Another very busy, but very enjoyable day.
The two keynotes this morning were both about the ways that Open Source is being used in Bioinformatics research. One of the speakers (Ewan Birney) is based in Cambridge and is looking for staff, so I think I'll try to get to talk to him at some point in the next couple of of days.
The first session I went to was Ben and Mena Trott talking about Moveable Type. I use MT for a couple of blogs (here and here) so it was nice to hear about it from the creators. I was so impressed that straight after the session I went off and made a donation to them for my copy of the software.
After lunch I went to Jos and Ann's session on CPANPLUS. Much as I love CPAN.pm, I know that's it's showing its age. CPANPLUS looks like it will be a great replacement.
At some point in the afternoon I sent a complaining email to CafePress. Last Thursday I ordered some merchandise from my nms store, expecting that it would arrive at some point this week (I really wanted to wear the t-shirt at the nms BOF). There was no sign of it arriving. I hadn't even got the email saying that it had been shipped. I pointed out in my email that there was no point in sending the stuff to me now as I wasn't going to be in the hotel after Saturday. Within a couple of hours I got an email back apologising for the delay and saying that they would ship the stuff to me in the UK for no extra cost. That seems like a pretty good resolution to me.
We also took the traditional #perl group photo this afternoon. There were far more people than last year. I'll post a link when the photo goes online.
merlyn's "Teaching Learning Perl" talk was interesting, but as he said at the start of the talk, it wasn't really aimed at people like me. It was really aimed at people with no training experience who are asked to give a class on Perl to some of their colleagues. It was still a useful reminder of the do's and don't's of giving a successful presentation.
I quickly popped into the O'Reilly author signing and discussed with a couple of author's how weird (but ultimately satisfying) it is to have complete strangers come up to you and ask you to sign their copy of your book.
And then it was the nms BOF. I really wish I'd thought of giving a lightning talk on nms as that would have served as a good advert for the BOF. As it was we had four people there, but they all seemed interested in the project.
Straight after that was the Perl Foundation. This largely consisted of gnat and Elian looking for ways that the TPF could be even more successful in the coming year than it has been to date. They also pointed out that brian d foy who started the Perl Mongers (which is now part of TPF) has moved on to other things (like The Perl Review) and they would like someone to take on his Perl Mongers role. Next think I know, my hand is in the air and everone is thanking me for volunteering. Hey ho.
Next stop was the LAN party in the hotel lobby and bar. cwest had done a great job in organising it. As part of this party we ran an auction to raise money for the Perl Foundation. Earlier in the week I'd donated a complete set of london.pm t-shirts and Casey had asked a number of Perl luminaries to sign them. Also Robrt had some Stitch dolls to add to the pile. Robrt was the auctioneer and he did a great job. One of the shirts (the Sunnydale one) went for $100.
Soon after the auction I went off to gnat's party. He informed us that the fridge was full of beer and that it was imperative that it was all drunk. I tried my best, but the busy day caught up with me and I had to bow out embarassingly early. On the way back thru the bar, I stopped just long enough to see exactly how bad at Quake acme is.
