RasterWeb!What the heck is Parrot? Parrot is:
Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot will be the target for the final Perl 6 compiler…as well as variety of other languages.
I just talked to chromatic about Parrot. He’s just one of a whole bunch of Perl folks at the Chicago Perl Hackathon working on getting a Parrot release out.
I’m at the Chicago Perl Hackathon right now. I just talked to Chris Dolan about Perl::Critic, which is “an extensible framework for creating and applying coding standards to Perl source code…”
They’re working on writing policies right now, so you can choose what tests to run against your code.
It’s beyond my coding skills, but it looks like an interesting project. Hopefully they’ll make some good progress this weekend.
Back in July I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to pull of BarCampMilwaukee, but we did it. It was hard work, but totally doable…
BarCampMadison is currently being planned for February 2007, and I’m sure that will go fine. Plenty of people involved in BarCampMilwaukee will also be involved in BarCampMadison, in one way or another.
But those Madison folks, they just had to raise the bar… they’ve announced BarCampUSA, which will be a 4 day event at the Jefferson County Fair Park in August 2007. The site says:
We are expecting 5000+ participants (our location can accommodate 20,000+)
Now that’s crazy… But more power to them! I hope they (we?) can pull it off. (Advice: you’re gonna need one hell of an internet connection to satisfy that many geeks!)
Earlier in the week Dana checked the city’s web site and determined we should go to the community center. We got there just after 7 AM. The line was short, maybe 15 people or so. There was a guy in front of us who heard me ranting about the media and the government, and then kicked in with his opinion, saying the media and the government mean to control us and keep us down (so far, so good) and he then suggested we watch some 2 hour movie on YouTube. I muttered something about not trusting YouTube since they do not have a history of respecting the rights of creators, and since Google, a large evil corporation now owns them, they really can’t be trusted. (I’m guessing the guy was not a Democrat, since he had a ‘Dump Doyle’ sticker on his long black trenchcoat.)
So we get to the front of the line and Dana is not listed, so they send her to register. I am not listed either. I give them my address, and one person tells us to go to Greenland Elementary School, while another suggests we go to City Hall and ask them. We opt for Greenland since I voted there previously when I lived a few blocks away. Greenland had a long, long, line. Not 15 people long, more like 50 or 60, and it seemed to be moving slow. It was just after 7 AM though, so maybe that’s why.
The voting process itself was pretty smooth and easy. At Greenland they had sample ballots on the wall so you’d know what it would look like. They handed me a ballot and a small slip of paper with a number (I was number 99 – I believe it said ‘voter 0099’ to be precise.) I walked to the little standup desks with sidewalls filled out the paper ballot using a black felt tip pen that was provided, and then brought it to a machine (it was not a Diebold, but I do not remember the name of it.) A woman instructed me to insert it into a slot on the machine, and I did so, and handed her my number slip, which she placed on one of those spike things people use on their desks to hold expired bits of paper. That was it, so we left… Hooray for Democracy!
