This afternoon wasn't quite as frantic as this morning's six talks, in one way, since you didn't have to decide where to be as often. I decided to camp in the room with Jos's CPANPLUS talk, which was interesting although I think I paid a little too little attention once again; the fact it has interfaces to many package management systems had passed me by (and Aevil managed to volunteer to build Solaris packages, too, I think). That was nifty. I was fighting various installation problems on OS X during the talk on TERN, which would have gone over my head anyway, I suspect.
The main reason I was camped in that room was for Adam Turoff's talk, advertised as SOAP but really covering XML-RPC and REST too. In the end it was more of a high-level overview but it did help clear up the distinctions between them. I'm not sure a longer talk would strictly be useful. Following that was a talk on getting through authenticating firewalls with Perl's socket programming, which again I paid slightly too little attention to.
Lightning talks followed, with Adam Turoff doing two good talks, on learning from other languages (FORTRAN, Lisp, Smalltalk, C++ and Forth) and why Perl6 is a good thing. There were also talks criticising the community's handling of social issues and search.cpan.org which seemed to go down badly on IRC, but which I thought had a kernel of truth; Allison Randal, a newcomer to the Perl community who's involved in Perl6 design, who did a Dr Seuss style poem on the new language, and other talks on graphing web sites (acme would be proud), using Getopt::Declare, buidling complex websites, SNMP and a few others that seemed to have less impact my memory. Oh, we're just about to get gnat's movie...
Once the lightning talks finish (yes, I'm being very bad and blogging them during the time allocated) there's a set of BOFs; I think I'll go to the CPANPLUS one, continuing my avoidance of pretty much all the Perl6 stuff (sorry, people). There's also a barbecue on later, which I think I've managed to get a lift to.
