Raleigh, NC

Welcome!

We're the Raleigh branch (pictures) of the "Perl Mongers" organization... That's "Raleigh" as in RTP - the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area of North Carolina (USA). For more information about what Perl Mongers is all about, see their web site at www.pm.org.

IRC

If you are IRC savvy, consider joining us over on channel #raleigh.pm on the irc.perl.org server.
A few of us are almost always in the channel even if we're away from our computers. If we don't respond, that's what's up. If you're able to idle there for a while, someone should notice and respond.

Future Meetings

We haven't been having in-person meetings for a while. But until we do, please join us on IRC or our email lists; your technical questions are more than welcome!

If you are interested in organizing in-person meetings again, please join the raleigh-talk list and let us know. (We used to meet on the third Thursday of the month.)

How to Join

Anyone is welcome to join... Our members range from complete beginners to fairly experienced Perl people. You're a member as soon as you're on our mailing list (that's how we announce things).

Our "main" mailing list covers announcements, meetings, and various other things of interest. Other than this web site, the "main" list is the only way that meetings are announced, so be sure to subscribe (the volume is usually low). You can subscribe via http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/raleigh-pm.

We've got a second mailing list set up as a place for members to get help with perl problems before going to comp.lang.perl.misc. You can subscribe via http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/raleigh-talk.

Book Reviews

To check out our book review section, click here.
See Daniel Engel's review of Perl Best Practices [ added October 2005 ]

Past Meetings

2010

• November 18th, 2010 Bill Cowan presented "Configuring the Perl Debugger".
• May 27, 2010: Brad Oaks presented "Perl Critic -- static source analyzer for Perl code".
• April 15, 2010: no meeting.
• March 18, 2010: Trevor Little and Shawn Page presented "Automating End-to-end web app testing with Test::Class and CGI::Application::Server".
• February 18, 2010: no meeting.
• January 28, 2010: Michael Peters presented on "Web Security 101"

2009

• November 10th, 2009 Jason Purdy presented on YUI testing.
• October 15th, 2009 meeting rescheduled.
• September 17th, 2009: no meeting.
• August 20th, 2009: Brad Oaks and Michael Peter presented "Review of Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC::NA::2009)".
• July 16th, 2009: no meeting.
• June 18th, 2009: David Prater presented on his use of VMware's Perl API.
• May 19th, 2009: Jason Purdy presented on Google Analytics.
• April 16, 2009: Social meeting at Fishmonger's in Durham.
• March 19, 2009: Brad Oaks presented Warming up to Modular Testing The slides for this talk are available in PDF and PPT format.
• February 19, 2009: Michael Peters presented Testing Best^H^H^H^HGood Practices The slides for this talk are available in PDF format.
• January 15, 2009: no meeting.

2008

• December 18, 2008 no meeting.
• November 20, 2008 Jason Purdy presented "selecting a javascript framework"
• October 16, 2008 Jess Sterling gave a Pittsburgh Perl Workshop debrief.
• September 18, 2008 Social meeting at Raleigh Times Bar in Raleigh.
• August 21, 2008 Bill Cowan presented "Exceptions, Exception Objects for DBI, and SQL::Abstract Module"
• July 17, 2008 YAPC Debrief.
• June 19, 2008 no meeting.
• May 15, 2008 Jason Purdy gave a thorough talk on strategies for "Search Engine Optimization."
• April 17, 2008 Trevor Little introduced us to "Automating version control tasks with Perl and Subversion."
• March 20, 2008: Mike South demonstrated use of Devel::Cover to spot some parts of your code that isn't covered/exercised by your test suite.
• February 21, 2008: Bill Cowan will talk about Object::InsideOut and maybe inside-out style class builders as a group . . .
• January 16, 2008: Amazon Web Services (joint meeting with NC*SA)

2007

• July: Brad Oaks presented on Gantry and Bigtop for rapid web applicationd development.

2006

• December: Trevor Little presented on using OpenLaszlo to create a flash frontend to his perl backend database application.
• November: Brad Oaks presented on creating a custom Data::FormValidator constraint and touched on the Test::FormValidator module.
• October: Jason Purdy presented on using MIME::Lite for sending email (including attachments).
• September: Brad Oaks presented on using Jemplate to render Template Toolkit in the browser.
• August: Brad Oaks presented on using PDF::FDF::Simple for filling in Acrobat forms programatically.
• July: meeting cancelled.
• June: last-minute social at tir-na-nOg.
• May: Steven Hilton presented on the server side of SOAP::Lite.
• April: Matt Nash presided over a BioPerl Installation Lab.
• March: Brad Oaks presented on the client side of SOAP::Lite.
• February: Jason Stajich presented on BioPerl and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.
• January: Matt Nash and Casey Overman presented an Overview and Introduction to Bioinformatics.

2005

• November: find, find2perl and File::Find -- a round table. (regularly scheduled talk postponed until January)
• October: James Oden presented on RPM2(3pm), the perl bindings for librpm that allows you have direct access to package headers, and to the rpmdb.
• September: Mike South presented on Template Toolkit and its plugin and filter stuff.
• August: Brad Oaks presented on CPAN::Mini and Pod::Webserver The slides for this talk are available in OpenOffice format as well as PDF format.
• July: Mike South presented on use of the built-in Perl Debugger. The Perl Debugger notes for this talk are available online.
June: Brad Oaks presented on CGI::FormBuilder which can be used to quickly generate web forms including client-side JavaScript validation.
• May: Jason Purdy presented on Data::FormValidator ("How I came to trust user input ... and how YOU can TOO!")
• April: H Wade Minter presented on "Content Syndication using RSS and Atom" (slides)
• March: Rob West presented on RSS or "How I Hacked an Email Update Notification From a Gallery RSS Feed" (slides)
• February: Jason Purdy presented on CGI::Application (slides). (This meeting was rescheduled to February 22 to accommodate our speaker's availability.)
• January: Mike South presented on Template Toolkit. We will put Mike's slides up here soon. (This meeting was rescheduled to January 20th due to inclement weather on the regular meeting date.)

2004

• May: H. Wade Minter presented how he used Perl/Tk to redesign the sound system at the Raleigh improv comedy club, ComedyWorx. The discussion ranged from the implementation of a Perl/Tk GUI to problem solving to cross-platform coding, and more. His application, Mr. Voice, is now over three years old and is used in improv clubs across the country, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Richmond, and points in between.
• April: Mark Whitteker presented on web security.
• March: Rob West talked about using WWW::Mechanize for testing.
• February: James Rhew did a walk through and demo of his client/server solution for tracking and displaying performance with GD.
• January: Brad Oaks did a presentation on Class::DBI. His slides are available here. Click on a slide to advance to the next one. Hitting 'i' in the browser will take you to a table of contents/index slide. Hitting '1' will take the browser to the first slide. Right clicking on a slide will back up to the previous slide.

2003

• December: Mike South: 3D visualization of Hunt the Wumpus in Perl with a Guest Appearance by Expect
• November: DBD::SQLite: Fun with a Good Local DB by Derek Lane.
• October: More Testing with Test::More by Rob West
• September: Canceled due to hurricane.
• August: Mike South held forth on Exegesis 6. We all stopped worrying and learned to love Perl 6. Mostly. :)
• July: Open space meeting. We ended up talking about autoloading.
• May-June: No meeting.
• April: Rob West gave a talk on Perl and RSS.
• January-March: We continued developmental work with Haywood and had a social at Out of the Park in Morrisville.

2002

• December: Social at James Rhew's. Beer, cookies and the holidays!
• October/November: The group gathered at James Rhew's to work on modifying and extending Haywood. Haywood is a prototype of an automated home DJ system. It is designed to deliver a variety of audio programs to home and work, and is composed of several software packages tied together with Perl. To date, we have Icecast, Iceshout and Festival installed and working.
• September: Rob West shared the Conference Presentation Judo slides from perl.plover.com. Also, we had a direction discussion.
  
• August: Chris Sherman presented an in depth look at Perl regex features in his talk "Extreme Regular Expressions: The Zero-Width Negative Look-Ahead Assertion and how it's useful(!)"
• July: Mark Whitteker spoke briefly about the Net::Telnet::Cisco module, used for connecting to Cisco routers and switches. He also mentioned a very cool graphing tool GraphViz that has a Perl interface on CPAN.
• June: Richard Barnes shared his success story of how he used Perl to report the status of the US Postal Service's 42,000 point of sales computers. We archived his slides, which include code samples.
• May: The founder of the national Perl Mongers organization and publisher of The Perl Review, brian d foy, gave a talk on Perl Design Patterns. He also spoke about The Perl Review, Perl Mongers and the Perl community in general.
• April: Social outing at Out of the Park in Morrisville.
• March: Derek Lane discussed make implementations (some written in Perl). Mark Whitteker reviewed two books,Perl for Web Site Management and Mastering Perl/TK, and Bradford Powell talked about his recent use of Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent module. We also discussed Parrot/Perl 6.
• February: Derek Lane discussed his recent Perl/TK contributions to Project Gutenberg and a web-based support site.
• January: Mark Whitteker demonstrated an application used to track RPM members and their information using HTML::Template, CGI, and DBI with MySQL on Apache

2001

• December: Holiday social.
• November: Rob West gave a talk on tied objects and James Rhew shared code demonstrating an ordered hash.
• October: Anyone remember?
• September: John Klassa shared an interesting idiosyncracy in a script he wrote recently. Bradford Powell talked about perlDL and James Rhew talked about a fun voice synthesized DJ application he put together.
• August: We had a social. Great edibles and a chance to chill and chat and get to know each other better.
• July: Bill Cowan talked about the Template Toolkit, whereupon Derek Lane talked about ASP, Perl and Visual Basic.
• June: James Rhew and Rob West talked about, er, something.
• May: We had a Perl Quiz Bowl, ably led by Megan Conklin and John Klassa. The scoring system became more creative as the evening wore on! Great fun, and some great books were part of the evening's prizes.
• April: Mike South talked about getting his changes to Math::Matrix onto CPAN and took us on a journey through his thought processes in developing 3D vector graphics using Perl (with quite a few extensions of his own). The rotating icosahedron was pretty cool. Check out some of his work with letters and shapes.
• March: James Rhew talked about using the Algorithm::Diff module and Rob West presented on using the Safe module.
• February: We gathered at The Warehouse (downtown Raleigh) for pool, games and food.
• January: Bill Cowan talked a bit about Metagenix and their work with perl. Megan Conklin talked about her experiences as a reviewer for Lincoln Stein's new book, Network Programming with Perl. We then formed committees to coordinate content for future meetings.

2000

• December: No meeting.
• November: Anyone remember?
• October: We had another programming contest. The entries and final results are archived.
• September: Bradford Powell talked about DBI.
• August: Megan Conklin talked about agents.
• July: Mark Whitteker did a talk on XML.
• June: John Klassa talked about Sorting in Perl.
• May: Programming contest (our first). The goal was to write a search engine. The prize was a slew of O'Reilly books (thanks, O'Reilly)!
• April: Mark Whitteker talked about CGI.pm. After that, we went around the room again and shared CGI scripts.
• March: We went around the room and introduced ourselves and shared code. We also took some group pictures.
• February: Ken Coar, apache developer and book author, visited us to talk about the care and feeding of CGI scripts.
• January: Meeting got canceled due to snow.

1999

• December: We partied and chatted with brian d foy.
• November: Rasmus Lerdorf dropped by to talk about PHP (which he created).
• October: We had a presentation on a script by John Klassa, a book report by Derek Lane, a "what's new" presentation by Bill Cowan and a special visit from brian d foy.
• September: We skipped this month thanks to Hurricane Floyd. :-(
• August: Social gathering.
• July: Simon Karpen did the quick overview and then Derek Lane talked about reflection and the debugger.
• June: Brian Exelbierd did a quick overview of what's new in the world of perl, and Megan Alexander talked about using perl with LDAP.
• May: Bill Cowan talked about OO in perl.
• April: Social gathering.
• March: At this meeting, Rob Napier gave a talk entitled "From Llama to Ram: How to Think Like a Perl Weenie".
• February: The second RPM presentation was given by Derek Lane, on weird and horrible data formats.
• January: The first RPM presentation was given by Bill Cowan, on the topic of database interfaces with perl.

1998

• November: The first meeting was organizational.

Ancient pm-help threads

Questions/Comments

If you have questions or comments, feel free to get in touch with Brad Oaks at bradoaks@gmail.com.