Impressionistic summary of the French PW 2007 Lyon

ddn123456 on 2007-11-20T10:12:05

Small personal impressionistic summary (written yesterday in my spare time) of the French Perl Workshop 2007 at Lyon

>> About 59 French, Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, English and a very few camouflaged female Vulcan perl mongers participated to the FPW.

>> For about 20 people it was their first perl workshop experience.

>> 2 rooms were provided and named after 2 sponsors (Booking.com & EdenWare).

>> Both rooms were very well equiped with wireless Internet and beamer.

>> A web broadcast of all presentations given in the "Booking.com"-room is available at http://webcast.in2p3.fr/FPW2007. This since this room was equipped with a high-end camera & sound system operated by a dedicated technician (sponsored by CC-IN2P3).

>> Following tracks were available at the FPW.
- Catalyst
- Parrot
- Développement
- Perl6
- Keynote
- Windows
- POE
- ÃœberPerl

>> At the end of the first day, we were privileged to a visit of the CC-IN2P3's machine room (Centre de Calcul de l'Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules aka National Nuclear and Particle Physics Calculus Center). This Calculus Centre hosts the calculus data for CERN and several other global physics science centres throughout the world, for the record they don't even count in TeraBytes anymore but in multi-figure PetaBytes :-). And they're always looking for some smart motivated people, if you're interested ;-)

>> Perl 5.10 and 6.0 were the guests of honour the second day. We even were witness to the official upload/launch of Perl 5.10 RC1!

>> Due to circumstances the schedule had to be quite adequately adapted by the organisers. Even Murphy's Law couldn't slow down the schedule. The 2 schedule issues (Matt Trout's sudden illness just before the FPW & a room unavailability for the first hour on Saturday morning) were very swiftly and adequately taken care off. Rescheduling was very swiftly verbally + electronically communicated and executed.

>> Conclusion. It was quite an interesting deep tech perl workshop experience. Definitely worth participating if you master enough of the French language.

=> Chapeau for the French Organisers!

Specific notes about the talks I followed.
Day 1
Day 1 started with the traditional kick-off for all Perl Workshops. Participant's welcoming, PW Opening Talk, Job Fair Opening Talk, Coffee and Job Fair Break, Keynote Speech. Then the talks started.
So here a small impression of the talks I attended to.

1. Dirk De Nijs (ddn123456) - Win32 Perl: Introduction to Perl & WMI (40 min, English) [Windows]
- In the open source world you just open the binaries and have a look at the internals of the beast bugging you. With Win32 Perl one usually doesn't have this luxury. Therefore this talk about the WMI HowTo undocumented basics. Do you really want to do it in Perl if you can just copy-paste some vbs script from the Internet?
- Well if you just need it done in 2 minutes flat and never going to use it ever again... Perhaps.
- However if you have already acquired a profound Perl scripting knowledge and want to make use of its regular expressions, xml & db handling, excel & msoffice reporting, perhaps compiled into an executable, reuse this code later on...and last but certainly not least Perl's cross-Win32-OS functional consistency (which is VBS's Achilles Heel).
It's a good idea just to have a look at it and do it in Perl. And guess what all the hard work of looking up the basics is done already and available right here :-).

2. Serge Hoffmann (atcom) - Particularités de Perl pour Windows (20 min, Français) [Windows]
- A great talk to show around non-Win32 connaisseurs in the wonders and pitfalls of Perl administering, handling and automating on Win32.
- Chapeau Serge.

3. mirod - XML::Twig pour les nuls (40 min, Français) Eriam Schaffter []
- A nice talk giving a good impression of the XML::Twig Swiss Toolkit for "giga-sized" xml files.

4. Jerome Quelin (jq) - Introduction à POE [POE]
- MonoThreaded MultiTask Framework introduction of it heights and loweths. Impressive.

5. damien krotkine (dams) - RT + REST + POE + ncurses = RT::Client::Console (40 min, Français) [POE]
- POE-based Terminal Console interface (Rest) to RT (issue ticket management system similar to BugZilla). Impressive!

6. Alexis Sukrieh - Perl Console - Votre compagnon pour développer en Perl (40 min, Français) [Développement]
- *nix interactive perl console allowing you to enter line by line a small test program with a cached history of entered line. Win32 might be an issue. A very handy small development tool avoiding you all those test.pl files.

7. Aaron Crane - Faster Regexes: What to do when text matching is your bottleneck (20 min, English) []
- Basically downsize the amount and format of data to filter, read Jeffreys Friedl's book really well, apply that knowledge and you may gain a bit. Redesign and develop a new algorithm and you may gain a lot more.

8. Jerome Quelin (jq) - rrdtool à la rescousse (20 min, Français) []
- A sysadmin snmp data collector and graph generator. Monitoring a >1000 machine park does generate a lot of logging data however. Perl & some aggregation logic to the help of course. Main logic is to aggregate and fade out data as it goes back in time, thus keeping a good overview of the past and detailed minutes of the recent data collections in figures and graphs. As very well explained by Jerome Quelin.

9. Evening dinner at Brasseries George where the virtues of emacs and vi met;-).


Day 2

Day 2 started with the Participant's welcoming, and then the talks.

1. Laurent Dami (dami) - Data::Domain - validation d'arbres de données (20 min, Français)
- (WebCast advised).

2. Jonathan Worthington - Parallel New World (40 min, English)
- Parallel programming explanation motivated through the essential current hardware cpu and memory limitations. Worthwhile watching the webcast!

3. Stephane Payrard (cognominal) - Comprendre haskell pour mieux programmer en d'autres langages (40 min, Français)

- Functional programming introduction and its influence on Perl 6. Hmm as remote from and close to each other as math multiplication tables and Pythagoras formulae. Fascinating introduction. For the moment I'll nevertheless stick to Perl however :-).

4. Jonathan Worthington - Understanding Roles, Constraints and Classes (40 min, English) [Perl6]
- Low Level technical tips and tricks for OO-handling in Perl 6. Also worthwhile watching the webcast!

5. Alexis Sukrieh - Redécouvrir le Perl Objet avec Moose (40 min, Français) [Perl6]
- Backporting Perl 6 OO into Perl 5 with Moose and then catching Moose's essence in COAT which you just can pick up and go.

6. Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni (Maddingue) - use CPAN; # ROGNTUDJUU ! (40 min, Français) [ÜberPerl]
- A CPAN's Best Of. (Webcast advised).

7. Lightning Talks (60 min)


- A nice ratatouille of talks. And a valuable metaphor to remember. ReInventing the wheel is a good idea. ReInventing the toothbrush really isn't. (Cf. The Fabulous Toothbrush Lightning Talk) (Webcast advised).

8. Closure Speech

9. Auction
- TShirts personalised by Perl's leading figures, Flux, perl books and objects, ... Just another great auction where things with a big intellectual or emotional value are sold at awesome prices. ;-)

For more info please refer to:

http://webcast.in2p3.fr/FPW2007



With kind regards

ddn123456