Well, the brand new books mentioned above are on sale here, and being given away: Early Bird registrants (except for Early Bird Registrants who also happen to be speakers, go figure) are given free copies of what looks to be a very useful tome for all Perl programmers (including the authors, we'd wager). The Pocket Reference is being given away to everyone who fills out a survey.
The Perl Mongers are here in force, getting signatures for locations around the globe. Seems we'll be reporting several new Perl Mongers groups in the next few weeks.
The registration packet included some standard fare: a schedule, a copy of the most recent Perl Journal, some pens, a pad of paper, inserts from sponsors. There's no hefty binder with conference notes this time; the notes are on a CD instead, which may be immediately useful only to those with laptops or 780nm lasers embedded in their skulls. Kudos to O'Reilly: the CDs have an HFS partition, complete with a custom icon seen under Mac OS.
Two other CDs are included: Velocigen, for high-speed CGI stuff, and the super-cool Red Hat Linux 5.1 distribution. There's a computer room here with about 20 computers: two Macs, three NT boxes, and the rest running Red Hat. Also super-cool. The bandwidth does not seem to be very good, the Windows and Mac boxes did not have Perl installed, there are no extra wires for laptop hookups, but it is still a step forward from last year (one computer for speakers/media, IIRC).
No numbers yet, but the place looks very busy today, when only tutorials are happening. Tonight, Perl Mongers hosts an evening with Randal Schwartz, and O'Reilly sponsors the first of several movie nights. Not sure what is on tap for tonight, but good sci-fi is definitely in the mix.
