Live in southern Ontario? Attending dinner meetings is free.

PegaSoft's July Dinner Meeting

Date: July 26, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Location: The Office Bar and Grill
                                                                                
Attendance

Ken B, William P, Mike H
Mel W is on vacation.
William R and Eugene R did not show.


Meeting Business


Annual Membership Renewals

PegaSoft memberships are $45.00 per year.  Although you don't need to be a
member in order to join the mailing lists or attend our monthly dinner
meetings, membership entitles you to discounts on PegaSoft events and the
opportunity to participate in PegaSoft projects and teach in our workshops.
Membership also allows you to attend our annual PegaSoft Summer Retreat.
Members must sign the PegaSoft Employee Conduct Policy/NDA.

Mike H became a member.


Summer Programming Challenge

2005 challenge: create an application that listens to sound, either through the
microphone jack or from a file, and interprets the sound in some way.  For
example, drawing patterns in response to sounds.  The project is due at the
PegaSoft Summer Retreat.


PegaSoft Summer Retreat

Each year PegaSoft holds a 3-day geek retreat at Ken's parent's house near
North Bay, Ontario.  Activities include one day of Linux hacking plus a BBQ,
the annual river boat cruise and all-you-can-eat brunch.  This year the
retreat is scheduled for August 26-29, 2005.

Schedule:

  Friday, August 26 - Arrival and Setup
  Saturday, August 27 - Server Setup and Project Discussion
  Sunday, August 28 - River Cruise and All-You-Can-Eat-Brunch
  Monday, August 29 - Farewell Breakfast

The retreat is open to PegaSoft members.  Attendees will bring food for meals
and a computer with Linux.  Space is limited.  RSVP no later than Friday,
August 12, 2005.

Ken B, Dan B and Mel W have confirmed.

New Meeting Location

William P will get the phone number and reserve a place at the same location
that PHLUG meets.  This will be for the September dinner meeting.


Open Forum - Linux in the News
[Opinions are those of the participants.]

Skipped

PegaSoft Member Projects

 
Business Shell (BUSH) (Ken B)

BUSH now has MySQL support but it still requires both MySQL and PostgreSQL to
be installed.  Testing is underway for a version 1.0.2 release.

http://www.pegasoft.ca/bush.html


Bash/GTK (William P)

William added GTK support by using XML to describe a GTK dialog.  Executable
shell commands (or simple variables depending on the context) can be put into
the XML and triggered when a user accesses dialog items.

http://home.eol.ca/~parkw/index.html#bash


PegaSoft Third Call for Projects

Ken put out PegaSoft's Third Call for Project ideas.  There was no consensus
as to what to work on and people were busy during the summer.

It is better to work on something than nothing.  William was concerned that no
project would be started.  Ken gave William some preliminary work to do in PHP.
William wanted to do it using Bash [Last month William said he would give up
working on Bash--KB].  More discussion would occur at the Summer Retreat.

Discussion: Introduction to Perl (Ken B)

- Perl is similar to PHP
  - has similarity to shell and C
  - originally combined tools like sed, awk and grep (imperfectly) into one tool

- variables
  - variables have no type
  - interpreted as strings or numbers depending on context
  - may be defined or undefined
  - quotes use shell quoting rules (single, double, backquotes)
    - Example: print "The answer is " . 6*7 . "\n";
  - quotes make a big difference on how characters are interpreted
    - Example: print "ken@pegasoft\n"; # @pegasoft is an array

- booleans
  - different than PHP
  - undef, 0, '0', are false
  - equality: "==" is numeric and "eq" is string (backwards to shell)

- commands
  - runs commands similar to shell scripts
  - supports file globbing
    - Example: rm *.txt;

- statements
  - look similar to C
    - Example: if (x>y) { ... }
  - unless means "if not" but depends on English fluency and "if (!" is shorter

- arrays are similar to PHP: lookup tables and associative arrays (hashes)

- $_
  - this is the "default" value in a context
  - in a for loop, this is the current index value
  - since it's dependent on context, easy to break with changes to code

- subroutines
  - declared using sub command
    - Example: sub name {...}
  - parameters must be accessed using commands like shift

- regular expressions
  - if expressions, etc., can "grep" when slashed expressions are used

- operators
  - all the standard operators
  - "&&" versus "and": one short-circuits, different priority in expressions

- summary
  - Perl advantages
    - many modules and scripts available
    - runs on many platforms
    - good for text processing
    - Mason module allows Perl web templates
  - disadvantages
    - looks like Linux...but may not work as expected
    - many exceptions and special cases to learn
    - hard to debug - not suitable for large, complex applications
    - not very reliable - a working script may not be completely correct
  - summary
    - Perl offered a big advantage to Windows users when there was no alternatives
      except DOS scripts
    - many similar tools under Linux

Next Dinner

There is no dinner meeting in August due to the Summer Retreat.  The next
dinner meeting is Tuesday, September 27, 2005.