Day 4 of the European Open Source Convention 2006

Posted on September 21, 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during the talks on the fourth and final day of the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

You can get to the index page for my notes on this conference here.

The Conway channel

Speaker: Damian Conway

List::Maker

  • In Perl6 we have @bitmap = (0) x 256;_ becomes _@bitmap = 0 xx 256; and many other things, but for Perl5 we have List::Maker

  • for (<@list>)

  • for (< ^@list> ) (count down)

  • my @list = <1, 4, ..30: !/13/>; (1 to 30, 3 by 3, but not 13)

  • my @list = <yada yeda 'hello world' hello>;

  • my @list = < 46d >;

  • Extensible by using the add_handler funcion

  • New version up on CPAN in a day or two

Contextual::Return

  • Designed to solve the wantarray problem

Examples:

use Contextual::return;
sub yada (){
	...
	if (LIST) return X;
	if (ARRAY) return Y;
}


...
return
	LIST { @list }
	BOOL { 1 }
	STR { "hello" }
	VOID { die "huh?" }
  • return FAIL; => if it is called in a BOOLEAN context return undef, else die. This means that open FH 'file'; now dies (as it should) because I’m not checking the return value

Douglas Engelbart’s Hyperscope: Taking Web collaboration to the Next Level using Ajax and Dojo

Speaker: Brad Neuberg

  • Augmenting The Human Intellect - Paper to read (1962!!)

  • Tools for thinking:
    • Language ( 40,000 years? )
    • Writing ( 3,500 - 6,000 years? )
    • Computers ( >= 1950 )
  • Systems Thinking
    • Tools
    • Humans
    • Training (no training is good, implicit training should suffice, but training get you further, faster)
    • Language (a way of conveying symbols, not just words)
    • Methodology (take what you’ve already got and use it in new ways)
  • Capabilities (all 5 parts of the systems have capabilities)
    • Can be broken down
    • Work together
    • Some are more core than others

  • Look at tools and humans holistically

  • http://hyperscope.org/