Appropriate journals for layperson Perl articles.
I'm writing a paper and presentation for the SAGE-VIC Symposium to be held on the 11th March. I'm giving a talk on web development, particularly on how to be lazy and get HTML::Mason to do all the hard work for you.

The presentation comes with a paper for the proceedings, and the whole thing is squarely aimed at a technical audience, but not one that necessarily knows Perl. The paper itself will be a few thousand words, and besides from being suitable for conference proceedings, I feel it could also easily be turned into a journal article.

My problem is now which journals to approach. I'd normally have a chat to TPR, TPJ and perl.com; however, I can't help feeling that readers of these publications will find themselves getting to the end of the article and wondering what happened to all the Perl content.

The article could be suitable for a more mainstream software development magazine, but I'm really at a loss as to which ones to approach. I rarely find myself with the time to read 'general developer' periodicals, even though we have picked up a few subscriptions along the way.

Since one of my goals is to improve the awareness of Perl in Australia and New Zealand, I'll probably start with some of the local publications first. However I'm quite open to suggestions at this stage.

I suppose that what I really should be doing is concentrating on finishing the paper and slides, rather than worrying about the medium-term uses of the work. After all, the conference is barely three weeks away.

Company Tax Time
I'm currently in the process of filling out our company tax return, and I now understand why the ATO provides companies with up to nine months to complete this task. Put simply, the form is not user friendly.

Personal tax, even with all the suppliments, is a walk in the park compared to company tax. Personal tax assumes that you don't have a copy of the taxation act on your desk, or know how attributed foreign income differs from its unattributed counterpart.

Personal tax provides great refernces to resources that explains all the terms used, whereas with company tax one needs to do much more research.

The question could be asked: why isn't our accountant handling all this? Well, despite our accountant doing a good job of establishing the company, they've been fairly silent except for a glossy pamphlet reminding us that they'd love to fill in our personal tax returns.

In particular they've done nothing to let us know of the approaching company tax deadlines, or even ask for our financial records so they could make a start on completing the return. I don't imagine most new company directors know when their company tax is due, and rely upon their accountants to tell them. I was in this case until I got suspicious of the silence. So in short, our accountants have failed the 'caring' test.

Given the amount the accountants would have charged for the return, and given that our 2003-04 return is relatively straightforward, we're making a slight profit doing it ourselves, even though I could be spending the time out doing real work.

Melbourne/Australia Perl Happenings
It seems that some individuals read my journal to hear about the latest happenings in the Perl scene in Melbourne and other parts of Australia. With that in mind, I believe that I should mention a few recent events.

Melbourne Perl Mongers has restarted, and our first meeting for the year had discussions about OSDC/YAPC::AU 2004, the Phalanx 100, an offer from yours truly to talk about HTML::Mason, and the discussion of starting up combined open-source developer meetings, affectionately known at this stage as Open Source Developers Club. OSDClub is currently arranged for every second month, instead of Melb.PM.

I volunteered to try and rejuvenate the Melb.PM website (which is currently down), although I'm currently waiting to receive the appropriate keys from the relevant people inside Melb.PM.

Last Friday was SecureCon, which Jacinta and myself attended, and discovered that all the usual suspects were there. There were large contingents from SAGE-AU, including Baden Hughes from The Perl Foundation. Practically all the SAGE-AU members there had submitted proposals for the next SAGE-AU conference, or were on the reviewing committee, or both. There were a couple of LinuxChix, a group from 2600, and all the old Melbourne University computer science crowd.

The weekend was spent on a new project that focuses on the Australian Perl community, which is active but fragmented. I'm hoping to reduce community fragmentation and produce a way that all Australian entities (including businesses, user groups, and invididuals) can communicate more effectively. Stay tuned for more details (and hopefully a beta in the next couple of weeks).

Journal comments on use.perl.org
After much time wondering why my use.perl journal no longer seems to attract comments, I finally performed a quick technical sanity check. Looks like I've been posted 'comment disabled' entries on use.perl for some time. My automatic cross-poster was feeding the wrong comment parameter to use.perl, and they were just getting turned off.

Hopefully that's now fixed, starting with this journal.

Media Apperance
An interview with me has appeared in a feature article in this week's ComputerWorld magazine (9th February, 2005). Unfortunately it's only in print, so I'm not aware of any legal copy of the article available on-line.

The feature compares different development platforms (Java, .NET, C++, and Perl), and there's no prizes for guessing which one I'm talking about. There's a reasonable amount about Perl 6 (since lots of the questions were about 'new features' and future directions), quite a bit on the flexibility of Perl, and some time spent dispelling the myth that Perl is only suitable for small projects.

There's even a mention of PerlMonks and Perl Training Australia for those looking to learn Perl.