Agenda
On 13 June, 2002, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:
- I could not update the details on the web site so there were e-mail announcements only.
One about the content and
one about the location
Location:
Report
A total of 11 people came to the meeting nearly twice the number of the
previous meeting. This is great.
We went together with Reuven and missed the exit from the highway in
Tel Aviv twice because we ware talking about Perl.
Anyway we got there a bit after 18:00
Some people were already waiting there though most of the were local
to Raz. As more people joined us we talked about how they use Linux on
their printer photo-copier in Raz (I think, though I am not sure I
understood that :)
We talked about MS and BSA and that some of us have received warnings that
they will come to check our systems for Applications without licenses.
Sure. Most of use Linux anyway but this triggered us to talk about a
few applications like Power Point that has no Open counterpart that
works in Hebrew as well. Oded showed us what he is using.
Personally I think that all the frightening ads the BSA shows lately is
a huge opportunity to anyone selling Linux as the solution.
I think the BSA generates the right amount of fear that can be
resolved by some Open Source software with its license.
We also talked about the difference between an MS programmer whose
world is the Visual Studio and the Unix style programmer who can work
with any editor and compiler. Personally I think that the fact that
VS provides such an easy way to program does not necessarily create
bad programmer but sure, it does not force you to have full
understanding of a lot of underlying issue. The question remaining is
weather it is important ?
Then a bit after 19:00 Reuven started his lecture
Actually this was the first time I heard Reuven give a real lecture
and I liked very much his style. He gave us an introduction and
history of representing letters in computers then moved on to
the various unicode definitions - the 2-byte version of Microsoft
and the variable length version of the Unicode consortium.
Finally he talked about how the whole thing is implemented in Perl
5.8 that should be released in the near future.
You can see his slides as well.
After the lecture we kept talking a bit and there were two
volunteers already to give talk on the coming meetings. We are going
to schedule them soon.
This meeting summary was written by Gabor Szabo.