Memoirs of a Roadie

Making Memories

Posted on 11th February 2008

In June 2005 I was in Toronto for the 2005 YAPC::NA Perl Conference. Aside from being my first YAPC::NA conference, it was also a chance to discover first hand some of the places that are referenced on albums and in songs for Rush, one of my favourite bands. I first discovered the band in the late 70s, and finally got to see them on the Signals tour in the UK. I've seen them a few times since, including being in the audience for A Show Of Hands, but I've always wanted to visit the city were they made their home.

I also got to go up the CN tower, the tallest tower in the world at the current time.

I first uploaded these photos onto a BlueYonder photo album site, which has long since been shutdown, although VirginMedia seen to have resurrected it, but none of the photos or accounts are there from the previous incarnation. It's been on my TODO list for some time to reload the photos to my personal site, and finally last week I found them. Now I have to find all those links I made previously and update them.

The trip itself marked my first speaking engagement in North America. I have been fortunate enough to continue this since. Toronto itself is a great city, and although it's a bit of a trek, Niagara Falls aren't too far away. However, it was the city's association with Rush that fascinated me the most. Although I got to see a lot of sights, I didn't quite see as much as I would have liked. There were several bars and restaurants, and official offices that I would have liked to have seen, but most of all I would have loved to have seen a concert at Massey Hall and The Orbit Room. Seeing as MessageLabs now have a base there, it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that I could be visiting the city again at some point. I'll also have to time it to have a few beers with the Toronto Perl Mongers too, who did such a wonderful job of organising the Perl Conference.

Photos uploaded to the following galleries:

• Toronto - Flight, Tower and Fireworks
  
• Toronto - Niagara and Moving Pitcures
  
• Toronto - Danforth & Pape and Maple Leaf Gardens
  
• Toronto - Hotel, City and Airport

File Under: canada / music / rush / toronto / yapc NO COMMENTS

A Light In The Black

Posted on 5th January 2008

Now that I'm looking to another year of the Birmingham.pm World Tour, with visits to a number of UK LUG and Perl Monger groups, LUGRadio Live (UK not US), the UKUUG Spring Conference in Birmingham, YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe, as well as possibly a few European Workshops too, I need to start think what I'm going to present. I like the fact I can go to Linux based groups and conferences and talk about a variety of Perl topics, as although I might not be an expert, I know enough to give an introduction in several areas at least. But for more Perl specific technical events, I really need to stick to what I know.

The problem is that I feel I've done enough with CPAN Testing, Phrasebooks and Selenium for the time being, and it does get a bit boring for both me and the audience if I'm repeating myself every year. I may do some update on CPAN Testing, as there are likely to be changes in the coming year, a lot of which is being worked on currently, but what else is there that I could present that would be of interest to somebody?

One talk subject that has crossed my mind has been to do something like 'Labyrinth - A Perl Success Story'. It's been commented a few times that within the Perl community we talk a lot about the possibilities (particularly with frameworks) rather than getting to the finished product. While Labyrinth might not be for everyone, it might possibly be something that works for some, and as a consequence might interest people who have been asking me what it is and why I wrote it. However, although it is related to web and content management it isn't the next Catalyst or the new Jifty. You might be able to draw similarities between them all, but there are also many differences. Labyrinth isn't a framework as such, it's not meant for high-availability websites, and it also doesn't have the large development team knocking out code and fixing bugs that the others have. It's just me. But it might have just enough functionality and usability for someone to pick it up and get a site running how they want it to work, without having to understand the magic internals of frameworks like Catalyst and Jifty. I wouldn't be talking about the internals anyway, as I would prefer to give examples of how I solved problems and interesting asides that led me to learn something new about web design. I'm just not sure enough people would find it that interesting.

Further topics that come from the guts of Labyrinth, and are things that I have been keen to see how other people solve the same problem, are user input validation and content output correction. At the moment Labyrinth handles these within the same codebase, and it works rather well. However, it seems rather the wrong thing to do, to present a talk where the code to do the job isn't on CPAN and is embedded in another system. As a consequence I've been thinking about abstracting the code out of Labyrinth and releasing it separately. It might make for an interesting discussion and may provide people with an reasonable example of how they can use one solution to treat their input and output.

I've also started thinking about doing a short talk along the lines of "My Favourite CPAN Modules". A number of people have done this in the past and at one London.pm meeting several years ago, Leon presented one that got me looking up a few modules I'd not really heard of before. It's probably a talk better aimed at local group technical meetings and maybe a Workshop if appropriate, but I've also been thinking it might be better to actually to structure several talks of this style, but with a theme. So one talk would be "The Web Edition" and feature several modules useful for website development, another "The Test Edition" feature several useful Test modules, and perhaps also "The Mail Edition" with a selection of useful email modules. I've made an attempt at this style of talk before, but got too involved with the mechanics, when really all you need is a quick flavour of what the module can do, with enough references for you to go and find out more yourself.

I still need something more concrete for LUGRadio and the YAPCs, but at least I have some ideas to work with now. If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know.

File Under: community / conference / labyrinth / linux / perl / yapc NO COMMENTS

I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide

Posted on 5th July 2007

Finally got the time to sort through my photos from last week. From over 2,000 photos, I've got them down to just over 700. There are still a few in there that aren't quite as good as I'd like, but then until I can freeze people in time before taking the shot, I'm going to struggle with the current camera. I'm looking at to getting a DSLR at some point, so hopefully I won't get so many blurred pictures then. Still I'm pleased I managed to get quite a selection that I did like.

For those who discover this entry by searching for YAPC::NA, here are all the photos I have online:

• YAPC::NA 2007 - The flight from Newark to Houston
  
• YAPC::NA 2007 - The early arrivals
  
• YAPC::NA 2007 - Day One
  
• YAPC::NA 2007 - Day Two
  
• YAPC::NA 2007 - Day Three
  
• YAPC::NA 2007 - NASA Space Center
  

I also took some videos of Luke Closs and the Lightning Talks, so once I've converted them I'll get those online too.

Last week was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I got to go. Looking forward to YAPC::Europe now :)

File Under: conference / houston / opensource / perl / photography / space / technology / yapc NO COMMENTS

Heaven, Hell or Houston

Posted on 3rd July 2007

Last week saw me attending the 2007 YAPC::NA Perl Conference in Houston, Texas. Well not just attending, but speaking too. I did 3 regular talks, hosted one BOF and took part in another. You can read the full gory details over on my technical journal.

The conference is a grassroots affair, and is now traditionally hosted annually by the local Perl Monger user group. This year it was a joint effort by Houston.pm and BrazosValley.pm, and was an admirable effort considering that none of the organisers had been to a YAPC before. A number of people had said they weren't attending because it was Houston, but seeing as the town is famous for Lyndon B Johnston Space Center and ZZ Top, I couldn't believe it was that bad, and indeed it wasn't. Though I didn't get a chance to wander around the town, as the University is quite a distance from the town centre, and the local transport system consists of taxis.

I have lots of photos to get through, including a trip to the Space Center, which I'll be posting soon, and I'm getting better with my camera. I seem to have taken several good photos, but having said that there were the fair share of blurred or out of focus ones too. At a conference like this, it gets frustrating when I think I've taken a good shot, then later view it on the laptop and discover it isn't as good as I thought. You never get a second chance. But I am getting better at holding the camera still and taking some nice closeups.

Since I bought a 2GB xD memory card, I can now take 30 minutes worth of video. It meant I was able to video a few talks, but it also meant I discovered more of the limitations of the camera. The camera's main function is to take pictures not video, so some aspects are understandably lacking when taking video, such as being able to zoom in/out. Although you can adjust zoom before videoing, once you press record it's fixed. I assume this is because the problems with auto-focusing. Still it did mean I got to watch the talks again later :)

While Houston was hot, it was pouring with torential rain when I arrived, and did so during my stay there too. The humidity was high and occassionally felt like I was breathing in water, but for the most part we were inside in the air-conditioning, so it wasn't really that much of a problem. Apparently the cockroaches are much more of a problem, though I only saw a few on the pavements. Those staying in the dorms seem to see them at every turn. We even joked that Jose was taking a family home with him. What I saw of Houston I liked, but had they had a decent local train or bus service I might well have visited more of the town.

The conference itself was good, and I got to speak to several people, both familiar faces and newcomers. It meant there was quite a difference in the expectations and the response to talks. I think most got something out of the event, but I can't help think that the beginner type talks were a bit thin on the ground this year. I'm going to see whether I can change that and plan to work on some new material to have a go at for next year. If nothing else, it'll provide plenty of material for the 2008 Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour :)

File Under: conference / houston / opensource / yapc 2 COMMENTS

Rockin' the Paradise

Posted on 25th May 2007

In June 2006 I attended and spoke at the YAPC::NA Perl Conference in Chicago. It was great to meet up with several people I'd met in Toronto, but it was also a bit odd discovering that I wasn't as anonymous as I was last year. In Europe more people recognise me as I've been to every YAPC::Europe Perl Conference and have been involved in several other activities where people have got to know me. But apart from my appearance at OSCON in 2000 (when nobody bar the London.pm guys knew me), I wasn't expecting to be so easily recognised. It was good to put a number of names to faces though and it was a very enjoyable conference.

There was one downside though. On the morning of the last day of the conference I got called by work. Seeing as I was part of the CPR team, I was oncall 24/7 regardless of the fact I wasn't in the UK. Thankfully I didn't have to worry about it conflicting with my talk as I'd already done it. However, it did mean I had to disappear for a while as I set up jobs to go and do the task I needed to do. I'm rather glad that firstly I used screen and secondly that I'd got all the jobs running that I needed to. As while getting up to plug in the power cable, my laptop got knocked on the floor. Had I powered down and shut the laptop, it might not have been so bad, however, it was open and running. I managed to truly trash the laptop, as later investigation seemed to indicate the bus connector to both the DVD/CD writer and the hard disk drive had been damaged beyond repair. Despite swapping the HDD to another laptop, it also appears I complete wrecked the connectors to the HDD. There wasn't enough on the drive (apart from the photos I'd taken over the first few days) to warrant paying for it to be scanned professionally, so it got binned.

At first I thought that I'd now lost all my photos from the conference and was a little downhearted. As a consequence I didn't take the camera to the speakers dinner event that Josh and Heather had laid on after the conference, and I didn't bother taking any photos the following day either. Thankfully, JJ gave me a program to recover image files from portable media, and got back pretty much everything bar the first day of the conference, which unfortunately are now lost due to me writing over them with pictures from the last day. The lesson I've learnt is that to use multiple media to record photos and don't write over anything until you've had a chance to back them all up safely.

The conference was great though, and I did enjoy wandering around the city. On the first day Cog and I went up to the Skydeck of The Sears Tower, walked down to see The Water Tower and visited The Apple Store, where we caught quite a cool band, called The Ruse. For the Early Arrivals Dinner, we ended up near Wrigley Field, where the White Sox play, while the conference itself is close to ? where the Cubs play. Didn't get to see a game, but I do plan to revisit the city again. I never even took the time to check out any blues clubs, so I owe it to myself to go back really ;)

This year's conference is in Houston, so I'm hoping I can go and visit the Saturn rocket at The Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre while I'm there.

File Under: chicago / conference / perl / yapc NO COMMENTS