Lightning talks from outside the echo chamber
I'm already tired of the hoohah about "Perl 5 is dead" and the hand-wringing and the useless flapping about what we should do. I'm more interested in what is going on in Perl that none of us have heard of yet.
If I didn't have family and book obligations, I'd gladly take two days off and an 18-hour round trip to Omaha, Nebraska to check out the lightning talks presented by the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Tuesday. [Robert Fulkerson](http://www.cs.unomaha.edu/faculty/people/fulkerson.html) [posted to the Omaha.pm list](http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/omaha-pm/2008-December/001955.html):
> The Fall 2008 UNO CSCI 2850 (Programming on the Internet) class
> invites you to an evening of lightning talks on Perl programming,
> the Firefox web browser and other (mostly) web-related topics.
>
> Lightning Talks are no longer than 5 minutes and can be about
> anything: a new idea, an evaluation, an observation, a story, a
> complaint, an explanation, a suggestion, a report of success or
> failure, a call to action, a description of a technique, technology,
> or a lament.
>
> Usually we split the talks over two nights, but this semester it's going to be one, big solid night of talks.
>
> Where: Peter Kiewit Institute, Room 252 ( http://tinyurl.com/5g83cb )
> When: Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
> Time: 6:00 PM until 8:30 PM
>
> Topics
>
> * Writing a Greasemonkey script for FireFox to make BlackBoard tolerable
> * Obfuscating Perl
> * Connecting Perl to databases
> * Net::SSH::Expect
> * Using BioPerl for sequence analysis
> * Perl Google APIs
> * Acid Test 3
> * Gossamer Forum
> * Perl vs. Python
> * Index a website starting with a single page
> * Dictionary attack using Perl
> * iTunes playlist extractor: C++ vs. Perl
> * Regex Creator
> * Regex Coach
> * History of Perl
> * Software Pirating Debate (Spore, SecuROM)
> * Perl 6 vs. Perl 5
> * Rapid Exploit Development using Perl
> * SSH on iPod Touch
> * Regex usage in Perl vs. C
> * Ubuntu with Conky
> * Perl-XML: XML Made Easy with Perl!
> * Perl Module - GD::SecurityImage
> * Gmail:Checker module
> * Improving Perl program efficiency/performance
> * Subversion Tortoise client search
> * Perl PayPal APIs
> * JQuery UI
> * Talking to LCD projectors using Perl
"Talking to LCD projectors using Perl"? "Rapid Exploit Development using Perl"? "Perl 6 vs. Perl 5" by someone who (I assume) is not part of the core group? Someone get this on tape and YouTube 'em, willya?
I would *love* to be there. (Plus, then I could go get some [Valentino's](http://www.valentinos.com/) pizza).