OOPSLA 2009 happened a few weeks ago. OOPSLA stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications and I've always been quite interested in the conference. The proceedings of the conference aren't put online, but I've managed to find two interesting papers:
A Market-Based Approach to Software Evolution (PDF) tries to imagine an open market which is targetted around fixing bugs and improving software. It's quite interesting as it's quite similar to a proposal from Nicholas on spending other people's money. The authors point out many potential flaws.
The Commenting Practice of Open Source (PDF) analyses projects on Ohloh and tries to spot commenting trends. "We find that comment density is independent of team and project size", but they find that it varies from language to language. "Java has the highest mean of comment lines per source lines at.. one comment line for three source code lines" and "Perl has the lowest mean with.. one comment line for nine source code lines". They list as future work to find out why this might be the case.
A few weeks ago I was up in the hills about Geneva reminiscing with my sister about all the things we used to enjoy when we were smaller. When I was younger I used to really enjoy programming computer games, first on my 48K Spectrum and then later on in STOS BASIC and then 68000 assembly language on my Atari ST.
I haven't programmed a game in a very long time. However, I'm an avid gamer, playing games while travelling on my DS and at home on my Xbox 360. I almost enjoy reading Edge magazine more than I like playing games.
At YAPC::Europe in Lisbon, Domm pointed out that the Perl SDL project (which wraps the Simple DirectMedia Layer) was languishing and that we should all programs games in Perl.
A few months later I got around to playing with SDL and made a simple breakout clone which I styled after Batty on the Spectrum, but with gravity. It was fairly easy to program, but there was a lot to grasp. The Perl libraries are a mix between a Perl interface to SDL and a Perlish interface to SDL, with limited documentation, tests and examples.
Of course this is where I join the #sdl IRC channel on irc.perl.org and start discussing with the other hackers (kthakore, garu, nothingmuch). We decide on a major redesign to split the project into two sections: the main code will just wrap SDL and then there will be another layer which makes it easier to use. I've started writing a bunch of XS on the redesign branch of the repository while trying to keep Bouncy (my game) still working. There is a bunch of work still to do but we've made a good start. This is what Bouncy looks like at the moment:
I'm trying to update various URLs in the Perl source code. Regarding the Perl/iX for HP e3000 MPE README.
It's very out of date now and most of the URLs are broken. I've contacted Mark Bixby, but he no longer has any involvement with the MPE/iX OS or that particular Perl port.
Does anyone run Perl on this platform? Does anyone build Perl on this platform? If so, please contact me and we'll try and update the details. Cheers!
Two weeks ago I attended YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon, Portgual. This wasn't the first YAPC in Portugal - in 2005 we went to Braga, a university town inland and it was a very well organised conference. It's no surprise the YAPC in Lisbon was also amazingly well organised, as it was the same organisers - José Castro (cog), Alberto Simões (ambs) and Magda Joana Silva. Thank you so much José, Alberto, Magda and all the others involved - it was amazing.
The theme of the conference was "Corporate Perl" and this made a useful track in the vast schedule. It's amazing all the places Perl is used. Every talk I attended was great - the speakers knew their material and explained their content well. Some of the presentations are already online, see "Talk" in the schedule.
I liked the venue, three metro stops away from our hotel (also very walkable). The main room was huge and the three other tracks were just nearby, leaving a large space behind these for socialising with the just-over 300 attendees (and easy access to the sun). This was also where the terribly-important refreshments were, including oh-so-tasty pastéis de Nata.
The attendees' dinner was great. It was in a huge churrascaria (meat on swords!) by the river. It was also a good location for the Quizz Show, with 16 two-person teams fighting to be the geekiest. This was quite hard, as the questions varied from Portuguese history, Star Trek, Buffy and Perl internals ("How many levels of precedence does Perl 5.10.0 have?") to Unix history.
Community was very important at the conference - there are lots of seperate groups of Perl people clustered around the core, Perl modules, Perl projects or even cities and conferences are where you can mix, meet people in real life and start making crazy plans for the future. There are so many exciting things going on in Perl and I'm really looking forward to YAPC::Europe in Pisa in 2010!
I always enjoy reading the papers of the SIGGRAPH conference. It's nice to see what new graphical techniques are coming. Here are my favourite picks from 2009:
- Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization
- Self-organizing tree models for image synthesis
- 4D Frequency Analysis of Computational Cameras for Depth of Field Extension
- Deforming Meshes that Split and Merge
"These images from an animation show viscoelastic horses being dropped onto one another".
I love Moose. It's a postmodern object system for Perl 5. It's very powerful, saves me writing a lot of code and is very extensible. Dave Rolsky received a grant to write the Moose::Manual and it's a great introduction to Moose, how to use Moose and covers every part of it in detail. I don't really enjoying reading documentation on a screen, so I converted the manual from Pod to LaTeX so that the typography would be beautiful, fixed a few typos in the manual, designed a nice cover and you can now buy a copy for yourself. At the YAPC::Europe 2009 auction a copy of the book signed by Yuval Kogman and Larry Wall went for €120!
I love Moose. It's a postmodern object system for Perl 5. It's very powerful, saves me writing a lot of code and is very extensible. Dave Rolsky received a grant to write the Moose::Manual and it's a great introduction to Moose, how to use Moose and covers every part of it in detail. I don't really enjoying reading documentation on a screen, so I converted the manual from Pod to LaTeX so that the typography would be beautiful, fixed a few typos in the manual, designed a nice cover and you can now buy a copy for yourself. At the YAPC::Europe 2009 auction a copy of the book signed by Yuval Kogman and Larry Wall went for €120!
London Perl Mongers organises technical meetings every two months. The technical meetings are a chance to find out what has been going on in the Perl community, what techniques people are using and how Perl integrates with other software.
The next technical meeting will be on the 30th July from 7pm to 9pm (you may arrive from 6.30pm, sign in at the reception) and the theme is “Corporate Perl”. You have to sign up to attend, see below. It will be held at Gumtree's's offices near Richmond station. Many thanks to Dave Cross, Gumtree and everyone involved for allowing us to use this wonderful venue.
Talks planned so far:
Dave Cross - Why do so many companies re-invent well-known CPAN
modules badly and end up writing far too much code?
Pedro Figueiredo - Perl in the cloud
Léon Brocard - Fewer cables
Our venue size is limited so you will have to sign up to attend this meeting.
http://londonpmtech.appspot.com/
See you there, Léon
