Geek Education and The Princess Bride
I was fortunate enough to spend the first two days of this week attending Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices course. The course was enjoyable, but there were a couple of points that I found perplexing.

At one point during the day, Damian made reference to The Princess Bride, illiciting a chuckle from both Jacinta and myself. However, the rest of the attendees were silent. Perhaps they were just nervous, but perhaps some of them had never actually watched The Princess Bride. Inconceivable!

I've noticed in recent years that more and more IT professionals seem to be lacking the common history and background that I'd normally expect. This includes popular geek culture (Star Wars, The Princess Bride), jargon (grok, kludge, hack), and computer science (order-of, sorting techniques, halting problem, Turing machines, P vs NP, stacks and queues, linked lists, hashes).

Of course, I don't expect such advanced knowledge from people who are new to computer science, or who have simply fallen into IT skills as a by-product of their job. However I encounter people who have studied computer science, who do have it as their life and job, and yet they don't grok sorting algorithms. They think that Roguelike games are a special olympics for a World of Warcraft character class. Help me, Obi-Wan...

Like all things, the culture of computer science is moving on. Much of this is caused by the sheer ubiquity of computers, and the fact that for most people computers are no longer a transparent box filled with tools and bugs from which to craft something wonderful. Computers are instead finished products in their own right. Our new generations are learning how to use brightly coloured operating systems, where a register is where you pay for that operating system, rather than a location in which to store data.

Overall I view these changes as a good thing. People can use computers to get things done, and get on with their life, rather than having to devote their lifetime to study. However it does make me feel a little old. While certainly not in the first generation of computer scientists, I had ample opportunity to interact and learn from them. I still have my friends gather round and ask for the tales of the Internet before spam.

Oddly, I find the most disturbing aspect of this is that some of my humour is becoming stale. A few years ago I could get a round of laughter by mentioning that CPAN is so great, we even have a module that solves the halting problem; whereas these days it's likely to be met with awkward silence. Inconceivable!

Canberra
Spent the last week in Canberra, teaching our Perl courses. While the courses went well, we're not particularly happy with our facilities providers who put us in a room that was too small for our needs, and which had decidedly dodgy air-conditioning. If you provide computer facilities for hire in Canberra, and have a policy of not screwing your customers, then now's a great time to get in touch.

One of the best aspects of the trip was the hotel. Rejane and Victor, the owners of Quest Canberra, get a huge thumbs up for their friendliness and service. We had our room upgraded (twice!), we were presented with a complimentary bottle of wine on check-in, and we were given a sufficency of drink vouchers for the pub next door. Plus they held our bags for us on the last day. It's so refreshing to encounter a business that's so committed to making its customers happy, and who properly understands the value of raising good-will.

While in Canberra I met up with the local Canberra Perl Mongers group. Unfortunately I didn't realise how long it would take for our food to arrive, so presentations happened much later than expected. I got a few chuckles from my Mind Control talk, and had a surprisingly good reaction from my old talk on Using Strict. Andrew Pollock also gave a presentation on watching directories in Linux and how to control his server by remote e-mail.

On Thursday night Jacinta and myself had the honour of catching up with Pia Waugh from Linux Australia. The meeting was held in the Pancake Parlour, which appears to be a happening place for geeky things in Canberra, due to its free and unrestricted wireless access, which incidentally was set up by one of the Canberra.PM members. We chatted with Pia about a variety of topics, including false teeth, quarantine, and open source, as well as resetting the password on a Linux box that one of our students had brought along.

Renovations
Ian and Sofie are renovating their house in preparation for sale, and both Jacinta and myself, along with many other friends and family, have been having a grand time helping them out. My main tasks have been climbing on tall ladders, painting, and shovelling rocks and soil. In return we keep getting fed with extremely nice foodstuffs, so I think we're getting the better deal out of the bargain. Sofie's parents in particular have been excellent company, and have kept me well-stocked with beer, food, and humour during my visits.

Role-playing
After two years of running my 1st Ed AD&D roleplaying game, the party has defeated the incredibly hard encounter that was supposed to appear in the first adventure, and is almost up to the point where they can start to survive the main content. The running joke is that we'll still won't have finished in sixty years time.

Chickens += 4
Jacinta's parents were kind enough to buy us new chickens as a birthday present. We now have four more, named Coffee, Chocolate, Mocha, and Latte.

Puzzle Pirates
Shiver me timbers! Puzzle Pirates is a fine time-waster for an old salt like myself, and what better excuse to talk like a pirate to ye friends? My pirate is Tarrlox on the sage ocean. Feel free to drop me a message if you're also playing.

Win32::Screenshot
I've just discovered Win32::Screenshot, a Perl module that not only allows one to capture the entire screen, but more importantly makes it easy to capture individual windows, or portions of windows.

Installation of the module was a bit of a pain. Even though there is a ppd file at http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Win32-Screenshot.ppd it depends upon PerlMagick, which under more recent releases is properly named Image::Magick and can be selected as part of the windows ImageMagick installer. I quickly hacked together my own ppd file that simply omits the dependency section. Besides from that, the whole thing worked like a charm.

So why is Win32::Screenshot so useful? Well, a lot of Windows programs have no command-line interface. If you want to communicate with them, you have no choice but to use the GUI. That's fine for humans, but what if you want to perform automated testing, or automatically watch a window for a particular event? Then Win32::Screenshot, especially in conjunction with Win32::GuiTest, really shines.

I've been joking with my friends that I'm going to use all this to play Puzzle Pirates automatically. In reality I have a much more interesting (but unfortunately secret) project at hand.

Conference talks
I'm pretty fond of conferences, a fact that's fairly well known. However I sometimes get questions asking "Why aren't you attending XYZ?" To answer this, we need to look a little more closely about why people attend conferences.

When applying for funding, everyone says they wish to visit a conference because it's educational, or because they'll be exposed to industry experts and valuable new ideas. While that may be true, conferences also represent a holiday away from work for many employees. Conferences mean a paid time away from work, with groovy people, and often excellent food and free drinks. Sounds like a holiday to me.

The reason that conferences are holidays for many people is because their employer pays for them. If they were paying for themselves, then attendees may consider saving the money and going scuba diving in the tropics. If you're self-funding (which ultimately I am), then the conference rapidly loses holiday value. That leaves the networking and education.

Now, here's the rub. While I find many conference presentations interesting (and some... less so), the main reason I attend conferences is the same reason I attend user-groups. It's to meet people. People are so much more important than the latest tech-tool or newest way of doing unthinkable things with XML.

However meeting people is hard work. There's all these wacky social protocols and handshakes in order to open communications and find a common topic, and even then you're not even sure if any useful information is going to be transferred. Conferences often provide very little time to actually talk to others, since talks and presentations take up so much of the day. Luckily, there's a simple trick that turns all that around. You give a presentation.

When presenting a wonderful thing happens. You get to provide an idea to hundreds of people. Now anybody you meet for the rest of the conference has something to talk to you about, meaning you can immediately skip a lot of the more difficult parts of the opening protocols. Even better, people you meet will tend to self-select for ideas and interests similar to your own. By presenting, one gets the most bang-for-buck out of a conference.

Now I can finally answer the original question of why I don't attend conference XYZ this year. It's probably because I didn't hear about the Call For Papers (CFP). Some conferences tend to only send their CFP to a very narrow band of people, and in those cases I don't even have the opportunity to present a paper. That's a real shame, because inbred conferences are often prone to repeated content and poorer presentations.

Sometimes I'll catch the CFP, but not actually be accepted as a speaker. This primarily seems to be when the conference is very technically focused, and I submit papers that are on non-technical topics, such understanding social APIs, or practical mind control. While this is a shame, I don't blame the organisers. Picking speakers for a conference is hard, and if you haven't seen them present before then it's only sensible to go with the on-topic ones. All it means is that I simply haven't met enough people yet.

So, if I'm not at a conference, it's usually because I've missed the CFP or otherwise don't have an opportunity to present. Occasionally it's because I'm just plain busy. After all, I do have a life around here somewhere...

I think it must be on a backup tape.