Our 4th November meeting attracted about ten people including the speakers.  This is a  bit sad when you think that the content of the talks involved the Indonesian internet and Perl programming methods.  However, we found that lack of numbers made up by the quality of the people who attended.

Perry Ismangil stood up at about 1.10 p.m. and gave us a really good talk about the use of Linux and the Indonesian internet.  His wife is studying at
Sheffield University just now and he's come over to be with her while she studies.

He has his own company in Indonesia which is Trabas.com.  Click on the Trabas logo that's on the right of the page to go there.   He started Trabas with a couple of his friends five years ago.  Not so long ago he decided to focus on Linux through his company.  He explained his own companies involvement in Linux.  Indonesia is about as large as Europe with a population which is the fourth largest in the world.  60 % of the population is on one island which is Java.  There is a problem with telecommunication generally.  The internet started up in about 1994.  There are still no local 0845 numbers and so the ISPs have to provide point of presence in all cities.  There is only one ISP that can do this and Perry says it's not that good an ISP.   Perry decided that e-mail was the most important thing and that Linux was the way forward with his.  The bandwidth is not that good so every bit helps.  Unlike England over in Indonesia you can get hold of a copied Microsoft CD for about £2.  So, it's difficult to say that Linux is cheap.  However the stability of Linux when compared with other software is well worth considering.

Perry gave us a superb talk about issues concerning the Indonesian internet.  We were then able to talk to him about it for a while before Simon stood up and started his own talk on Perl programming methods.
 

Simon Cozens is generally known in and around England.  Has has also become well known in Japan.  He is a brilliant Perl programmer and he's written a book for Wrox Press which is called Beginning Perl.  Well worth a read if you want to know more about the subject.  One of his friends is Stephen Turnbull.  You can read more about Stephen if you have a look at our feature pages.

His interests are Unicode, documentation and teaching people things about how Perl works.  This he proceeded to do in front of us with some ease.  He explained that Perl can be extended as well as embedded.  Next he went on to the Perl interpreter.  There are a number of elements to the interpreter - Initialization, Parsing, Optimisation.  Perl is an interpreted language unlike C which is a compiled language.

Perl 6.0 was discussed at the Perl Conference at Monterey in California.  That's where Simon was this year.  He says that Larry Wall and other people have come to the conclusion that Perl will have to be re-written from scratch.  It is thought that 90% of Perl 5.0 code should work under Perl 6.0.   Simon's part in all of this to make sure that Perl is fine with Unicode and that it works with all character sets.  The hope is that Perl 6.0 will be more robust and much faster.  It might even work a little bit like C or C++ ( apologies to our Perl programmers ).  There's also a hope that it will output Java byte code.

We finished off with a question and answer session and then after that we gave up and went for dinner and a few beers.  Simon's talk was well received and we do hope that he can return at some time on the future.  The chat between three of us in the Hillsborough Hotel later on was mostly about general issues to do with programming methods and things to do with Free Software.

We all enjoyed the meeting which took place on the only sunny day in the three months up to Christmas.  Guy Fawkes went through the traditional seasonal greeting and it rained on the 5th of November which was the day on which the fireworks were supposed to have been set off.  For our next meeting we will have some Linux Demo Days which are just before Christmas.
 

Richard Ibbotson