[Perl] Summary of our last meeting

[Shlomo Yona]

Hello everyone,

Last Thursday we had a Perl Mongers meeting hosted by 
Raz Information Systems LTD. http://www.raz.co.il/

The people who showed up were:
        Gabor Szabo
        Semuel Fomberg
        Shlomo Yona
        Shlomi Fish
        Mikhael Goikhman
        Uri Itscowits
        Roi Illouz
        Oded Resnik
        Miri Resnik
        Aline Resnik
        Pinkhas Nisanov

As in the previous two times I've attended a Perl Mongers meeting in
Raz Information Systems LTD, we had nice refreshments waiting for us
when we came in.

Until 19:00 the informal part of the meeting took place, and we were
talking about various Perl and Open Source issues and also exchanging
some exciting news about new things some of us did.

Once we all sat down for the formal part it was about 19:00.

Oded said a few words about Ariel, who has passed away about one month
ago. We learned how Ariel was knowledgeable about many aspects of computing
and how he was involved in several projects which are now orphans on CPAN.
Oded suggested that we might take up and continue some of Ariel's work so
it can serve as a memorial to him. Gabor suggested that the nice talk Oded
gave about Ariel can be written down and put on the perl.org.il site.


Next, Gabor spoke about Perl activity in Israel. Activities in the center (e.g.
Perl Mongers meeting) and in Haifa. What about activities in Be'er-Sheva (with 
some camels?!). 

Gabor got some books inherited from Gaal (former Israel Perl Mongers) which were
given by book publishers (O'really mainly), and he also approached Manning publishing
and got us some more Perl related books. The deal is that members are encauraged to 
write book reviews and to publish it online, preferably on the perl.org.il site,
preferably, in English. Some of us took some books from our nice library (thanks to
Gabor who carried all the books from Modiyin).

As far as I know the following people loaned the following books for one month:

        Shlomo Yona     extending and embedding Perl
        Gabor Szabo     data munging with Perl
        Uri Itscowits   perl for system administration
        offer kaye      user friendly the comic strip

Perhaps more took books, but have not filled me in.

After that, I gave a talk about Sorting in Perl. I am glad that even the people
who thought they saw it all, learned something from this lecture.
The lecture slides are located at:
http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~shlomo/perl/short_sort_lecture/
a more lengthy version of the slides are available at:
http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~shlomo/perl/lecture5/

After the lecture Gabor showed us some nice tricks using Filters in Perl, and
especially the nice Acme::Bleach (http://search.cpan.org/author/DCONWAY/Acme-Bleach-1.12/lib/Acme/Bleach.pm)

That's it - a short summary from my point of view.
I'd like to hear some comments on the meeting from other people's view.

-- 
Shlomo Yona
shlomo at cs.haifa.ac.il
http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~shlomo/