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The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2005-10-30

Hmm... Thursday afternoon and I've only just started writing the summary... What happened to professionalism? What happened to rigid, albeit self-imposed deadlines?

Um... I've had a cold. The cats ate my homework.

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Women in Open Source

On the last day of EuroOSCON there was a panel discussing why there were so few women in the open source community. It turns out that the predictable claim that “It’s the same throughout the industry, it’s not an Open Source only problem!” doesn’t really stand up. Danese Cooper pointed to a study that found that 12% of all developers were women, but only 2% of Open Source developers are.

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Stealing Culture

At EuroOSCON, Cory Doctorow talked about plans for a European Broadcast Flag – a ‘rights management’ system which is to be built into future digiboxes. He talked about the implications of Digital Rights Management for the consumer (there are no good implications). What he didn’t discuss were its implications for media makers.

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Rael's View

O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest believes that we’ve trained ourselves to accept disappointment from web applications. He maintains that Web 2.0 is about apps that meet our real expectations.

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Back from 'Dam

Well, I’m back from EuroOSCON, which was a pile of fun. I spent most of my time on the ‘hallway track’, occasionally dropping in on interesting talks and keynotes, but mostly just hanging around with interesting people. I took a pile of photos and still have a couple of rolls of film left to develop now I’m back home.

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Spiers and Boden: Songs

Listen to this. You’ll not regret it.

Whee! John Spiers and Jon Boden have finally made an album (Songs) that sounds as good as they do live. Not that Through and Through and Bellow are bad albums, it’s just that their playing has improved somewhat since they were recorded. On stage, Jon and John play with an almost telepathic level of communication. Songs captures that magic.

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The meaning of BOFH

Just in case you didn’t know, BOFH stands for “Bastard Operator From Hell”, a character invented by Simon Travaglia and patron saint of cynical systems administrators everywhere. The original BOFH articles were a lightning rod, used by stressed admins as a way of dealing with idiot lusers. Even if you never acted like the BOFH, you could think “What’s your username? … clickety-click” and all would be well for a couple of moments.

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Joining the dots

A few of points, I wonder if we can make them join up.

  • The BBC has been making noises about allowing license payers to download a big package of episodes and watch them at their leisure.
  • A month or so ago, having previously said they had no intention of doing so, Elgato released an API for their EyeTV tuners.
  • Yesterday, Apple announced a new, slimmer, iMac. Said new iMac comes with a shiny new Media Centre app called Front Row and a remote control.
  • The iTunes Music Store now sells pop videos and a limited range of TV episodes (in the US).
  • Apples DRM includes region lockout1

What could it all mean?

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Packing for EuroOSCON

My new combined laptop and camera bag arrived yesterday, a Crumpler December Quarter. It’s a little snug for my 17" Powerbook, but it’ll serve. The question now is, what cameras do I pack?

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The Perl 6 Summary 2005-10-09

Welcome to the first of my self-hosted Perl 6 Summaries.

Loads of stuff's been happening this week. The perl6-internals crew have been making everything work properly with Parrot 0.3.0 and generally doing housekeeping prior to the next big push. The perl6-language people have been continuing their ongoing task of nailing bits of Perl 6 down, except for the bits where they're suggesting new features. And the perl6-compiler people seem to have been rather too busy discussing stuff on IRC and then implementing it to post much to the mailing list.

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You what?

Look, I know that the US is a strange, God-ridden country, but surely God told me to do it is still the last refuge of the serial killer and not a sound basis for foreign policy.

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Had we but world enough, and time: Serenity

Joss Whedon’s Firefly was a sf series that was never given time; episodes were jumbled by the network and the show got cancelled just when it was starting to build a serious fanbase. And that’s all she wrote.

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Complexity Management Revisited

Browsing through my logs, as you do, I’ve noticed that the essay I wrote over two years ago on The Fine Art of Complexity Management is still showing up in the top 10 hits. In fact, at the moment, it’s the second most popular non-feed, none front-page article on the site. What’s weird is that, most of the links to it that I can find on Google point to a no-longer accessible version of the site.

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Testing Is Good

If you’ve hung out with extreme programmers, the Perl 6 crew, a large subsection of the Perl community, or, well, almost anyone who’s given it any thought, you’ll know that having a good test suite is essential.

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