Yesterday I attended the first Israeli Ruby enthusiasts meeting. Despite many problems in its organisation - it was very successful. It was in the format of a barbeque in a villa in Hertzliyah, an informal chat, an informal introduction and then a round of some future expectations and planning. Since the meeting is currently hosted at Google Groups (%-)), and I'm subscribed there from my gmail.com account which I also dislike, here are my impressions and pieces of advice.

There's a lot of good advice in Rick Moen's "Recipe for a Succesful Linux User Group" and I suggest that people go over it, because while the Rubyers seem enthusiastic, they've made some classical mistakes.

This video in which someone tries to write a Perl script using Vista's voice recognition made me lough very hard. A link to it was spotted on the perl5-porters mailing list. I think it's a huge step forward in Perl programmers' productivity.

Whatsup reports (in Hebrew) on the parodical site Linux Genuine Advantage. Warning: do not install the source code that is available for download. Anyway, it's a pretty funny site.

Well, the upgrade to Mandriva 2007.1 Alpha went relatively flawlessly. urpmi was successful. However, then I ran into this KWin (KDE's window manager) bug, which made using KDE unusable for me. So I've switched to using IceWM and am now speaking from an IceWM exile. Nevertheless, I am still using all the nifty KDE applications that I'm used to using so it's not that bad. I still miss the KDE environment, though.

Today I've placed my QClam modifications online, and notified the author about it. I also installed the Inkscape trunk, found a bug, and confirmed or said I could not reproduce a few others. I read LWN, and added several links to the Vi Humour page on the Text Editors' Wiki (so no one should say that "Vi is serious.".).

I also tested bleadperl (The development version of perl5). I was able to install the CPANPLUS bundle, but installing Task::Sites::ShlomiFish was dead-on-arrival because of a Params::Validate compilation problem. I didn't feel I was as productive as yesterday, but today things tended to get in my way.

Well, I'm off to write a report about the recent Perl Mongers meeting.

I just returned from a walk where it occured to me that Spaceballs is a pun on Baseball. And it came to me when thinking of one of the latest Foxtrot cartoons, which I read earlier today.

It often takes me a lot of time to detect some puns, but this one took about 15 years for me to get to the bottom of, which is very exceptional, even for me.