Technical Meetings

The technical meetings are a monthly event, that aims to provide the Birmingham Perl community with an educational night of talks. If you wish to attend, please feel free to come along and listen in.

Talks Wanted: If you would like to do a talk, whether a 5 minute lightning talk, a 15 minutes talk or longer, please let us know and we'll add you to the schedule. If we are unable to add you to the schedule for the next meeting, we will give you priority at a future meeting.

Guest Speakers: Are you visiting Birmingham at some point in the future, and would be willing to give a talk? Or are you based outside of the West Midlands, but would be willing to make a trek over to see us and present a talk? If so, then I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email with details of when you are in Birmingham and the talk you would like to present. I'll then arrange a schedule and confirm.

See also:

Schedule

28 March, 2007 - Birmingham.pm Technical Meeting
Time: 7pm - 10pm
Venue: Bennetts
Address: 8 Bennetts Hill, Birmingham, B2 5RS
Details: A selection of talks regarding Perl and related subjects. Entry is free, and newcomers are welcome. See our meetings page for further details. Meetup at 7pm for drinks and food, talks start around 8pm until about 10pm.
Links: Technical Meetings

The Talks

Stuart Langridge - 'Aq' * - DOM Scripting, JavaScript, and Ajax

Abstract:

Not a technical talk, more a handwavy why-this-stuff-is-cool type talk

Barbie - Selenium - An Introduction to Web testing

Abstract:

This talk takes a look at the hot new website testing framework, called Selenium. We will look at how to install the tool and remote control server, and work through some of the Perl bindings you can use in your test suite. It will feature a demo of a website being tested.

Resources:

Selenium

Richard Dawe - FOSDEM - A Lightning Talk

Abstract:

Last month Rich attended the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (commonly known as FOSDEM). This will be a short talk about the event.

Resources:

FOSDEM

Tom Hukins * - Testing When You Don't Have Time

Abstract:

To be completed

David Morris * - Making better use of vmstat (LT)

Abstract:

It's a short talk on using shell scripts to record useful information along with vmstat output:

 Start Date: Wed Mar 21 00:01:00 GMT 2007
 Hostname: localhost.localdomain
 Start Timestamp: 1174435260
 Monitoring Interval: 5
 Iterations: 17280
 Generator: vmstat
 procs memory swap io system cpu
 r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
 6 0 0 28428 337792 979964 0 0 57 66 234 416 4 10 85 1
 1 0 0 30300 337792 979964 0 0 1 175 222 276 22 78 0 0
 1 0 0 30300 337792 979964 0 0 0 35 217 245 21 79 0 0
 1 0 0 30296 337792 979968 0 0 0 49 211 257 22 78 0 0
 1 0 0 30292 337792 979980 0 0 2 32 216 234 20 80 0 0

And then use Perl to turn it into a CSV for spreadsheet types to analyze and draw graphs

 Start Date,Wed Mar 21 00:01:00 GMT 2007
 Hostname,perftest.localdomain
 Start Timestamp, 1174435260
 Monitoring Interval,5
 Iterations,17280
 Date, Time, Runnable, Sleeping, Swapped, Free, Buffers, Cache, 
 +Swpd in(KB), Swpd out(KB), Blks/In, Blks/Out, Intrpt., C'txt Sw., 
 +Usr/CPU, Sys/CPU, Idle, Wait I/O
 2007/03/21,0:01:00, 6, 0, 0, 28428, 337792, 979964, 0, 0, 57, 66, 234, 
 +416, 4, 10, 85, 1
 2007/03/21,0:01:05, 1, 0, 0, 30300, 337792, 979964, 0, 0, 1, 175, 222, 
 +276, 22, 78, 0, 0
 2007/03/21,0:01:10, 1, 0, 0, 30300, 337792, 979964, 0, 0, 0, 35, 217, 
 +245, 21, 79, 0, 0
 2007/03/21,0:01:15, 1, 0, 0, 30296, 337792, 979968, 0, 0, 0, 49, 211, 
 +257, 22, 78, 0, 0

* = Guest Speaker

Meeting Sponsor

MACS Software

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