From chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk Sat Aug 11 11:41:50 2001 From: chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk (Chris Benson) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:10:54 2004 Subject: London.pm Emergency Technical Meeting 31st July Message-ID: <20010811174150.A27945@beta.home> London.pm held an emergency technical meeting because several Perl People were passing through on the way from The Perl Conference (TPC4? 5?) in San Diego to YetAnotherPerlConference::Europe in Amsterdam. Visit to London.pm emergency technical meeting in honour of Brian Ingerson author of Inline.pm Venue: State51. A place with all the necessary facilities, space, electricity ... and good Internet connection. Remarkable to this first-time visitor: the range of sofas and chairs, the largest free-standing table I've seen, the amount of warm beer and bagles lying around. Brian gave a laidback (jet-lagged?) talk about Inline, the recent TPC in San Diego, working for Activestate, tattoos and piercing and showed Inline::C, Inline::Java, C with embedded Perl ... using Inline to embed C ... or was it Perl? Inline::Perl and his tattoos and piercings. Inline.pm acts as a front-end to the standard way of embedding non-Perl code in Perl: XS. Inline does a very good job of hiding the nasty bits:- #!/usr/bin/perl -w use Inline C; print "9 + 16 = ", add(9, 16), "\n"; print "9 - 16 = ", subtract(9, 16), "\n"; __END__ __C__ int add(int x, int y) { return x + y; } int subtract(int x, int y) { return x - y; } Works for multiple languages: useful ones like C/C++ and then the rest: Java/Tcl/Python/... there's even a joke language: Inline::PERL There's also CPR (SeePerlRun) that turns C into a scripting language (with the full Perl language available to help it out):- #!/usr/bin/cpr int main(void) { printf("Hello World, I'm running under Perl version %s\n", CPR_eval("use Config; $Config{version}") ); return 0; } Then about 10pm we went out for a drink, chatted for a while and the I went back to the hotel. -- Chris Benson From chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk Sat Aug 11 12:39:11 2001 From: chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk (Chris Benson) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:10:54 2004 Subject: UKUUG talk 9th August: Ted T'so Linux: Past, Present & Future Message-ID: <20010811183911.A28278@beta.home> Hmmm, it appears that certain words in the first paragraph of a message are trapped by the mailing list software as misdirected admin commands. I've just had 2 out of 3 of my messages redirected back to me for manual correction. Perhaps this will allow the message to get though! ----- Forwarded message from Chris Benson ----- Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 17:43:09 +0100 From: Chris Benson To: tyneside-pm@happyfunball.pm.org Subject: UKUUG talk 9th August: Ted T'so Linux: Past, Present & Future Tim O'Reilly was booked to give a talk "The pause before the next wave" about what happens next to the high-tech. economy. He had to cancel, but a long-time Linux kernel hacker Theodore T'so stepped in to talk about Linux: Past, Present and Future. Some misc. notes. Using the start-off point that Linux was about 10 years old (the exact date depends whether you count birth or conception -- as Ted pointed out this is possibly more important in the US than in Europe :-) he gave us some history. Pointed out that a lot of things happened as long as 5 years ago ... He talked about the Linux creation myth: write a process switcher, test it: AAAABBBABABABBABAAABABBAAAABBBBBB, add a terminal driver and then a few system calls later you have a Unix-like o/s. He talked about the present: companies large and small faring well, and not so well in the Internet/Linux age. Business Models Some do not work - banner ads, building/selling hardware to add value to Linux (Ted works for VA/Linux that has just pulled out of hardware), ... The hobbyist/enthusiast will always be around which ensures the survival of Linux. IBM get more revenue from services than from hardware, therefore Linux was not a threat (and if Linux reduces NT sales by running on IBM's intel hardware that's fine, and if Linux reduces sales of Suns by running on S/390 hardware, that's fine too). Predicts that IBM will do well ... Another model: BitKeeper source control software: written by Larry McVoy in his own time. Available to anyone who wants to use it *BUT* the change files are made public unless you pay for it. The software is good and works and supports a 12 person company. There was a digression into what BitKeeper does and how it works ... and into how Linus is one of those people who is so naturally good they haven't had to learn how to deal with software engineering problems that mere mortals have to cope with (Linus does not use any source code versioning s/ware on Linux, though others do). BitKeeper is the business (if he should choose to use anything!). The talk about the future became (of course) less specific. A lot of it around political, legal and social issues: copyright, patents, trade secrets. These may kill open source: if it becomes illegal to reverse engineer s/ware to interoperate, away goes SAMBA and much else. If more stupid patents are granted it gets more difficult for small companies (and academics and enthusiasts) to write any code -- only corporations with armies of lawyers *and* large sheaves of their own patents to bargain with, will be able to write code without being sued. Of course Open Source developers are at a disadvantage because they make the code available ... Linux (and other open source developers) need to produce code that people can use (story about being unable to build a Debian package of the kernel because there is a ' in his name ... and if someone whose been building Linux kernels for over 9 years can't do it ...). This may need usability testing and regular re-testing, standards documentation, .... While some types of open source progress very quickly, some areas (SCSI subsystem, documentation, ...) don't. Need to work out a way of getting the grunt work done. This may take social engineering -- not a common hacker trait. One estimate puts Linux on 5% of desktops: about the same as MacOS. If Linux can provide a stable platform (not everyone wants to compile and install a new libc to run some app), it could be worth s/ware companies supporting Linux. Become politically active: tell politicians (in language they understand) about the effects of their laws. And that was about it. -- Chris Benson ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Chris Benson