Qantas gets the consumer booby prize for this post. Their ~$250 of unlisted "fees/taxes" didn't even cover the $25 departure tax at Wellington airport, and a badly timed doze somehow meant I was to be inflicted with only snack food for the flight. In hindsight, given the quality of the meals, I think I might have come off better than the other passengers.

I somehow completely missed the fact that it was only tutorial sessions on Tuesday, but nobody seemed to object that I sit in the sessions - I watched Randal Schwartz give a "Testing Web Applications" talk, building from 'print "ok 1\n"' to the classic Test.pm to Test::More and Test::WWW::Mechanise. Why haven't I seen Test::Differences or Test::Deep before as better alternatives to Test::More::is_deeply? He then gave an introduction to Template Toolkit, and I picked up a few more little tricks, while I worked on getting git-svn to support importing SVK mirror paths.

Randal opened the main proceedings yesterday morning, relating an anecdote of catching the train back to his hotel from the University where the conference is being held, but due to a long drinking session the night before, fell asleep on the train and woke up "beyond the black stump"¹. I missed the keynote - these two happenings were not entirely unrelated.

Cog from Portugal is probably the farthest travelled attendee to this conference. He gave a couple of highly entertaining talks on perl "White Magic" (eg, useful command line tricks) as well as some black magic - Obfuscation and Golf. He listed a whole load of "secret operators", such as the "half inchworm on a stick" operator: ~-, which is a "high precedence decrement" (if the argument is positive). And works in Perl 5 now!

The talk by Paul Fenwick on Perl 5.10 was pretty cool - there are a lot of new features stolen from Perl 6 going into perl 5, to be lexically enabled via the use feature pragma. Including the "defined or": // (apparently pronounced "door"), and of course the "inchworm" operator: ~~.

My head was still throbbing a bit when I gave my Moose talk, and my delivery of it this time left several things to be desired. I hadn't worked on the talk recently - given how successful it was last time, I didn't think it overly necessary to fiddle with it much. I couldn't work out what it was, until afterwards a fellow monger pointed out that it looked like I had continually been wanting to point at the screen - which wasn't possible on account of it being about 2 metres high, starting at my head. Thinking about it, I am normally quite animated with my gestures during a talk, so I think this was a large contributing factor. Nonetheless, I got a compliment anyway, and a lesson learned.

The rest of the day I mostly spent pestering Damian Conway and Alias, and come 6 O'clock it was time for the conference dinner. Damian read us a "bedtime story" - the Da Vinci Codebase - and if you ever get the chance to bittorrent a video, I highly recommend it. He put 100 hours' worth of time into it - and it was certainly worth one of mine. And be sure to test the code fragment that involves the ~1400 digit prime number.

¹ - en_AU translation of "in timbuctoo"