DC.pm - Past Discussions

Previous meetings of DC Perl Mongers had these discussions:

• November 2003: Jim Harle from the Naval Academy gave a presentation on Perl and LDAP. The Power Point slides are here.
• June 2003: John Anderson gave a talk about log management and rotation (with a focus on dealing with large web server logs). More sys-adminy content than pure Perl-y goodness but the code was in Perl.
• May 2003: Toni Ellison went over the XML::Simple and XML::Parser modules, with some examples showing how to use them. These modules are basic to most Perl XML applications, as most other XML::* modules have one or both of them as dependencies.
• April 8, 2003: Special thanks to Mark Jason Dominus who gave his talk titled The Perl Hardware Store - Six useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed. He also presented his Return to the Perl Hardware Store - Eight more useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed. Information about these talks may be found here. Information about MJD may be found on his website here.
• October 2002: Peter Loscocco from the NSA spoke about Security-Enhanced Linux. Information on SELinux is available at http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/. Security-Enhanced Linux is a research prototype of the Linux kernel and a number of utilities with enhanced security functionality designed simply to demonstrate the value of mandatory access controls to the Linux community and how such controls could be added to Linux.
• August 2002: Zachary Zebrowski gave a talk titled Building A Soap Chat Client & A Comparison of the Security of IM Protocols. This presentation discussed the simplicity of building an IM client using Perl and SOAP, and included a comparison of the protocols used in other IM clients. This presentation was originally given a year earlier, but it was still relevant.
• June 13, 2002: Special thanks to Damian Conway for his presentation on Quantum::Superpositions at out regular meeting place. Damian also spoke at George Washington University from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM on Saturday, June 15th. This presentation was hosted by the George Washington University Cyberspace Policy Institute and was titled Extreme Perl -- The Horror That Is SelfGOL.
• June 2002: At our regularly scheduled June 4th meeting, Adam Turoff gave a very useful presentation on CVS.
• May 2002: Lisa King of Randstad spoke about job search strategies and living with the IT cool down. Lisa is an IT recruiter with Randstad and is the resident technical career expert at WashingtonJobs.com. She is also a frequent guest on WashingtonPost.com discussions. See the Washington Post Video Vault.
• May 2002: Jim Tarlau from the Communications Workers of America talked about tech unions and the CWA and what it does.
• April 2002: Dan Sugalski gave a presentation on Parrot and Perl 6 - The Implementation and Architecture. A recording of his talk is available here in Ogg Vorbis format.
• Although it wasn't really a DC.pm event, our very own Lisa Nyman gave a presentation on Open Source at the U.S. Census Bureau. This was recorded and is available here in Ogg Vorbis format.
• March 2002: Paul Ceruzzi spoke to us on "Zeno's Paradox and the History of Computing". Paul is Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

• February 2002: Adam Turoff demonstrated some features of the Perl debugger. His slides are available here. There is also a framed version and a gzipped version and a zipped version.
• January 2002: General discussion about DC.pm advocacy, getting new participants, etc.
• December 2001: Lisa and Rachael presented "The Poor Woman's DeskTop Mapping System." This is a thematic mapping production system they've been working on that uses perl, mysql, GD, and Template to create thematic maps for MapStats, the QuickFacts sybling at www.fedstats.gov. Her PowerPoint slides are available here.
• Adam Turoff presented on SOAP and SOAP::Lite.
• Joe Davidson gave an informal presentation on ParseRecDescent.
• Steve Palincsar presented on Mark Jason-Dominus' Text::Template module.
• Jonathan Eisenzopf talked about Perl 5.7. Meeting was held at the Brickskeller.
• John Porter talked about functional programming in Perl
• Jonathan Eisenzopf and Gyepi Sam tag teamed to talk about the new features in perl 5.6.
• Jonathan Eisenzopf talked about writing daemons in Perl.
• Gyepi Sam of Whirlwind Interative showed how to use CGI and template files in a data driven web application.
• December 1999: Lisa Nyman presenting on the very popular CGI module. The handout she handed out can be had here.
• November 1999: Jonathan Eisenzopf gave a presentation on the LWP family of modules for dealing with the Web. Examples included the SpunkyBot and mirroring the microsoft Web site. You can download the slides and sripts or view the HTML slides here.
• October 1999: Randal Schwartz was our special guest speaker for the October meeting. He gave a report on what's happening in the Perl community including new Perl features and the status of Topaz, Chip Salzenberg's effort to rewrite Perl in C++. Jonathan Eisenzopf also previewed the XML::RSS module.
• John Porter gave a presentation on the magic of tie().
• John Porter gave a presentation his nifty MacroExpander module that uses object method calls to fill in classes. Look for it on CPAN. John's module is at: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/J/JD/JDPORTER/ under the name Text::Macros.
• Steve Palinscar discussed a successful project he completed for the US General Accounting Office using a complex web-based survey with Perl. Interesting stuff!
• Joel Burton is spreading the perl meme to unsuspecting nonprofit web designers through a small module he calls eSQL. This module allows nonsophisticated web designers to create static or dynamic pages using templates to call records from a SQL database using DBI as access. He even threw some Visual Basic commands in there!
• Jonathan Eisenzopf gave a preview of the talk he'll be giving at yapc on XML. You can find some of his scripts and documentation at http://www.perlxml.com/dcpm/.
• Raul Miller answered the call for someone to talk about Perl/Tk! He has also written up an introduction to Perl/Tk that you can read online.
• We talked with Peter Chines of Extropia about their future set of public-domain web modules.
• We picked Chip Salzenberg's brain for information about Perl guts, advocacy issues, and MST3K trivia.
• Chris Winters talked about mod_perl and how it will change all webmasters' lives, for the better. He has written a brief document introducing mod_perl.
• Jonathan Eisenzopf talked about XML
• Chris Winters talked about the DBI (Database Interface) and databases in general. Here is a brief introduction to the topic.
• John Porter gave a good introduction to object-oriented Perl.

We also just talk about general matters, so if you bring some code or a problem, we can all help you debug your work. Beginners are welcome!

Updated: Date: 2002/02/06 00:17

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