[Phoenix-pm] Thanks for the AJAX Demo; Who Was That Unshaven Hippie?

[Scott Walters]

Benjamin, 

Glad you could make it.  Seeing this subject line, I thought you were refering
to me, and I was going to reply with my name.  It took me a moment to realize
you were talking about yourself.

On  0, "Benjamin R. Ginter" <bginter at ndevtech.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I just wanted to thank you for the ajax demo and brief runthough of a few 
> modules.  I'm the guy who arrived really late (as usual) and this was my 
> first ever Perl Mongers meeting.  For some background on my Perl and 
> technical experience in the Phoenix area, read below.  It's long winded 
> and full of hubris, so don't say I didn't warn you.

There are some really interseting people who have great stories lurking around
in this group...  

> patterns, Perl's reference counting garbage collection (had some memory 
> leaks),

Scalar::Util::weaken -- use it on any references that shouldn't count
to create a "weak reference".  Usually it's clear which reference should
get this treatment -- references passed to constructors of other objects
when references to those other objects are held in instanance variables,
or references in a hash used for lookup, and so on.  Bascially, use it
for anything except the primary reference to the object created and held
outside of the object.

Sorry to apparently ignore the human points and move in on the technical
points.  I guess for me it's an ice breaker.  

> They eventually just stopped acknowledging the bugs existed.  I stressed 

Wow... 

Re: CVS, Bugzilla, etc in your development environment, sounds like you'd
score well on joelonsoftware.com's purity test.  

> Lots of other consulting over the years, various side projects 
> (myNewsPorn, a usenet binary decoder subscription site that predated 
> guba.com and probably inspired them), Perl Modules I haven't touched in 

EasyNews is based here in town.  I showed up in their office drunk once
with another fellow who was also drunk, and neither of us had meet the
EasyNews guys before, and we somehow managed to talk them into letting
us collect a friend's crashed out Linux server from their server room,
even though we accidentally said some very inappropriate things.  That's
just how cool and easy going they are.

> ages including Video::Info, MPEG::Info, MPEG::LibMPEG3, NetPacket 0.02 
> (temporary maintainer fixing critical bug in TCP header option parsing 
> before original author took over), and wrote the key polling daemon in the 

Interesting.  You should post a brief (or long, if you prefer) bio of
yourself on the Wiki at http://phoenix.pm.org.  The password is brock2.

> They included me because of some silly little freeware POP before SMTP 
> perl utility I wrote and put on Freshmeat to keep a berkeley db hash of 
> IP addresses and timestamps from pop3 auth log entries that sendmail 
> could read as a map accessed from local_check (with some Claus Abmann 
> hacks) to permit SMTP access from foreign networks.

Of the Berkeley db hashes on my system, probably 97% are in some way related
to email...

> Hopefully I've not bored everyone and have dropped some name or company 
> one of you may recognize.  If not, well you know my background and what I 
> might be able to share with the rest of the Phoenix perl mongers.  Hope to 
> see you all next month.

Sorry Benjamin, you don't make the cut.  Your membership is revoked.  Er,
what I mean is, hey everyone out there!  If you came to meetings, you could
hang with cool people like Benjamin!  So git yer arse down to the meetings!

Seriously though, think about doing some presentations.  You can take as
little time as you like and be as informal as you like and show people
"how I solved X" or "proposed solution and first stab at Y" or "neat
module to do Z".  I say this because presentations seem to be the biggest
draw, so if you have non-module ideas for ways to entertain Perl 
programmers, by all means, go for it.  Of course, no one is obligated to
present, but until there are too many presenters, I have to put a fine
point on it.

I really enjoyed reading your bio -- I'd post one of myself, but I'd
miss all of the good bits (my memory is tricky), so I can do is parsel
out random stories as they occur to me.

Anyway, very nice to have you!  Please come again!

-scott

> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Benjamin R. Ginter
> 
> "Beware the fury of a patient man"
> 
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