Today started with a fun little meeting in the lobby whilst waiting for the bus to the conference, while mjd castigated people for giving away his talk (by reading the Big Orange Proceedings Book and remembering them), and there was also some talk about Mail::Audit, Procmail and non-crispy duck.
After arriving I went to Adam Turoff's talk on open-source presentation tools. He swiftly pointed out why Powerpoint won't do, covered the shortcoming of both Magicpoint and HTML slides, and pointed out Projector (which runs on Perl/TK), TeX to PDF tools (which he doesn't use as he doesn't know TeX, which I can identify with) and AxPoint, which he settled on and I might have a look at (being similarly enamoured with XML myself; I'm aiming to see his SOAP talk later.)
Following that I stayed put partly as it was easy, but Casey West's talk on Imager turned out to be interesting. Imager is somewhere between Image::Magick and GD, although if I heard right it doesn't use C. Anyway, the talk was a good quick intro to writing things, and it looks like it can handle at least TrueType fonts, so I'll think about giving it a go.
A quick run down the corridor to Brown 100 led me to Simon Cozen's talk on his top ten useful modules. He cheated a bit by including a couple of bundles, but the plugs for XML::Simple (something I like) and POE (see yesterday's entries), along with a bunch of others which I'd largely come across already (even if I didn't use them).
I stayed in that room while mjd talked about Mailing List Judo, or how to get your patch past the minefield that is p5p. It was very amusing, even to a non-p5p reader like myself.
For lunchtime, pizza has been ordered and paid for. Mmm.
