Next talk was a success story, "Internet publication of Geneva justice decisions, with Perl" made by Laurent Dami. Laurent explains why and how they used Perl. He also explained the difficulties he encountered to make Perl officialy enter his organization. I followed Abigail's talk "Writting Better Regular Expressions". It looked a lot liked what I had already read in Perl Best Practices but with a nice live presentation.

The first part of the afternoon is dedicated to lightning talks. Lightning talks are 5 minutes only talks. They are perfect for a short introduction to a module, a success story, a "please join us on project X" or any funny talk that don't require more time. Here follow a subset of these lightning talks:

  • Tatsuhiko Miyagawa showed us an amazing usage of Google maps: moves of his laptop were moving the position on the map!
  • Edmund von der Burg made obvious the perfomance improvement using HTTP::Async which process several HTTP requests at once. Compared with a "one by one" request style, the decrease of execution time was amazing.
  • Chia-liang Kao demonstrates the power of Jifty, a web application framework. The one that runs Hiveminder at Best Practical
  • Ruben Fonseca gives a powerful example of replacing Procmail by a Perl script using Email::Filter. Instead of Procmail complicated syntax, just use Perl syntax and Perl regex to filter your emails and trigger any action on specific email, for example sending a mail to Ruben with "shutdown" in subject will shutdown his computer (... this "feature" was removed by now).

Marty made the auctionSecond part of the afternoon was for the auction. It seems a YAPC always ends with an auction. The purpose is to gather money for the local Perl Mongers group by selling stuff they collected for free. There was a lot of T-shirts, Perl books and other weirder things like BooK's arms with your favorite Perl module written on a tatoo, or a piece of "Google Goo" with Larry Wall's fingerprints on it. The city for YAPC::Europe 2007 was announced, it will be Vienna in Austria. The last auctionned item was something related to next year YAPC. The winning item was "orange mohican" hairstyle. During the auction, I made a great deal with Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk Programming and Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (signed by chromatic) for only 25 pounds.

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