SPUG: The SPUG Report, 17 August 2004

Andrew Sweger andrew at sweger.net
Wed Aug 18 00:21:50 CDT 2004


August is usually a slow month for SPUG and meeting turnout tends to be
lower than normal. This year, August decided to throw a few extra punches
at us just for fun, but ended up being pretty darn good.

When it was time to start the meeting, we discovered that we had no
network or access to the Internet. This effectively killed our second
presentation from Bill Campbell, which was a live application on the
Internet. Then we couldn't find our first speaker, Tom Coleman. Turns out
he snuck in late and was hiding in the audience.

Tim Maher's thank-you-for-creating-SPUG-etc mug arrived tonight. Twice!
(The manufacturer decided that two would be the minimum order quantity.)
To top it off, the mug engraving has a small factual error; it claims that
Tim lead SPUG from 1993 to 2004. Rather than try to argue with the people
that created the error, I have decided to rewrite history. SPUG now
officially started in 1993. This should finally put to rest any remaining
arguments on whether SPUG started before The Perl Mongers or not.

Tom Coleman gave his presentation on the number puzzle solver he developed
and how it evolved from a procedural perl script to object-oriented Perl.
Tom's technique of breaking a problem down into classes and objects was
fun. It combined formal notation and technique with a relaxed practical
approach to "stuff and things".

As a bonus, Rick Croote gave an impromptu walk-through of his Class module
that provides basic services to other classes. I'm not quite sure how to
describe it. It takes care of calling all base methods in all base classes
of your package. Rick says that the module should be available and
entering the public domain soon.

These notes are mostly pulled from memory that is fading fast. Meeting
attendance was about 40 or 45 people (see, memory corruption, quantum
uncertainty).

Thanks to Tom Coleman and Rick Croote for informing and entertaining us
tonight. My apologies to Bill Campbell for making you drive all that way
and not get to share your discoveries.

At the moment, no one is committed to be the center of glorious attention
at the September SPUG meeting which will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday
the 21st. Please contact me directly (off list) and beg me to let you be
in this coveted position. I will coordinate and accept your bids starting
now. Thank you.

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.



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