Luckily, the other two thirds of the book are about photography. As stated in the introduction, the information “is presented as a variety of techniques regarding equipment choice, technical approach, subject matter, and production practices”. This is certainly the case, and the book is useful and applicable, certainly if you’re relatively new to photography. On the other hand, if you already have replaced a camera because you used it to death, you won’t discover much new: yes, you need a tripod at night and warm clothing .

So, if you’re new to photography, I’ll give it a 3 stars out of 5 (1/3 of software manual killed it for me). If you’re not, maybe 2 out of 5: it’s not a bad book and certainly not something very technical of that goes deep in the artistic part of photography. Nevertheless, it’s very fast read and it’s good to see the bits you’ve learn in one document.

Thanks for everyone on the community making this possible!

Also, have a look at Wendy’s post about the dev-room.

Dear Perl Mongers and friend,

PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO YOUR PERL CONTACTS  (excuses for the yelling )

We have to make this short and simple. Therefore most of this email is copied from last year’s Call for Speakers.

What?
Perl Dev-room, Saturday 2 February 2013, 11-19h.
Perl booth, Saturday and Sunday 2-3 February 2013, 11-19h.
FOSDEM, Brussels, 2 & 3 February 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/

Where?
Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh: https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/

Why so late?
Because our dev-room request was denied at first. They gave it to another programming language community, so we ended with only a booth. Now, the other community had to cancel their participation. We are Perl, so we jumped in and we asked for this. We got it.  Now we have to fill it.
So be quick and send in your presentation proposal.

Send proposal to who?
Both Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org).

Perl booth and dev-room information (most is from last year’s Call for papers):

The stand request is approved some time ago.  The stand will be open throughout the weekend. The dev-room event will take place Saturday, February 2nd 2013 , between 11:00 and 19:00, in room AW.126. The room itself has 75 seats, WIFI and a VGA projector.

This environment, being a university classroom with raised seats, lends itself perfectly for talks. This is a wonderful opportunity to present your Perl project ­big and small­ or talk about subjects you care about. We are looking for a variety of subjects on all levels: starter and advanced, generic and specialized, core internals and CPAN. We have 8 hours time, so we have the flexibility of using different time formats: e.g. talks of 20 minutes, more classic talks of 40 minutes or longer (although we learned from experience that longer talks should be split into slices of 20 or 40 minutes).

Please don’t doubt to send a proposal (information about yourself, subject, short description and time needed). If you have several subjects you are enthusiastic to talk about please send alternative proposals. In the case more than one talk is not selected, your proposal will help us when putting the schedule together and even have backup talks in case someone cancels. Also mention your time constraints (if any).

Please send your talk proposal by e-mail to the address below as soon as you read this.  You will receive an answer within 2 days. We will submit a definitive schedule on Sunday 2013-01-27 to the FOSDEM organizers.

Please forward / distribute this call as wide as possible (certainly to your local mongers).

Thank you.  Hope to meet you all in Brussels.

NB1: This is a community event without sponsoring. We don’t have the means to pay for your trip and time. If you want to sponsor part of the event, please feel free to contact us.

NB2: We’ll also appreciate volunteers, booth and dev-room. Please tell us your availabilities so we can also prepare a planning for this.

Depending on your expectations, the book may be a hit or a miss. On one hand, if you unrealistically hoped to be a PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS wizard after reading the book: no luck. You’ll need to buy several books about each subject and invest the necessary time to get to know the technologies. But, you probably know this already. If, on the other hand, you just want to scratch the surface but -this is the interesting part- you want to see how these disparate technologies interoperation, then it’s a pretty good read. In the limited space, the author manages to give attention to best practices (e.g. database normalization), something I didn’t expect. The including classical web application mini-project, that uses the 4 technologies, may be a good incentive to those that prefer a more hands-on approach.

Hammering Man, Frankfort

Getting to Frankfort wasn’t as easy as expected. A three hours direct trip from Brussels became a 7 hour one including six trains (including local ones), several changes and stops in the middle of nowhere because of a yet again a broken train. Being packed like sardines in the corridor of a non air-conditioned carriage for 1h30 when the temperature outside was close to 40 °C (who knows how hot it was inside): not nice. Add to that getting almost no information what so ever. Anyway, a long cold shower, a change of clothes, a walk in Frankfurt and dinner with the Belgian mongers Serge (president of Brussels.pm) and ecocode (Brussels.pm && Flanders.pm) put me back in the YAPC mood in no time. The hotel were I stayed was a half an hour walk from the venue and although there was public transportation, I preferred to walk to and from the conference: what better way to enjoy a city?

Walking to YAPC

The arrival at my first YAPC was a little schizophrenic. It was impressive to see the wide array of people of the Perl community. Different languages, accents, backgrounds… you name it. At the same time, it was fantastic to meet Perl people I already met in the past (e.g. by organising the FOSDEM Perl dev-room) and being able to link faces to irc nicks (e.g. sewi from Padre). I picked up a lot of things I can use at work, and through the presentations I got curious enough to try new things (e.g. Dancer). Also talks outside the rooms made me curious (e.g. Mojolicious). For the record: I am not a web-dev guy.

Larry Wall

Even if you weren’t there, you can probably get from the lines above that YAPC is at the same a technical and a community event. There were way too many great talks to name them all, so I’ll limit myself to the talks that left a background job running in my head. Probably in chronological order, first there was markov’s lightning talk about the “Perl Reunification summit” (summaries here and here) that was held this weekend in the town of Perl (a real town). Liz and Wendy (which I know from Flanders.pm) gathered important people from the Perl 5 and 6 community and got them… talking. If they can fulfil their plans (they are ambitious) it would be completely amazing. Time will tell. Read the summaries linked above.

markov’s talk about the Perl reunification summit

The second talk that rang a bell was Stevan Little’s talk about the new MOP (Meta Object Protocol) in Perl 5. I can not stress on how cool and important this is: Perl 5 is going strong. While a technical talk, Stevan’s talk had a strong –although implicit – community aspect. This is a huge change to the core Perl and introducing the MOP and the related syntax requires the collective effort (in code and advice) of different part of the community, including Moose and yes, Perl 6. Salve from Oslo.pm announced they are organising and sponsoring a Moose hacklaton in a few weeks. Oh, and stevan mentioned en-passant how real exceptions will look like. That would remove 2 out of 3 of the my “weakest points in Perl” list. Incredible.

stevan’s talk “A MOP for Perl”

Salve’s talk about Mongers communities

I was positively surprised by Mst’s “State of the Velociraptor [Perl 5]” as it echoes my personal stand of Perl in the wider FOSS world. First, Perl 5 trolling is so passé. Second, we should be positive about the FOSS “competition”: “Let a hundred flowers blossom” as they used to say in China . He illustrated this by a very recognisable example from IRC when people ask (e.g. #python and #perl) what language to learn. His advise is “learn both and pick the one you like most, they are both great languages” (quoting from memory). I applaud this positive attitude of the community of the last years. It shows that we’re no longer in the defensive. In my experience this is something people appreciate.

mst’s “State of the Velociraptor”

To conclude, mdk’s last lightning talk didn’t get stuck it my head through the technical or the community aspect, but -damn it!- through the the rhythm and the melody. Like the next speaker said: “try to be the next speaker after that” .

I don’t like Perl!

The last day I had a nice dinner with two Perl Mongers from Barcelona: Diego and Enrique. I met Diego at FOSDEM and Enrique is a co-Padre-hacker. We had a very nice and long talk on a beautiful –and luckily less hot– evening. A perfect end for my first YAPC.

But let me end by thanking the people in the yellow t-shirts, the organizers. They did a fantastic job in difficult circumstances (did I mention how hot it was? ). Thank you Frankfurt.pm and friends!

A big applause for the organizers!

You’ll find more (and bigger) photo’s on my flickr page.

Blogpost will follow later.

If you already program in Perl you know that “Programming Perl” is the de facto reference of the language. I haven’t met Perl Mongers citing randomly from it, but we are not that far from it . If you’re new to Perl, well now you know what you will be reading soon.

 This brings us to the targeted public of this book and that’s a tricky question. In my opinion, if you’re new to Perl –or new to programming– you are better served by “Learning Perl” (or a similar book). On the other hand, if you are an experienced programmer you’ll learn Perl from “Programming Perl” with a deep understanding of the language as a bonus. But 1184 pages may be a little too much to get your feet wet.

Don’t return the book to Amazon yet if you take the tutorial-road: your copy will serve you well for years to come as reference for the less obvious aspects of the language (and let’s be honest, there are several). So, this book is not a tutorial book. It’s neither, unlike what I just wrote, a pure reference book. The book is very well written, with just enough humour (also: as not “too much”) to make the 1184 pages digestible to get a deeper insight of the language, something that can not be said of many reference books that are written in a “phone book” style.

The previous versions dates from the year 2000 and covers ancient perls preceding the Perl revival and modernisation we’re enjoying today. Well, if this book is so important for the language –the codification of the language as it were– and well written to be enjoyable, the authors should be lucky to not face trial for the Perl riots while waiting for the update of the book. More seriously, the update was indeed urgently needed and kudos to the authors: writing this kind of book (content and reputation) is hard. It helps that Larry, the creator of Perl, is part of the team. A great read.

“Programming Perl, 4th Edition” by Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall, Jon Orwant
O’Reilly Media, February 2012, 1184 pages
Print ISBN: 978-0-596-00492-7, ISBN 10: 0-596-00492-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4493-9890-3, ISBN 10: 1-4493-9890-1
Programming Perl @amazon.co.uk

The good news: it works flawlessly using the (graphical) alternative below.

As a enthusiastic photographer (see my latest Perl Fosdem pictures) I am very positive about the colour management integration in the latest Ubuntu (12.04). Sure, colour calibration was possible before, but now it’s an integral part of the system and not a simple add-on. Ubuntu++

Once the reviews are in, I will probably buy the ColorHug open source hardware calibration device. In the meantime I borrowed an old Spyder2 (express) from my father-in-law. I do not recommend buying new devices from Colorvision. The company is known to be very antagonistic to free and open source software. But, if you already have the hardware in a drawer it’s better to use it.

Once you plug in the device, the “Calibration” button will activate and the necessary packages will be installed. However, for this HOWTO it’s easier just to install the software (and its dependencies) from a shell window:

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-color-manager

(This install argyll as a dependency that does the real calibration beneath the GUI.)

This step is only applicable if you have a Spyder 2 device. As mentioned above, the company is not FOSS-friendly and doesn’t even provide technical specifications. You will need the firmware of the device from the Windows driver. If you trust me, you can get mine here [MD5: 007ac5705a3a8ed7edf01569700e6ebf]. Put it in the .local/share/color directory in your home directory (create the needed directories if not present). It was extracted from the 2.3.6 Windows driver for the Spider2 Express (the latest at the time of writing). If you want to create the file yourself, see here. In short: you’ll need the driver CD. If you don’t have it or want/need a more up-to-date version, you’ll need to install the driver and feed the generated .dll to spyd2en: spyd2en -v ./CVSpyder.dll

In the GUI (Dash -> Applications -> Color, or simply type “color” and click the icon), if you select your screen and the “Calibrate…”, the steps offered by the wizard are straight forward. Very easy. While it worked great on the computer of my better half, the generated profile on my own laptop (attached to an external screen) had a terrible magenta cast. Not of the type “your eyes will adapt to it”.

After investigating and looking closely at the profile, it was clear that the profile used a 6500K white balance, instead of the 5000K requested in the wizard (it’s called “Photography and graphics” there). Furthermore, the wizard offered 3 calibrations options: 4, 10 and 20 minutes depending on the desired accuracy. While I chose 4 minutes for testing purposes, the calibration took a long time (an hour or longer). Also, the advanced output in the calibration window (hidden by default) categorised the screen as CRT while it’s a LCD. Because of this, I don’t think the problem is tied to the specific firmware (running the latest available) of the hardware, but rather to gnome-color-manager integration with the device and maybe certain configurations. I don’t have other calibration devices available to test. Bug reported.

dispcalGUI is a OS-agnostic alternative to gnome-color-manager and in fact – just as gnome-color-manager – and GUI on top argyll. Just download the deb (the most recent deb for Ubuntu 11.10 works fine on 12.04). If you double click it, the Ubuntu Software Manager will launch and perform the installation (or just use “dpkg -i” if you are a Debianista at heart).

Now, launch the dispcalGUI application from the Dash or just open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + t) and type:

$ dispcalgui

Select the Photography profile, your screen (if you have a multi monitor setup) and probe your device (by clicking on the “recycle” arrows) and give your profile a more recognisable name and a location. I use brand_model_calibrationDevice, e.g. Samsung_SyncMaster2443FW_Spyder2Express). Click on Calibrate and Profile and go read a book or take some pictures (it will take a lot longer than 20 minutes, probably an hour). If you wish you can skip the white point and black level, YMMV.

Now go back to the Ubuntu Color Settings as above and add the new created profile by selecting your screen, then click “Add profile”, select other and choose the path you save the monitor profile.

Your monitor is now calibrated!

Finally I found the time to “develop” my Perl dev-room @ FOSDEM 2012 pictures (convert from camera RAW files to jpg). It was a very nice event. If you missed the Perl dev-room in the past year, you should really visit us in 2013. Or even better, give a talk.

In the pictures above you see Nicholas talking about Moose. He forgot his mac-VGA adaptor (ahum) so he ended up writing code on the blackboard (“the loudest syntax checker on earth”). Marc mixed some Haskell in his talk while Flavio showed some Javascript-powered Perl. Clément presented a Perl SSO solution and Erik showed us a open source accounting solution. Stefan introduced the PerlCommerce platform, while Ævar (a famous guy being the most mentioned name in Programming Perl, 4th ed!) talks about git-deploy (or rather git-undeploy ). Marius explained the marriage of Moose and MemCached.

As the organizer of the Perl dev-room, I had to attend to a few things during the talks. My excuses for not taking pictures of Mark’s and Guillaume’s talk (I was able to attend most of it, though). Sadly,  I didn’t had the time to photograph our fabulous Perl stand (although I have some pictures from last year): Wendy, Liz, Eric and all the other volunteers did a great job.

Thank you for a successful Perl FOSDEM presence.

The Program was as follows:

The good

It’s certainly a good read. I enjoyed it. It’s short (100 pages), sometimes funny and always extremely to the point, something I appreciate. McDougall is really passionate about the subject and that shows: the author’s style is enthusiastic and upbeat. If you’re a business you’ll be using the oldest marketing tricks in a digital jacket in no time. You’ll reach a much bigger audience that you thought it was possible and it will cost you peanuts. Good.

The bad

So, what if you not own a business? No problem, the back says “business, cause, or organization”, you may think. Nope. Being an free and open source enthusiast involved in a few projects (e.g. Padre, the Perl IDE) it was specifically the “cause or organisation” part that made me curious. Of the 25 recipes, isn’t there at least one applicable to smaller (not commercial) open source projects? Sadly, no. It will help you to sell coffee or burritos, but not reach new users or developers. Did I learn something I didn’t know? Again, no (I repeat: I enjoyed the book).

So the “anti-marketing how-to community-engagement book” epithet may be a little euphemistic. Let’s stick with a “not-annoying and not insulting practical online marketing book for small business”. Sure, it sounds less “cool”, but take it from me, “not annoying and not insulting” part is worth *a lot* when talking about marketing.

Conclusion

Will I recommend it? Well, it depends on who you are. The 3 of 5 stars I give to this book is just an average: it ranges from totally irrelevant for some uses to a fantastic HOWTO to get the online marketing of your business started in no time. You Mileage -May- Will Vary.