perl589delta needs your help!
I've volunteered to write the release notes for the upcoming 5.8.9 release of Perl. However I rapidly discovered there's an awful lot of changes that need to be examined and distilled into the final document that will become perl589delta.pod.

Luckily, this is a task that's easily broken into chunks and run in parallel, and I've done exactly that. I've got a copy of all the changes that have gone into the 5.8 branch since 5.8.8 was released, and I've chunked it by month. Some months are quiet, with not many changes, and some months are very busy, with lots of changes.

I'm making a call out to the Perl community to volunteer to help with the writing of the release notes. You don't need to be familiar with Perl's guts to do this; if you don't understand a change we'll have a "too hard" bucket that things can be thrown into, and someone (who may be me) will figure them out. Likewise, you don't need a lot of time; I'm not expecting everyone who volunteers for a chunk of work to finish the entire chunk, just as long as you work on it sequentially and let us know where you're up to, you can put it down at any time.

Contributing to the perl589delta project directly helps with the release of Perl 5.8.9. However you'll also get a mention in the prestigious Perl authors file, which looks totally awesome on your resume, and gives you super bragging rights. If you're on ohloh, you'll get kudos from me, and commit points from the project. Your work will almost certainly give you enough material for a 5-minute "What's new in my bit of Perl 5.8.9" lightning talk, which will make you incredibly popular at conferences and user-groups.

In order to get started, just follow the instructions in the README file at the bottom of our source control repository page and sign up to the discussion list.

Feel free to track the repository or sign up the list even if you're not sure if you want to contribute, and are just curious about how all this works. We're happy to have the company!

If you have any questions, or would like to volunteer, you can e-mail me at pjf@cpan.org, mail the perl589delta team at perl589delta@googlegroups.com, or simply post a comment on this journal if you're reading it on use.perl.org.

Memoirs of an OSCON rockstar, Day 4 (Human Interfaces for Geeks)
My sleeping pattern at OSCON remains sub-optimal. I've crossed timezones, and beause there are so many cool tings to do each evening, and talk practicing and preparation, I find myself going to bed late and sleeping in. I could push myself to wake up early, but being sleepy really wrecks my speaking ability, and after my talk on failure, I've got a reputation to maintain.

I wake up late in the morning, and receive what was the most exicting e-mail I'd received in the entire conference. It's from Allison Randal:

Would you be willing to repeat "An Illustrated History of Failure" [as a plenary]? It'd be 12:45pm Friday.

Woah!

At this point I should mention that presenting a plenary/keynote at OSCON is one of my lifetime goals. I thought that I'd gain a little fame at 2008, a somewhat bigger audience in 2009, and then if I'm very very lucky I could possibly be considered for a plenary/keynote in 2010. I certainly didn't expect it at my first OSCON! The only lifetime goal I thought I would have had a chance of claiming at OSCON was to play Rock Band.

Today I'm presenting "Human Interfaces for Geeks", aka "Hacking Wetware for Fun and Profit", aka "Paul can't make up his mind as to what this talk should be called". My talk is essentially about how people think, how to make them happy, and how making them happy causes them to do your bidding.

When possible, I try to include conference-specific jokes in my talks. In my failure talk I managed to reference Rod::Logic and Dr. Evil Conway. Here, I figured that enough of my audience would have gone to People for Geeks, so last night I had picked Schwern as my victim. Schwern had kindly provided me with some pictures of him as a zombie, and I spent way too long last night creating Schwern in The Sims 2, taking screenshots, turning him into a zombie, and adding general zombie references.

I arrive at OSCON in time for lunch, rather sad that I've missed some of the morning talks I was really looking forward to. I'm also stuck for where I should go after lunch; Anthony Baxter's running the general lightning talks, and I love lightning talks. Anthony runs the lightning talks at OSDC, and Linux.conf.au, and he does a great job of keeping things moving and amusing. I've got stacks of lightning talks up my sleeve, so attending this should have been a no-brainer.

However, Tim Bunce of DBI fame is giving a talk on Ultimate Perl Code Profiling. I'd spoken briefly to Tim earlier in the week, and he told me new the profiler is awesomely cool. I know that I could learn it in my own time, but that will probably take months before I get a round tuit, or I could just attend Tim's talk and download it into my head in one go.

I attend Tim's talk. It is awesome. I know kung-fu.

I sneak out of Tim's talk during question time, because my talk is next. I find coffee and hurry to the room where I'm presenting.

Amazingly, the talk goes down extermely well. I seem to have been gaining popularity over the conference, and now not only is the room stuffed with people, but there's even a handheld video camera in the audience! It seems the audience wasn't disappointed, giving me a 4.9/5.0 across 16 ratings! Wow.

Next up are the Perl Lightning Talks. I wasn't sure what to expect from these, as I've seen lightning talks done really bad, but these are just superb! The Perl community has some great speakers, and the talks are witty, informative, and well presented. Of course, I give one on autodie, in case the conference hasn't heard enough about it already. ;)

The conference ends with Larry's "State of the Onion", and the Perl Foundation Auction. Unfortunately things run a little late, and we lose a few too many audience members before the auction. I pick up a copy of Perl Medic (autographed, yay!), a few assorted other books, and some cool YAPC drinking glasses.

With the main conference over, I head off to a rather exclusive OSCON after-party. Everyone at the party is famous. Everyone. In fact, as r0ml casually comments to me that his son wrote Twisted (python), I realise that everyone and their families are famous.

The party was amazing, although I continue to make the odd faux pas: "Oh, you use identi.ca too?", "No, I'm @evan. I wrote identi.ca." Eventually I get used to the idea that if someone mentions a technology I use, then not only did they write said technology, but they also hold a Nobel Prize, played a role in the original Star Wars, and psychically know what I want to drink next.

Eventually the party gets broken up. It's probably the first time I've ever been to a party so cool that it gets broken up rather than just peters out. I head back to my hotel, discover I'm hungry, and go looking for food at 3am. I find a Mexican place that gives me the most awesome burrito I've ever had in my life, but since I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, when I return there the next day I'm served something which is considerably less than awesome.

Eventually I get back to the hotel, set multiple alarms so I don't miss my talking slot, and sleep.

Memoirs of an OSCON Rockstar, Day 3 (An Illustrated History of Failure)
It's Wednesday, and I'm giving what I consider my good talk. I've presented it a number of times in Australia, it's gone through four revisions, and it's nicely polished. That, combined with my new OpenOffice 3.0beta presenters' screen, and my alluring aussie accent, I'm practically guaranteed me good reviews. Out of all my talks, this is the one I'm most looking forward to presenting. Plus it's the last talk of the day, so I have a chance to get a decent night's sleep the night before.

Needless to say, everything worked beautifully. I did some self-promotion at my security tutorial, and since there were a number of familiar faces in the crowd, I think it paid off. In fact, it seemed that before there was standing room only. Wow!

My talk finishes, the crowd cheers, I feel like a rock star. R0ml, who gave the amazing keynote the night before, sticks around despite the crowd of people milling around me after the talk, and hangs out at the trade show with me. The trade show had beer, and wine, and food. The food at OSCON was consistently excellent.

After drinks there were Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. I arrive at the rethinking CPAN BoF, hosted by Andy Lester, which has a modest but significant attendance. My big gripe about the CPAN is that users are too easily paralysed by the issue of having too much choice, and I think a simple favourites system for users can help here. Andy has much grander plans.

After the rethinking CPAN BoF is the managing user groups BoF, hosted by Gabrielle and Selena! I almost consider this to have been the therapy BoF for those who have the difficult tasks of managing user groups. There were a lot of common themes, and at least for me it was good to know that I was not alone.

After the BoFs, you guessed it... back to my hotel room to work on another talk for the next day!

OSCON, Day 2 (People for Geeks)
Tuesday ended up being only day of the entire conference I didn't do a presentation, and as such I have some ability to relax and enjoy the presentations of others. Most importantly, I attend People for Geeks, a three hour tutorial featuring all my favourite people, including a few that I didn't know would end up being my favourites. ;)

The whole of People for Geeks was excellent. Having different presenters on short topics not only fixes the problem of learning fatigue, but makes it easier for presenters to give their best material. My favourite section was probably Selena and Gabrielle's talk on managing user groups and communities, and I was lucky enough to get one of their booklets on the topic.

Tuesday night was the OSCON Extravaganza. r0ml, who I had never seen speak before, gave an outstanding and hilarious talk on software development models, tying in the classics in a most elegant way. Damian Conway follows-up with a talk title I won't try to reproduce here, but it combines all the odd physics I could imagine with Perl. It's also excellent, as we've all come to expect from Damian.

After the excellent presentations are the White Camel awards, to recognise some of the oft unsung heroes of the Perl community. However a few minutes before the awards are announced, I get a sneak preview through a private message on IRC with regards to one of the winners:

(8:26:31 PM) jmcadams: hi paul, are you in the oscon presentation now?
(8:26:44 PM) pfenwick: I sure am!
(8:26:51 PM) jmcadams: good deal
(8:27:04 PM) jmcadams: Jacinta is getting a white camel
(8:27:12 PM) jmcadams: would you accept it on her behalf?

Woah!

Needless to say, I was stunned and delighted to accept the White Camel on Jacinta's behalf. I don't think I even said anything when I accepted it, and usually it's hard to stop me from speaking to an audience given the opportunity.

Jacinta has a little more in her blog about how surprised she was to be given the award.

After the extravaganza, I (unsurprisingly) went back to my hotel room and worked on my slides for my Wednesday presentation. In particular, I asked Damian nicely if I could obtain an image and fragment of code from his talk, so I could use them as a callback in mine. I'm very thankful that Damian agreed, since it provided me with two extra guaranteed laughs from the audience the next day.

Memoirs of an OSCON rockstar, Day 1 (Perl Security)
I wake up and go to Damian Conway's tutorial on programming vim. After a mere 10 minutes I've already learnt a huge bundle of new tricks, and have additioanl goodies added to my .vimrc file. After 30 minutes I realise that I can't stay. I'm tired, and I can't stop thinking about the tutorial I'm giving in the afternoon. With great reluctance I excuse myself, head to the Speakers' Lounge, ingest coffee, and hack on slides.

At this point the Speakers' Lounge may as well be called the Aussie Lounge. There's Adam Kennedy, Pia Waugh, Laura Thompson, Luke Welling, Anthony Baxter and Stewart Smith all there. Jokes are made about 'OZCON'.

I keep encountering new people at the Speakers' Lounge. They're all famous, but I have to work on my slides. Three hours is a lot of presenting, and I'm really trying to make a good impression. It's my first time at OSCON, and my first time in front of an American audience.

When I present my tutorial, I find my audience is huge. I've got 80-100 people! My presentation ends up being "okay", even though I'm handing out chocolates for anyone who asks a good question, or comes up with a good answer. I'm not happy with my pace (too quick), and fear some of my topics may have not fully sunk home with my audience.

The 3 hour tutorial format is hard. People naturally get learning fatigue, particularly if they're doing theory for a long time without doing practical exercises, or getting up for a break. That's why lectures at University are usually an hour or less, because that's about as long as you feed an audience theory before it stops being absorbed.

One thing I misjudged is how many questions I'd receive. I figured going to OSCON I'm going to have an entire contingent of extremely smart, extremely vocal, high-profile hecklers who'll quiz me on difficult topics. This never happened; I don't know if it's because my audience was polite, or because my hecklers didn't arrive; I suspect it's a combination of both.

Despite the fact that I really thought my tutorial was luke-warm, I found that throughout the week I have plenty of people actively seeking me out and telling me how much they enjoyed the talk. Thank-goodness for the +2 aussie bonus. For those who are curious, I received a 4.55 average rating across 40 evaluations, which isn't too shabby at all.

In the evening I went to have sushi with the Moose and Best Practical crowd. From there, back to the hotel, where Andy Lester catches me and asks if I want to meet at the DoubleTree hotel to help him work on his tutorial the next day. Apparently there'll be beer, and since I'm exhausted from my tutorial, I figure I could really do with a beer.

When I arrive at the DoubleTree, I find there's a big contingent of drinking Australians, along with a decent number of Python people, who, as usual, are all famous. I join the table, swap stories, admire tattoos, and discuss various topics. Andy arrives, but proclaims that he won't be upset at all if I finish another beer or two, so I don't actually help him with slides at all. Oops!

Eventually, I head back to the hotel knowing that I have the rare luxury of not giving a presentation the next day, and can relax a little.