[Vlaanderen] Small personal impressionistic summary of the French Perl Workshop 2007 at Lyon (http://conferences.mongueurs.net/fpw2007/index.html)

[DirkDn]

Small personal impressionistic summary of the French Perl Workshop 2007 at
Lyon

>> About 59 French, Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, English and a very few
camouflaged female Vulcan perl mongers participated to the FPW.

>> For about 20 people it was their first perl workshop experience.

>> 2 rooms were provided and named after 2 sponsors (Booking.com &
EdenWare).

>> Both rooms were very well equiped with wireless Internet and beamer.

>> A web broadcast of all presentations given in the "Booking.com"-room is
available at http://webcast.in2p3.fr/FPW2007/. This since this room was
equipped with a high-end camera & sound system operated by a dedicated
technician (sponsored by CC-IN2P3).

>> Following tracks were available at the FPW.
       - Catalyst             - Parrot
       - Développement   - Perl6
       - Keynote             - Windows
       - POE                  - ÜberPerl

>> At the end of the first day, we were privileged to a visit of the
CC-IN2P3's machine room (Centre de Calcul de l'Institut National de Physique
Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules aka National Nuclear and Particle
Physics Calculus Center) .
This Calculus Centre hosts the calculus data for CERN and several other
global physics science centres throughout the world, for the record they
don't even count in TeraBytes anymore but in multi-figure PetaBytes :-). And
they're always looking for some smart motivated people, if you're interested
;-)

>> Perl 5.10 and 6.0 were the guests of honour the second day. We even were
witness to the official upload/launch of Perl 5.10 RC1!

>> Due to circumstances the schedule had to be quite adequately adapted by
the organisers.
Even Murphy's Law couldn't slow down the schedule. The 2 schedule issues
(Matt Trout's sudden illness just before the FPW & a room unavailability for
the first hour on Saturday morning) were very swiftly and adequately taken
care off. Rescheduling was very swiftly verbally + electronically
communicated and executed.

>> Conclusion. It was quite an interesting deep tech perl workshop
experience. Definitely worth participating if you master enough of the
French language.


=> Chapeau for the French Organisers!


Specific notes about the talks I followed.

Day 1
Day 1 started with the traditional kick-off for all Perl Workshops.
Participant's welcoming, PW Opening Talk, Job Fair Opening Talk, Coffee and
Job Fair Break, Keynote Speech.

Then the talks started.

So here a small impression of the talks I attended to.
1.  Dirk De Nijs (ddn123456) - Win32 Perl: Introduction to Perl & WMI (40
min, English) [Windows]
- In the open source world you just open the binaries and have a look at the
internals of the beast bugging you. With Win32 Perl one usually doesn't have
this luxury. Therefore this talk about the WMI HowTo undocumented basics. Do
you really want to do it in Perl if you can just copy-paste some vbs script
from the Internet?

- Well if you just need it done in 2 minutes flat and never going to use it
ever again...
Perhaps.

- However if you have already acquired a profound Perl scripting knowledge
and want to make use of its regular expressions, xml & db handling, excel &
msoffice reporting, perhaps compiled into an executable, reuse this code
later on...and last but certainly not least Perl's cross-Win32-OS functional
consistency (which is VBS's Achilles Heel).
It's a good idea just to have a look at it and do it in Perl. And guess what
all the hard work of looking up the basics is done already and available
right here :-).

2.  Serge Hoffmann (atcom) - Particularités de Perl pour Windows (20 min,
Français) [Windows]
- A great talk to show around non-Win32 connaisseurs in the wonders and
pitfalls of Perl administering, handling and automating on Win32.

- Chapeau Serge.

3. mirod - XML::Twig pour les nuls (40 min, Français)     Eriam Schaffter []
- A nice talk giving a good impression of the XML::Twig Swiss Toolkit for
"giga-sized" xml files.

4. Jerome Quelin (jq) - Introduction à POE [POE]
- MonoThreaded MultiTask Framework introduction of it heights and loweths.
Impressive.

5. damien krotkine (dams) - RT + REST + POE + ncurses = RT::Client::Console
(40 min, Français) [POE]
- POE-based Terminal Console interface (Rest) to RT (issue ticket management
system similar to BugZilla). Impressive!

6. Alexis Sukrieh - Perl Console - Votre compagnon pour développer en Perl
(40 min, Français) [Développement]
- *nix interactive perl console allowing you to enter line by line a small
test program with a cached history of entered line. Win32 might be an issue.
A very handy small development tool avoiding you all those test.pl files.

7. Aaron Crane - Faster Regexes: What to do when text matching is your
bottleneck (20 min, English) []
- Basically downsize the amount and format of data to filter, read Jeffreys
Friedl's book really well, apply that knowledge and you may gain a bit.
Redesign and develop a new algorithm and you may gain a lot more.

8. Jerome Quelin (jq) - rrdtool à la rescousse (20 min, Français) []
- A sysadmin snmp data collector and graph generator. Monitoring a >1000
machine park does generate a lot of logging data however. Perl & some
aggregation logic to the help of course. Main logic is to aggregate and fade
out data as it goes back in time, thus keeping a good overview of the past
and detailed minutes of the recent data collections in figures and graphs.
As very well explained by Jerome Quelin.

9. Evening dinner at Brasseries George where the virtues of emacs and vi
met;-).

Day 2

Day 2 started with the Participant's welcoming, and then the talks.

1. Laurent Dami (dami) - Data::Domain - validation d'arbres de données (20
min, Français)
- (WebCast advised).

2. Jonathan Worthington - Parallel New World (40 min, English)
- Parallel programming explanation motivated through the essential current
hardware cpu and memory limitations. Worthwhile watching the webcast!

3. Stephane Payrard (cognominal) - Comprendre haskell pour mieux programmer
en d'autres langages (40 min, Français)
- Functional programming introduction and its influence on Perl 6. Hmm as
remote from and close to each other as math multiplication tables and
Pythagoras formulae. Fascinating introduction. For the moment I'll
nevertheless stick to Perl however :-).

4. Jonathan Worthington - Understanding Roles, Constraints and Classes (40
min, English) [Perl6]
- Low Level technical tips and tricks for OO-handling in Perl 6. Also
worthwhile watching the webcast!

5. Alexis Sukrieh - Redécouvrir le Perl Objet avec Moose (40 min, Français)
[Perl6]
- Backporting Perl 6 OO into Perl 5 with Moose and then catching Moose's
essence in COAT which you just can pick up and go.

6. Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni (Maddingue) - use CPAN; # ROGNTUDJUU ! (40
min, Français) [ÜberPerl]
- A CPAN's Best Of. (Webcast advised).

7. Lightning Talks (60 min)
- A nice ratatouille of talks. And a valuable metaphor to remember.
ReInventing the wheel is a good idea. ReInventing the toothbrush really
isn't. (Cf. The Fabulous Toothbrush Lightning Talk) (Webcast advised).

8. Closure Speech

9. Auction
- TShirts personalised by Perl's leading figures, Flux, perl books and
objects, ... Just another great auction where things with a big intellectual
or emotional value are sold at awesome prices. ;-)

For more info please refer to:
http://conferences.mongueurs.net/fpw2007/index.html
http://webcast.in2p3.fr/FPW2007/

With kind regards.
DirkDn
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