Israel.pm - The Israeli Perl Mongers

Agenda

On 02 June, 2005, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:

• 19:00-19:30 -- Assembly and light refreshments
• 19:30-20:30 -- Roman Parparov will lecture about "AI & Perl - implementing CSP method for Swiss chess tournament pairing"
• 20:30-20:45 -- Break and light refreshments
• 20:45-21:45 -- Shlomo Yona will lecture about "A job-interview like sorting riddle"
• As usual after the meeting we will go out to a nearby pub/coffee-shop/etc. for a post-meeting social gathering.

Location: Tel-Aviv University

Report

1. Ido Perelmutter
2. Mikhael Goikhman
3. Offer Kaye
4. Pinkhas Nisanov
5. Roman Parparov
6. Semuel Fomberg
7. Shlomi Fish
8. Shlomo Yona
9. Uri Bruck

We gathered in the second floor. When I arrived only Uri Bruck was there. We started discussing stuff, among it:

1. Whether Open Source and the Creative Commons were Socialistic, Communistic, pro-Capitalistic, non-Capitalistic, anti-Capitalistic, etc. Later on, we decided that it did not matter whether it was Socialistic or not, as long as we all agreed that Open Source was "good for the Jews".

2. We discussed the eBay's acquisition of shopping.com (formerly dealtime) for several hundred millions dollars (which I surprisingly did not hear about - can anyone give me a URL?).

I probably have a lot to say about #1, but I'll leave it to another message. We helped Roman carry the Bourekas and Beverages, and then enjoyed eating them. Then Roman's presentation started.

Roman's presentation was about using Perl to construct and manage a Swiss Tournament. He covered a lot of the theory and then went on to cover the Perl implementation (without showing any code).

Then we had a break. A new guy (Something Perelmutter) showed up and we talked with him. He now studies Mechanical Engineering in Tel Aviv University, and is a Reserve Student (Atudai). He is heavily involved in the Bney-Yehuda Football group - started as their webmaster and now is involved with the children. We touched a bit about how it was relatively unusual for hackers (even male) to like spectator sports, and Offer asked him if he can get tickets to the game for his co-workers.

We also discusses tabs vs. spaces, whether political or philosophical discussions were boring or not, who convinces who in such discussions, etc. There also was an interesting insight about the fact that the Hamakor Bylaws caused many discussions to require the people who conveyed opinions to tell how much exactly did they contributed to open-source.

Then came Shlomo's presentation. The slides are available online (URL?) and the problem was very interesting, and there was a lot of involvement from the listeners. I suggested a solution to the problem which was different from Shlomo's solution, and also could be generalized. Shlomo's solution was considerably more complex, and some people wondered how he could think of it At the end of the presentation, we took out the screen, and I wrote the Perl code for my solution. We had 30 minutes to do the same for Shlomo's solution, but we decided against it.

Then Offer asked how many people wanted to go to the cafe, but only three or four people wanted to go, so he decided to skip it.

The meeting was attended by 8 or 9 people, which was relatively low, and even many regulars did not attend.

This meeting summary was written by Shlomi Fish.