So, what cool stuff is Oslo Perl Mongers planning to do in 2012?

In February, we’ll visit Telenor – Norway’s largest telecom company, to learn how they’re using Perl to manage half a million routers in Telenor’s network. We’ll also have our general assembly, so this it’s a great time to show give a hand.

In April, Damian Conway will visit us again! He’ll be teaching a couple of his courses, give a presentation for us, and attend the Go Open 2012 conference.

While Damian’s in town we’ll also organize a Perl 6 Hackathon in the Redpill Linpro offices. Invitations have been sent to several core members of the Perl 6 community, and we’re looking for sponsors who would like to help some of them coming to Oslo. (If you haven’t heard from me, check in with sjn on #perl6, and we’ll see what we can do!)

Preikestolen (The Pulpit)

In August, we’ll take a trip to YAPC::EU in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Right after YAPC::EU, we’ll fly directly from Frankfurt to Stavanger for a 5 day Moving to Moose hackathon near Lysefjorden, including a trip to Preikestolen (“The Pulpit”). Some details are still pending, but if you’re interested in working on moving Perl 5 to Moose, or move some useful CPAN modules to Moose, then this event may be something for you. On another note – we need sponsors! If your company uses Moose, please consider helping with funding for this hackathon!

In October, we’ll have our 10th anniversary! No plans yet, but we know the date is October 16th.

Now I have to remind myself (and you) that these are plans, and subject to change. But at least you can get a picture of what we’d like to do. If you want to join in, you know where to find Oslo.pm!

One thing worth keeping in mind is that Oslo.pm has always been a small group of die-hards, impervious to the changing trends of programming languages. Stubborn geeks that insist there’s a future within the Perl community, and try to “make stuff happen” despite countless reasons to do something cooler, more important or more fun. This has shaped much of what we’ve managed to do and what we haven’t done.

In the last nine-and-a-half years, we managed to meet up the first Wednesday (or Tuesday) of almost every month. Usually this has involved beer, often there’s been discussions about computer nerdy stuff, and sometimes there’s been a presentation or a conference or a trip to YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference). I think it’s safe to claim that we’ve managed to build a good community for everyone who enjoys learning new stuff in a social setting.

But looking back at this, I have to admit there must have been some kind of brain damage or madness that must have kept those Oslo.pm die-hards going. Either that, or some hidden unknown secret that no-one knew about kept them going despite dwindling usage stats, despite quips from the kids that decided Python or Ruby was “TEH BEST EVAR!!1!”, and despite the unwholesome baggage from the 90′s and early 00′s (Matt’s Script Archive being the dirty example worth mentioning first.) Add “real life” to this, and it becomes obvious that Making Stuff Happen often can be very difficult. So, what kept those old crooks going? Was there a hidden unknown secret that no-one knew about, or had they just lost their marbles?

Before getting into that, it may be useful to take a closer look at what happened in Oslo.pm last year. 2011 was a year that brought many good things.

2011 highlights

Carl Mäsak showing off Perl 6

In March, we took part in the Communities in Action event in Oslo. The event concept was simple – Gather a bunch of meetup groups, and let them organize their regular meeting at the same venue. More than 500 people dropped by to check out the different meetings, and I’m quite happy to say that Oslo.pm got to be part of one of the cooler ones – a Code Kata where we got to see four people implement Minesweeper in Ruby, Java, Javascript and Perl 6. Carl Mäsak had come to help us with it, and it was truly an enjoyment to see him show off the cool stuff Rakudo could do. And when Carl started saying “I think we can make this code a bit shorter” and then time and time again show off idiomatic Perl 6… I loved it, and so did the rest of the crowd.

We

In June, Karl Rune, Karl and Salve went on a Perl cruise. We sailed from Oslo to the Nordic Perl Workshop in Malmö, Sweden. In three days we experienced most of the things that make sailing fun – quiet night time sailing; several hours of high-speed sailing with a strong breeze from the side; relaxing in the sunshine while sailing through the Swedish skärgård; rough puke-inducing seas between Malmö and Copenhagen. We had a great time, with great food, great sailing and great discussions. Also thanks to Copenhagen Perl Mongers for setting up an emergency social meetup just for us!

In August we got a visit from Damian Conway. We’ve tried to get him to visit Norway for many years, but when he suddenly found time we jumped right into action. He gave his wonderful talk about Fun with Dead Languages, exposing a whole new crowd of students and hackers to the “Mad Professor” of Perl.

Damian also held two of his courses for people in the Oslo Perl community. He told us about Modern Perls and of Perl Best Practices, and we managed to sell more than 40 seats to the two courses. Out of this, Oslo.pm got wonderful feedback, a bunch of new Perl programmers in the community, and 25% of the profits. I think we can comfortably claim the event was a success.

If you

Right afterwards, several of us went to YAPC::EU in Riga, and were blown away by the venue, the tracks and the smooth organization. In Riga, we also managed to reach a huge milestone in the life of Oslo Perl Mongers – for the first time, Oslo.pm could donate a significant sum of money, and this time we gave €1000 to the Perl Foundation. That’s a pretty hefty sum for a tiny outfit like Oslo.pm.

Oslo.pm social meetup, after JavaZone

In September, Oslo Perl Mongers had a stand at the CommunityZone booth at JavaZone 2011. We gave away some of the marketing material that Mark Keating made (he even updated it in a hurry just for us!), and just hanged out talking with the Java crowd about the merits of Perl, Ruby, Scala, Clojure and much else. We also got some good exposure to the other socio-topical (meetup) groups in Oslo, and showed that even if we’re one of the smaller ones we can get things done. After JavaZone, we had our regular monthly meeting.

In October, we visited Opera Software and got a good discussion about the merits of and difficulties with Mojolicious, a look at Bron Gondwana’s cunning module for streaming tar files. Afterwards, we started brainstorming Oslo.pm’s main event for 2012. More on this in a later blogpost.

In November, we visited Startsiden, where Andreas Marienborg gave us a nice introduction to their (quite impressive) application build system. They have something really cool going on there, and I hope they manage to release it under an Open Source license sometime soon.

In December, we got the oslo.pm domain, when the .pm top-level domain was opened by AFNIC. Currently the domain just redirects to our main site. Maybe we’ll do something more later. We also had a very enjoyable Christmas dinner together with the Oslo Linux User Group – something definitely worth repeating next year.

Other activities in 2011

In June, we had an extraordinary yearly meeting, were Martin Tostrup Setek came in to replace Kirill Miazine, and Karl Rune Nilsen stepped up to join the board again.

Otherwise, we spent a lot of time at the Schouskjelleren microbrewery, enjoying their wonderful beers. Good times!

What secret?

I’m quite pleased with the stuff we did in 2011. But there was quite a bit of work behind it all; and when this happened during off hours and on a volunteer basis, then motivation (or brain damage, or hidden unknown secrets that no-one knows about, as the case may be) becomes an issue. How we got this far is still difficult for me to grok, but if you really want to know, I think we can figure this out over a couple of beers. You’re buying!

But if you’re reading this while you’re organizing your own Perl Mongers group, or want to organize something completely different, then I hope you can make use of Oslo.pm’s current “secret plan”:

1. Do something cool
2. Tell about it

And that’s it. That’s what we tried to do in 2011, and that’s what  we’ll aim for in 2012. Stick around for my next post about Oslo Perl Monger’s plans for our 10th year alive – and I think it will be the best one ever!

The *.pm top level domain was only available to residents and organizations in EU and Switzerland. I was quite distraught to find out that Oslo wasn’t a Swiss city, somuch I almost gave up in despair! Luckily, I’m not prone to let facts of geography get in my way, and tried to register anyway. As one would expect, GANDI.net dismissed my advances in a polite yet firm manner.

Before this rejection, I noticed the wording of the registration form, and just a few days ago I found out that they had changed the requirements. Suddenly anyone in the European Economic Area could register! And as everyone obviously knows, Norway is part of the EEA through EFTA. You can only imagine the joy that overwhelmed me. Oslo Perl Mongers might still get it’s oslo.pm domain!

I went back to register anew, and saw that I was allowed to fill in a new form with all kinds of details about Oslo.pm. I was very happy, it felt like it was almost Christmas – until I discovered that I had to somehow prove Oslo Perl Mongers was a real organization, and that we in some way had a legitimate claim to the Oslo.pm name.

GANDI.net’s registration form offered plenty of business registers one could claim membership of. I had heard of none of them, so things were looking bad. The only half-sane alternative was to check out the one register that wasn’t obviously French – the Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number.

D&B claims «A D&B D-U-N-S® number gives you credibility in the marketplace and can have a positive impact on your bottom line.» And when I found out that D-U-N-S really meant Data Universal Numbering System (truly a name concocted by marketers) I got the feeling that this was going to be expensive. Did I really have to register at some USAnian Pay-Us-And-We’ll-Give-You-Credibility scheme, just to get a French domain name?

First step was to find out if Oslo.pm already was registered. A quick search in their company search (found on their front page) yielded a positive hit. The result page also offered a link where they could send me an email with the D-U-N-S number.

Progress!

Until I found that to get this mail one has to be a registered customer, and that only USAnian and Canadian companies were allowed to register.

Generic curses! Foiled again!

Luckily, The Great Book of Knowledge offered a sliver of hope. There is a sneaky way of finding a (US only) D-U-N-S number – could those instructions also work for companies outside USAnia? As it happens, yes. It worked quite well, and the proof in the pudding can be found by searching for the D-U-N-S number on the Advanced Search page.

Problem solved, and today we know that Oslo Perl Mongers both has «credibility in the marketplace», that the Oslo.pm domain registration was successful, and better still: the oslo.pm domain actually works right now.

Success! \o/

Han er kjent i Perl-miljøet som “the Mad Scientist of Perl” og har gjennom ti år klart å fylle konferanse-saler, keynotes og forelesninger med syke, hysteriske morsomme og utrolige fascinerende idéer.

Nå kommer han til Norge, og foredraget han vil holde for oss heter…

Fun with dead languages

Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in five unrelated languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you’ll also learn about modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross-dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn’t frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft’s new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.

Foredraget er gratis og åpent for alle.

Sted: Store auditorium, Informatikkbygget (Ifi1, Kristen Nygaards hus), UiO, Blindern
Tid: Torsdag 11. August, kl. 18:15

Oslo Perl Mongers (Oslo.pm) er en faglig-sosial forening åpen for alle som ønsker å lære om og vedlikeholde kunnskapene sine i programmerings- språket Perl. Vi møter første onsdag hver måned, og organiserer jevnlig fagøl, hackathons, konferanser og foredrag. Medlemskap er gratis, og instruksjoner for innmelding finnes på oslo.pm.org.

Takk til Institutt for informatikk og USIT for hjelpen med å få til dette.

Velkommen!

mvh,

- Salve J. Nilsen (Leder Oslo.pm)
- Martin Setek (USIT, styremedlem Oslo.pm)

Oppdatering: Heng opp denne plakaten om arrangementet!

Choose a sound bite, choose a few topics to repeat, and then repeat them relentlessly. The only thing you have to do, is to fill enough time with repetition and repetition and repetition that anyone listening gets bored and moves on.

This way, you’re using a weakness and strength in normal people to stay in the game.

Normal people easily get bored. Normal people just want a good life. They don’t like analyzing and digging and figuring out why bad things are happening. And they don’t like to have their attention span challenged. This takes time and time is the one thing everyone doesn’t have much of. After all, don’t we all just want a good life to live? Spend our precious time on positive things?

Sometimes, I wish there were fewer “normal” people. I’d call these people “journalists”.

Oslo Perl Mongers will be organizing a (well planned and stunningly early annouced) last-minute emergency presentation on that thursday evening. Details will be annouced when we have them.

On a serious note, I have to admit Damian is a crazy brilliant presenter and well worth experiencing – even for people who aren’t inclined to use Perl. If you’d like to have your mind bent into funny shapes, make sure not to do anything else that fateful thursday evening!

Also, Oslo.pm is organizing two 1-day training classes in cooperation with Damian and Redpill Linpro. These are for max 12 24 people each, and are sold at a first-come-first-served basis. More datails on the Oslo.pm course page (in Norwegian).

And finally, we get to decide which presentation Damian will give! Damian has a few suggestions for us, but the final decision is entirely in our hands. We’ll do it at next week’s Oslo Perl Mongers meetup.

• Schouskjelleren microbrewery
• Wednesday  June 6th, at 18:30.

See you there?

We’ll be leaving on wednesday june 15th (or maybe a little before, if weather dictates), and plan to be back in Oslo thursday the following week. I’m certainly looking forward to the trip. And as for Perl Mongers events, I’m sure this will be one of the more memorable ones!

In other words, I’m looking for good speakers, engaging topics and anything interesting or inspiring that we can get into the program next year. And to do this, I’d like to hear from you!

• What kind of topics do you find interesting and relevant?
• Which communities would you like to see presented on the technical track?
• What’s more interesting or useful to you?
  • Technical inspiration (“cool stuff and fun projects”)
  • Real-life usage/experiences (“we did this and failed/succeded”)
  • HOWTOs (“this is how you can get X up and running/do useful stuff”)
  • Technology intros (“these are the important clues you should know about technology X”)
  • Technology trends (“what’s the buzz about technology X?”)

Tell us! We need your thoughs on this so we can make the Go Open technical track better than ever.

(Oh, and feel free to reply in either English or Norwegian, and if you don’t want to reply in this forum, feel free to mail me at <salve at friprog.no>.)

One goal for Perl 6 is to make building large and maintainable applications far easier. But does that mean sacrificing on being able to build little tools? Thankfully, Perl 6 is working hard to do well in that area too. In this talk, I’ll show examples of how various features of Perl 6 make things easier for those writing one liners, those writing small tools and those writing much larger things. The easy things will become easier, and the hard things more in reach.

If you don’t know Jonathan, I can tell you he’s is a brilliant speaker and among the highest qualified people around that can tell about the language. Also, Rakudo Star had it’s second release last month, so you can start playing with code right now! If you’re even just vaguely interested in programming languages, this should be something for you!

If you’d like to get a picture of what Perl 6 and Rakudo is about (or you’re just interested in socializing with geeks,) then tuesday’s meeting is a must.

For myself at least, being there is a no-brainer.