In praise of AnnoCPAN
I've become increasingly fond of AnnoCPAN, an annotated version of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. AnnoCPAN has rapidly become my scratchpad for writing down notes, explanations and reminders regarding modules.

AnnoCPAN is automatically linked to from each module on CPAN, so I'd think that more people are aware of it. However my experiences at conferences and user-groups may suggest otherwise.

Tidyview
Perltidy is a fantastic tool for reformatting Perl code. I'm impressed at its abilities, even when I think my code is beautiful, perltidy can often make it more beautiful. Whenever I've been called to help maintain code that was written by the style impaired, perltidy has been an essential tool.

Leif Eriksen has recently released tidyview, a graphical tool for adjusting perltidy options. This allows one to see visually see what all the perltidy options do, without having to go through the manual process of run-and-compare yourself.

I understand that tidyview is still beta, and has a few dependencies that Leif expects to remove for final release. However it's still impressive in what it can do so far.

SAGE-AU 2006 wrap-up
I'm home from The Australian System Administrators Conference, more commonly known as SAGE-AU 2006. This year the conference was held in Canberra, in the middle of winter, but since my entire time was spent indoors I didn't really have a chance to discover if the weather was as cold as it was supposed to be.

Perl Training Australia often uses conferences as a way to boot-strap new courses, and this year the boot-strapped course was Perl for System Administration. The full-day tutorial was held on Monday, and I stayed up rather late the night before getting the slides and materials just right.

During the tutorial I discovered that my audience had a lot more knowledge than I had anticipated, but this ended up being very good as I could cover more advanced topics in more depth, and more material overall. I was also worried that the content wasn't SysAdmin-focused enough, but the great many comments I received after the course indicated otherwise.

The conference dinner this year was held in the ANZAC museum, which featured a great many original and recreated artifacts from WWII. Overall it was a very sobering experience, despite the copious amounts of free alcoholic beverages that were available.

Lee Monette, SAGE-AU's administrative head and heart is moving on to greener pastures, and was given a standing ovation at the dinner for her amazing service to the guild throughout the years. Lee's efficiency and organisation has been nothing less of astounding, and I am certain she'll have great success in her new adventures.

Friday morning at 9am I presented my paper on Human Interfaces for Geeks. I try to put a little humour into my talks, although I wasn't sure how many laughs I'd get with everyone being hung-over from the dinner the night before.

I was very pleased to discover that SysAdmins keep their sense of humour even after a long night of festivities, and that many had woken "early" and consumed a great deal of caffeine to see my presentation. The talk was extremely well received, with a great many laughs all around. With luck, a few people may have even learnt a thing or two.

I'm now back in Melbourne, enjoying a beautiful weekend before starting on yet another hard-slog finishing our web development course. My plans are then to stop biting off huge chunks of coursework, and instead take the rest of the decade off.

Airport Season
Today I fly to Canberra to teach Perl Security.

Tomorrow night I fly home from Canberra for the weekend.

On Sunday (two days later) I fly back to Canberra to teach Perl for System Administration.

On Monday night I fly back home again.

On Wednesday I fly to Canberra a third time for third time for the SAGE-AU conference.

After the conference I fly back home again.

I will then have a whole month in Melbourne, before flying out to Canberra again to teach Web Development with Perl.

After the web development course I'll be flying home, turning thirty, flying to cities that are not Canberra, and taking the rest of the year off.

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Fenwickus of Borg
As part of preparation for an upcoming talk my brother-in-law (James Dominguez) prepared a disturbingly realistic photograph of myself after borgification. It looks like something that you really would find on a Star Trek episode.

Ironically, I'm looking at making it more "obviously edited" for my presentation, so the audience will realise it's me, rather than just assume it's just another borg photo.

This entry contains media elements which are only visible on my main site.

Fenwickus of Borg
As part of preparation for an upcoming talk my brother-in-law (James Dominguez) prepared a disturbingly realistic photograph of myself after borgification. It looks like something that you really would find on a Star Trek episode.

Ironically, I'm looking at making it more "obviously edited" for my presentation, so the audience will realise it's me, rather than just assume it's just another borg photo.