MIT Era History (ii): from Email logs, 2017-2020 
2017-2020
2017-2020
Boston Perl Mongers history is divided into three parts, like Gaul.
(Note. This file (and later) is in chronological order, most recent at the bottom. The first two files are recent on top, or reversed order. All start with a table of contents by year.)
For 15 years, MIT IT and Facilities provided user group meeting space on campus for the convenience of MIT staff and other community members who wished to attend.
The facilities were very nice MBA case rooms in the Business & Humanities building E51, with built-in A/V.
MIT Era spans the file break between Part i and and this Part ii, due to source of information. Part i was extracted from 2-3 generations of Wiki Calendar Archives. This Part ii is extracted from Email archives, which accounts for the change in format.
Tues, Jan 10th, 2017, 7:30 Room E51-376
learningperl6.png
“6 More Things about 6” will cover a combination of features, ideas, and concepts that I find interesting about the new language. I’ll also answer question about the upcoming “Learning Perl 6” book, the Kickstarter campaign for it, and other things you may want to ask.
About the speaker brian d foy is a long time member of the Perl community, a prolific Perl trainer, and writer. In addition to authoring the upcoming Learning Perl 6,† he’s the the author of Mastering Perl, and co-author of Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, and Effective Perl Programming. He’s a frequent speaker at Perl conferences. He founded the first Perl user group, the New York Perl mongers, as well as the Perl advocacy nonprofit Perl Mongers. A contributor to Perl documentation and maintainer of several modules on CPAN.
†(Narrator: With the Raku language rename, Learning Raku* is now the title of the book. Also, FWIW, “Six things … about …” was an au courant cultural reference at the time. *)
SLIDES for this talk Perl 6 Advent article by bdf on Object Hashes P6PT Slides for (first) 6 Things about Perl 6 at NY.pm (prequel for above talk) see Brian also as (ex)LearningPerl6->@LearningRaku (twitter.com) and @briandfoy_perl
Twice postponed because Valentines had basically 0 RSVP and Pi(e) Day 3.14 had a Blizzard Watch
I’m a bit of a digital pack-rat, so I will be showing a tool that I developed to help me hoard Tumblr meme posts. As a bonus, just for this talk I wrote something in Perl 6 that does a similar task for XKCD.
(So if you’re looking for ways to capture unstructured (no API) data from the web with Perl, this talk is for you.)
Ricky Morse has been using Perl for various things since the late 90s.
(Deferred from Feb 14th Valentines Day to March 14th Pi(e) Day … and also the latest 2nd Tuesday falls, so two months in a row, BLU.org 3rd Wednesday Linux/Unix meeting fell the day after Boston.PM, twice since not a leap year.)
( 3.14 is Pie Day. We usually have Pizza which is Pie and a Pi joke in itself, so I’ll bring rectangular cookies that are trigonometric in a different way. If someone brings a dessert Pie, that would be OK too. – Bill )
(OK we now have a BLIZZARD WATCH posted by NWS . Odds of Perl meeting Tuesday drops fractionally every hour that stays in effect and more so if elevated to a Warning. As if it wasn’t obvious … Meeting tonight is canceled, speaker and topic postponed to April 11th. Pi Day will be observed online. - Bill )
Celebrity guest Randal L Schwartz, at the home of Uri Guttman “Perl Hunter”.
Join us to see what’s new in the latest Perl. Using slides prepared by brian d foy for an AmsterdamX.pm presentation, we’ll go over the highlights of new features and changes in Perl 5.26, including the potential disruptive change of removing the current directory (.) from the @INC module search path. We’ll supplement the slides with the official Perl Delta (change log) document, and other online sources where more depth is required. The talk will be an open discussion format, with Bill Ricker leading us through the slides, but plenty of opportunity for the audience to ask questions, or offer opinion, and in some cases we’ll try some live demos of the new features.
Attendees will select Lightning Talks from The Perl Conference 2017 playlist. We can’t play all 29 of them unless we ‘gong’ more than half quickly after starting, but at 6 minutes each, we can get through a dozen (unless we choose to discuss and experiment between).
Samples from among the 29 six-minute choices available -
Bill will be our VJ, but the audience will lead.
Damian Conway, “Three Little Words” (or “Why I Love Perl”) (recorded at The 2017 Perl Conference).
Another MST3K YouTube TPC/YAPC screening and discussion
Damian Conway, known for his rapid-paced, wide-ranging, tour-de-force presentations, was the keynote presenter at The Perl Conference, 2017 (formerly known as YAPC::NA). In his keynote he tells “a tale of madness, obsession, and coding extremity,” describing what it took to bring 3 keywords from Perl 6 to Perl 5. A community effort that took three years and 2.8 million lines of code. This is a more extreme example of what some developers are going through to bring Perl 6 functionality to Perl 5.
We will watch his recorded keynote and discuss among ourselves.
Even if you are new to Perl and don’t follow all the technical details, Damian’s highly entertaining presentations are a must see. (Plus, after the talk when we discuss it, we’ll happily answer any questions.)
About the speaker Damian Conway is an author or co-author of numerous Perl books, and a widely sought-after speaker and trainer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob6YHpcXmTg
Tonight (As an emergency substitute talk) we will be having
a mini-hackathon on the Config::Std CPAN module that
Boston.pm maintains. We’ll be offering a live demonstration of setting
up continuous integration (CI) using Travis CI and Appveyor, two hosted
CI tools made freely available for open source projects on GitHub. Join
us as we stumble through the process and learn from our mistakes.
Perl has had Test::Harness for decades, with CPANTS
providing distributed Continuous Integration testing of Released CPAN
module distributions for a decade or more. Thank you CPANTS volunteers
for creating a distributed cloud for us :-). Now GitHub is offering
similar capabilities to all the other FLOSS communities via free
integration with freemium cloud Continuous Integration tools Travis-CI
(for Linux) and Appveyor (for Windows). Since we have CPANTS for
release, we can use Travis-ci&Appveyor to test our DEV branch after
check-in. They’ll even test Pull Requests before merge! Any GitHub FLOSS
project can use these, but Perl CPAN projects can make use easily since
we already have a regression testing culture, we won’t need to write the
tests, just enable them.
LIVE Speaker !
Remember, if you get Veterans’ Day Monday off work, Tuesday will feel like Monday.
“Deep Learning with AI::MXNet: Navigating implementation issues”
ABSTRACT This talk will cover lessons learned from a recent experience in getting a deep learning projected started, with little prior experience in AI. All code will use the Perl MXNet API and guide the audience through developing a simple model, which is then built on to perform more complex tasks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has for a long time captured the popular imagination. Results from academia and industry have finally started to deliver on some of the long hoped for results: self driving cars, automated medical diagnoses, and written and verbal language processing. These areas are showing advances that were once simply products of fiction writers. The current wave of AI enthusiasm may be attributed to what is called Deep Learning which is a convenient label for relatively new techniques using neural networks. The possibility for increased automation across virtually every industry has resulted in the spinning up of many new startup companies, as well as new projects within existing enterprises, resulting in the need to develop the skills necessary to pursue this new area.
While not the language of production, Perl is used to develop algorithms and demonstrate concepts before they receive fuller treatment. Deep Learning practitioners often begin their deep learning work, correctly, with a review of the literature and research into the fundamentals. Projects then often start confidently with high hopes, built on that conceptual understanding, only to quickly get bogged down in unforeseen, but critically important, issues of implementation.
Adam Russell is a software engineer with OptumLabs’ Center for Applied Data Science (CADS). CADS is tasked with developing prototype applications which implement recent advances in algorithms and technology to address issues of importance to Optum business interests. Most recent projects have been focused on Deep Learning. Adam has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, his academic interests involve Computational Geometry and Data Visualization and these explorations, much like the work described in this talk, are all Perl driven. He also teaches, on an adjunct basis, at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
room reservation failed due to IAP, so we had a social in the hallway.
topic originally scheduled for January
Amsterdam Perl Conference 2017 video screening
Noted Perl personality Ovid (Curtis Poe) has built a Space-exploration on-line role-playing-game called “Tau Station” in Perl. It’s even a business. In this talk, he describes the games industry and how Modern Perl makes building his game fun.
Original Abstract -
“With Tau Station, we’re building a sci-fi universe in a browser. However, in object oriented design, what does the”single responsibility principle” mean when your combat armor serves as armor, a weapon, and medkit?
“And when many different behaviors have long chains of duplicated requirements (for example, do you have enough money to buy a medkit, or refuel your ship, or repair your blaster, or bribe a guard), how do you handle that in an efficient an easy to read manner?
“And how do you avoid god objects when your character in the universe drives almost everything?
“This talk explores some of the techniques we’ve developed for Tau Station to easily model complex behaviors.”
We’ll have our usual community discussion after (or by hitting pause as needed) in lieu of speaker Q&A.
GPS! Randomness with Radiation!
Abstract: Using the lowest amount of custom hardware and pouring Perl over everything as the glue binding it all, we create two minimalistic devices delivering a perfectly tuned network time source (synchronizing with a GPS satellite), and a naturally random entropy source (leveraging a Geiger tube’s measurement of natural background radiation).
We’ll watch (dissect?) two shorter conference videos, with our usual MST3K commentary and rabbit-hole research. Topics are 3 dialects of Function Signatures in recent Perls and infinite precision computation in Perl 6.
August is canceled.
We’ll have a meeting in September; 2nd Tuesday is the 11th – Where is TBD; maybe at MIT, maybe in Waltham. If Waltham, it’ll be near (T) bus and train as well as parking; and I’ll provide Car Pool out and or back for anyone that wants to.
Our Wiki is down. Free provider has pulled the plug. (In copious spare time, Tom and I are looking for right replacement.) So temporarily boston.pm.org DNS points to a 404-ish page :-(
Meantime, our Twitter, Facebook, G+ (ominous music), MeetUp, LinkedIn, and these two Mailing Lists provide redundant communications.
- The Wiki is Back! New hosting thanks to Greg R ’s QualityBox.US , suppliers of wikis and forums to discerning SMBs. Same Boston.PM.org address thanks to Perl.ORG
(Narrator: alas this only lasted through end of 2021)
September 11th: Ricky Morse - Perl 6 and Typesetting Formal Announcements
or, Ringing halfsheets with Perl 6
Meetings resume ! September at the usual place
After ringing a bell for 45 minutes to 3 hours, you kind of want people to know you did it, and what you did it for. Ricky uses Perl 6 to replace a manual process for creating “half-sheets” to post in the Old North ringing room, for tourists to see.
Ricky sensibly doesn’t want to retype or copy-paste what’s already
somewhere on-line, so he uses Perl 6 to pull the data from a database as
XML, and then typeset the half sheets. This is using Perl6, GROFF,
and C6PAN Modules Template::Mustache,
XML::XPath, and HTTP::User Agent.
Commemorative text of a peal rung 
Ricky gave background on the Change Ringing style of bell ringing and also briefly listed various software paths he considered to transform XML to PDF for this print problem.
Slide notes http://pukku.com/bostonpm/2018-09-ringing-halfsheet/
Program https://github.com/pukku/ringing_halfsheets ( link is in the notes above).
We did not watch all the videos or dive into all the reference links … have fun with this rabbit warren of links!
For the October 9 gathering of Boston Perl Mongers we’ll be hosted by MaxMind in Waltham, instead of our usual MIT location. Our speaker will be Mark Fowler.
(Boston.PM is happy to accept this offer of hosting from MaxMind, and would welcome hosting offers from other organizations in Eastern MA. It gives those who live further West or otherwise are unable/unwilling to travel to the city a chance to attend.
“A resource for beginners and advanced Perl users alike, the Perl Advent calendar http://www.perladvent.org/2017/ features humourous stories featuring Santa’s Elves and the fun they have with Perl. This talk will talk about all the exciting things that occurred in (last) year’s calendar. Somewhat akin to twenty four two minute lighting talks, it’ll expose you to a range of topics.”
About the Speaker
Mark Fowler is a manager with experience in running teams developing, maintaining, and improving innovative internet based technologies, currently working for MaxMind, an industry-leading provider of IP intelligence and online fraud detection tools.. He has a strong background in programming and development, speaking at conferences, and writing technical articles. Author/maintainer of 32 modules on CPAN.
( Boston.pm’s Jerrad Pierce was the first Perl Advent interregnum editor after Mark’s inaugural stint. We’ve not been involved in the 2nd interregnum or the Restoration, so it will be very good to hear this! )
SITE: 14 Spring St, Waltham, MA 02451
(For CarFree folks, meeting will be on Express Bus / Bus network and short walk from Commuter Rail (transit map), or you can Carpool with Bill! Free parking across the street.)
Hosted by BLU Boston Linux Unix
Moderator: Greg Rundlett, founder of eQuality Technology
A guided tour of QualityBox, a MediaWiki hosting service
Abstract:
Greg Rundlett, founder of eQuality Technology, has created a hosted software service called QualityBox which is provides the wiki engine (MediaWiki) that drives Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, QualityBox is instantly usable by the end-user. And like Wikipedia, it includes a huge number of configurations, extensions and customizations that make it supremely useful. Greg will take us on a tour of QualityBox, and the MediaWiki ecosystem to illustrate some of the features and capabilities that are available right “out of the box”.
Featuring: - MediaWiki 1.31 LTS - Visual Editor - ElasticSearch (v5.6.10) - Excellent Mobile support - Modern and traditional layouts - New dashboards - Top to Bottom security upgrades - Free SSL certificates - Subdomain-based wiki farms - And LOTS more.
(Narrator: The BLU and Boston.PM wikis were hosted as the demos on QualityBox. Alas the business model fizzled by the end of 2021. It was nice while it lasted. The experimental multi-tenancy MediaWiki was a cool idea.)
Ricky Morse will review the highlights of several of the Perl community Advent calendars of 2018.
Following up on Mark Fowler’s Perl Advent 2017 review in October, Ricky takes on 3 of Advent calendars of 2018.
We stumbled on a video talk that provides a fast-forward review of how Perl’s OO has evolved over the last 25 years. We’ll give that our MST3K commentary treatment.
Test2 is a replacement for many of the Test modules, which comes with advanced comparison features, and a version of Ruby’s “SPEC” DSL.
Ricky screened Chad Granum’s 2018 Perl Conference talk where he introduces the Test2 suite of modules.
In addition, Ricky already had a bunch of tests written using Test2, which he showed from his iPad.
Hue-Saturation-Luminance for Ack3 with Convert::Color::HSL and Term::ANSIColor
Curious about how to handle different color spaces in Perl?
Bill Ricker will show how he improved RBG palette help for Ack3 using the HSL colorspace model and CPAN module that does HSL<->RGB transform.
Ack uses an module Term::ANSIColor
that uses base-6 colors from 000 to 555 .
ack --help-rgb-colors will display all possible colors. The
palette display was formerly laid-out as convenient for the code loop,
not for the viewer’s comprehension.
Reorganizing it according to a geometric color model makes it easier
to see the various gradients between color coordinates. Bill
Ricker used Convert::Color::HSL
to prototype a new palette-help, as seen in new Ack3
code.
The HSL model is very similar to the HSV model, with subtle distinction between “Luminance” and “Value” in the third, vertical coordinate:
They say only Perl can parse Perl, but Perl can also generate Perl. In “Perl begat Perl”, a preview of a talk Uri will present at this year’s Perl Conference, he will discuss how you can generate Perl inside Perl and then call eval on the code. Uri will explain why you might want to to use this technique, and illustrate it with good and bad examples.
Uri Guttman is a founding member of Boston Perl Mongers, a long time presence in the Perl community, and founder/owner of Stem Systems, a Perl consultancy, and known as “The Perl Hunter,” a recruiter specializing in placing Perl talent.
TPC Video of same talk has abstract -
Have you ever wondered why some CPAN modules actually generate Perl code to be eval’ed? Some of the reasons are simplicity but most often it is for getting faster running code. The key Perl feature used is eval on strings (the dangerous eval, not the safe eval of blocks). Newbies are always warned not to use string eval but this talk will show you why and how to use it for your benefit. Simple and common examples will be shown that anyone can use. Then more complex examples from existing CPAN modules (two of which are by the speaker) will be covered. They use Perl code generation for major speed gains (including 4x in one case).
NOTE: Back to 3rd floor!
Emergency Video MST3K as scheduled speaker rescheduled, real life happens.
(Narrator: This was announced on list, rescheduled a few times, and was never presented. It is included in history since (a) it was announced and (b) it’s neat technology.)
“Jupyter Notebook (formerly IPython Notebooks) is a web-based interactive computational environment for creating Jupyter notebook documents” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jupyter#Jupyter_Notebook
Adam Russellhas integrated a Perl kernel with the D3.js visualization library for repeatable explainable reusable sharable dataviz.
d3.js, Data Driven Documents, is a JavaScript library for live web graphics based on changing data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D3.js
“How Jupyter Notebooks Will Improve Your Computational Life” “The Jupyter Notebook is a browser-based command shell for interactive computing in several languages” https://wp.sanger.ac.uk/barrettgroup/2016/03/10/how-jupyter-notebooks-will-improve-your-computational-life/
(Both Perl5 and P6=Raku lang kernels for Jupyter Notebooks exist!)
Boston.pm will apply our MST3K interactive discussion style to one or more recent Conference Videos.
Couldn’t make it to the last Perl Conference? In our next meeting (Tuesday, 10/8) we’ll be viewing a keynote presentation from Sawyer X where he looks at what has transpired in the last 20 years, and then takes an honest and critical look at where the Perl 5 language stands today, and where it could go.
how Perl 5.30 (2019) fits in arc of history and a possible future.
but attendees can select a different one from shortlist or elsewhere for our interactive discussion (MST3K) treatment.
With a Monday holiday this week for many, we’ll take a pass on November. (Hug any veterans in your life.)
FEDERICO LUCIFREDI O’Reilly Author, hardware hacker, and product manager at which-ever Linux company his business card says this week
December 10th - 7ish pm - MIT - as usual
Legend has it that you can learn Perl in 2.5 hours — we want to distill the essence of Bash scripting in a similarly short session. Federico will bring slides and a “core” overview of this notoriously hard to master language, come help us figure out what else is missing!
sampling the best of the Perl-ish Advent Calendars of 2019.
Covid hit Boston. History continues with the Virtual Era.
