FAQ for London.pm

Yes.

As of the Dec 2007, Greg McCarroll has assumed the mantle of chief cat herder.

See the mailing list page.

Look for a cluster of noisy geeks. It's usually quite easy to spot us. The meetings page may say something about where in the pub (as well as in which pub) we're likely to be found.

Dave (Cross) is the founder of London.pm and was considered 'our leader' until Dec 13th 2001; if there are any problems (or, occasionally, as an excuse) then the standard response is 'Dave told us to'. Due to his no longer being our leader we are not sure of the status of this statement.

Over the years the topic of job advertising and recruitment in general has proved to be rather controversial on occassion and in order to settle the perennial question of whether job postings should be allowed to the list and who should be allowed to send them and how we have set up a jobs mailling list which you can sign up to at http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/jobs . You only need to be subscribed if you want to see the posted jobs, if you want to advertise a job then please feel free to send it to the address on the above page. This is is a fully moderated announce only list, but discussion about particular jobs and the job market in general is encouraged on a jobs discussion list where replies from the jobs list are sent.

If you are a recruiter with a Perl job you might also consider submitting free of charge to http://jobs.perl.org

No but Harry Jackson wrote a page with some really good advice on it. You can find it at http://www.uklug.co.uk/sharp_practices.html .

Yes, on this very site there are mailing list archives , from June 2001 onwards. There are fragments of older archives: details are in the 'join us' section.

The IRC channel is #london.pm on irc.perl.org.

You can talk to people about all sorts of things- as with the list, occasionally there are Perl questions, but a lot of it is banter. It's also a good place for your oneliners. There's more about it on the IRC page.

Many years ago Kevin Lenzo wrote the veneral Infobot and one such example, called purl , lives on #perl .

#london.pm aquired their own infobot and called him/her/it dipsy . The bot quickly aquired its own set of modifications.

Several years later, frustrated with the quality of the Infobot code some members of London.pm ported the extensions to be Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable plugins with a Bot-Infobot frontend.

You can see what plugins are installed by asking dipsy for "help" in a privmsg.

People wanting to change the bot's functionality are strongly encouraged to write a new plugin or provide patches against svn .

Initially London.pm had a very simple rule for meetings (at the time, there were only social meetings), namely that they were on the first Thursday of the month.

As you'd expect, though, sometimes that meant that the meeting was on the first day of the month. However, one prominent member once missed this meeting, and turned up on the following Thursday -- the 8th -- and posted to the list the following day wondering where everybody was.

As a result there grew a heretical sect around this member who maintained that meetings were held on the first Thursday of the month, unless that was the first day of the month; this was later shortened to 'meetings are on the day after the first Wednesday of the month'.

This was how things stayed for a while, and in 2001 there were two meetings in February and March on both Thursday 1st and Thursday 8th. Plans were brewing, though, and in August, at YAPC::Europe, the date of London.pm meetings was put up for auction, and Dave Cross [his explanation of the term] lost.

Hence, official meetings now follow the 'day after the first Wednesday' rule and the 'new heretics' recognise the original formula, meeting whenever a Thursday that is the first day of the month happens.

London.pm uses a lot of venues - we rely on generous companies for the technical meets and for the social meet we phone up pubs who don't hate us yet and ask if we can reserve an area at no cost. The criteria we use include good beer, quiet(ish) i.e no cheesy europop being blared out at a 1000Db, food served, near a tube and, if possible, good disabled access. Not necessarily in that order.

Paul Makepeace has thoughtfully done a page on this subject.

You basically have two choices - (A)DSL and Cable. We'll deal with cable later.

First you need to pick a provider. Many people seem happy with Nildram (http://www.nildram.co.uk ) who, whilst they may be slightly more expensive than some provide excellent technical support. A static IP will cost you a bit more.

Also recommended are Andrews and Arnold (http://aaisp.net.uk ) who givestatic IPs on all products and even /24 networks, will SMS you when the service goes down and send invoices in text and PDF all PGP signed.

Other options can be found at http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ who provide excellent service comparisons, price guides and FAQs.

Once you've picked a provider and a service (including whether or not you want a static ip which will allow you to contact your firewall remotely without using DynDNS) then you have to decide whther or not you want managed or wires only.

Managed services come with (usually a cheap USB) modem and cost a little per month. The advantages are that if the modem breaks then you get a replacement plus they set everything up for you. The disadvantages are that the modems tend to be crappy and it will end up costing more in the long run.

The alternative is to get a wires only option. This will turn on the service for you but you'll have buy your own DSL modem. Many people recommend the D-Link 504 which is a combination router with 4 port switch and comprehensive web, shell (through serial access) and application (windows only) configuration. It's a good balance between features and cost and can be picked up for about 90 quid from Dabs, Scan and Amazon.co.uk (where I got mine from).

It should be noted that the phone line that the DSL modem is plugged into will need a microfilter. This looks like a telephone splitter and protects your normal PTSN phone (and Sky Box or Tivo or whatever is plugged into the phone line). You should get one with your service but they're available for about 7 pounds from Scan or about 15 pounds from shops on Tottenham Court Road,

An alternative to DSL is the much cheaper cable services like Blueyonder (http://info.blueyonder.co.uk/publish/index.html ). These often come as part of a telvision of phoen package from the same company and represent very good value. Allegedley they are faster (on paper) than DSL although anecdotal evidence suggests other wise. These are almost always managed services.

Once you've selected your broadband provider you'll want to connect the rest of your computers up (you do have more than one, don't you?).

Whilst you can just plug everythign straight into the modem this could be considered harmful even if the modem does have firewalling capabilities. For about 30 pound you can build yourself a computer capable of running a firewall (go for the lowest spec possible, you don't even need a harddrive if you can boot from a CDRom or a floppy). Then run something like IPCop (http://ipcop.org/ ) or Smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org ). Set up your network something like this.

              internet
                 |
                 |
    	modem/router
                 |
                 | (RED ZONE)
                 |
           ----------------
          |  Firewall box  |--- (ORANGE ZONE)
           ----------------     
                 |
            (GREEN ZONE)
                 |
              [ hub ]
              /  |  \
             /   |   \
          YOUR COMPUTERS
    	

Everything in the Green zone will be able to see each other. Anything in the Orange zone will be able to see each other but won't be able to see anything in the Green Zone. If you have an Airport or other wireless hub then you probably want to connect it to the Orange Zone. This means that people leaching your bandwith cannot h4XX0r the machine in the Green zone which will probably be wide open because of SMB or whatever.

If you want all your computers to be using Wireless (which is what I do since I don't want to run cables upstairs) then stick the Airport in the Green Zone but configure it only to allow connections from specified MAC addresses. This isn't perfect but should be a satisfactory balance between security and convenience.

Originally we had a server called penderel after the Penderel's Oak and it's what hosts london.pm.org. People that once paid cash for this have shell accounts on it. It's currently in state51 and what jolly nice people they are too.

You could get accounts on penderel for 20 GBP waged, 5 GBP unwaged; the money went to buy the inevitable upgrades.

Post a distasterous RAID crash in 2005 we're no hosted in a lovely FreeBSD jail by Mark Blackman.

Not any more, but we did sponsor a camel at London Zoo for nearly two years (late 2000 to 2002). Some of the people who put money towards it (and some others who didn't, but we don't mind) went to see it in August 2001. Paul has photos on his site , if you're interested.

We also have a page about the camel .

Well, when we were planning YAPC::Europe 2000 one of the things that came from the North American YAPC was the obsession of American conference attendees. Or at least a playful charicature of American conference attendees, in that they seemed to be obsessed with muffins, and one of the hardest things we had to deal with at YAPC::Europe 2000 was catering. Not providing muffins (it was after all 40 quid for 3 days) almost became our little rebellion against the expectations of conference goers. In the end we provided one of the best buffet lunches that will ever be had at a Perl conference including free wine, which I believe set some attendees up for a very drunken afternoon. But we didn't provide muffins.

There are so many off-topic posts on london.pm that some people find it amusing to mark posts that are about Perl with [OT]. Whether in this case they mean on the list's topic or off the list's offtopicness is a matter of debate.

A spoiler is giving away an important or unexpected plot element in a film or TV series that someone hasn't seen yet.

People generally don't like knowing too much of what's going to happen in advance, so we have a spoiler policy on the mailing list that you don't reveal important plot details of a TV series until it's aired on UK terrestrial television, and similarly that you don't reveal plot elements from a film until a month or so after release (although some warning is still appreciated then.)

People in the US or who have non-terrestrial (eg Sky) television, in particular, need to be careful when discussing such TV series.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (official site, US based) is a television series that a lot of people on London.pm enjoy, partly because it is a sharp, witty, well-written synthesis of teen drama with b-movies and partly because of the attractive lead characters. Both Buffy and the spin-off series Angel are probably the most common TV series to be referenced on list, and also the series where spoilers are least welcome.

A TiVo is a hard-disk based 'video' recorder for television programmes. Some members of London.pm use it to 'timeshift' programmes, and we try not to annoy them with spoilers either.

Acme::Buffy and Pony are perl modules of dubious practical value which will reformat your code in a more london.pm friendly way. In this case Damian Conway and his Acme::Bleach module are to blame.

If people think you're acting stressed on IRC, then they may well offer you a pony to stroke, since stroking a pony makes it all better. For more extreme times, there may even be a 'pony drop' of many ponies.

The dancing monkeys or, if we're being cultural, les singe qui dansent , are those London.pm members who on any given subject will make a lot of noise, offer suggestions, make proclamations, fling faeces, indignantly post about people who they perceived have slighted them, the list, the IRC channel or Perl in general and, by and large, create more noise than signal.

Occasionally amusing but more often annoying no-one is entirely sure why they do this since it is widely known that such posturing is not big, clever or hard.

The monkeys who will dance for any given occasion is fairly predictable but we keep them around for the few times that they are actually amusing.

"The likelihood of anything being achieved is inversely proportional to the number of cavorting simians involved."

See also jfdi .

It's an acronym for Just F**king Do It - or, in other words, "stop talking about it and just get on with it"

When London.pm were organising YAPC::Europe 2000, the group produced a set of t-shirts with the YAPC logo. At the same time, Simon Wistow was planning to produce a run of t-shirts with the slogan 'Perl is my Bitch'. When the news of this reached the list (and two others), there was a massive flame war over the misogyny and business-hostile nature that some people perceived in the slogan.

As a result, the shirts weren't produced as part of the YAPC fundraising, but did get produced in a much more low-key unofficial manner later that year. Occasionally Simon threatens to do another run, but at the moment there are only fifty t-shirts in existence, none of which are for sale.

*Update* at YAPC::Europe 2003 Simon auctioned off one last t-shirt that he'd found and donated the money to YAS. The lucky winner was Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat who paid an astounding 250 Euros for it.

Dim sum is a facet of Chinese cuisine consisting of a hotpotch of little dishes which you pick and mix from to create a meal. London.pm has seemingly become fond of going to places like the New World in Chinatown to eat dim sum for lunch, and you'll see messages on IRC and the mailing list asking about meeting there sometimes.

You can find out more about it at Open Guides , the open source guide to London.

TVR is a cocktail of tequila, vodka and Red Bull that is available at the Penderel's Oak and other places. Some of London.pm's most debauched meetings have been held under the influence of this substance.

At social meetings, the first few people there should procure an empty, dry pint glass for keeping money in. People are requested to add a note (usually a tenner) to the kitty, and then when people go to the bar they just take the kitty. This saves the tedious nature of buying small rounds, and worrying if you get to the end of the night and feel you should have bought more people drinks.

'Slap the Yank' appears to be one of Greg's fevered ideas from his time at eBookers, but you'd have to ask him about it really.

Leon Brocard seems to make wearing orange (and using it as a colour in web page design) his point in life; or at least, that's how some people perceive it.

Yes. Leon and a cabal of supporters bought the 'official London.pm colour' at YAPC::Europe in 2002. Since there's not really anywhere for it to manifest itself other than this site, london.pm.org is now bright orange, with brown bits.

At YAPC::Europe in 2003, the language of the front page of London.pm.org (and Paris Perl Monguers) was auctioned, and Esperanto was the winning choice. Paul Makepeace has translated the text (see the archives ) and the page has been changed .