London Perl Workshop 2007

This year Matt, Mark, Chris and Leigh were set to attend to represent Shadowcat and to give talks, demonstrations and to give out sponsorship items. Due to unavoidable complications Chris was unable to attend at the last minute but Matt, Mark and Leigh trolled along.

Yet again we were back in the University of Westminster, Cavendish Campus for the LPW 2007, and once again Shadowcat were sponsoring part of the event. This year we were asked by Greg to provide some bottles of malt whisky (and a few SCSYS merchandise like the limited edition t-shirt) for some of the volunteers who help to make the LPW a successful event.

The day started off in an almost usual manner with us not making enough allowance for transportation and turning up slightly late at the venue. thankfully we weren't the only ones and we managed to creep into the lecture theatre with the main talks having only started five minutes previously.

Matt did his Database Haters Anonymous talk, this time the technical challenge we had set ourselves this time was a new laptop (I don't know why but every time we do this we add a technical complication such as visual presentation, new laptops or untired distros, actually I do know why, we're techies, we like to play with technology). The Laptop was only 'partially' Debian enabled (in that it had only been installed a day before and was not tweaked enough to have the correct settings for Matt - didn't even have his favourite x session) and whose Vista install seemed intent on slowing the computer to a near crawl. The talk though didn't suffer at all from that so Matt started pretty much on time and this seemed to be to his disadvantage as he lost some of the momentum from Vienna (Matt gave the Database Haters talk in Vienna to a near raptuous crowd, he started really late and then spurred on by having to rush produced a funny and passionate delivery). The Catalyst talk was his usual mix on the Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes theme and this went down well and actually benefited from him doing it a few times before even if he overran in the shortened time slot.

The live build an API seemed to go like a souffle in a cupboard and was full of fluff. It was always going to fail spectacularly, but it didn't quite do that instead it gracefully fell over, if it were to be done again there would have to be some kind of conditions set upon it so that it failed in a nicer or more explosive manner. Matt did get some functionality though so at least showed his competency ;).

Once more the laptop gained notoriety with people asking Leigh about her pink cover and asking me if I had painted mine red.

The evening of the day ended in typical fashion at the public house, some of the sponsors had paid for a round of drinks and finger food for the attendees at the George and Dragon near to Warren Street station. After this we went to a sushi and karoke bar wth Greg who had just been made the new leader of the London PM group.

The University of Westminster's Cavendish campus