
>      _______________________________________________
>      Phoenix-pm mailing list
>      [3]Phoenix-pm at pm.org
>      [4]http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/phoenix-pm
> 
> References
> 
>    1. mailto:awwaiid at thelackthereof.org
>    2. http://countercultureaz.com/
>    3. mailto:Phoenix-pm at pm.org
>    4. http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/phoenix-pm

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