Mark Keating

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

My Ironman Status

Fairfx offer several types of Card, the US Dollar and Euro cards which carry only that currency and the "anywhere" card which does what it says in its name.

FairFX website

I'm going to discuss a service I have used for over a year now and I want to gush a little about how great they are. The service is a currency exchange site called FairFX.com. The site offers an interesting alternative to travellers cheques as it allows you to purchase a "currency card" that you put money on. This is a Mastercard so is accepted just about everywhere cards can be used. The card only has the money you put on to it, so if you lose your cards or they are stolen their is no chance of someone gaining access to your credit accounts or details. It is simplicity itself to add more funds to your card while on holiday or to cancel in case of issues and gain a refund of unused funds.

Fairfx offer several types of Card, the US Dollar and Euro cards which carry only that currency and the "anywhere" card which does what it says in its name.

The joys do not stop at this already useful service, for FairFX do what their name implies and give a really fair exchange rate that you will find hard to better on the high street or from their competitors. My recent travel exchange saw me benefit from an extra 180 dollars in comparison to the closest competitor, and nearly 340 dollars better than offered by my bank. I can also leave money on my card for future trips.

FairFX also offer a great travel currency service. Like their cards it is simple to use and comes with great exchange rates. The service sends cash to your door by next day delivery (Faster than the 3 days that my bank takes and I don't have to go to the counter to collect). The delivery charges are waived if you order over 100 pounds in cash, which means that for most people they will never see this extra charge. This level of service is to my mind unparalleled. It took me just 3 minutes to order my travel cash and the next day it was hand delivered to me by secure postage.

I really couldn't raecommend this service any more than I just have. I urge any frequent traveller or anyone who takes holidays abroad to sign up this service and get themselves some cards and cash secure in the knowledge they are getting a great service.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site
Twitter Feed: Mark Keating on Twitter
Facebook: Mark Keating on Facebook
Flickr: Mark Keating on Flickr
Family site: Mark Keating's Family Site
Flavor.me Combined Feeds: Mark Keating on Flavor

I know that all sounded very dry and stuffy...

Presenting Perl Website

Today, 1st March (though this post was written late on the 28th February), Shadowcat Systems, in the guise of Matt S. trout and Mark Keating are launching a new community resource site called Presenting Perl.

So what is it?

Well basically...

The presenting Perl website is a resource location for talks and presentations on, or about, the Perl language. The site will initially have videos from conferences and workshops but it is our aim to provide a single location for all Perl audio/visual resources and material. Coming soon will be the ability for the authors of the videos to add html links and materials of their own to other resources, such as slides, supporting documents on the net. Or to embed those items in the page their video or presentation is displayed upon.

Future iterations of the site will, we hope, incorporate other multimedia properties as we develop them. The site is built and maintained by Shadowcat Systems Limited, but we will accept offers to support, promote, and build the project from interested parties.

Presenting Perl is powered by Idiot Box which is built using the Web::Simple framework created by Matt S. Trout for 'light web applications' development.

All of the material will have a licence on the page it is on. The general site licence is a "Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence", other material provided by authors may have their own restrictions and conditions. If you wish to use any of the material at another location then please contact the site owners to confirm usage, also so we can promote and link your usage.

Well okay then...

I know that all sounded very dry and stuffy but I was writing this as a serious piece that I could ameliorate to different contexts, then I realised that what I wrote couldn't be fused into different styles without still sounding stuffy so I left it and will hope you'll forgive me for sounding so drab and making a fun thing sound so restrictive.

If anyone has any video or resources they want to start adding to the site then please contact me and we'll work on incorporating that. If you have some time and want to help work on aspects of the sites code, design, look, feel, message and purpose, well you know where we are ;). I will keep you all updated to the changes and new features as and when we release them.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site
Twitter Feed: Mark Keating on Twitter
Facebook: Mark Keating on Facebook
Flickr: Mark Keating on Flickr
Family site: Mark Keating's Family Site
Flavor.me Combined Feeds: Mark Keating on Flavor

I thought it would be a great idea to have some printed with a Shadowcat focus as promotional gift items

During February I created for the Enlightened Perl Organisation a group of beermats for the use and distribution at conferences and worshops, especially those that have a non-Perl focus as detailed on the TPF wiki page. See my blog article on mdk.per.ly.

The mats looked good when they finally arrived here at the Shadowcat Barracks, so good in fact that I thought it would be a great idea to have some printed with a Shadowcat focus as promotional gift items. The initial print run will have the design below:

These mats are currently with the printers and if they look as good as the EPO group they will be sent out to the wider world soon after. So if you are going to a workshop or conference and know that we are going to be there, then make sure to grab us for a beermat (coaster) or three to rest your favourite fermented fruit upon (we will also give them out to people of a more sobrietous bent as long as you promise not to persuade us to be so restrained ;) ).

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site
Twitter Feed: Mark Keating on Twitter
Facebook: Mark Keating on Facebook
Flickr: Mark Keating on Flickr
Family site: Mark Keating's Family Site
Flavor.me Combined Feeds: Mark Keating on Flavor

Is possibly the greatest human being ever to hold the title Davorg

Last week the very well-known and indominable force of nature that is Dave Cross was kind enough to mention Matt and I in a list of people in his article The Without Whoms, who had done good work in 2009 for the Perl community. Specifically he mentioned the work we did on the Ironman blogging competition. I found this strangely humbling as I have a great deal of respect for Dave Cross and so in return I will try to capture a little of the impact of this man.

Dave is the founder of the London Perl Monguers and has been a principal force in both the bringing into being of the YAPC Europe conferences and the London Perl Workshop. He has spoken as the Keynote speakers at both 2008 and 2009, he has also presented free workshops at conferences to encourage new, or greater, participation in the community.

Aside from running a vast number of projects to be found on CPAN and on his Github Page Dave maintains a number of Blogs. These are:
Perl Hacks; davblog; as well as administering: Blogs at Perl.org;
and tweeting happily here: Davorg on Twitter where he is possibly the greatest human being ever to hold the title Davorg; slicdes from his conference presentations are updated to Slideshare for all to view.

More information on Dave can always be found on Dave's personal website, which is kept up-to-date (and I swear he must have a team of immigrant children working in a sweat shop somewhere to track all that he does and update all this).

Professionally Dave is well respected for his training courses that have been run at many conferences and workshops with O'Reilly, UKUUG, YAPC and others all desiring his services. His company website Magnum Solutions has a full list of details about these.

There is still more that can be said about Dave Cross. He is constantly supportative of the local community around him as is shown by the number of Planet sites he has built, or is involved with:
The Planetarium;
Planet Balham;
Balham Twits;
SW12 Org;
Planet Westminster;
The Political Web;
This list doesn't include the fact that Dave is always on hand on varioius IRC channels, or in person at community events to give advice, offer help and support and generally be an all-round excellent person[2].

This list is not exhaustive or complete, and any errors or omissions are mine and i would be glad to correct them. Please send me an email to add a comment to this list about Dave.

[1] Dave may or may not be modest, I only believe so from personal experience and the fact that he didn't do anywhere near enough blowing of his own trumpet in his article.

[2] He makes all the girls and boys moist with anticipation.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

...all but one fell asleep...(did the wrimos make it through the night?)

Each November a challenge is run by a vast number of people that goes under the auspicious title of Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.org) which stands for the National Novel Writing Month. The elevator pitch of this is that you write a 50,000 word story during the month of November.

My wife and I, Leigh who is the Shadowcat Company Secretary (her duties are few but her presence is mighty), have been in this competition since the company began. In fact we started the competition in the same year that Matt and I started the business. This year we were joined on the challenge by Matt (who is still struggling through while I dawdle at 70,000 words) and Leigh became the local ML (Municipal Liaison) for our region. As part of that she asked if Shadowcat would sponsor an all-night write-in at the offices where local Nano-ers (Wrimos) could attend. Naturally loving all things community-inspired or based we said yes. So, on the 21st November 2009 we held the all-night (8 p.m. until 8 a.m.) write-in - a veritable write-a-thon.

We took the theme from the San Fransisco group's official write-in of a Film Noir and Shadowcat provided a bevvy of snacks, drinks and the unmissable pizza and off we went. The night was quite a sucess with eight of us in the offices and a few others joining us online for the whole night in the Nano chatroom. our claim to fame is that we beat Newcastle who all but one fell asleep. There was a brief break for a few of us at midnight when we showed the movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid starring Steve Martin, a Film Noir pastiche/homage.

By the end of the night, fingers were tired, brains were numb (in point of fact the habitual Zombie jokes started to abound as we called out for Brains), the word counts were impressive and we all struggled home on bended knee - well actually we went for a greasy fry-up at the local Wetherspoons first.

NJP who was online in the chatroom and typing from home on the night

Outofmytree who was online in the chatroom and typing from home on the night

Lots of writers busy as their novels (and pontificating wildly)

Symetrical can stacking

A final tally of scores for the night

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

I am hoping that a lot of people will come to the event and decide to begin something new in Perl.

Original Interview
London Perl Workshop 2009
H-Online Press Release

A few weeks ago the people at Nestoria interviewed Mark for their site. What follows is a revised transcript of the interview, you can find the original interview linked above.

1. Why does London in particular have such an active perl community? What's the essential ingredient in maintaining an active open source community?

There are a combination of factors that make up London's strong Perl community. The first to my mind is the steadfast support of its more senior members who have been active in promoting the group, I am avoiding saying mature in relation to these people as it makes one think of age and cheese and a large number of the Perl luminaries are younger, and a great deal smarter, than I am. London held one of the very first YAPCs and the first YAPC::EU and has always encouraged strong involvement from its members in the wider community.

Another contributing factor is the manner of the social meetings, they always try to make newcomers feel welcome, will organise emergency socials at the drop of a hat for visitors to London and strive to make the socials as non-Perl specific as possible. No matter what your background you feel included by these people.

Then there is the mailing list. At some times trivial, always busy and with great historical events such as the Willow vs Buffy trauma, the LPM mailing list is perhaps the most subscribed to list of any monger group and with good reason.

These to me are a basis for the essential, and sometimes elusive, ingredients of maintaining a community. There is no silver bullet or single approach, it is a combination of factors and the inclusiveness, support and notion that one is working amongst equals (though I always feel surrounded by giants) is a strong factor in this.

2. The last few years have seen a renaissance in the perl community, with great new modules, an emphasis on testing and "enlightened" development techniques, more conferences, and a more vocal community (big thanks to blogs like perlbuzz, Ironman competition). What's responsible for this?

Still going for the easy questions :). That is a very complex situation to assess as there are many factors affecting the Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modern Perl that we have today. On a side note my personal preference to that is that Perl is in an Enlightenment that is the motion towards what we can know as Modern Perl, the Renaissance, for me, came and went around 5.8.

The changes started a good deal of time ago. I think the dawning of the current movement happened around the time between Perl 5.6 to 5.8, or at least that's when the effects could be seen. Since that point there has been a maturity of projects and the developers both in their approach and output. At the same time there has been changes in the language itself, projects such as Moose, Catalyst, Dbix::Class and Devel::Declare to name a few, who seek to utilise, and in some cases form, the language changes that have been under continuous development in Perl. We should value the importance of CPAN and its breadth of resources that have allowed Perl development, projects and libraries to start with a strong foundation.

As for the vocal community, I think we are finally coming to realise that we know how good the language and its associated tools are, but it often feels that the rest of the world is under some impression that we are just gluing things together with CGI scripts. So I think there is a common feeling that we must firstly discuss the current state of Perl and secondly educate people away from 'legacy' techniques bringing them up to date with the current best practices.

3. This year LPW's theme is "Beginning Perl". Who is the target audience? What types of talks can attendees expect? Why are universities in the UK typically not teaching perl, despite the high level of demand from companies?

As always the LPW seeks to bring new people through the doors, and these can be Perl developers with years of experience 'under the belt' as well as welcoming back old friends and stalwart community giants. The theme is broad and is intended to give the speakers and audience a chance to explore the notion of beginnings. This could be starting Perl for the first time, or a 'How To' for people not familiar with the language or a project, it can also be taken as a chance to present how something began, such as a piece of development. One could even go further and look at the great advances in Straberry Perl, Raduko, Padre and see this as Beginning Perl and Perl 6 on Windows. But at the same time the current movement in Perl, the feeling that in Perl since 5.8 we have been passing versions instead of point releases, so that we currently stand at Perl 5 Version 10.1 and the changes in the projects and the core itself seem to reflect that. So Beginning Perl could be seen as truly that for all of us. I am hoping that a lot of people will come to the event and decide to begin something new in Perl.

There is a culture in UK Universities to teach Java in computer science degrees and this is going to be difficult to change without a level of investment and commitment. There is also the fact that there have been non-educational forces on the universities as well, on a business sense it is wise for them to push .net and Java to their students as it gives them a broader job market when they leave university which satisfies a governmental focus. Part of our task should be to educate universities as much as possible to the job market for Perl skills. At this year's LPW we will be running a free 'Skills in the Workplace' seminar that will be initially offered to University students to help towards this issue.

4. As someone who started a business working with open source software, please describe your experiences. How has the level of acceptance of open source changed in the business community in the past few years?

The movement towards open source becoming accepted has been slow, and in many cases quite tortuous. In the last few years though we have seen a big push inside some Governments for open standards and open document formats for the sharing of information and resources, particularly in the European Union, and OSS already works towards this. For most Small to Medium Enterprises though, there is a great deal of struggle to convince them that the software pre-installed is the best way forward, especially since their staff will have a great deal of experience in using it and this to them outweighs the cost of ownership versus OSS solutions.

Where we have come forward has been in the acceptance of projects such as Firefox and the general awareness of the populace that many servers use Open Source to function. The pushes by Google to open source Android has given businesses faith in the idea that a business model can be built on OSS.

The transparency of Open Source, the ease of availability and the fact that we are a far more computer-orientated culture has also helped to strengthen acceptance of the possibilities of using it as an alternative. There is still a long way to go though.

It has certainly helped that open source is reported and discussed in the general media, at one time we would spend the first hour or so of any meeting explaining what open source software was in comparison to proprietary/closed software, we no longer have to say as much. I still feel that there is a culture of treating it as a 'ham radio' or academic-orientated which is an uphill struggle.

There are even deeper changes caused by the flow and availability of data, expertise, as to whether businesses can now rely on a closed-model of business focus if it seems to stymie innovation, and if using a proprietary route will mire you in the circumlocution of patents, intellectual property, copyright and trademarks but I think they are out of the scope of this answer.

Certainly if we examine the last twenty years there has been a broader uptake of Open Source in the last five years, how much this has been influenced by the stronger computer-orientated culture is interesting. I hope that the future we will see more companies realising that OSS represents a real choice to a formerly dominant closed software system.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

There are hackers In utili-kilts, with hair down to their backside, Who will tell you that the future, Is the London Perl Workshop...

It is with great pleasure, and with some tardiness and lack of expedience, that I announce the London Perl Workshop to be held on Saturday 5th December at the University of Westminster's New Cavendish Campus.[1]

The theme for this year is Beginning Perl, which can be taken as Perl for beginners if one so wishes, or aimed at people new to Perl who are fluent in another language, or in fact any variant theme that one can conjecture including beginning a CPAN module, projects that are fun/welcoming/reliant on beginners (and also we expect some of you to ignore this all together and submit as you feel).

The call for papers is now open and the website should be live very soon (if someone grabs Monsieur Cholet and shouts into his ear it will be sooner). The closing date for submission will be Friday 6th November (of this year obviously) and notification will arrive on Monday 16th November.

As always the London Perl Workshop is a totally free event solely supported by the efforts and goodwill of the community. If you would like to help in any manner or organise an event to coincide with this then please contact Mark Keating. There has already been an offer to find a venue for the public house for the customary workshop socialisation which will be handled by the erudite Mister Laver. But many other things can be done to help.

The event will once again welcome Josette of O'Reilly who will bring a good range of books with her at the usual discounts, so bring lots of money and a small mule to carry home your purchases.

Once again I would ask that if anyone has a video camera and intends to video an event we get together on the wiki and work out a possible coverage. If we then use the auspicious YAPC.TV website we may get the entire conference uploaded for the whole community to enjoy. Please feel free to use the wiki to start any organisation of this manner and ping mdk on irc or mail m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk to let me know and I will attempt to find other volunteers to make this easier.

So enter the date in your diary, sharpen your presenting wit or prepare to attend the best event in the calendarâ„¢.[3]

[1] Part of the delay in this formal announcement was the negotiation for the venue with a new Dean. Sean as always was in our corner confirmed the venue. Otherwise we would have held it in Dave Cross' house where he has promised to hold a barbecue and roast a organiser or two.[2]

[2] This may, or may not, be true.

[3] Okay this one probably isn't true, but I would invite all detractors to first argue this with the proud and upstanding folk of London.pm, bring beer money you'll need it.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Iron Munger code is a-finally-a-mungering and all of us in this challenge can now view our badgery goodness

So the Iron Munger code is a-finally-a-mungering and all of us in this challenge can now view our badgery goodness and declare status and make complaint if status be confusing or just plain wrong (I make no such claim myself but I have heard decided rumours from beneath the waves).

It has come to light though, that some of the competitors would like to adorn their pages with badges and to perhaps show the status of each blog post as it progresses, not their current status, they may also wish to use badges in places where a link would be innapropriate. Therefore as the creator of the graphics I have placed them all in a permanant directory on the Shadowcat site ( http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges). We will not move this, and if we do we will make sure there are proper re-directs so that all links will still work. Also the badges are displayed below if you wish to drag them to a desktop or link this article or copy and paste. You will note that at the end there is a series of special and alternative badges that you can use if you so wish :).

Use. Distribute. Show. Enjoy.

Paper Man

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-paperman-badge.png

Paper Woman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-paperwoman-badge.png

Stone Man

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-stoneman-badge.png

Stone Woman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-stone-woman-badge.png

Bronze Man

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-bronze-badge.png

Bronze Woman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-bronze-woman-badge.png

Copper Man

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-copperman-badge.png

Copper Woman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-copper-woman-badge.png

Iron Man

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-ironman-badge.png

Iron Woman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-iron-woman-badge.png

Man of Steel

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-man-of-steel-badge.png

Woman of Steel

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-woman-of-steel-badge.png

Specials and Fun Badges

Meta Man

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-meta-badge.png

Meta Woman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-meta-woman-badge.png

Modern Ironman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-modern-ironman-badge.png

Tinman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-tinman-badge.png

Cyberman

http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/badges/-cyberman-badge.png

(Please note that I assert my right as creator of these badges and if at all possible please credit me as such. If it isn't possible, looks silly, or you just don't want to then fair enough. Larger versions may be made available on request in writing but I reserve the right to set conditions on the use of those versions and any specific creditation. Images will be released under an appropriate licence at some point for the free usage by the community, but please respect this request until that time).

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

There are hackers In utili-kilts, with hair down to their backside, Who will tell you that the future, Is about Enlightened Moose...

There is always a good mood at a YAPC, I am not sure what the exact mix is that creates it but it is there, it pervades the schedule and penetrates the attendees bringing them to an almost pleasant little euphoric state. This is especially true of a YAPC::EU and the conference organisers of this year's event did all that they could to encourage this sensation.

This does not imply that there is no seriousness. That would be insulting. The organisers put a great deal of effort in to ensuring that the event and the surrounding socialisation runs smoothly; the sponsors push out the boat to encourage and promote a community they seem to care so deeply for; the speakers yet again seek to not only enlighten but to entertain and endear, always surpassing expectation with the quality of what they present. All of this contributes toward that sense of worthiness you feel when you attend. You know the effort of attending, of arranging a perhaps busy schedule is paid off by the quality of treatment and experience you are given.

But there is more to it than that...

There are the people, which is you if you attended, or you if you go next time, or you the reader who can imagine the experience we all shared. The people who attend are the element that makes a YAPC special, and they do it in so many ways. I am going to focus on two experiences that are close to my heart and really made my YAPC. The first was a challenge and the second a much-appreciated return...

The Challenge

It is no secret that the Shadowcat Technical Director likes to use profanities to punctuate both his speech and his writing. A long-term devotee to good English he nevertheless uses profanity to add emphasis and direction, also to my mind he uses it to influence people to highpoints or significant issues in his argument almost embolding what follows the profanity. He also uses it, in my interpretation, as a technique to imply derision or reductify position of argument he calls question with. Added to this he is one of the last of the good-time drinkers and is used to colloquial, somewhat laddish, northern-beer-man-swillish behaviour and conversation patterns.

There has been some fun had for a few years by attendees to his talks to either guess what emphatic use he will give to profanities or to count the number of times he gives them. In jest I have produced a t-shirt which has the message, "play the Matt S. Trout drinking game, every time he swears you take a drink. See how many sentences you survive.". Now let us have as an understanding that I have always believed that Matt uses profanity in the manner he uses any other word he utters, writes or presents. It is a tool to convey meaning and his point. Whether it is in a comfortable laid-back manner or with gusto and zest to entertain his audience.

This year though he was presented with a challenge by Jesse of Best Practical, to deliver all three of his talks without profanity. He could still use the original slides, which had some profane words on them and had been used in these presentations previously (the title of the Lightning talk was "Rum, Buggery and the Lash"), but he could not utter profanities.

The winning of the bet was a night of drinking to be paid for by Jesse.

Matt had to control his natural enthusiasm for profanity used as emphasis and watch carefully his use of words as he presented in case he slipped and delivered it in a previous manner. It was an excellent challenge that Matt won (which I had little doubt of as I stated in my understanding of his usage above). But, it also added an extra dimension of fun to the proceedings and I think to the entire conference as was proved by the dedication in the Catalyst book that was auctioned and the first paragraph that was also auctioned to be read out to the gathered masses.

The video of these talks is available on the shadowcat website in the Conference videos section, and if you wish to compare and contrast them, simply load the Pittsburgh versions and match the diffence in words.

The Return

Many people in the Perl community know that Piers Cawley has been away for some time having fun with the Ruby language. Others will know that he has returned to Perl and this year he presented at the YAPC his reasons for returning to Perl.

His talk was one of the best at the conference being not only well delivered and well structured but also had a great introduction by Damien Conway who managed to get a good joke about introductions being "short and boring" as well as playing with the other element of Piers's talk MooseX (moo sex). Piers has graciously allowed me to put his video on the Shadowcat site as Matt and I did a small favour for him for the talk and I think it is worthy of as much promotion as possible.

The other element Piers brought to the YAPC is his great enthusiasm and his ability to accurately tease as was proven in his lightning talk where he sang his 'revised' version of a folk song which played with the notion of profanity and mocked both Perl people and other IT communities in a gentle and yet well-targetted manner, a rather excellent slice of satirical mockery.

Due to issues with recording (and not wishing to breach the authors original copyright and rights) I do not have the video to show, I only wish I had as Piers skilfully managed to tempt a room full of techies to sing along with him, I can however give you some of the words Piers sang (I do have the complete words available and will give them out if asked):

1.
Oh the pirates in their fetid galleons
Daggers in their skivvies(?)
With infested tattoes fingers
Wrapped around a blunderbuss or two
Signs of skurvy in their eyes
And with murder on their minds
It is from them I expect to hear the f-word not from you

[Chorus]
We sit down to have a chat
It's f-word this
And f-word that
I can't control how you Perl people talk to one another
But I don't like to hear you use that f-word with your mother

4.
There are Rubyists
whose arrogance make Mister T look humble
Who because they've got a porno slide
Are way more cool than you
With their thirty-seven signals and domain-specific language
It is from them I expect to hear the f-word not from you

[Chorus]
We sit down to have a chat
It's f-word this
And f-word that
I can't control how you Perl people talk to one another
But I don't like to hear you use that f-word with your mother

6.
There are hackers in utilikilts
With hair down to their backside
Who will tell you that the future's
All about Enlightened Moose
With their Catalytic Dbix::Class
And tendency to hubris
It is from them I expect to hear that f-word not from you
[Last chance to join in everyone]

[Chorus]
We sit down to have a chat
It's f-word this
And f-word that
I can't control how Matt S. Trout will talk to everyone
But I don't like to hear him use that f-word with his mother

The original of this song is "A Chat with Your Mom" by Lou and Peter Berryman

This is the spirit people bring to the YAPC, and there were many more people showing the same spirit, these were just two examples and they had a related theme I used them both. In a future article I will be returning to this issue as I will talk more on the spirit of Perl people, perhaps returning to some of the events in and around this years YAPC::EU.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

...the amount to which we sponsor is not fixed, we don't have to tally up a set figure for a reward or recognition, all of it is valid...

To celebrate the Marriage of Wallace Reis (Wreis) and his partner Karen, on 8th August 2009, this page will show a running commentary from the irc channel for well wishers who canot be there.

To leave a message, open up your favourite IRC client and go to #karen-and-wreis on irc.perl.net and the happy couple will be sure to read it.

Wallace has been a developer for Shadowcat Systems for a couple of years and is a well-loved member of many teams (I have to say that the man is getting married), we all wish we could have been with him in person, but we wil be toasting his good name in spirit (and probably many of them).

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

...the amount to which we sponsor is not fixed, we don't have to tally up a set figure for a reward or recognition, all of it is valid...

...if you have the ability, to sponsor the community in any way you can. Hmmmm, okay that comes across a little stronger than I want it to, so: we are responsible for ensuring the success of the communities we are involved with, communities and projects we use and rely on and therefore it is wise to support those things to ensure their survival and our continued benefit.

But I am just a poor boy and my story's seldom told...

This isn't just about money, in fact it isn't really a discussion on the duty, as I see it, of companies and individuals to contribute paid support into the communities and projects they rely on in their endeavours. That will be at a later point when I will probably urge people to contribute cash :). It is an expression of one type of sponsorship.

Sponsorship, sometimes synonymous with promotion, is often bundled into a bucket with many other elements of what people determine to be marketing. But, it isn't always a marketing tool (again I will be discussing this more at a later point), as a sponsor can be the person(s) who assume responsibility for something during a period of acceptance. Think of the sponsor of an apprentice who ensures that they perform well during the period of their instruction. So we can all be sponsors, without it ever being a matter of money, promotion or enterprise.

We can be those who are responsible...

What do I have to do?

There is no set requirements for this type of responsibility in my mind. I believe that we should examine our roles to see if there is something more we can contribute; we should be supportive of other people's efforts, and offer analysis and criticism that is productive to their endeavours; we can, if we so wish, shout from the rooftops about how good something is and why everyone should know this; we can join mailing lists, irc channels, wiki(s) etcetera to further the cause.

The amount to which we sponsor is not fixed, we don't have to tally up a set figure for a reward or recognition, all of it is valid. But we should consider ourselves responsible for our community, our projects and modules, whether you are a core programmer, a CPAN tester or just a business who uses scripts. We are all re-Sponsor-ble

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Perlesque Blog: Mark Keating on per.ly
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Images from the 10th Anniversary YAPC::NA in Pittsburgh, 22-25th June 2009

YAPC::NA::Pittsburgh

The city from Smithfield Street Bridge

Monongahela heights incline station

Penn Bridge from Mount Washington

The city in splendour

Looking across the river toward Liberty Bridge and South Side

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Images from the 10th Anniversary YAPC::NA in Pittsburgh, 22-25th June 2009

YAPC::NA::Pittsburgh

The infamous and awesome Barbie - playing with his lens - boys and toys

Schwern locked us in a room

The Organisers are captured in a rare moment of peace

Abigail spots the camera and gets ready to bolt

Probably the nicest guy in the Perl community

Perlers and their hats

People gather in their masses for Italian food

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Images from the 10th Anniversary YAPC::NA in Pittsburgh, 22-25th June 2009

YAPC::NA::Pittsburgh

Opening Laptop party - all Geoff Avery's fault

And the floor rats start to gather

Sungo looking far too intent

People looking far too intent - copying Sungo

Jay Hannah arranging a hit on people who disobey him (he's the sweetest guy I met today)

The Anti-dinner crew found a bottle-shop - oh dear

They are way too happy - what have they been drinking

People from the official dinner start to turn up

Herr Flick - anyone?

NPerez - I love this man :) Don't tell our wives...

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Images from the 10th Anniversary YAPC::NA in Pittsburgh, 22-25th June 2009

YAPC::NA::Pittsburgh

The Cathedral of Learning - used in the film Ghostbusters

Colourful Rhino

View from 5th Avenue looking out over South Side

Downtown and the UPMC building

Smaller of the two Tourist River Boats going under Smithfield Street Bridge

The Majectic, Tourist River Boat turning to go under Smithfield Street Bridge

The Majestic heading towards the Penn Bridge

6th Street Bridges on the North Side

Buildings from the 6th Street Bridge

Baseball Stadium for the Pirates

Looking out from Liberty Point

The city from the site of the fort.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

...after slipping them a few valiumesque palliatives (and in the occasional case a drink that may hit like a slice of lemon wrapped around an aforeknown gilded building material)...

My business partner this week has been musing on the contribution he has made to the Perl Community and to Open Source Software as a whole. So while he has been doing that I thought it might be a good time to say a few words about the contribution our clients have made to OSS.

To State (as John Cleese would) the Bleeding Obvious...

Shadowcat's clients are generally people who are already using Perl in their business, or are people who have a significant presence in web-based services, so are often using software that is Open Source. One or two have been people running proprietary systems with maybe an Apache install or cgi scripts.

For the most part then our clients are clued-up about Open Source and the implications for using, or rather since a lot of our earlier conversations are with technical staff they are clued up on Open Source and the use of it. However, at some point we will issue our standard contract with its wonderful section seven which details intellectual property and the contribution Shadowcat makes to the open-source community and projects.

Sometimes...not that often really...but sometimes, at this point a manager, or a member of the legal team of a company, will be reading the contract and they will suddenly panic.

Birthing the purple kittens...

So what is actually causing them to have to birth the purple kittens of shock and awe? It is the group of paragraphs where we quite openly declare that we will be contributing back to the community the altered modules and libraries that are created or adjusted for their project. Though we don't actually say that. They just think we do. And they will often contact me in a slight flap of consternation as to whether this means that a community (or as some may believe a bunch of barely-human Trotskyite communists, or free-loving, mescaline-imbued anarcho-terrorists) is going to do with their business product.

So after slipping them a few valiumesque palliatives (and in the occasional case a drink that may hit like a slice of lemon wrapped around an aforeknown gilded building material) I sit down and explain in calm, soothing tones. What the actual situation is.

Section Seven: We all stand together...

What the infamous Section Seven in fact says, and this is a very brief discussion of it, is that in creating their project, or developing their code, we will be using OSS and community-maintained projects. It also explains that we contribute altered modules and libraries back to the community to help further those projects that we are all benefiting from. It also lets them know that it is -their- (important emphasis) choice of how much we contribute back to the community. We make it clear what OSS licences are and where they can find copies, of the need for transparency in code and the value in distributing the source code with the project. But, we also make it plain that if they so wish we will develop proprietary modules and libraries and we will create code that they can copyright and patent as long as this is expressed before we begin work so that we can take steps to ensure we do not breach community licences.

We also let them know how much longer the development will be and how that will affect costs as there will be a certain level of re-inventing the wheel so as not to breach ownership. Also a big selling point is that modules that are released to the community become part of projects that are community-maintained and often are evolved and tested without cost. Not to mention the transparency and the fact that they can hire other people to work on their codebase not just people certified by one company.

The surprising thing is, well it isn't really that surprising, that once they understand this...once they grok us and join up to our anarcho-commie-hippie-perp communes, they start to really like it. Even jaded business-types with one eye on the time sheet and the other on the expenses column, and a third eye probably closed and dreaming of the bonus for coming in under budget (boss Nirvana), start to appreciate the benefits. Suddenly the purple prose of popularist patent-promoting proprietary passionate publicists (say that fifteen times quickly) becomes less important and they start to linger in the shoals of the open-source-software seas.

So, I, would like to take the time to thank all our clients. Past and present. For without them I doubt that modules, libraries and projects would look the same, certainly our contribution would not be the same. For, although, we would love to just spend all our days working on OSS and furthering the grand communities and people we work with, we would in fact starve. Our clients are the ones who come with us on this journey of OSS and Perl. They are the ones who understand our need to create and work in this manner. Many of them come to passionately support it in the manner we do (though I am sure a few weep at the fact that it doesn't have an index-linked investment matrix).

So I salute you...all of you...and thank you deeply, for all that has been past and all that will be.

(Eventhough at some point I may be trying to sell Enlightened Perl to you and the need for you to support us all in the community a little more :).)

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

the best laid plans of rodentery and sapients go flying out of the window like a simian with its genitalia immolated

North-West England Perl Mongers Homepage
Meetings Homepage
Meeting #5: Social #3
Enlightened Perl Organisation

There were always going to be issues...

So, sometimes the best laid plans of rodentery and sapients go flying out of the window like a simian with its genitalia immolated.

What did we do that was wrong, well we arranged to have a social meeting in which the following events played a part in affecting turn out:

Football Match
On the same night as our social Manchester United wold be playing Barcelona in (I think) the Champions League final, so the whole of Manchester was filled with rowdy, drunken surface pond matter by the early afternoon, and the general mood was already exuberant with a touch of aggression. This would only become worse as the evening went on, and if Manchester United were to lose (which they did) that mood would darken. It is natural to presume that a lot of people would be put off by this, also we have to consider that some people would be out watching the match as they may be football supporters. In fact had we thought about it (or if anyone who followed the football at all had mentioned it) we would have changed the night. We did in fact end up leaving the venue about twenty minutes into the match as the mood was getting very dark from the people gathered in the pub to watch the events. We moved to a different pub which locked its doors once United had lost to ensure that they were not involved with the aggrieved mourning.

Hearing the message
There is still the feeling that we need to promote the message about the group being in existence and that we don't all sit around cursing Ruby/Python/PHP programmers and spitting. I mean some might do that, but we don't -all- do it :).

People missing the train
There was the fact that some people, and I wouldn't mention the name of my co-leader Ian in this, managed to miss the train to Manchester and the next one from their remote location would be long in coming.

level of work - with a bank holiday
Then there was the fact that there was a bank holiday weekend the weekend before. Which meant of course that everyone came back to work after a long weekend to, no doubt, a backlog of things to do and one less day in which to do it that week. That kind of pressure often puts you off socialising.

So the turnout may not have been as high as we would have hoped for, but that isn't always a bad thing. To begin with there was a new face who hadn't been to a meeting before so the less people wasn't as much of a shock and allowed them to get a good deal of attention. Also the smaller group allowed for a conversation where everyone could say more and get to know each other a little better. I think this made us all feel a little more committed to the cause of getting the word out about our fledgling group.

Part of that was the feeling we all went away with that we need to be a little more pro-active, using the tools such as Facebook and Twitter to pass information on about nwe.pm and the Perl world in general, and to actively talk more about Perl/nwe.pm on our blogs.

After leaving the meeting I started to Twitter under the name of shadowcat_mdk and Graeme started the #northwestengland.pm irc channel on irc.perl.net.

Another bonus of a small meeting group for me is that I got to wax lyrical about the merits of Enlightened Perl and the EPO and I think I may have persuaded more people to join the cause.

So...my actual feeling is that I am glad it was a small meeting, to be honest. I certainly want big meetings, but from this little meeting there was an instant reaction and that's a positive thing. Oh well, the next meeting is a Technical Meeting and I am hoping we see some more new faces along with a higher number of the regulars :).

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Hoping my wife doesn't read this easy to find post...

YAPC::EU Homepage
Schedule
Enlightened Perl Talk
Dependency Management Talk
EPO Workshop
Mark Keating Bio
Matt S. Trout Bio

It is just two months to go until the YAPC::EU in Lisbon and I am sure that the organisers have started to enter that vague twitchy-panic state that comes before such a major event.

As for us at Shadowcat Barracks, well some of us will be presenting talks at YAPC::NA in June (bites fingernails nervously), along with talks at the local North West England PM group in July. But even still we have a little extra thrill at the thought of the fast approaching Lisbon.

Well at least I do...

This is partly to do with the YAPC, and partly to do with the fact that I will be arriving the week before with the intention of seeing more of the city (and perhaps the countryside around).

So if there are any other people arriving early and want to meet up at night for a pre-conference beer, let me know. I cannot promise anything as I will be sightseeing and my wife will be insisting on a no-Perl conversation rule for a few days before the conference. But if you have family with you, want a bit of sanity where we can manoeuvre others into talking while we slope to one side and get a brief tech talk in under the radar, then let me know :)

Hoping my wife doesn't read this easy to find post...Well at least not before I have had a chance to think of a reasonable excuse for not lavishing all my attention, deservedly, on her.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

take the people who are under the impression that Perl is a quick glue where Tim Toady rules in ignorance upon a throne of loose grammatical form by the hand and take them through the streets of Modern Perl

Programming Language with the Happiest Users

I was trolling through the blogs on Planet Perl Ironman and pulled the above link to a quite interesting article on the positive Tweets about programming languages and extrapolating the hapiness of the programmmers who use different languages. I am not going to discuss the main article here, I recommend people search it out for themselves.

What I was going to discuss was the comments that were left by the varous people who read the article. There was a general surprise at the fact that Perl was at the top. Some users indicated that the article was probably invalidated because of either the inclusiveness, or non-inclusiveness, of certain languages - others attempted to invalidate the statistical model, or to cast doubt on the collection methods (which seems to me to be invalid as the model was applied accurately/inacurrately to all the languages shown so they all benifitted/suffered from the same process, which is still parity) - others just bitched about the fact that any language could be better/worse than their flavour of the month.

But what distressed me the most was the people, either positively or negatively, who described Perl as just a glue, a patch-up language suited seemingly just for DIY. There were too many who saw Perl as just Tim Toady (TIMTOWTDI). Worse, it was often described fondly, or despised, as noodley pasta.

Now I am just the Adminion around here at Shadowcat Barracks, so a lot of the deeper levels of programming are normally lost in the realms of the ether to me, but the notion that Perl is always messy, always full of quick and easy code, and even worse is sphagetti almost offends me. Why? Easy. Use Strict and Be Consistent. That's it really, that helps us to produce Perl code that is a little less of a glue and more like a scaffold (which is what it actually is). Perl is a language you can hang things onto and build up from. That is a major feature to my mind. It is adaptable and allows for variation. But that doesn't mean it has to be messy, quick, dirty or cheap.

I would like to take the people who are under the impression that Perl is a quick glue where Tim Toady rules in ignorance upon a throne of loose grammatical form by the hand and take them through the streets of Modern Perl, I will show them something that might just blow their mind.

Modern Perl is Enlightened Perl. It is a Perl ruled by Best Practices. It is a Perl that is devoted to the knowledge that there may-be-more-than-one-way-to-do-it but that doesn't mean you -SHOULD- do it anyway you want to, and that Consistency is Not a Bad Thing.

Many popular Perl libraries and projects use strong principles to guide their development. These include the idea of factoring out hacks and edge-case variables that lead to conceptual cul-de-sacs and replacing them with leaner code that is easier to integrate and implement. Perl has CPAN, that alone and the strong principles it is built on already elevate the language into the stratosphere of good practice.

And on a discursive note...

It is a true strength of Perl that you can do just about anything you want to with it. It is also true that you can get away with a lot of insanity even if you -use strict-. But this is not sphagetti, or a noodley-goodness in a FSM devotional sense, it is dialect, colloqualism, cliche, idiom, it is Language and it Evolves.

Perl is a fluid and liguistically rich programming language. It gives it strength and it enables a wide range of expression. But languages that are rich enough to do that will for every Shakespeare have a hundred Jeffrey Archers, a million txtrs and sh1t3s who l33t.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Comments

Developers are by nature very possessive of their own favorite language and seem to rant and rave about other programming languages like they are the plague or some other awful monstrous device.

You mentioned the responses about Perl being negative, well if you look closely you'll also see very similar rants about other languages, e.g. even php gets a good knock-up.

Could it be that the Perl Community is reacting overly sensitive to criticism because of some innate feeling of insecurity? We started out the best and now have to deal with being the underdog.

I've been an enthusiastic software developer most of my life and have learned various programming languages. My favorites by far are good old C and of course Perl. I don't care what others think, because I have alot of fun and that's all that counts, isn't it?

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if within the year Perl goes through some kind of renaissance of increased popularity, what with Perl6 and those interesting initiatives leading up to it like Moose, DBIx::Class and Catalyst. I wouldn't be surprised if some magical transformation takes place now that lighthttd and mod_perlite are coming of age. Maybe we replace LAMP with this other new-fangled underdog, and all of a sudden Perl is the most famous and popular programming language around. And then what have we we achieved? Are we happier? Is the Perl Community saved from the next ice age?

Well, the answer is that proof comes with just plodding on and having fun with what you are doing, proving by example what is possible. It doesn't matter who's the best or which language makes the happiest tweets on twitter. What really matters is that fantastic CPAN tools are popping up by the dozen, allowing us to extend our creativity beyond expectation, creating wonderful state-of-the-art architectures like Catalyst.

I have nothing to complain about. I like it the way it is. I never get enough of Perl and learn new things about it all the time. There's much to do so let's shape up and get the job done.

Kiffin Gish, The Netherlands

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

This is a companion piece to the article It's All About Support published this week

There is an issue that came to my mind recently when thinking about how long one has to support items after they have been surpassed or deprecated, and that is the issue of Education and Research.

Education

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches" [1]
[Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Maxims for Revolutionists, Man and Superman, 1903.]

"Those that cannot be trusted to either, are management"
[Mark Keating, It's All About Education and Research, Shadowcat Systems Blog, 15 May 2009][2]

How do we keep upto date with our education in a fast-paced development strategy? There is certainly good reason to keep oneself abreast of any recent changes if one is an educator, in fact it should be an almost absolute requirement. But what of those who have been educated? How much responsibility does the community have, or to be clearer, how much should we assume in keeping the education of our progression as positive an experience as possible? And how do we do that?[4]

I guess my main issue is along the lines of the support. If we are assuming an eighteen-month to two-year development strategy, with an 'n' amount of changes that are being introduced, refactored, deprecated or deleted completely, we have to assume a slightly longer period for this to be part of an educational system. And we should assume it is part of an educational system. At this point there are training courses et al., but one should always strive to introduce more formal education in any large subject. As one does one should also assume that there is going to be a continuum of development stages, so unsupported leapes or changes can foul this system as there would be little chance of keeping all parts of the educational system at the same innovative position.

Research

Books

This issue also ties into our research concerns. When one is producing a book on a computer subject there is the necessary temptation to make it as upto date as possible. In fact the real truth is you want it to herald. the next evolutionary step of the development process (unless it is a manual :) ).

That presents us with a possible issue...

Say the step you herald, the changes you desire to make, are so unworkable in practice that they are removed at the next stage? Or worse, say they are so good there is a million hungry developers screaming to make changes and add features? By the time your book is produced it is almost going to be obsolete.[5]

Documentation

This isn't really an issue in regards to documentation...

Wait a second and let me rewind that...(make little rewind voice sounds in your head)

This shouldn't be an issue that affects documentation. But in regards to that, some docs take a long time to be updated and revised. There is also the matter of introductory documents, easter eggs/advent calendars and the other trappings of projects and communities that end up on wiki pages and strewn around the blogsphere. What is the strategy for keeping them sync'd. I have often noted that a particular 'newby' to a project will start by updating a wiki tutorial, or an advent calendar freebie because the docs do not cover deprecated items. The whole issue of updating old blogs and forums is huge. In any formal strategy these should be considered as well. If one is consolidating an effort an attempt to recognise all the issues is probably a valid approach.

This effort make seem like a Herculean task, but it need not be. It would be difficult to perform in a retro-active manner, but if one starts with the idea that all the things need to be tied together and the efforts consolidated with a clear strategy, and perhaps sort formal listing system, then one could potentially keep documentation relevant and upto date, and could keep people posted for changes to blogs/forums. It could probably even be automated to some degree using a scripting language that links together some text-based instruction files, we could even have a database or something...who knows...

Conclusion...of sorts

I am not trying to suggest in these articles that there are major problems. But the issue is that we should consider it part of our thinking process when we build a broader strategy for any medium- to large-scale development. The notion I am trying to work on is that it is 'potentially' disastrous, and almost certainly facile, to have a rules system that attempts to encompass all elements of a development into the same time frame. I haven't in these articles yet considered the broader issues that affect industry when it comes to development and deployment of systems. The fact that most companies run (innapropriately) hardware and software together as if they are intrinsically tied in terms of an evolutionary strategy, or that budgets are usually tied to the political landscape as this affects the economy they exist within.

So my argument is that we have a richer roadmap for development that doesn't parcel everything into the same rota of events but appreciates each element for its differences and alots a strategy that encompasses its particular uniqueness.[6]

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

[1]So before a gaggle of teachers gather outside of my door baying for blood or calling me a fascist tool for a totalitarian state, let me point out that it was Bernard Shaw's fault he was a dirty little epigramator. The teachers, educators and bile-slingers who are normally offended by this comment, for shame on you, the man was being satirical, read the rest of the list.Return

[2]Oh I'd like to reference this self-reference[3]Return

[3][Mark Keating, 2009, ibid.] :)Return

[4]You can comfortably assume that I now have asked a lot of questions to which I may not have an answer to. What is even worse is the fact that I am not assumoing there is an answer to them or if they are important. This really is just a discursive article intended to provoke a set of thoughts. It may be in fact careening down a blind alley like a mynock with its testicles on fire (presumably listening to Jerry Lee Lewis and escaping the Millenium Falcon).Return

[5]Though there is strong argument that this is the case anyway and the best you can produce is a tome of best practice and future promise :).Return

[6]I managed to get through both of these articles without mentioning compatibility or the seemingly dreaded backwards compatibility.[7]Return

[7]Crap on a cracker, I just did.Return

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

we have all met the programmer, hobbyist, or client who appears n multiplied by nine, divided by five and plus thirty-two years after and changes and in a different temperature scale

I don't like to argue with programmers about programming decisions. I even less want to argue with package and release managers on a matter of schedules, especially when a cursory glance tells me that they excel in experience at this to me by a factor that can only be expressed as a power. But on a recent trawl through the blogsphere I read an article that I have no huge issue with in regards to its rules regarding road mapping features and deprecation of invalid code, but I do have a concern with it in regards to its lack, to my mind, of support and education & research.[1]

Support

There is always a problem with support. How long do you support something you created? When do you cancel support for something that is deprecated or refactored? Why should we carry people who not only can't be bothered to be modern,[2] but don't want to pay or be concerned with on-going change and evolution but expect you to be concerned with supporting their archaic or anachronistic possession.[3]

The answer is that there is no clear answer. The issue with support is always going to be a complex one which isn't helped by the fact that the length of support is intrinsically linked to what you are in fact supporting. But these are just an initial thought (and hopefully not a knee-jerk reaction).

How do we treat people who require support? They may be active contributors to projects. To some they may be indulging in a favourite deprecated module snippet, but they may also be maintaining complex legacy systems that are difficult or expensive to replace? Do we tell them to force an upgrade that may be costly or impossible to achieve? And if he cannot do we simply say tough, or we're sorry, or employ a bunch of us to refactor/rebuild your codebase?

How do we sell to clients and industry the idea that unless they engage not only in continuous software integration (which is no bad thing), but rolling support, especially if our time periods are very short. The notion of refactoring, deprecating and advancing code as a major release on a quasi bi-yearly schedule (for complex bases and larger projects) is fine. But the thought of a potential[4] two-years support for a feature that you may have in your codebase is not bad per se but gives off potential warning signs to industry. Business doesn't like the thought that something they develop one day has the 'potential' to be out of community/industry support in less than two years.[5]

Consider this economic situation and answer me this question, would you spend money on a piece of code that may be unsupported before a recession is over? Because a vast number of people would not. They may be willing to invest in new technology or innovation to help with their business but not at the risk of it being invalid and expensive to continue to use over a short budgetary period. Even though this is not what is being suggested that is the perception that is gained when we have such a short support period.

Now, quite rightly, businesses should also be expected to pay for this level of support. The standard thought to this is that some well-known developers, or companies, are going to end up supporting and patching older systems and rightly earning a living from it. This situation exists and will continue to exist. But what about the notion of businesses supporting the community? How about we consider persuading more businesses to allow their developers to contribute to projects and modules they use in their working life and to do this while they are at work. How about if a company pays for documentation patches and code refactors for the *whole* community. That is a form of payment that benefits us all.[6]

Businesses, specifically medium to large enterprises, are often retiscent to change as it is expensive and probelmatical. They are also, conversely, the strength behind a lot of innovation and change. Small companies can, for want of a better word, be more *agile*, but they don't always have the resources for long-term investment that brings about substantial alteration of culture. There are always exceptions to this broad statement but major changes do not occur until a company has affected a certain portion of a culture. This does not happen in the short term, and any culture that ignores the slug-factor of larger enterprise may find itself relegated to niche waters.[7]

If we are going to have clearly defined software development periods with a road-map for development and a schedule for deprecation then that gives a positive boost to the future of a project. But, to my mind, unless we understand that the support period, especially for industry and large projects, has to encompass a plan to have support hooks in place both in the community and in our development road-map for a much longer period than that release/deprecation cycle we will encounter issues.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest to me, or if I think will be useful to others, then I will add them to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

[1] By now there are some who may know have guessed the article that inspired this post and may wonder why I haven't posted this on that blog as a comment, or made a reference to the original here. Well the answer to that is simple:
a. The principle issues raised in that blog I am not actually discussing here;
b. I respect the person's opinion and stance and don't wish to appear negative especially since I have discussed the article with intelligent people (who are programmers) whose opinion I respect and who have helped me to gain a better understanding of the broader issues that article is addressing.Return

[2] Whatever the hell that means.Return

[3] And we have all met the programmer, hobbyist, or client who appears n multiplied by nine, divided by five and plus thirty-two years after and changes and in a different temperature scale, demands some help without any thought of remunerative action and is indignant if you aren't fully compliant (there are no Shadowcat clients like that, though, they're all lovely :) ).Return

[4] I want to highlight that this is 'potential', it would be supported for a year after deprecation and any feature not deprecated would have continuous support, this goes without saying but is clarified here.Return

[5] While fully supporting the idea that they are 'cutting-edge', 'progressive', 'evolutionary' or 'modern' (see above).Return

[6] Note that we, and many companies like us, already do support the community in this fashion. Also our clients are often willing to contribute some, or all, of the development time they pay us for into returning innovation into community modules we use. My point is that we need more of this and to target it as a positive feature of using open source code.Return

[7] This is really skimming the surface of this argument and because of that it is at best shallow in some of its conclusions, and at worst just plain wrong. I don't disagree with what I have said, I just haven't covered what I am trying to say well enough. But it serves as an introduction to an area of thinking not the conclusion of a thought process.Return

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

The Iron Man competition gains badges that perhaps represent women, and Mark tries to stray away from arguments about sexism

Paperman
Stoneman
Tin Man
Cyberman
Iron Man (modern)
Paper Woman
Iron Man Update
We are Iron Man
Planet Iron Man

Who is the Paper Woman?

I am going to give you the short and potted history to the Paper Woman and a brief explanation about why I chose the design for her that I did.

So I am on holiday in LA and about 8 hours deviated from any conversations I would normally have with my coleagues in the United Kingdom. I checked my IRC channel last night and I saw that Matt (Matt S. Trout) had asked me to do a variant of the Iron Man badge I had done for the Iron Man competition. He asked for a Paper Woman badge.

So before I got started I had a brief think about this. Why did he want a Paper Woman badge, was a thought that wandered through my head and I figured he had been asked to do badges so that a woman could choose (this is true as I have discovered from Matt's latest post there was a conversation on Eric Bat's Journal page about the Blog post Matt did and the apparent sexism therein.

Okay, I said apparent sexism and I am going to make an aside to explain what I mean by that before I get misunderstood.

1. The Iron man contest was conceived as a homage to another contest and the Iron Man comic, at no point did we think of being exclusive to gender.
2. Language (specifically in this case, English) has been biased in favour of males for generations and therefore is favoured towards males and repressive to females and the use of gender neutral pronouns that are male and the bias of the I signifier as noted by Lacan and ther French feminists is well known.
Hence the 'sexism' is not intended and therefore can only be 'apparent' as I know it is not 'intentional'

But let's go back to last night before I knew of this post and was considering the Iron Woman badge. I trolled around the internet a bit to get a general feel for how to do an Iron Woman, I didn't find the one from the cover of the Iron Man comic but I did find quite a few examples to get my thoughts going. I eventually decided to base the image on the female android from Metropolis (in its broadest sense) but I did change one important detail...

Unlike almost every other female robot image you will find on the internet, and probably elsewhere, the one I have created has no visible breasts/cleavage. This was a conscious decision and taken long before reading Eric's post. It was quite simply that when I added them, and the images I viewed of female robots with breasts, were tawdry, they were cheap and that felt offensive. I felt at the time that had Matt been asked by a female hacker to give them the choice of a Paper Woman badge they wouldn't want it to look tawdry. When I said choice above, I do really mean 'choice' as I see no reason why males or females can't choose to have either the male or female badge on their site/posts. You don't have to define your gender all the time, surely the point of equality is choice not just representation (in fact representation gives you little in terms of real equality: choice, respect and appreciation of your individuality are far more important in my opinion). Also if I was going to do breasts I would have to do an Iron Man with moobs to represent the growing obesity in western society and the tendency for older men to develop moobular extensions as gravity begins to win the fight.

So I designed the robot to have no breasts and no shadow of a cleavage. So how to represent her. Well my response was to go for the genetic predisposition and statistical average that women are slightly more curvy and generally slighter in build. The use of oval eyes and red lips was a personal choice and just used to indicate some facial distinction to the Iron Man as was the oval shaped head. None of these things were intended to indicate anything other than a general feminine as opposed to masculine form so that a set of badges could be created.

If anyone has feedback (and until we have a commenting system) please don't hesitate to email me at: m.keating [at] shadowcat.co.uk, if your comments are useful, fun, or just plain interest me and I think will be useful to others then I will add tem to the end of this post, let me know how you would like to be named (anon, nick etc.).

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

The growing Cartoony Men mystery pulls in yet more cultural mythos with a British TV classic

Inkscape Homepage
Paperman
Stoneman
Tin Man
Cyberman
Iron Man (modern)

Who is the Cyber Man?

Well if we were being pedants we would perhaps be asking "Who are the Cybermen?".

The answer is really very easy, the Cybermen are a race of people from the Doctor Who television series produced and owned by the BBC. They were originally a race of metal men from the planet Mondas (and also Telos), though this has altered in the modern Doctor Who where they were developed on an alternate Earth.

The Cybermen are a race of Cyborgs, literally men who made themselves into machines eradicating what they thought was a weakness, the flesh and emotions that make up mankind. This emotionless quality is often mocked by the successsive doctors and blamed for their eventual downfall. Though it is usually the interference of the Doctor that actually causes them to be destroyed.

The Cyberment were created by Dr Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis for the serialisation, The Tenth Planet. All copyright is owned by the BBC.

Their inclusion here is because of my fondness for the Doctor Who series and to continue the meme of this series of blogs that started with the Paper Man mystery.

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

The growing Cartoony Men mystery suddenly gains some meaning and a conclusion, of sorts, to this exposition.

Inkscape Homepage
Paperman
Stoneman
Tin Man
Cyberman
Iron Man (modern)
2009 Nordic Perl Worksgop
Enlightened Perl Organisation

Who is the Iron Man?

The Iron Man is a character owned by Marvel Comics, a superhero, though to be more precise an augmented ordinary man as without the giant metal onesie codpiece the hero Stark is just an ordinary man with too much time and money on his hands.

The Iron Man has gained a lot of prominence in the last two years due in no small part by the commanding presence of Robery Downey jnr in the Hollywood movie of the same name.

So why is it being blogged here?

What the hell is going on?

Those questions will be answered in more detail by Matt S Trout as he has announced at ther Nordic Perl Workshop on 17th April 2009, the Iron Man Blogging competition as sponsored by the Enlightened Perl Organisation.

More details will be linked as they happen...

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

The mystery of the Tin Man begins, as the growing Cartoony Men mystery deepens without actually becoming any clearer

Inkscape Homepage
Wikipedia Article on the Tin Man
Paperman
Stoneman
Tin Man
Cyberman
Iron Man (modern)

Again we travel into the depths of this mystery as it unfolds slowly in these blog pages. Firstly there was the introduction of the Paper Man which was quickly enhanced by the mystery of the Stone Man, and now, we have the the Tin Man.

So who is the Tin Man?

Well (after a brief look at wikipedia and a sudden edit of the text), lets have a look...

The Tin Man was originally called the Tin Woodman (or the Tin Woodsman in adaptations) is a character in the fictional Land of Oz created by American author L. Frank Baum. Tin Woodman first appeared in his classic 1900 book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and then in many other of the Oz books.

The origin of the character is quite shocking, he was an ordinary man by the name of Nick Chopper who used to make his living chopping down trees in the forests of Oz. The Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe to prevent him from marrying the girl that he loved. The enchanted axe chopped off his limbs, one by one. Each time he lost a limb he replaced it with a limb made of tin. Finally, nothing was left of him but tin. The tinsmith who helped him neglected to replace his heart. Once Nick Chopper was made entirely of tin, he was no longer able to love the girl he had fallen for.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale befriends the Tin Woodman and he follows her to the Emerald City to get a heart from The Wizard of Oz. They are joined on their adventure by the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. The Wizard sends Dorothy and her friends to the Winkie Country to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. The Tin Woodman's axe proves useful in this journey, both for chopping wood to create a bridge or raft as needed, and for chopping the heads off animals that threaten the party.

The Wizard turns out to be a "humbug" and can only provide a placebo heart made of velvet and filled with sawdust. However, this is enough to please the Tin Woodman. When Dorothy returns home to her farm in Kansas, the Tin Woodman returns to the Winkie Country to rule as emperor.

So why is this man here? What is his connection to the Paper Man and the Stone Man? Will there be an answer in this blog...

No. Not at the moment as already the thunder is sounding, the lightning is flashing and another man is wending his way towards this blog.

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

The mystery of the Stone Man begins, wait this is very familiar...

Inkscape Homepage
Paperman
Stoneman
Tin Man
Cyberman
Iron Man (modern)

If you thought the mystery had begun and would perhaps end with the mysterious, and yet strangely quixotic:

PAPER MAN

Then you were dead wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrongly wrong, wrong, wrong. Absolutely wrong, in fact just plain wrong in the wrongness of being wrong.[1]

For what light from yonder monitor breaks, it is the east and this new figure is the sun. What a sun did shine, and the light that burns twice as bright is very painful on the eyes, never burn a candle from three ends as it would be an odd shaped candle...[2]

So what is the oddly shaped man I see at the side of this page?

Is it a brick?
No.

Is it a pebble?
Close, but still no.

Is it a duck?[3]
A duck?
No.
Definitely not, you were closer with brick.
For it is....

STONE MAN

Yes another strangely incongruously named man with a range of improbable super powers that are also strangely believable, such as:

The ability to lie still in a valley after being deposited there by an ice age.

Can be shaped by an artisan and form part of a regular structure.

Will roll down a hill and gather no moss, but if you leave him alone he will be covered in bird shit and lichen[4] in minutes.

Will sink like a...well like a stone actually.

Stone Man, a man who is a stone and who may, or may not, be related to the mystery of the Paper Man. Keep watching this blog for more, and possibly even less, clues to this ongoing mystery.

[1] Sigh. Sorry.

[2] Really going for it this time, may have to go and lie down in a darkened room if this continues.

[3] A foul pun, I know, but I was game for it.

[4] Can moss be compared to this?[5]

[5] Can it be likened to lichen?

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

The mystery of the Paper Man begins, and perhaps even ends, with this exciting post.

Inkscape Homepage
Paperman
Stoneman
Tin Man
Cyberman
Iron Man (modern)

Look in the sky...is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a rare reflection of the planet Venus shining on the horizontal plane in just a way to suggest a moving shape of an indecipherable nature?

No it's..
dum..dum..dum..dum..dum..
da..da..dum..
dum..dum..dum..dum..dum..
da..da..der .....
dum..dum..dum..dum..dum..
da..da..dum...
da..da..dum...
da..da..dum...
da..da..da..

Actually it is a bird. Sorry, it just flew closer.

Meanwhile, what is this thing on the side of the page next to this text?

Is it a man?
No.

Is it made of metal?
No.

Does it have wide rule, feint lines on yellow foolscap paper with two hole punched clean for filing?
Yes.

Then it must be...

PAPER MAN

A man made from paper, who has the ability to turn to a soggy mass slowly in a puddle and absorb ink. Especially ink drawn into perverse regular shapes of varying shape with numbers of indeterminate number, and yet oddly repeated pattern, which form episodic elements of meaning in a defined structure that seemingly has enough innate variance to form almost infinite forms and interpretations.[1]

A man who has appeared in what otherwise has the appearance of a business related blog with rather staid posts related to information technology.

What can this mean?
What is the purpose of it here?
What was it drawn in?[2]

Watch this blog....

da..da..dum...
da..da..dum...
da..da..da.......

ROLL CREDITS

[1] SLAP. Sorry really let the mind wander on that sentence.

[2] The artwork was created entirely in Inkscape version 0.46 which is available from the link at the top of this page. I thoroughly recommend this program to all who deal with vector graphics and page layout.

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

A recollection of how Matt Trout and I came about to use the word Enlightened in association with Modern Perl

North-West England Perl Mongers Homepage
Enlightened Perl Organisation

Precis

This is a short discourse on the history of the term Enlightened Perl. It is not a technical discussion and is based solely on my recollections of events.[1]

In the beginning...

The origins of how and when we started to use enlightened in association with modern Perl[2] can be traced back to a conversation Matt S Trout and I had in the latter half of 2005. At that time Matt was starting to become more involved with the project communities that are a major part of the wider Perl world, he had always been aware of them as a junior Perler and was a contributor to some of the libraries as well as being active on IRC. For my part I was a minor lurker on some channels but an avid listener to Matt's dialogues on various subjects concerning Perl, most notably the shape of some of the community projects, his assessment on the development of Perl libraries and the state of the language.

Matt was discussing how, as he perceived it, Perl was entering a new phase in its development, it was in a Renaissance period distinguished by the wealth of high quality libraries in development and the general sense from the community working on Perl 5. He made this distinction based upon the fact that there had been a slump in the Perl development up until this point that he was likening to a Dark Age and that we had come out of this into the Renaissance (to keep the analogy running). He also elaborated on the fact that many new libraries and langauge developments had started to learn from the still-in-creation Perl 6 along with looking at other languages and their libraries, projects and development.

The imagery was provocative and did seemingly fit the shape of Perl at the time, but I probed deeper as some of the elements of his argument intrigued me. Specifically Matt felt that this development was almost a radical shift in thinking. It had been assumed by many, up until that time, that development in Perl 5 would be a stop-gap while waiting for Perl 6 and that it would not be as innovative. But the modern libraries that were appearing, along with a change in focus in development with the understanding that although TIMTOWTDI[3] was an underpinning statement to PERL there was good reason to follow a 'best practice' and to obey development strategies of compatibility and consistency.

It should be understood that the people developing Perl 5 Libraries were not rebuking the development of Perl 6, nor were they on a crusade against the focus of the Perl Foundation, this was simply about the development of existing Perl projects and the evolution of them. There was also the strong undercurrent on the need to freely share practices and implementations of Perl that had been tested in a corporate environment.

The more that Matt spoke about the developments in the community and in the Perl 5 language the more I became convinced that we had grasped the wrong period for our metaphor.[4] The Renaissance was a period of history most clearly understood as a rebirth of classical ideals after a period of regression, it encompasses a revolution (of sorts) in education and science (limited to an understanding that science works only in relation to God's creation). This wasn't what we were experiencing as there was no 'classical' period that was being returned to, and there was no 'limited' revolution. What we had was a surge of ideas and revolutions in how we approached community structures, programming conventions, the development of the language. If anything the very nature of this change to my mind resembled the period of the, predominantly Western, Enlightenment.[5]

The Enlightenment is a period that is hard to define and even harder to date, as it doesn't encompass a simple series of events or an easy to follow shift in historical features. It is a period defined by a change in thinking, and in a rapid technological advancement spurred by revolutions. The Enlightenment covers a period marked by the Industrial Revolution, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the shift in social mobility governed by wealth and ability as opposed to simply by birth. It is also marred by vast colonial expansion and exploration, the development of companies that we would consider super-corporations, the charting and taming of the globe. Many of the great thinkers who shifted the focus of intellectual enquiry away from the concept of God-appointed rights, or a natural law with the rights of kings to rule, were born during this period with their emphasis on liberty and reason. Emmanuel Kant tells us that the, "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity" while Thomas Paine gave us The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man. During this period we also see the impact of development for women as Mary Wollstonecraft writes her feminist work A Vindication of the Rights of Women in which she argues that women are only inferior to men due to education (specifically the lack of it) and that they should be treated as equals.

This to my mind fitted the allusion and gave us the imagery we were trying to express. There was also the fact that an Enlightenment can be seen in a religious sense to be representative of achieving a certain level of understanding or of being, it is often the step before one reaches the nirvana of choice, and this was no bad thing to add to our metaphor. The modern definition for enlightened is: "having or showing a rational, modern and well-informed outlook", which fitted the thoughts of all of us when we decided to form the Enlightened Perl Organisation.

[1] Which may be considered exemplary, facile, inaccurate and precise all in the same breath. Recollection is of course subject to the whim of focus and interpretation and therefore should not be treated as a gospel rendition, more a 're-imaging' (to steal a Burtonesque idea) of events.

[2] When I mention Modern Perl, I am referring to the practices and libraries associated with Perl 5, with a particular emphasis after Perl 5.6. Much of the practices have their roots in good software development as used throughout the ages, so probably from the 1960s onwards, as for the communities that use them they are a more modern phenomena in software circles but have their roots in socially-structured networks which are seemingly hard-wired into the species.

[3] There Is More Than One Way To Do It.

[4] The thought has occurs more than once when I get roused by the use of imagery that this may not be important and that any imagery that conveys the sense of what you are saying is enough. Then I remember that type of thinking is nonsense, as a society (and even perhaps as a species) we are spurred by the use of imagery, it is why we have metaphors, allusions and similies in our language. We identify with the image and become immersed in it, so that the whole shape of our reaction to a specific thing can be determined simply by the imagery we use to describe it, e.g. compare your response to 'he had thunderous eyes' to 'he had a lightning smile', both are storm images but one comes away with a different sense of the nature of the person eventhough very little has been said.

[5] Classifying the Enlightenment as the Western Enlightenment presents its own problems. While it is true that the Enlightenment was predominantly based in Europe with its strong colonial powerbase, and America as an emergent nation, it is incorrect to assume that its influences and affect was solely restricted to these locations. The Enlightenment had roots in the philosophies, teachings and religions of many countries but its impact, in a simple reading, was focussed on European nations.

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

flexible working also leads to a much more comfortable working environment... we have all become comfortable about the amount of work each person can be considered to be doing at any one time

There are general myths about the usage of time, and how much we do with out time, it has been remarked on at great length but I thought I'd throw in my tuppence worth for good measure.

Consider

*The Average:
Ten men take 40 hours to dig a hole, therefore the hole takes approximately 400 man hours to dig (10 men x 40hrs)

*The Professionals:
Three strapping professional diggers take 65 hours each to dig the same hole, ergo the hole is 195-400 man hours deep. (And while I was writing this the music to the eighties cop show was pounding in my mind.)

*The Managed(!) Team:
Sixty managers take fifteen meetings of two hours each in length, sixty consulatncy sessions of one hour, eighteen business lunches of at least three hours and a trade review lasting twenty weeks by six men at thirty hours a week to decide to dig the hole, which is 3,744 hours, they then appoint twenty men to work for forty-five hours each totalling 900hrs making the job 4,644hrs in length. Ergo the hole is now between 195-4644 man hours deep

*The Machine Solution:
A machine manufacturer builds a digger that takes one hour to dig the hole. the official specs state that it does approximately 250man hours per hour, the marketing promotion claims that is does 3000+ man hours per hour saving you the job of employing 3000 people. A company buys the digger, sacks its 3000 professional diggers and gets six months behind on its projects in the first two weeks.

And now for a brief anecdotal aside...

I was talking to a couple of friends about the number of hours I had worked one day, and he was comparing it to the numbers of hours he worked in a general week, you know this type of conversation and you know where it goes and how it leads to a general pissing contest with each stating how much longer, or harder, they have to work.

Me: Wow I had a seventeen hour day yesterday as I absolutely had to get that work done.
Friend #1: That's nothing I had to work seventy-five hours last week and I will most likely do the same this week.
Friend #2: Yeah, well me and him (he indicates #3) had to do a thirty hour shift to move some server code.
Friend #3: And we stayed up all day after that to wind down and chat
Me: Well I have done a thirty-four hour shift
Friend #1: I had to work for three months at sixteen hour days without a break

(And as we strayed into Monty Python territory)

Friend #3: That's nothing I once had to do one hundred hour weeks when I was Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
Friend #2: That's nothing, I was once trapped in a Chinese brick works where I worked for sixteen years at twenty hours a day on a stale crust and a cup of water each week.
Me: Luxury, I had to single handedly build the great pyramids at Giza....

Now this particular conversation is in fact fictional (well except for the bit about the pyramids), but I am sure that you recognise it. We have come to place a value not on what we do at work, but on how long we are physically doing it, even the manner in which we receive reward is not by how well the job is done, but rather how long we took to do it.

I began to think about this in the light of my office. Primarily there are three of us who work out of the same office, and it is a moot point to some of the people I talk to how much we actually do work out of it as our office hours are a little odd.

There is no imposed regime for times, I generally work nine to five at the office and then at home on some evenings, early mornings and weekends. My companions will work twenty-hour shifts, or do three days at eleven hours each day and then work a Saturday/Sunday at home. Sometimes they will work for two days solid and not leave the office at all. On occasion, and it does happen, so do I. We don't impose a flexi-time or a standard work time, we work to what we find comfortable and effective for ourselves and our lifestyle. This has caused friction in the past, both internally and externally (clients) as there is no set regime for contact and reciprocation, but once you settle into it, the system works very well.

For instance most offices on a diet of 9-5 - mon-fri, may have a regular time for contact but what do you do if you are out of those hours and need someone, what do you do if you are in a different time zone? We have found that because we all work different hours and times of the day, and because we all work on different days of the week, with Sunday being about the only day when we try not to work, we generally cover seventeen-eighteen hours of each day from Mon-Saturday. Many of our clients are between 6-9hrs displaced from us, so this works really well for them, but we would do it if our clients were in the same time zone. The basic point is that we can be contacted (usually in a text manner) at most times of the day and someone will usually reply within a hour or two. It may not always be the person you needed but it will be someone who can take a message and pass it on.

This flexible working also leads to a much more comfortable working environment. We don't usually feel pressured to come into work at a certain time. As long as the work is done and the clients are happy we generally don't mind. This means we are rarely involved in the general exodus of frustration that is the rush hour traffic. It also means that we have all become comfortable about the amount of work each person can be considered to be doing at any one time. Like the mythical man hours above we can vary between the professional diggers and the managed team without much concern as to what the others think as we have come to accept that this is a part of a normal working lifestyle. No one runs at the pace of the professional worker all the time without burning themselves to a crisp, and many of us know that in our working life we often stray into the managed team with surprising ease. In relation to clients we log our time in 15-minute increments, hence we may work on a client project for an entire day but only log two or three hours of time as the intervening time can be easily whiled away on trivialities, as long as the client hours are logged precisely so that they pay only for the work we do for them there is no ethical/legal issue.

So, aside from industries where regular working hours and shifts are essential (it would be crap if everyone at your local A&E decided not to come into work on a Monday morning) the flexible time based approach does work. In a larger organisation it should be possible to use flexible schedules to allow 24hr coverage yet still give staff flexible working hours. It is not beyond the realms of reason to imagine that people would like to occasionally arrive at lunch time or leave at midnight, most staff would stick to a general routine as that's how their lives, and the lives of their friends and family, are composed. What I have found it brings is a greater devotion to work when you set your time to do it. So I may arrive late one day and finish early, but when I am there I dig that hole in 200hrs, and for the weeks where I trudge through my nine to five routine as a lesson to prove it can be done, well for those times I set up meetings, business lunches and consultations on hours worked and goals achieved to ensure that I dig that hole in the time I have allotted for it ;)

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

Pingu was the first to start racking up the pints and was as usual quickly slaughtered

Lancaster University Campus: Infolab

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Meetings Homepage
Tech Meeting #1 Page
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The Infolab at Lancaster University
Catalyst Framework
Moose Homepage
Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

The "fledgling"[1] North-West England Perl Mongers (nwe.pm) group had their first technical meeting at the University of Lancaster's Infolab building on Wednesday 25th February. The group have decided to have bi-monthly technical meetings which alternate with their bi-monthly social nights. Speaking at the first meeting was Matt Trout and myself. Matt did two twenty minute talks, the first was an introduction to Modern Perl and was called Perl 5 is Alive, a variation of a talk he gave at the Postgres West Conference in 2008, the second a quick introduction to Catalyst and Moose. I spoke for ten minutes each on Enlightened Perl Organisation and the Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC).

The attendance was quite good for the second meeting of a local Perl Group, especially one that has to support a rather wide geographical region. There were fourteen people at the event and that turnout was due to the efforts of Ian Norton who worked hard to promote the event and secure us a venue. The only disappointing factor was the lack of students[2].

The talks themselves seem well received. There was some initial problems with the devices (Matt's laptop and the projector) not talking to each other - we had tested beforehand successfully but the great God Murphy decided that he should strike so Matt transferred his talk slides to a memory stick and presented on my Mac. Matt's talk, when it started [:)], was a blisteringly good introduction to Modern Perl and outlined how Perl 5 is far from dead in fact it is very much alive. The best feature of this talk is the wide-range of projects that Matt covers and introduces and the breadth of his awareness of the state of Perl 5.

My first talk was on the Enlightened Perl Organisation, what it is and some of it's aims. This was okay, my personal feeling was that I was a little nervous eventhough there were only a small group of people. I soon settled down and the second half of the presentation felt smoother to me.

The next talk I gave was on GSoC and how you can join in on it. The talk may have had less value than what we could have hoped for [see 2], but on the whole it gave me the experience of presenting to people which is beneficial in itself. I relaxed a little and felt more confident. I had practiced this talk more beforehand and that helped as I was more familiar with the sequence of my slides and the subject matter.

Matt concluded the presentations with a quick introduction to the Moose and Catalyst modern Perl libraries. Again it was a good example of how much Matt knows the implementations and the development of these projects. If I had one niggle it was that the presentation felt loose and a little disorganised, this is often the case when one has such a short time to prepare and Matt was unable to do as much preparation as he would have wanted to on the talk. He mentioned afterwards that he had about half the number of slides he needed to present as well as he would have liked. It was still a good introduction and with a little more work will turn into another great talk.

We finished the evening with a visit to one of the local bars on the University Campus. Our mascot Pingu was once more the first to start racking up the pints and was as usual quickly slaughtered, he really cannot hold his ale.

[1] Not sure I like the term fledgling, it is commonly used in relation to new organisations as an indication perhaps that they do not yet have their wings, but it always seems a little too indicative of immaturity, surely we can have an organisation that is young but yet composed of experienced people? Would not their experience confer somewhat to the organisation they have formed? probably not :)

[2] There were two students at the event, one who is waiting for confirmation of the start of his PhD, the other I think is a part-time student. Unfortunately neither of them wanted to do the GSoC.

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

A few thoughts on the manner in which people navigate sources of information

The brief

North-West England Perl Mongers Homepage
Enlightened Perl Organisation

How do people find the information or resource they require when they look?

How do you guide people to new material or relevant information to their enquiry?

How fast can they find what they need and how important is it that they find it?

I have a few questions that I have been posing to myself as I start a re-think of navigation for a new site, and while I consider the navigation through some of my existing projects. The above questions work as a brief precis of those thoughts (I have shortened the list to make it accessible to think about here), and I will probably come no way towards answering them :). This article -or group of articles- is simply to serve as an aide to memory and a start point for my journey.

An anecdote[1]
on three types of information navigation

I regularly play a roleplaying game with a few friends of mine. The game has a series of rules, rule books and guides that are often consulted to check on variations of conditions (this is especially true in challenges and combat but not important to this argument). Three of us have a different approach to how we navigate to a given piece of information in the books and it illustrates the most common approaches to information navigation.

Friend One: The Seeker
The first person in our navigation trio when looking for information uses the book as much as the two others. He is by nature a person who tries to remember as much of the information as possible yet will struggle with where he read the details, often leading to confusion as he pieces the data from more than one source. On looking for data he will firstly jump to the rough section of the book where he thinks the information is. If he cannot find an exact match he will read around to see how he gathered that information. If neither of these approaches work he will resort to using the contents page to see if there is an unremembered section or category before finally retreating to the index.

In regards to website navigation this approach signifies those people who flick from page to page scanning information and fast seeking data. In order to better serve them we might make the navigation links refer accurately to the page they represent, or we might repeat information in several locations in order to collate as much as possible, those repeats would have links to the parent article or page in much the same manner as a wiki works.

Friend Two: The Knowledge
Number two in this group is the person who knows all, a positive oracle of information. He has studied the book several times in order to fully immerse himself in what has been written. When asked for information he will quickly recount his knowledge and then will open the book and move to the section from memory and re-scan the information to verify his answer. His abilities are in the retrieval of personally stored information, its failure is when he has mis-recalled or when information is updated as he may mix the information. He rarely uses a guess or a compaction of more than one source, he will instead recount both.

For website navigation this is the person who has read your website many times and can often navigate straight to the information they require. The essence here is on familiarity of layout and content delivery and to ensure the information is as accurate as possible and easy to recall. This person is probably going to be aided by good RSS feeds that inform of data updates or changes as then he can re-read the relevant section without trawling through seeing what else has been altered and therefore speeding the user experience.

Friend Three: The Archivist
Number three's approach is to always use the index. He will sometimes recall the general location, compact information from more than one source or recall the whole section, but on a request for information he will always use an index. The value to him from this is that a properly constructed index will direct the reader to the data accurately without any confusion.

In regards to website this person may best be served by a search engine, except that they usually return too much text. One could use a site map, or a table of contents but this has to be accurate enough and comprehensive enough for them to drill down the information fast enough. This type of user is normally served with the 'best possible' option. Perhaps this is the accurate site map, or maybe an index generated from context, the use of tags and a tag cloud can suit this user very well.[2]

It should be noted that these three people often each have a copy of the same book and go scrabbling for the information. Partly it is a race (I guess), partly it is to do with getting everyone the information as quickly as possible so as not to interrupt the flow of the game. Strangely, the fastest to the information is often number three and number two almost simultaneously as number ones reliance on compacted data from multiple sources often has him scanning the wrong section. Even more interesting to note is that when number two is fed data from number three on the specific location, he is very fast as he has already navigated to the correct section and so is in the right area to retrieve the information.

This dual approach strikes an interesting question as to how we drill down a large amount of data into easy to display, manage, and retrieve chunks. How can we combine our methods of data searching by navigation utilising good contextual links, tags and RSS feeds into a combined system as opposed to three forms of navigation. That's perhaps a question for next time...

[1] The idea of telling anecdotes seems to have become a fascination of mine and I hope it doesn't cause too much distraction.

[2] I have an issue with tag clouds as they are often displayed visually as a cloud or block of information, they are often filled with colours and larger displayed fonts to show important links, which are as negative an effect as they are positive. I think it looks clumsy and doesn't accurately reflect how we navigate information. I personally would like a tag cloud to be generated into an alphabetical index with the use of emphasis to show details like popularity, frequency of appearance etcetera.

Mark Keating is: Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems Limited
Director and Secretary of Enlightened Perl Organisation
Co-Founder/Co-Leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
Work Blog: Mark Keating on Shadowcat
Public Blog: Mark Keating on Vox
LinkedIn Profile: Mark Keating on LinkedIn
My Homepage: Mark Keating's Personal site

North-West England Perl Mongers Homepage
Enlightened Perl Organisation