I am attending my first Perl conference: YAPC::Europe in Belfast (YAPC means Yet Another Perl Conference). This is quite fun for me as I have had a long interst in Perl (both for UNIX/Linux system administration, and for web programming) but haven't had as much time to spend on it recently. I use lots of Perl (like the MovableType scripts that power this weblog) but do not write much code at the moment.
The keynote address was by Allison Randal of The Perl Foundation that was a good update on Perl (Perl5 and Perl6 release news), Parrot (the new Virtual Machine for non strongly-typed languages like Perl) and Ponie (bridging Perl5 and Perl6).
There was an excellent talk on HTTP:Proxy by Philippe 'Book' Bruhat. It looks to me like this could be deployed as an IPv4 or an IPv6 proxy (this dependency is on LWP rather than Philippe's module). He uses it himself on his own machine to do the usual advertisemnt stripping, but can change character sets, and customise the appearance of any external website. This means one can view all web-based material based on one's personal preferences. His examples forcused on the Dragon Go Server (i.e. on-line playing of the Japenese/Chinese game of Go) which he customised to supress the text message box (as it made the submit button too far down the page) unless he explictly requested it by clicking on the remaining link. It can also be used to log personal browsing habits for potential data mining later. The system is based on small filter scripts (mainly using regular expression matches and substitions) that looks easy enough to master. This is a very flexible tool for web-based material, or as he says himself "All of your web pages belong to us!"
Posted by mofoghlu at September 15, 2004 11:56 AM | TrackBack