[San-Diego-pm] July 2009 Meeting Recap

[Chris Grau]

=head1 NAME

SanDiego::Meeting::Social - Social gathering of the San Diego Perl
Mongers

=head1 DATE

Thursday, 16 July 2009, 19:00 - 21:45

=head1 LOCATION

Scranton Food Court, San Diego (Sorrento Valley), Calif., USA

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This is a simple meeting recap, conveniently written in pod so everyone
can read it in whatever format they prefer.  If you lack an appropriate
formatter, well, you can always write one.  As an added bonus, if you're
using a decent MUA *cough*Mutt*cough*, a formatter is only a few
keystrokes away:

    macro pager ,pd "<pipe-message>pod2text<enter>"

=head1 ATTENDEES

In no particular order.

=over

=item

Bob

Our de facto fearless leader (no one else wants the job).

=item

Bob

Who, I believe, attended his first meeting (if I'm mistaken, sorry about
that, Bob).  He's currently doing some contract work on embedded
systems.

=item

Bob ... er, George

Who, we're not supposed to say, has a ... hey, George, what are you
doing here?  What is that you have in your hand ... Ow!

=item

Manny

Who is marketing's bitch.

=item

Chris

Who wrote the notes you are currently reading.

=back

Qualcomm Ratio = 1:5

=head1 TOPICS

=head2 Stunt Barbie

Yes, I said Stunt Barbie.  And, like anyone worth talking about, she has
a web site[1].  What, besides sounding cool, does this have to do with
Perl?  Well, those of you who met Randal Schwartz at Stone know what I'm
talking about.  Those of you who didn't, well, you know as much as I do.

[1] L<http://stuntbarbie.com>

=head2 Not Exactly What is Meant by "Software Bloat"

An important safety tip for those of you using MySQL with InnoDB storage
engine.  The C<ibdata1> file, where the actual table data is stored, can
only grow.

For example, let's say one database has a 100 MiB C<ibdata1> file.  This
file contains the data for all of the tables in the database.  All of
the data is removed, using C<DELETE FROM TABLE $table> statements.
Then, all of the data is reloaded.  This results in a 200 MiB C<ibdata1>
file.

Obviously this is a rather contrived example.  However, it's useful to
know if running a database with a lot of churn.  That is, rows may be
added or deleted with some frequency, which may happen in something like
a web session table.

=head2 Git 'er Done

Chris has proudly proclaimed that he will attempt to switch one of his
big projects at work from CVS to Git.  He gave a handful of high level
reasons for this:

=over

=item *

It's a distributed version control system.

=item *

Atomic commits.

=item *

Better branching and merging.

=item *

Easy to extend by writing scripts called C<git-$command>.  He also
promised a future demo of this, using the example in I<The Perl Review,
v5i1>.

=item *

He's already supporting customers who use it.

=back

There are, of course, lots of features available in Git, which Chris
will figure out as he uses it and designs work flows around it with his
team.

=head2 It May Be PHP, but You Can Still Control it with Perl

George maintains a personal knowledge base using MediaWiki.  Yes, we
were sure to give him crap about using PHP-based wiki software (writes
the guy who uses WordPress for his blog).  George would like to generate
a list of something-or-other and automatically populate a section on one
of his wiki pages.

He was referred to the C<MediaWiki::API>[2] module on the CPAN.  Chris
has some code he's written at work that subclasses this module's
precursor, C<MediaWiki>, to operate on the MediaWiki-based wikis on the
internal network.

[2] L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/MediaWiki-API/>

=head2 Branches? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Branches!

During the meeting, Manny exclaimed that the code he had contributed to
the Linux Mint project had been broken.  Apparently, something was done
between when he submitted it and it was released.  An important safety
tip resulted.  When performing C<scp(1)> transfers with a
pass-phrase-less private key, make sure said private key does not, in
fact, have a pass-phrase.

The interesting bit, however, was learning that Linux Mint does not use
source control.  No, really, they don't.  Remember kids, real life
doesn't have save points; version control for your files is about as
close as it gets.

=head1 NEXT MEETING

Thursday, 20 August 2009, 19:00 - 21:00

We have a special treat in store for our next meeting.  Daniel has
graciously volunteered to present a project of his, which he described
on the list back in June:

L<http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/san-diego-pm/2009-June/002061.html>

The meeting will be held at the offices of DrJays.com:

    9180 Camino Santa Fe
    San Diego, CA 92121

L<http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=9180+Camino+Santa+Fe,+San+Diego,+CA+92121+(DrJays.com)&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=51.887315,55.634766&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=17&iwloc=A>

L<http://bit.ly/Bd4br>

=cut
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