[Pdx-pm] State of the Shallot

[Joshua Keroes]

Contents:
0. State of the Shallot
1. Meeting Recap: Ruby for Perl Programmers
2. Ruby, a Continuation
3. Meeting Recap: freepan.org

#------------------------------
# State of the Shallot
#------------------------------

Over the past year, Curtis Poe built Portland.pm up from the ashes.
He created a healthy working usergroup that has regular meetings and
provides a great place for our local kids to go after school to keep
them off drugs, or something like that.

Curtis has also stepped down to pursue Having a Life. At the meeting,
we retired his shirt to hang in the rafters, without him struggling too
much. I believe I speak for us all when I say, "Thank-you, Curtis."

2003 is here. With a new year comes a new leader for the group: me.
I ran on a secret platform of kissing your babies, and having
succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, have taken over the portland.pm
leadership. 

These are my goals and intentions:

    1. Meet Regularly

       We've had a meeting per month for a year now. This shall continue.
       Onsite will *not* be offering their location for future meetings
       so we'll have to find a new place. Contact me if you have a 
       video-projector, please!

    2. Increase Membership

       I expect we'll troll the 2600 meetings for 5kr1pt-k1dd135 and
       perhaps kidnap a PLUG member or two. Bring your Interested,
       Interesting people! The more people we have, the more opinions
       present, the closer our group aligns with other local groups,
       the greater the knowlege bank becomes, and the *better* this
       group becomes.

    3. Have an Outing

       At some point, we should get away from the green glow of our
       monitors and Go Somewhere. I expect we'll revisit this topic
       when the tempurature rises above the freezing temps we've
       had lately. Or we could go to Meadows.

    4. Update the Website.

       We have grown beyond the means of http://portland.pm.org/ (or
       at least, I very much want to). Over the next week or so,
       Christian Brink and I will test and deploy the new website.
       It will be open soon for *you* to play with and add to.

    5. Build a Library, Review Some Books

       Our first book has been requested. Todd Caine is reviewing
       Mannings' _LDAP_Programming_ and will write about or discuss it
       within the next two months.

       Is there a book you'd like to review from Manning, O'Reilly,
       or $publisher? Get me the book info and contact and I'll take
       care of it.

Want to discuss any of these topics on the mailing list? Please start a
new thread. Thanks.

#------------------------------
# Meeting Recap: Ruby for Perl Programmers
#------------------------------

For our first meeting, Phil Tomson gave his lecture "Ruby for Perl
Programmers" to a joint contigent of Perl and Ruby programmers. Phil
did a fine job with the educating stick, dealing out no less than
three or four lethal blows with his mighty nun-fu. Praise be.

#------------------------------
# Ruby, a Continuation
#------------------------------

Want to learn more?

Phil Tomson explains Ruby to Perl programmers, (this is a  
transcript of the above lecture):

    http://www.aracnet.com/~ptkwt/pm_presentation/rSlide-0.html


Simon Cozens compares Perl5, Perl6, and Ruby:

    http://ddtm.simon-cozens.org/~simon/ruby.html


Links to more Ruby Stuff:

    http://www.aracnet.com/~ptkwt/pm_presentation/rSlide-15.html

#------------------------------
# Meeting Recap: FreePAN.org
#------------------------------

FreePAN is a language-agnostic code library. It's not just Perl
anymore, it's Ruby, Perl, PHP, Squeak, and $your_favorite_OSS_lang.

Ingy's work on FreePAN.org continues. Ingy demoed the new website,
http://freepan.org/ . 


-Joshua

PS Again, if you wish to discuss any of these topics, please start a new
   thread with a sane Subject line. Thanks.

__END__