reposted from Hacking Thy Fearful Symmetry
Last month, thanks to a concerted effort of German Perl Mongers[1] I was able to meet with the wonderful folks of Ruhr.pm.
It turns out that not only the Ruhr-area mongers are a superlatively friendly bunch, but they have pretty cool presentations too.
The feature presentation of the night was Fuse mit Perl, by Simon Wilper. After he was done, I also got treated with a quick replay of two previous presentations dealing with image manipulation. One was about openCV, a facial recognition software, and its Perl interface, and the other one was about the uses of Image::Magick, including the detailed instructions on how to create a psycho-llama. That last bit, I daresay, was worth the trip to Germany all by itself. The script to create the thing is in the presentation companion tarball, check it out (well, unless you suffer from epilepsy, in which case you want to stay as far away as possible).
So, bottom-line: Ruhr.pm rocks big time. If you're ever passing in the vicinity, I highly recommend paying them a visit. :-)
[1] Renée Bäcker saw my use.perl.org blog entry and forwarded the information to Ruhr.pm, Veit Wahlich -- fearless leader of the Ruhrgebiet mongers -- contacted me and arranged the details, and René Knopp was dispatched to pick me up from the train station. Many thanks to the whole bunch!
