I was going to try and put these up one day at a time, but it's been so long since the conference I'll a couple up each day now.
Day 0 : 17th September 2002
The journey started with Nicole and Dan dropping me off at Brum airport. Apparently for the rest of the afternoon Dan's conversation centred around "Daddy ... plane ... up ... gone". I've been told to buy him a plane before I get back.
The flight over was uneventful, although the train journey into Munich proved exasperating. Unfortunately it appeared the engine was having problems and a 40 min journey turned into an hour and a quarter. Eventually found the hotel only discover .. NO BAR!!!!! Ah!!! Oh well there are several establishments nearby. Eventually found many of the attendees at the restaurant Augustiner, where we talked, drank and some even ate.
Most had had a long day, so retired to bed early. I decided to do the same and get an early start in the morning.
Day 1 : 18th September 2002
After setting off in plenty of time, we discovered the directions for the venue were centred around the main building. So after a long trek round, we eventually found a security guard who directed us to the right place.
My first tutorial was Tom Pheonix's "Practical Web programmming" originally a talk by Randall Schwartz. The talk is well suited to anyone wanting learn some good ideas for web programming, but unfortunately for me personally it didn't go as far as I was hoping.
Randall's columns pages (http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/columns.html) include the examples being used, so I will take a wander through them later. One good thing it did do, was remind me I must use Cache::FileCache alot more than I do. Currently I have the bad habit of using Data::Dumper and then dump hashes to files, which isn't really the best way to cache data ... even though it works.
The morning break provided an opportunity to hook up with the rest of London.pm, who had managed to acquire a table with a power point and had daisy-chained some 4-gang sockets for us all to power up our laptops.
Alas I still haven't gotten around to sorting out a wireless card, which is a bit infuriating as everyone else is happily chatting away on IRC and I can't join in :( Have been directed to where the computer shops are here, so may see if I can get one on the cheap.
Now waiting for lunch followed by Schwern's talk on testing. I'm looking forward to that as I'm hoping to persuade QIIS to invest in the time for us to write a proper testing suite. I've amassed several papers and the like that people have kindly pointed me at, so the evidence of this being a *Good Idea* is mounting up :)
Unfortunately for Schwern he'd only just arrived at the conference having only flown in from Scandinavian from a Java conference an hour or so earlier. The talk was originally to be about Advanced Testing, but ended up being a bit more adhoc. There were some very good ideas that I'm going to taking away from this, but I was disappointed that some of the audience obviously hadn't thought to read up a bit more and were asking some very basic questions about the Test modules.
However, some of the modules I shall be looking into are WWW::Automate, Test::HTML::Lint and Dunce::Files. I liked the idea of replacing the DBI connection routines to test modules which need, but don't have to hand, a database. I kind of figured you could do it, but didn't realise how easy it was.
Towards the end of the talk, Schwern invited Greg McCarroll to talk about Test::MockObject as written by chromatic. All you need to know is new() and mock() to create and use a pretend object, which can then be used to fake objects during testing.
Marty Pauley then covered 'Testing Web Applications' with Apache::Mock, based on Apache::FakeRequest to test scripts and modules that may require a web interface to be tested.
Several Test modules were covered, as well as a discussion about including tests within your POD comments. In most instances the tests are distinct files in a testing directory, but as many include examples with their POD, why not test those too.
All in all a good talk, and covered alot ground. Hopefully my bosses will see it as a good thing too when I get back.
Straight after the talk I went in search of a wireless network card. Unfortunately the two shops I found didn't really inspire me with confidence. I was left feeling that prices were too high and the what if something goes wrong scenario? I decided to make do and just make sure I get one for next year's conference.
Back to the hotel for a quick phone call home, and then some of us met up at the pub on the corner. Many of our crowd were attending the speakers dinner, but the rest of us decided to have a nice meal by ourselves. We managed to spend alot and as a thank you, the staff gave us a round of Scnapps ... very nice. After sometime, the speakers started to return and joined us until the pub closed. Then it was off to bed, although I hear Greg managed to persuade several to carry on the drinking in his room.
to be continued...
I heard someone saying "MockObject" in one of acme's videos. Now I know who! Thank you.
