May 2011 Archives

Richard Stallman cancels university talks

A few months ago there was a rumor of Richard Stallman coming to Palestine, and I contacted him to suggest giving a few talks in Israel as well. He inclined and there were 4 lectures/speeches booked:

  • One at Shenkar College in Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv (which is where TelAviv.pm meets)
  • One at Tel Aviv University
  • One at a DIY venue for political activists
  • One at Haifa University

I booked the Shenkar College one (for the Tel Aviv Perl Mongers and anyone who wanted to attend) and the one for political activists. I've slowly been collecting a group of people to help me organize the first meetup (which should have been in front of 300 people) since I did not want any organization or company (except for TA.pm) to be behind it. I wanted complete freedom, excuse the pun. :)

Yesterday Dr. Richard Stallman has written an email to the person organizing the Haifa speech, the TAU speech and myself, stating that he is going to cancel the university speeches. I'm assuming he phrased it as such since not all speeches are scheduled for universities.

This has so far been a source of inner debates, since Eddie Aharonovich has posted both the email Richard sent us (which I would personally classify as "private") and his response (which, to be honest, I really didn't care for) online. I wanted to both notify that Richard will not be giving the speeches, and to respond to some claims about the reasons Richard canceled the events.

Richard has stated in his email that his accommodation is paid for by Palestinians, and they have a problem with him giving a talk at a university. The reason, to those unfamiliar with the Israeli boycott, is because the university is a government institution which is not (and cannot really claim to be) dissident and approval of the boycott. Although it was claimed as "anti-Israeli", it's important to understand that it's not a matter of objecting people, but the policy of a country, and I believe it's completely valid. This in no way conflicts with his ideals. If he is critical of the government, he should have the decision to not appear at any of its supportive institutions, especially if he's currently being funded by definitive objectors.

Furthermore, although this might contribute to arguments, ostracizing and meaningless heated "discussions", I wish to state that not only do I understand Richard's decision but I support it. Although I wanted to see him giving a talk at TA.pm, it is nothing like standing behind your ideals, which is what I admire about the person. Say what you will (argumentative, zealous, difficult to work with), he will always stand by his ideals.

If you still wish to see Stallman speaking, you can do what I'm going to do and go visit Palestine, learn a bit about the crisis going on there, catch a good speech and meet new people.

Have a great day,
really,
Sawyer. :)

The Dancer release that will get you hooked!

I've been waiting for this blog post for a few good months now.

We've finally released Dancer 1.3050 (codename "The Captain Hook Adventure", named after Franck Cuny, who will forever be known as Captain Hook!) which carries our new hook system, written by Franck. Special credit goes to JT Smith who pushed the design and implementation of this system (and had great input and feedback) until it saw sunlight.

So what's the new hook system? Basically Dancer (and Sinatra, and Flask, and others) have a before and after/users/sawyer_x/2011/05/index.html

I will (probably) be attending the French Perl Workshop!

At school we had the opportunity to decide on a third language to learn, either Arabic or French. I opted for French (though my mother speaks Arabic as a second language) because it seemed interesting. School, as usual, makes you hate learning. I was kicked out of the class more than I actually attended it.

A few years ago I decided to take another shot at it. This was after I had already started working on Dancer with Alexis Sukrieh (sukria), Franck Cuny, Damien Krotkine (dams) and Philippe Bruhat (BooK). I took French classes, and started reading, writing and speaking. Going to Belg…

Lingering tragedies

Often times when we're mad, or get hurt, we keep it in. Unfortunately anything that isn't dealt with will soon surface to the ground, usually in the wrong time (since we fail to allocate an appropriate time), and in the wrong way.

When something hurts us - really hurts us - whatever bad experience it is, it changes our lives. It changes the way we interact with others: those that have done us wrong, those we've done wrong, those who stay behind while others leave, those who remind us of others gone, and mainly... ourselves. We ourselves change to accommodate a place for all of this pa…

Tel Aviv Perl Mongers meeting on May 25th (next Wednesday!)

Hey everyone,

We're having another Tel Aviv Perl Mongers (TA.pm) meeting next week.
As usual, we're gonna have some people, some snacks, lots of laugh and fun. Come along!

Date: May 25th
Address: Shenkar College, Anna Franck 12, Ramat Gan. Room 323.
Hour: 18:30 - meeting, 19:00 - talks start

Scheduled talks:
* ABC Path solver, live demo -- Shlomi Fish
A short talk of Shlomi's ABC Path Solver, including a demo

* Unicode considerations in Perl…

An addition to the Dancer core team: ambs!

As David Precious has written recently, ambs (Alberto Simões) has joined the core Dancer development team!

Ambs has been working closely with us for a while now and it just made sense for someone this motivated and responsible to be a part of the core.

Welcome ambs, and congratulations! :)

Dancer release codename "Yanick in Black"

Yesterday was May Day, also known as Labor Day. We finished a development release cycle successfully and it was about time to release a stable.

This release, as promised, is named after someone who has been in the Dancer community for a while and indeed deserved the recognition: Yanick Champoux. You can find the first commit by Yanick in the 4th development release of 1.2000 - wayyyy back. Since then he has also written quite a bit on Dancer as well, showing off how to use Dancer in production environments and having a lot of fun with it…

Dancer is attending GSoC (Google Summer of Code)

By popular demand and after careful considerations, Dancer has been accepted to GSoC. Two proposals were submitted and one was accepted, so we will be happily participating.

The accepted proposal is by Carlos Ivan Sosa (gnusosa), you can read his blog post right here on his blog, which is powered by Dancer itself. :)

Carlos will be focusing on factoring out the stand-alone script into a module in core, and then inserting there all the logic of the scaffolded maintenance scripts, so upgrading will be easy as pie (or somethin…

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