S P U G (Seattle Perl Users Group)

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Meetings:  |Jan| Feb| Mar| Apr| May| Jun| Jul| Aug| Sep| Oct| Nov| Dec| 2002| 2003

What is Perl?

Perl is a powerful, portable, and mature programming language created by Larry Wall, with  contributions from lots of other people.  It is culturally derived from the UNIX  C language,  various UNIX shells, and the grep, sed, and AWK utilities of UNIX, among other influences.  Although it was first embraced by UNIX programmers and Systems Administrators, in recent years, Perl has become the most popular choice of Web developers doing CGI applications.  It runs under most modern computer operating systems, and is freely available and unencumbered by royalty or licensing restrictions

SPUG: Seattle Perl Users Group

The Seattle Perl Users Group is dedicated to the development of a mutually supportive community of Perl programmers in the Seattle, WA USA area, and to the professional development of the individual members. Our primary focus is on helping each other learn more about the Perl programming language.

In pursuit of these goals, we strive to encourage the following types of activities:

• helping local Perl programmers get to know each other
• helping each other learn more about Perl
• helping each other find Perl programming contracts and jobs
• discussing the ways in which the SPUG meetings can better serve the membership
• encouraging SPUG members to take active roles in SPUG for our collective benefit

We operate as a kind of "Educational Cooperative", by taking turns telling each other what we've learned about Perl.

White Camel Award

According to a recent survey, SPUG has the second largest subscriber base (over 400) of any Perl User Group in the world -- only the London group has more, but not by much. But SPUG is not only one of the biggest groups, it's also widely recognized as one of the best, due in part to our unmatched record of having at least one technical meeting per month since our inception in 1998! In fact, SPUG is so good that its founder, Tim Maher, was awarded the coveted White Camel Award in part for forming and running it. (Click the picture for a larger view).

Monthly Meetings

Our meetings are open to the general public, and Perl programmers of all levels are welcome. There is no charge to attend.

About Beginner's Nights

In the early days of SPUGgery, we had lots of newbies, but as our members evolved and the topics became more advanced, abstract, and downright bizarre (thanks Damian! 8-}), we reached a stage where attendance by newbies began to diminish.

So our current policy is that every 3rd meeting or so will be dedicated to beginner's topics. The (usually 3rd Tuesday) SPUG Newbie Meetings for 2004 will be held on 1/20, 4/20, 7/20, and 10/19.

January Meeting; Tuesday, 20 January 2004:

In this talk, veteran UNIX/Linux/Perl trainer Tim Maher will provide an overview of the Perl language and Perl culture, for the benefit of those who are interested in the language but don't yet know much about it. The emphasis will be on basic features of the language, especially those that are easy to learn for people familiar with the UNIX grep, sed, and/or awk commands, and basic shell programming principles (use of variables, arguments, redirection, etc.).

Tim's talk will feature excerpts from his upcoming book for Manning Press called Minimal Perl for Shell Users and Programmers, his commercial Perl training courses , and his past presentations at the Linux Fest Northwest conference, YAPC conferences in the US and Europe, and The Perl Conference.

Topics will include:

• the easiest way to write Perl programs
• the Five Perl One-liners all UNIX users should know
  • and one they shouldn't, but they'll learn it anyway
• three Perl scripts UNIX users shouldn't live without
• simple Perl scripts that improve on grep, sed, and awk
• which Shell loop is missing from standard Perl, and how to use it anyway
• What a module is, and where to look for free ones (CPAN!)

February Meeting; Tuesday, 17 February 2004:

In this talk, veteran UNIX/Linux/Perl trainer Tim Maher will continue his overview of the Perl language and Perl culture, for those who are interested in the language but don't yet know much about it. The emphasis will be on basic features of the language, especially those that are easy to learn for people familiar with the UNIX grep, sed, and/or awk commands, and basic shell programming principles (use of variables, arguments, redirection, etc.).

Tim's talk will feature excerpts from his upcoming book for Manning Press called Minimal Perl for Shell Users and Programmers, his commercial Perl training courses , and his past presentations at the Linux Fest Northwest conference, YAPC conferences in the US and Europe, and The Perl Conference.

Topics will include:

• the easiest way to write Perl programs
• the Five Perl One-liners all UNIX users should know
  • and one they shouldn't, but they'll learn it anyway
• three Perl scripts UNIX users shouldn't live without
• simple Perl scripts that improve on grep, sed, and awk
• which Shell loop is missing from standard Perl, and how to use it anyway
• What a module is, and where to look for free ones (CPAN!)

March Meeting; Tuesday, 16 March 2004:

We will be meeting at 4013 Stone Way N this month.

Andrew will provide a live and interactive introduction to the perl debugger.

Topics will include:

• stepping in, over, around, and through code
• getting back to where you were quickly after making changes
• quickly zeroing in on logic errors

Michael will re-introduce us to some old ways of doing things in SPUG where folks can share their projects or interests or problems. The synergy is very effective and will likely be what saves this country.

May Meeting; Tuesday, 18 May 2004:

We will be meeting at Geospiza this month.

Come wrap your brain around another set of creations that could only have come from the mind of Ingy, and have only been created with the Power of Perl.

We will be meeting in a new location. A big thanks to the many of the folks at Geospiza (a Life Science company, and big Perl user) for stepping up to hosting SPUG.

IO::All Perl Module

IO::All combines all of the best Perl IO modules into a single Spiffy object oriented interface to greatly simplify your everyday Perl IO idioms. It exports a single function called IO, which returns a new IO::All object. And that object can do it all!

Spork Perl Module

Spork lets you create HTML slideshow presentations easily. It comes with a sample slideshow. All you need is a text editor, a browser and a topic.

Spork allows you create an entire slideshow by editing a single file called Spork.slides (by default). Each slide is created using a minimal markup language similar to the syntax used in Kwiki wikis.

June Meeting; Tuesday, 15 June 2004:

We will be meeting at Geospiza this month.

Brad Fitzpatrick is the founder and fearless leader of LiveJournal.com, an Open Source project and company focused on blogging and social networking with over 3,000,000 accounts, over half of which are in active use. His specialties have come to include Perl, frightening MySQL replication topologies, load balancing, distributed caching, scalability, and high-availability. He dislikes buying unnecessary hardware and commercial software. As such, he finds or creates ways to get more out of hardware, the open source way.

A big thanks to the many of the folks at Geospiza (a Life Science company, and big Perl user) for stepping up to hosting SPUG.

Perlbal

Perlbal's a load-balancing reverse HTTP proxy, as well as a webserver, as well as hybrid combo (useful for serving big files with complex auth/mapping which Perl/PHP is better at). It also has web-based stats. It uses epoll and sendfile to do things incredibly fast which Perl normally sucks at. Everything works in a single thread using an event-based model (hence epoll) and all truly synchronous operations (like the one-time stat and open syscalls before a sendfile) are done in a cloned helper thread which communicates the results back async over a pipe (Linux::AIO module).

Basically it all shows how you can do really fancy low-level stuff in Perl and still be fast.

July Meeting; Tuesday, 20 July 2004:

We will be meeting at Geospiza this month.

Autrijus Tang: Born in 1981 CE, Autrijus is a self-educated i18n geek, net a(ctiv|narch|rt)ist, and serial entrepreneur. While not busily translating Free Software and related books to Chinese, autrijus engages in Open Source and wearable computing advocacy.

In a very short period of time, he has managed to publish a healthy collection of Perl modules, many dealing with i18n issues. Additionally, he has made significant contributions to bringing the beast that is Perl module distribution and the CPAN to a more orderly world. Or the vise versa, perhaps.

We currently do not have a topic from our speaker, but I have it on good authority that this is definitely not a concern. The only concern might be that our meeting will be on the same day as his arrival in Seattle. But he wouldn't be the first crazy out-of-town speaker to do this.

A big thanks to the many of the folks at Geospiza (a Life Science company, and big Perl user) for stepping up to hosting SPUG.

Topic

TBD

August Meeting; Tuesday, 17 August 2004:

We will be meeting at Geospiza this month.

Speaker Information

Tom has nine years of experience programming with C++ and one year with Visual Basic, Visual Test, and Perl. He currently works for Siemens Medical in Issaquah where they design software and hardware for ultrasound medical equipment. After working for three years in software with Siemens, Tom transitioned to automated testing where he creates and runs scripts. Tom's first technical job was creating reports for a food services company where he enjoyed automating the process to create more free time.

Topic

In the daily Seattle PI there is this 4x4 number puzzler. Tom is too cheap to purchase the paper, and was too lazy to surf the net and find an online source of them. Perl came to the rescue to help him roll his own.

Creating a puzzle was one thing, finding a solution was another, finding all possible solutions, and rating the difficulty of the puzzle was yet another.

The challenge became too complicated for me using traditional procedural scripting. Conway entered via his book on object oriented Perl and saved the day.

Outline:

• An introduction to the PI puzzler
• I'll bring enough for everybody to try it we can have a race with pencils and paper (they take about 5 minutes by hand)
• An introduction to how object oriented perl made it possible
• rough view of the procedural attempt
• rough view of the object oriented solution
• A hands on introduction to how a "class" helped solve the problem by hiding or "encapsulate" the complicated stuff
• organize the complicated data into clusters
• give interface of functions to apply to these clusters
• Debates about when to use object oriented perl
• i.e. blackjack, tic tac toe, data extraction for statistics

Note:

Although Mr. Campbell has kindly offered to speak at our meeting, he has informed us that he might be called away at the last minute to attend to other more urgent matters. Such is the way of the technology world.

Speaker Information

Bill Campbell has over 38 years in the computer industry. He is an expert in software and hardware, an experienced troubleshooter of computer problems, and a specialist in Linux and Unix applications. He has extensive experience installing complex networks, combining Unix, MS-Windows and Apple systems. Most recently, he has become an Internet guru, and has installed Internet Service Providers throughout the United States.

Topic

Plone is a CMF (Content Management Framework) that gives the web site designer considerable flexibility while making it easy for people who aren't HTML experts. Bill will cover the following topics related to Plone and Zope.

• Join a Plone site which makes you a member of the site with your own directory.
• Log in to a Plone site to give you privileged access to your Member area. You may also have other privileges, Manager, Owner, Editor, etc. allowing you extra privileges and access on the main site.
• Edit existing documents.
• Create new Documents, Folders, Events, etc. on your site. For the purpose of this document, the term ``objects'' refers to Plone Documents, Folders, Events, etc. The object type will only be specified if it's important in the context.
• Delete documents.
• Hide objects or make them visible.
• Submit objects for publication.

September Meeting; Tuesday, 21 September 2004:

We will be meeting at Geospiza this month.

Speaker Information

Founder, CEO, and lead trainer of Consultix.

Tim has over 27 years of experience with the Unix operating system and its associated utilities and languages, as both a system administrator and programmer.

Before founding Consultix in 1986, he developed and taught original courses as a professor of Computer Science at a major American university (Univ. of Utah), he developed software as a Sr. Systems Analyst for the university that did more than any other to develop UNIX into what it is today (U. C. Berkeley), and he developed and taught UNIX classes for the company that invented it (AT&T).

Topic

Magicpoint is a popular open source presentation package with a strange mix of wonderfully advanced and unbearably primitive features. As examples of the latter,there's no practical way to ask for a particular word to be italicized, or for the contents of a specified file to be inserted at an arbitrary position, or even for page numbers to be shown atop each page. Even worse, there's no support for tables or user-defined styles.

Don't get me wrong; I'm very fond of Magicpoint. But if there was ever an application in desperate need of a preprocessor to amplify its ergonomics, this is the "mother of all such applications".

Magicpoint-EZ to the rescue! It converts text files written in an enhanced Magicpoint dialect into standard Magicpoint format,allowing Magicpoint to be used to view sophisticated presentations -- in spite of its primitive support for their construction. As an added bonus, Magicpoint-EZ also makes the development of presentations more efficient, because the developer typically has to type only 40% of the characters that ultimately appear in the resulting Magicpoint file.

Magicpoint-EZ is over one year old, and has been used to create hundreds of impressive slides that have been shown at YAPC, TPC,and Perl mongers meetings -- where attendees have found it hard to believe they were viewing a Magicpoint presentation! This talk will demonstrate the features of Magicpoint-EZ, and describe the pure-Perl code that implements it. Along the way, attendees will learn generally applicable Perl techniques for automating the conversion of one body of text into another. Naturally, the presentation will be developed using Magicpoint-EZ itself, and presented using the standard Magicpoint program.

Speaker Information

Jonathan Gardner graduated with a BS in Physics from the University of Washington. He has been a perl developer since 2000. He's worked at CarDomain Networks, Classmates.com, and Smooth Corporation. Now he is a mass mail systems developer at Amazon.com, where he has championed SPF. He also writes a lot of Python code, and actively develops on the PostgreSQL project. His most recent interests include forming an organization to actively market open source technologies in the puget sound area.

Topic

From the SPF homepage:

"SPF fights email address forgery and makes it easier to identify spams, worms, and viruses. Domain owners identify sending mail servers in DNS. SMTP receivers verify the envelope sender address against this information, and can distinguish legitimate mail from spam before any message data is transmitted."

Jonathan Gardner will discuss the history of SPF, the current status of SPF and competing protocols like Domain Keys and Sender ID, as well as the future of SPF. He'll also show how SPF will be one of the steps needed to solve spam once and for all. He'll also show what steps your organization, large or small, need to take to deploy SPF.

October Meeting; Tuesday, 19 October 2004:

We will be meeting at Amazon.com this month.

Speaker Information

Owner and operator of Collier Technologies. He is currently working with Amazon's Enterprise Commerce Services to build the next generation of E-commerce infrastructure. C.J. has been using Perl since 1998 for tasks including daily system administration, building test automation infrastructure and desktop application programming.

Topic

C.J. will guide beginners through their first iterations of Hello World, exploring Perl syntax, scalars, lists and basic list operators. Please bring a laptop if you want to participate in this portion of the meeting. Sitting next to an experienced Perl guru will likely help as well.

Speaker Information

Patrick Galbraith is a Senior Systems Engineer with MySQL AB. He has been enjoying Perl and open source software since 1994 and has been lucky enough to pay his bills doing so!

• Launched East Side Journal's website (now Kingcountyjournal) in 1996
• Worked for the Cobalt Group from 1997-1999
• Worked for OSDN on Slashcode/slashdot.org from 1999 to 2002 (now OSTG)
• Other stints - Classmates.com, TMobile
• currently Senior Software/Engineer at MySQL AB where he works on DBD::mysql, build tools, and most recently the MySQL Federated Storage Handler

Topic

MySQL, until version 4.1, didn't have server-side prepare statements in the C API (which DBD::mysql uses). With the current version of DBD::mysql, prepare statements with placeholders are emulated by simple string replacement, and results in having none of the benefits of using 'prepare' with placeholders, so many perl developers haven't really utilized the benefit of using placeholders in SQL such as with:

    my $val1 = 1;
    my $val2 = 'Test value';
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO testtable VALUES (?, ?)");
    
    $dbh->execute($val1, $val2);

Now that MySQL version 4.1 and later versions are available, it is possible to perform server side prepare statements in the C API, which results in much better performance. DBD::mysql will soon (if not now) have this functionality, which will give Perl developers the ability to use server side prepare statements, which in turn will give them better performance.

Patrick will show the Perl developer briefly how this was accomplished in the driver code. Also, he will show them how to write applications that take advantage of this new functionality, such as how they can prepare a single SQL insert statement and simply pass the values they wish for their application to insert by simply calling 'execute' as in the previous example. He will detail how their application can benefit from this, and how it will result in fewer database calls, using a mod_perl database-driven web application as an example.

He will also discuss future ideas for DBD::mysql, such as named placeholders and cursors.

November Meeting; Tuesday, 16 November 2004:

We will be meeting at Amazon.com this month.

Speaker Information

Jonathan Swartz is the original author of Mason and a current Amazon.com employee.

Topic

Mason is a popular Perl-based framework for developing web sites. Its component-based architecture allows the developer to break up websites into reusable parts, and it includes an extensive set of features for dealing with every-day web development problems. Mason is used by thousands of websites including Amazon.com, Salon.com, and AvantGo.

Jonathan will

• give a short introduction to Mason
• talk about the benefits and challenges of using Mason/Perl at Amazon
• summarize the latest Mason features (including changes inspired at Amazon)
• ponder Mason's future in the rapidly maturing web development world

December Meeting; Tuesday, 21 December 2004:

We will be meeting at Amazon.com this month.

Speaker Information

Bio forthcoming...

Topic

"Perl: Past, Present, and Future" Further details forthcoming...

Future Meetings (3rd Tuesdays)
We're Accepting Proposals!

Anyone who has Perl knowledge to share is welcome to volunteer to make a presentation at one of our meetings. Email proposals to talks {at} seattleperl.org.

Meeting Time

The official meeting is on 3rd Tuesdays from 7-9pm, preceded and followed by optional social hours over adult beverages at a nearby facility.

Location

As of October 2004, we will be meeting at the offices of Amazon.com in their Pac-Med building.

1200 12th Ave S
Seattle WA 98144-2712

• Yahoo! Maps
• MapQuest

I-5 (from North or South)

• On I-5, take the S Dearborn St exit and turn West on Dearborn (I-5 Southbound: turn right; I-5 Northbound: turn left) and proceed approximately two blocks.
• Turn right on 8th Ave S and proceed North for three blocks.
• Turn right on S King St and proceed East for approximately five blocks.
• Turn right on 12th Ave S and proceed South for approximately five blocks. Along this way, you will cross over the Rizal bridge.
• At this point, notice that you have been going in a circle.
• Skip to Pac-Med Building below.

I-90 (from East)

• On I-90, take the Rainier Ave S (hwy 900) exit Northbound and proceed approximately six blocks.
• Turn left on S King St and proceed West for approximately two blocks.
• Turn left on 12th Ave S and proceed South for approximately five blocks. Along this way, you will cross over the Rizal bridge.

Pac-Med Building

• Turn right at Charles St (the light after the bridge). The Amazon.com Pac-Med building is visible ahead and on the left as you make the turn and proceed South on Charles (Charles borders the West side of the building).
• Park.
• Walk to the South entrance of the tower. There is a convenient path that goes around the building in case you accidently end up at the North entrance.
• Enter building and go to the reception/security desk to the right. Sign in and wait to be escorted to the meeting room (just like when we met at Safeco in the U-district, more or less).

If so, join the SPUG Mailing List by visiting the subscription page.

If you don't want to receive daily messages, check the box on that page to select the digest version. To see older messages (going back as far as Jan., 2003), click on Spug-List Archives on that same page.

Recruiters at Meetings:

Job Offers for SPUG Members

Some of our members do contract Perl programming work, while others are looking for full-time jobs. Accordingly, we are always interested to hear about openings for Perl Programmers in the Seattle area!

We can help you communicate your job opening to the hundreds of Perl programmers on our mailing list. By providing you access to our members, we are providing you with a valuable service at no charge. In return, we ask that you provide the following details of your job opening, to prevent our members from individually having to ask the questions that would elicit the same answers.

To submit your job listing for consideration, Email a description of it containing the following details, to jobs {at} seattleperl.org.

• required skill-set
• contract or permanent position
  • for contracts, expected duration and pay range
  • for permanent positions, availability of stock options or other incentive plans
• placement through recruiter, or directly with company?
• W-2 vs. 1099 status
  • any restrictions on 1099 status: Corporation, etc.?
• physical location
  • telecommuting possible?
• company's product or service
  • e-commerce, grocery shopping, nuclear weapons, pornography, etc.

SPUG Contact Info

• Leader: Andrew Sweger
• Email: andrew {at} sweger.net
• U.S. Mail: SPUG, PO Box 33147, Seattle WA 98133-0147 USA
• Phone:  (206) 219-7119

To comment on this WEB-page,

• send Email to: andrew {at} sweger.net

Many thanks to Zipcon Internet Services. for hosting the SPUG website
and meeting space sponsor, Amazon

Copyright © 2004 Andrew Sweger
portions © Tim Maher 1998-2004