Houston.pm

Chris introduced the BER encoding for ASN.1. He showed some code and decoding examples to introduce this notation that underlies several technologies we use every day.

brian d foy gives a workshop showing how to create and upload your first Perl module to CPAN. The workshop also shows how to use github as the repository for your module.

Perl has turned out to be a popular choice for processing bioinformatics data. Daniel Culver introduced the group to subject and a set of challenges for anyone wishing to try their hand at the field.

Brett introduced the Sphinx indexing/search system and showed how to use it from Perl. This system allows queries to be made against a local set of data.

Daniel gives a presentation describing Moose from the point of view of a beginner.

Mark Allen gave a presentation intended to help people with no experience with Erlang up to the point of having written a simple Erlang program in one hour. Although it took a little longer than that, the audience got some pretty good insight into this fascinating language.

Random numbers are important in many areas of computing. A very important approach to generating random number sequences is Pseudo-Random Number Generators. Robert Stone gives an overview of Pseudo-Random Number Generation, with some explanation of Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generators. He also discusses some of the ways this can go wrong, including examples from recent security news. He finishes up with information about Perl modules that can be used for generating Pseudo-Random Number Sequences.

Ruth gives an overview of Library information systems and the work she did in migrating libraries from various systems to the open source Koha system. Perl's abilities to manipulate text-based data efficiently was critical to this work.

brian d foy explains some of Perl's more powerful regular expression features using a regex written by Randal Schwartz to parse JSON.

This meeting was intended to be another hack-a-thon for those people who had projects to work on. For those relatively new to Perl, Wade was going to run a help session to answer questions and go over Perl basics.

Brett explains how to use the Redis data store as a work queue. Many of the features of Redis support producer-consumer queuing.

We opened the conference room for anyone to work on their projects or help others as a Hack-a-thon. Unlike the previous attempt, no official project was specified that we would work on.

Reini Urban covered some of the background and low-level details of one of the efforts to modernize the compiler and run-time for Perl 5.