Here's what we've done at past meetings:

04/18/2001

• Attendance:
1. Jonathan Tomer
2. Brian Mathis
• Reviewed notes from last meeting
• Talked about getting listed in Computer Link Magazine, a local free computer publication
• Went over some recent Perl news
• Talked about some good April fool's jokes we heard about
• Discussed the workings of using Perl's XS to interface with other things
• Talked about complexity theory, Turing Machines, and other mind-bending theory

01/17/2001

• Attendance:
1. Brian Mathis
2. Jonathan Tomer
3. Tony Whyte
• Reviewed minutes from last meeting
• The O’Reilly books Programming Perl, 3^rd ed and CGI Programming with Perl, 2^nd ed were available for members
• The ORA book PC Hardware in a Nutshell has been requested, but has not come in yet.
• Went over recent Perl news from http://use.perl.org/.
• Presentation: Tony Whyte gave a talk on SSL, encrpytion, digital certificates, security, and how to use them in Perl programs. A very informative discussion about encryption and security followed.
• Next meeting: Writing XS modules by Jonathan Tomer.

12/14/2000

• Holiday Dinner at Empire Brewing Company

11/29/2000

• Attendance:
1. Bob Walton
2. Tony Whyte
3. Brian Mathis
4. Jonathan Tomer
• Trying out a more formal meeting type with an agenda
• Reviewed last meeting’s minutes
• Web site update: the mailing list is now being archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/.  There is a link to our archive on the mailing list page at http://rochester.pm.org/
• The O’Reilly books Programming Perl, 3^rd ed and CGI Programming with Perl, 2^nd ed were available for members
• New O’Reilly fall catalogs and discount coupons available for all members
• I’ve requested the O’Reilly book PC Hardware in a Nutshell, waiting for it to come in.
• Went over recent Perl news from http://use.perl.org/.
• Presentation on debugging Perl programs using ptkdb (a Tk based perl debugger) and perl –d, the command line debugger, by Jonathan Tomer.  The presentation was very informative.  Topics covered included some debugger basics, as well as how to specifically use the Perl debuggers, both command line and Tk interface, and how to use emacs to integrate your development environment with the debugger.
• Discussed a holiday dinner party.  We will be having a holiday gathering on Thursday, December 14, 7:00pm, at the Empire Brewing Company in the High Falls area.  Friends and significant others are welcome to attend.  Please RSVP to Brian Mathis with the number that will be attending by Tuesday, December 12.
• Next meeting Tony Whyte will be discussing Perl & SSL.

10/18/2000:

• Attendees:
  • Jonathan Tomer
  • Brian Mathis
  • Tony Whyte
  • Bob Walton
  • Anu Heda
  • Shmuel Tomer

• Introductions - new and returning members
• Issues with the IRC client on the web site - most of the servers are down. I'll try to find servers that are more stable.
• Review of CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd ed by Tony White. You can see the actual review here.
• Two books, CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd ed and Programming Perl, 3rd ed were available to look at, page through, etc.. Apparently, Programming Perl, 3rd ed has almost twice as many pages as the 2nd edition.
• "Introduction to Apache's mod_perl" lecture given by Jonathan Tomer. This was very informative and gave everyone a good groundwork for starting to program for mod_perl. You can view the lecture text here.
• Next meeting: Perl Debugging, using perl -d and the tk interface, ptkdb. We will try to use a laptop and projector for the presentation.