YAPC Dinner

Last night was the YAPC dinner, auction and this year boat cruise. The boat, (underwritten by IBM :) ) was great. The views were amazing.

The auction was a heck of fun. I walked away with a prerelease copy of Advanced Perl 2nd ed (by simon cozens). And some crazy man payed 1500$ for edition 0 of Damians Best Practices , plus of the 1st cover proof and a print out of the final PDF. Signature included. Very cool.

In another highlight brian d foy, bought a signed copy of HOP for 200$ then resold it for another 100$ all to the TPF's gain.

Pictures are here.

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YAPC and Toronto

So far this YAPC has been incredibly well organized. Very Very Smooth. And also very big. ~400 people, the bigest since YAPC 19100.

Toronto is a dang nice city, we're smack in chinatown, and last night we had an excellent welcome dinner at some random restaraunt that had enough seating for 150 people - it was excelent. Afterward we retired to a pub -- that managed to be publike yet open to the street - excellent.

And finally the first 3 talks were quite good. Toronto.pm opener was a good intro - then Larry talked on community building, and Allison basically did a state of the onion -- with the new TPF onion logo every where. And her signature poetics :)

A very good start I'm looking forward to the rest of the day, and the con!

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IP and `casual piracy`

This is a great article from the Freedom To Tinker blog analyzing how far Big IP (music) companies have hijacked the debate. To quote a quote (from Jessica Litman) :

The copyright law says so: section 1008 of the copyright statute provides that consumers may make non-commercial copies of recorded music without liability. Many people seem not to know this any more.

A linked article on the tactic of using DRM to stop personal copying, and how it will backfire is also worthwhile.

And finally this entry by a consumer who is FED UP is an excellent read.

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Santa Fe Real Estate

So the New York Times published this infographic today. It shows a pretty big large dot of Interest Only morgages over Santa Fe. Due to interesting housing sale laws in New Mexico it's pretty hard to know much about what is going on in the local market. The only people who know what is up are people with a vested interest in saying "buy now!!!".

However interest only loans are most certainly not the right choice for most people, being down right risky, if cheap to start out. As such a large chunk of such loans indicates that at the very least the local market is well over priced in comparison with local wages, and people can't afford homes without taking large risks. They are also the preferred vehicle for real estate speculators who plan on being out of the market by the time the risk hits in a big way -- usually 5 years hence. And lots of speculators almost certainly means a bubble. Which is where my bets lay ....

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South Afrrica, Mbeki, Zuma

Mbeki fires Zuma! This is really pretty heartening, Zuma's financial adviser was convicted for corruption and all the charges were tied to [Deputy President] Zuma. The man is in it neck deep, but he's hugely popular. He was mentioned as likely choice for the ANC's next presidential candidate . And he was trying to bluff his way through this, so he was going no where on his own.

This was a tough move politically for Mbeki and the ANC, and I didn't think it was going to happen. But it was the right move. More at Reuters.

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CPAN Tools

For the last 6 months, at the new job I've been coding as though I was distributing to CPAN --even when not distributing is the much more common case. And it has been amazing, Mainly because of the toolkits available. There are 2 major niceties:

Module Construction

It used to be that that you had to "ALWAYS BEGIN WITH H2XS!" . This was fine advise for distribution but I never found it usable - much less a productivity enhancer. These days I use Module::Starter and am a VERY happy camper -- particularly when I use it inconjunction with Damian's Module::Starter::PBP. An Excellent way to get rolling.

Module Distribution

I find that compared with a lot of the distribution hacks I've used over my career ExtUtils::MakeMaker doesn't actually suck. Module::Build very nearly rocks. And Autrijus's ExtUtils::AutoInstall rocks hard. The last is a must when distributing you're modules out without a local CPAN site - It integrates prereqs and CPAN installs with you make process.

Finally I've found that building projects in this fashion helps in little ways. You get used to using make test - and as such you test driven development becomes easier. You think more about distribution, and where a Module ends and a new one begins. Documentation, and Help get baked in as you go, etc, etc.

I truly think this is the way to go even when stuck behind a firewall ....

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