Another trip to Sydney
A lot of people have been complaining recently that I don't write enough in my journal. While I'm quite flattered that anyone reads the thoughts I jot down here, there are usually excellent reasons why there are periods when nothing seems to happen. It's usually because I'm interstate, and working very hard.

Last week was no exception, with me spending a week in Sydney teaching more Perl. The courses went down very well, some of the feedback and testimonies were just wonderful. I was pleased to have such a curious class, I ended up staying back late at lunchtimes and afternoons to keep up with all the questions.

As part of my trip I gave my talk on conference presentation to Sydney Perl Mongers. It seems I actually started a minor kefuffle on one of the SLUG lists, as I was talking about mind control, which we all know is evil. I started my talk with a song reminding everyone to wear their tin-foil hats.

My actual talk went down extremely well. So well that I ended up giving it a second time a few hours later, after Andrew Savige gave a presentation on Perl Best Practices (including a plug for Damian's courses). I'm seriously considering expanding my talk to tutorial length for the conferences in 2006.

Highlights of the evening included meeting with Pia Waugh, of Linux Australia fame, and obtaining photographs and movies of last meeting's flaming drinks from Conrad. (Seen inline on the pjf.id.au version of this journal.)

Back from Sydney, but first...
I'm back from Sydney, and have many things to say about my adventures there. But first I thought I would share a small but somehow amusing request for a new Perl keyword, and its obvious solution.

Sydney Paul Mongers
I'm heading up to Sydney to present some training courses, and as it happens I'm lucky enough to have this coincide with the local Sydney.PM meeting. I got lucky and caught Sydney.PM the last time I was in Sydney, and also the time before that, and the one even earlier. Despite living in Melbourne, I consider Sydney.PM to be oen of my local perl user groups.

I'll be presenting at the upcoming meeting, with a slightly extended version of my Mind Control talk from SAGE-AU 2005. Attendance is free, so feel free to drop around if you're in the area.

No more docbook
For historical reasons, our build environment for our course materials has been docbook, and it's never really agreed with me. Sure, it's open, free, and powerful, but I've never considered it to be at all human friendly. All those tags just get in the way.

Having said that, we still want to use docbook as our build platform; it produces good looking books and we have literally hundreds of thousands of words already written in docbook. I just don't want to have to write any more.

Luckily, Pod::Docbook appears to do a pretty good job of converting POD into docbook. That's a good thing, because POD is what I use for writing articles, program documentation, Perl Tips, and just about everything else except for web content.

The most lovely thing is that I don't lose any power by writing in POD. If I need to jam in some docbook-specific tags, I can do so with =for docbook for a little bit, or =begin docbook for a big chunk. Now I can have my cake and eat it too.

SAGE-AU 2005
I'm finally back from the SAGE-AU 2005 conference. I presented two talks, one entitled Conference Presentation Mind Control, and a double-length one on Starting a small (open-source) business.

I discovered that SAGE-AU audiences don't laugh as much as local user groups. At first I thought it was me, but this appears to be a comfort factor. Local groups usually see the same crowd each month, and are a lot less formal than a national conference which meets once a year.

The best reactions to my talks have always been at Sydney Perl Mongers, and I attribute this primarily to the meeting being held in a rather nice pub. I'll be expanding my presentation talk to recommend that if you can arrange for your audience to imbide alcoholic beverages during your presentation, they'll give you a better review than if presented with water. Just don't expect them to remember the details of your talk afterwards.

Damian Conway
If you're in Melbourne, or can get to Melbourne, Damian Conway will be speaking this Wednesday, 14th September, at Melbourne Perl Mongers. Damian is one of Perl's most highly celebrated speakers, and author of Object Oriented Perl and Perl Best Practices. Like all Melb.PM meetings, admission is free.