Presentations for 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade talked about both general Code Smells and Perl-specific Code Smells. The focs of the talk were on Perl code smells, since they are not documented elsewhere.

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

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

Robert is working on a pure Perl implementation of the Rijndael cipher in order to fully understand the algorithm. He presents his findings, with code. This helps others to understand this algorithm that has become critical to modern cryptography.

A number of people vounteered to give lightning talks, which are talks on a single topic time limited to no more than 5 minutes. Talks ranged from Perl builtins to using other languages in Perl.