[Toulouse-pm] OSCON Jeudi

[Michel Rodriguez]

Salut,

Voila le CR de Jeudi. Notez que j'ai rate pas mal du matin... le prix a
payer pour une rude soiree hier ;--(

Si vous allez a YAPC vous pouvez sauter la description du talk de MJD, il
le fait aussi (en plus long) a Paris.


Thursday
  45 minutes by MJD
   The Quilt project
    (for the French speakers a quilt is un "patchwork")

    MJD wrote a program to generate quilt patterns to impress his
    girlfriend. He eventually got married to her.

    The project was declared highly successful, actually the most
    successful he ever did.

   Text::Template
    "Text::Template" is stable, functional, and no new version
    needs to be released. So users complain and worry that it has
    been abandonned. Should he just update it every month? (He
    blames Microsoft for this deplorable state of mind).

    He also found out that people do not want to subclass the
    module and instead want him to add features to the module. He
    describes how to subclass it and urges not to be afraid of
    doing it.

   Getting help from strangers
    How to increase your chances to get help when asking help
    (from him or other strangers).

    Put your name in the email, give context, explain why it is
    important (if it is), be polite.

   How to progress
    (technically)

    *   Read books that other people are not reading (so he
        cannot tell us which books to read or we would all be
        eading the same books ;--)

    *   Read original source material (Einstein book, Gallilleo's
        books)

    *   Read actively, ask yourself questions while reading

    *   Take notes

   NP-Complete Problems
    The Holy Grail of computing Science is trying to solve
    NP-Complete Problems (if you solve 1 you can solve all of
    them)

    Even if you cannot find the optimal solution to the problem
    that does not mean that you can't find a close enough
    solution. So don't give up.

   Intermission
    A (very short) song by MJD

   On Fish
    When people ask basic questions he tends to just give the
    answer, instead of answering "perldoc foo" (he gives a fish
    instead of teaching them how to fish) He explains why.

   Why Lisp is never going to win
    Basically because of the community attitude. He shows a very
    funny usenet post from

   A message for the Aliens
    He shows a real message sent to aliens. It is a REALLY weird
    message!

Perl6 Design Philosophy
    Allison Randal

    Simple is better, but not all problems are simple (the
    simplest language is just no language, but that's not really
    useful).

    The waterbed theory: you will need some complexity, and if
    you simplify an aspect of the language, then an other aspect
    will have to be complex.

    The talk summarizes the design discussion in *Perl6
    Essentials* which I was reading this morning.

  Template Toolkit 3
    Andy Wardley

    Lots of cool new syntax features, speed improvements.

    Andy plans to split up TT in 2: generic template processing
    tools in Template::Toolkit and Template::TT2,Template::TT3
    (and even Template::Mason, Template::HTML)

    He wants the tookit to be more modular, so you can swap out
    some parts, replace them, or use equivalent parts from
    another toolkit. This will also make debugging easier. It
    will also allow for the creation of custom tags, processed by
    the templating system.

    You could also mix templating systems (have some Mason
    templates, some custom ones and some TT3 ones).

    Randall throws in the idea that TT4 could compile to Parrot
    bytecode, which would open the door to interesting
    extensions.

    TT3 will be available.... real soon now! Hopefully by the end
    of the year.

  TIPS for Learning XSLT
    Adam "ziggy" Turoff

    XSLT IS a programing language. And a weird one at that. It
    actually includes 3 languages: XPath, XSLT and the output
    language (HTML, or RSS or whatever)

    It encourages incremental development: change -> test. Start
    small and grow the program from there. Use XPath as much as
    possible. XPath is extremely powerful. It appears in "match"
    templates, in "select" expressions, in attribute values
    ("att="{count(ancestor::)"}")

    Use the default behavior (visit children for all element and
    emit text or attribte nodes)

    If multiple templates match, the last one is used: place more
    specific matches after generic ones.

    You can loop using recursion... but try to avoid it. Iterate
    over lists of nodes returned by XPath.

    Re-use is done with importing and including, which are
    slightly different: include overrides the local definitions,
    while import doesn't.

    Look at the Docbook stylesheets

    Use empty template rules to remove elements

   Push vs Pull
    push
        process current element, then let templates apply to
        children.This is rule based programing.

    pull
        grab current element and the relevant children, process.
        This is closer to procedural programing.

    Choose wisely which one to use. Roughly pull is often good
    for data (very structured) while push is better for
    documents.

    Cool, that's one distinction that I have always found very
    important, but that I rarely see mentioned, at least that
    clearly.

  5 things we do wrong with XML
    RJ Ray

    This sounds like a talk for me!

    This talk is honor of XML's 5th Anniversary

   People are too quick to use XML
    Often people just want to be buzzword compliant.

   People are too slow to use it
    Sometimes XML IS the right solution. Then don't hesitate.

   THese things should have schemas
    Software change logs, diffs, cooking recipes

    Then my laptop died... no more battery

  Writing about Perl
    Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix

    To really learn the subject answer questions, on usent or
    Perlmonks. Teaching is great because of the immediate
    feedback.

    Authoring formats: pod, FrameMaker, troff, LateX (in
    increasing order of uglyness)

    Writing a book takes a LONG time: a whole day of work per
    page. It doesn't really pay either (less than minimum wages).
    The book's main point is to raise your profile.

    Write the introduction last (when you know what the rest of
    the book is).


Michel Rodriguez
Perl & XML
http://www.xmltwig.com