VANCOUVER, British Columbia – November 29, 2000 – No, we're not talking about the great Cajun food. Get the newest tips on how to easily handle coding problems in Perl, Python, Sendmail, or Mozilla from our experts at a birds of a feather session. Ask questions, get solutions, and find out if *there's a better way to do it.*
Regular Expression Debugger
Tuesday, December 5 @ 8:00pm – 9:00pm
New Orleans Mariott – Mardi Gras B
Ken Simpson, Developer, ActiveState
Regular expressions are the bane of the casual programmer. Often, rather than fixing the regular expression, the programmer simply hard-codes the matching logic, missing out on the immense power regular expressions have to offer. This BOF provides an overview of the design and implementation of a regular expression debugger, which helps programmers understand why a regular expression doesn't work by letting them step through its evaluation. It also provides the programmer with a helpful visualization of the regular expression, which shows independent of syntax how the regular expression is interpreted by the regular expression engine and aids in conceptual understanding. Special attention will be paid to user interface design and particularly the design of the regular expression visualization widget.
Sysadmining with Mozilla
Wednesday, December 6 @ 7:00pm – 8:00pm
New Orleans Mariott – Balcony L
Ken Simpson, Developer, ActiveState
This session will discuss how the Mozilla application development framework can be used for system administration. ActiveState's experience with Mozilla is based on the development of a new cross-platform, multi-language scripting Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called Komodo. Komodo leverages the Mozilla architecture and the power of today's popular scripting languages: Perl, Python and JavaScript; and delivers a full-featured IDE for scripting languages that is both ready-to-use and extensible by the user utilizing their favorite language. Specifically, the following will be covered during the session:
- Overview of Mozilla as an application development framework
- Architecture of the Komodo IDE, a large non-browser Mozilla application
- Using Komodo to debug a remote process.
- Using Komodo to monitor mail traffic through a sendmail server.
Perl and System Administrators: Where Do We Go From Here?
Wednesday, December @ 8:00pm – 9:00pm
New Orleans Mariott – Balcony N
Gurusamy Sarathy, Senior Developer, ActiveState
Perl and System Administrators: Where do we go from here? This session will be of interest to all sysadmins who either use Perl to get their jobs done or have users in the same position. The major focus for the BoF will be how Perl can better support the ever-changing daily needs of sysadmins and their users, on a variety of platforms. Some potential topics include: blind-spots in Perl's support for common system administration tasks; headaches in installing Perl modules; do's and don'ts when upgrading to a new version of Perl; managing installations for large numbers of Perl users; and platform-specific Perl issues. Be sure to bring your worthy ideas, and don't be surprised if they actually find their way into the next version of Perl!
Getting Plugged Into Sendmail
Wednesday, December 6 @ 9:00pm – 10:00pm
New Orleans Mariott – Balcony L
Mike Smith, Developer, ActiveState
If you are interested in getting plugged into sendmail at the SMTP transaction level then this BoF is for you. We'll talk about how the Milter API lets you hook into sendmail at each stage of the transaction. Then we'll look at some simple filter examples written in C and Perl and discuss how these can be extended to provide powerful mail filtering solutions.
