It's winter in Wellington. We don't get snow here but it is currently cold and wet. This may help explain the lower than usual attendance at last night's Wellington.pm meeting. The fact that one of our two speakers had to cancel about 6 hours before the meeting may have put people off too.
I had recently considered that it would be a good idea to have a 'spare' presentation ready in case of a last minute cancellation. Unfortunately, I hadn't progressed that past the "thinking about it" stage. So I had to work fast to come up with something before the meeting started. In the end, I did a quick (and fairly superficial) demo of Ruby on Rails and then did an Introduction to Ruby for Perl Programmers.
Our other speaker Brenda (also a work colleague) talked about a Perl script her team is using to manage database schema changes in their projects (sorry, no slides). When she brought the code up on screen, I was amused to see that the comment block at the beginning included this line:
# This script was in no way inspired by Grant McLean.
At least they won't be coming to me for support :-)
On a releated note, I suggested to another colleague that he might like to look into using XML::LibXML and XPath for his HTML scraping needs. After I'd referred him to my lightning talk slides on the subject, he had a play around and came back with this quote:
so LibXML is pretty damned fast then ...
Apparently it was 20 times quicker than whatever he was using.
