london perl monger meeting, etc

i went to the london perl monger social meeting last night. it was decent. more programmer types which is good. i talked to one guy who worked at a special effects company in london named “the moving picture company” (horrible website). they’ve worked on a lot of big name films, “harry potter”s, “charlie and the chocolate factory”, etc. pretty interesting. another guy worked for a company called 3b. it looks interesting, but uses an active x plugin (i think i just threw-up in my mouth). they are using a java backend with a postgresql database. it seems a bit like an interesting idea that probably won’t go anywhere. another guy was non-i.t., but an interesting hobbiest sort of guy. he reminded me in his mannerisms of when mike myers is impersonating an english man or the simon character.

they’re going to have a “javascript night” in a week or so that i think i’m going to try and go to. it’s supposed to be several small talks. not that i really care for javascript. i have thought that it would be a good idea if you were using the same language on the frontend and backend. getting another language in a bunch of browsers at this point seems unlikely. well, unless you had a monopoly. the original netscape servers suported writing server-side javascript. i have seen this project/company called whitebeam before, but never really looked into it further.
i still haven’t sorted out where to stay in manchester. the place i had used before lists the closest available room in bolton. ungood. plus if i wanted to try and just grab a train back straight after the match it’s ~p100. plusungood. there’s still a few days left. worst case, i’ll just wing-it.

sunday’s the last day of the premier league season. all teams are playing. i’ll be seeing fulham v middlesbrough.

i’m almost through the common lisp book. the last few chapters are practical applications. regardless of what someone thinks about common lisp, the book is well written and has a good structure. real practical examples are ususally missing or lacking. hopefully, these will go far enough. the deployment aspect is usually what’s missing.

i installed flash again (constantly being uninstalled and reinstalled) to view the colbert thing. the main reason it usually gets uninstalled is because i’ll go to a website and then annoying flash ads and what not start going off. i also noticed another downside this time. even when a tab is not active in firefox, the animation is still going. it bumps the cpu up to max power (1.6g in this case) instead of using the lowest power. i suppose this would cause to drain your battery faster. not sure how significantly though.

if you actually do have flash installed, you should check out the ali g interview of posh and david beckham that peter sent. posh really does all the talking. it’s from a few years back, but still hilarious. i’m sure it would classify as rated ‘r’ if it was a movie.