Notes from the January Atlanta Perl Mongers meeting.

Pre-Pre-meeting Discussion.

  • Companies dealing in blood, suck.
  • Scott was talking about this pay-as-you-go hotspot, may be worth a look.
  • New Postgres release (9.5)
  • Dreamhost has some pretty good pricing right now.

Pre-meeting discussion

  • [cut out discussion of politics]
  • Scott admitted doing something stupid.
    • relating to programming in perl 5 vs perl 6
  • The tax on people who can’t do math is up to $675mil
  • Simply Noise
    • For when you want to cut down background noise or just be a smartass at a meeting.
  • I needed to send a link to Scott and asked him for his preferred method, he pointed out Slack
  • Yubikey - hardware 2-factor authentication
    • Was showing mine to the group.
    • Works with Google, no software required as it works through Chrome (and Firefox I think) fine.

Stephen’s talk - Keeping internet wolves at bay

  • I ruined his punchline slide.
  • Free SSL Certs @ Let’s Encrypt
    • short life span on certs; gets renewed through client on server
  • “How likely is it someone is going to get my cookies”
    • Ask this guy
    • Cookie Monster
  • Some discussion around how some slides are more blank than others
  • Pi Hole is a great name
  • HTTPS Everywhere is a handy plugin
  • Stephen needs to use github.io instead of geocities, I mean, Google Pages…
  • The media may or may not lie.

Post talk discussion

Util talks about a thing.

  • Out of general interest Util looked at AP CS Course
    • Language used in the course: Java
    • He copied down the code using the One True Brace System
    • Took code example from PDF (page 29) and rewrote in to Perl 6
      • I mainly copied the code down to see how the code block looked on the page.
      • I can’t type fast enough to show all the code he had done.
my Int @numbers;
# Precondition: numbers contains int values in no particular order.
sub mystery ( Int $num --> Int ) {
  for @numbers.keys.reverse -> $k {
    return $k if @numbers[k] < $num;
  }
  return -1;
}

  • Util will post his code online at some point

  • Scott asked how you can find all the Perl6 keywords; ex .value .key etc

    p6g -e 'my $a = 42; .say for sort $a.^methods>>.name'

Around the dinner table

  • Magnetic Notebook
  • Util was initially mistaken for a woman by the server. :)
    • In her defence he has long hair, and she saw him from behind initially
  • Further discussion of Stephens talk
  • During his talk Util had mentioned he was unable to copy the code from the PDF he was referencing.
    • Scott said that PDFPen Pro is a tool he’s used before to work around that type of problem
      • Mac only
      • $$
  • Some talk about how he manages browswers with many (many) open tabs
    • Util wrote a script to dump page titles and urls to a text file
    • Stephen suggested a the ‘Session Manager’ plugin
    • I am trying to write up posts with the links and what I got out of them; but that’s a fairly lofty goal.
    • I also save off information to Evernote
  • Fesability of putting ChromeOS on an older laptop
  • Penrose Tiling
  • Gold Dust Woman by Karen Elson was remarked on as it played in the restraunt
  • I asked if anyone had read The Player of Games or read anything from the Culture series.
    • I heard read about it online, both Zuckerberg and Musk endorsed it as a must-read.
    • I finished it over the holiday
    • Util is a third of the way in
    • Enjoyed it; surprised it was from 1988
    • I would like to read more about why Zuckerberg/Musk endorsed it
    • 2016-01-22 Update
      • I finally got around to reading an article about why they suggested reading this book and others by Iain Banks.
      • I get my initial confusion as my focus was on the main character and what he was dealing with, not really with the universe as a whole.
      • Likely need to read more of that series to really ‘get it’.
  • Not that I fully endorse everything the below image says; but some of it was funny :)
    • found here
      • also had a link to Coding Game
        • “A website where you solve games by coding the AI.”
        • looks interesting
        • Support 20+ languages; Perl included! If programming languages were weapons