Israel.PM Meeting
The recent Israeli Perl Mongers meeting went very nicely. First of all, I had an opportunity to do a lot of Chit-Chat there, which is something I like a lot. We talked a bit about WWW::Form, Perl in Israeli Banks (some banks don't wish people to know they are using Perl, because most people don't know what it is), Cobol and Java as the new Cobol, Mail::Audit vs. Procmail, Spelling errors and Microsoft Office features to correct them, and Microsoft Office in general (95, 97, 2000, XP).
Then came a lightning talk by Jason Elbaum. The first thing I noticed was that he had a strange accent. I guess I'm not very used to hearing Australian Accents. He gave a lecture about making XML-TV listings out of Israeli television listings on the Internet. The lecture was very interesting.
Afterwards, I took the stage and gave the Template Toolkit presentation (in preparation with the YAPC one). It went quite well, but after it, Ran told me I should have focused on one part more and create more suspense. I'll keep that in mind for the YAPC. One question I received was how compatible was my solution with laymen, who don't know squat about programming. I answered that the philosophy of the Template Toolkit (and Perl in general) is that you and your co-workers should know what you are doing. I previously encountered this mentality in talks I had with several PHP users.
After that, Gabor took the stage and lectured about HTML, CGI, CGI::Application and HTML::Template. The lecture was very interesting and instructive and I enjoyed it a lot despite the fact it was quite long. I learned some things there: "<form>" without arguments in the HTML leads to the same URL, a bit more about CGI::Application, etc. We learned that the first language Larry Wall designed had its code embedded in text, but luckily he came to his senses afterwards, and did not implement Perl this way.
Afterwards, most of the people there decided to go to the Bar and I took a ride back home with Ronen Kfir. I forgot my coat there, but when I got home, I called Gabor and he let me talk to Ran who took the coat with him. Eventually, I was able to set up a time to take it a few days ago. My father drove me to his home in Northern Tel Aviv, and I took the coat, while being able to meet his wife and see his baby. (but not much besides)
Hamakor Meeting
We held the annual meeting of Hamakor members, a week or two ago. I was one of the first to arrive, but was very soon followed by many other people from Haifa and Tel-Aviv. I got to do a lot of chat with people I know which was very nice. The meat of the meeting was:
- A presentation by gby about what was done in the past year of Hamakor. (current status)
- Short introductions by Hamakor members who wished to be elected.
- Elections for the new board and comptrollers committee.
I was first nominated for the board, but then moved my nomination to the comptroller committee, and in my introduction asked people not to vote for me because I did not think I was very suitable. I indeed wasn't voted, but I hope to find other ways in which I can get involved without being an official.
New Homepage URL
I changed my homepage URL from t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ to http://shlomif.il.eu.org/, thanks to the kind help of the il.eu.org hostmasters. The new domain gave me some trouble so far. Hopefully, it will be resolved in the near future.
Hacktivity
I did a lot of work on the Solving site. A lot of revamp and more revamp, new content, some graphics, some CSS tweaks, etc. I asked for critique from the webdesign-l mailing list and received some very useful input, which I also applied.
Solving now stresses a completely different paradigm: instead of trying to implement distributism in the government, I simply propose that individuals form competing leaderships, or support them, to make sure that people don't take the elected leadership for granted.
I also did a lot of work on the Better-SCM site. With contributions from other people, I added Visual SourceSafe and CM Synergy, and perhaps other systems into the comparison there. I plan to put all the source in an online Subversion repository, which will make contributions easier.
One thing that annoys me about Better-SCM is that people keep bugging me about darcs.
Vocabulary Builder
I'm looking for a vocabulary builder with a certain behaviour. This post to linux-elitists explains what the program I want has. I have yet to receive a satisfying answer. Meanwhile, the discussion there diverted to discuss whether Debian was indeed the Elitists distribution, and whether Debianists are simply too full of it. I am to blame for this. ;-).
Advogato
I certified miguel as Master due to his work on GNOME. I also see that mulix is blogging in Advogato, again. Welcome back, Muli!