So, I've been really lax in keeping up with my journal over YAPC::Europe. As you can guess, that was because I was busy.
Let's see, what have I been doing with my days?
I've listened to many talks. The ones that stick out are the talk on WxPerl (short summary: It may be the best tool for the job but it's not a good enough tool to use if that's not what you need the tool to do,) Spreadsheet::WriteExcel (soon: charts!) Unicode (databases are fun,) and Usenet Gems (substr in lvalue context can be odd.) There were also gazillions (well, twenty) lightning talks I watched and they were all really interesting.
I gave three talks. The one talk I knew I was giving before I got there was on bundling. I then found out from Geoff I'd had a lightning talk accepted (on Perl and UTF8) and I ended up padding out the end of the WWW Smackdown talk session with an hour from my CPAN Modules talk (in the process of I drunk half a litre of water and still had a dry throat by the end.) I think they all went well in the end, and considering I wasn't expecting to give so many before I arrived, I think I did okay.
Of course the best thing about YAPC is the chance to meet up with people who I don't get to see that often. In addition to many of London.pm who don't make it to every social meet, there was Birmingham, Paris and Stockholm Perl Mongers in full effect. If I spend time listing all the people who I got to speak to - only briefly - I'd be here all evening. In the end I got my mini-axkit-bof. And I sat in many a scary conversation (including Tim Bunce on the problems with utf8 and databases which has given me quite a bit to think about.)
What have I been doing with my evenings? We boozed the Tuesday night at the crown, on Wednesday I went for sushi and then headed home early (and ended up hacking automatic unicode handing into Spreadsheet::WriteExcel,) and on Thursday we all headed off to the odyssey centre where we split off and ran around doing all kinds of mad things (I had tapas, played air hockey, watched people bowl, play pool and shoot zombies, and of course went to one of the bars.) I tried to stay out of the Crown too much, and almost succeeded most of the time. And Friday night? I'm sitting in the airport watching planes land and writing this (wireless++).
All in all it was a great conference, it had it's highs and it's lows. But in the end Karen, Marty, and all the orange clad helping crew did an excellent job. Now all I have to do is sit down and go though my notes and work out all the interesting titbits I've learnt so I can write them up here.
I left YAPC on Thursday so I didn't get a chance to talk to you about this. Which is a shame.
I received your email (but not the patch). My replies, I guess, are in your spam traps.
Anyway, automatic handling of Unicode under perl 5.8 is a very good idea so I've added it to the write() methods for the next release and I'll implement it everywhere else in the release after that.
Thanks.
John.
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