My linguistics course contains lots of really interesting material but unfortunately has really boring assignments. The last assignment was so awful that I considered giving up the course as I didn’t want to spend my spare time on something I wasn’t enjoying. To help with the tedium I decided to find something to do with the new knowledge that actually interests me.

I have been reading about collocates - words that are typically grouped together such as “law and order” and “fish and chips”. What interests me is the introduction of new collocates. I read a study by Fairclough who had analysed 53 speeches given by Tony Blair. The word “new” occurred 609 times and the most frequent collocates were “new labour” and “new deal”.

I am also interested in the Perl community, how it is perceived and how it perceives itself. If I analyse the blogs of various members of the community what are the collocates of “Perl” going to be? Some are going to be obvious - “Perl community”, “Perl 6″ - but what unexpected ones will I find? And what has changed in the last few years? What did we talk about in the past that is no longer important to us and what is the latest thing to be linked with Perl?

I am starting to get overly sensitive about the use of gender specific terms in technical blogs. I really don’t mean for this to happen but tonight, when reading Schwern’s use.perl journal, I did wonder why he had to use the phrase “Gentlemen, start your RSS readers” as the word “gentlemen” makes me feel excluded. I assume that this is based on a quote “Gentlemen, start your engines” and I know that Schwern is not in any way saying that women shouldn’t subscribe to his RSS feed but I did notice it - and I’m not convinced I would have a year ago. So something has changed.

It could simply be that studying language has made me more aware of the words that people use or that in 2007 I read a lot of posts about gender and sexism. It could also be because Schwern’s post is about a new blog that discusses geek communication which made me look more critically at how he was communicating the news.

I don’t find the phrase offensive but it did make me stop and read the line again and make me wonder if there was a better way to have said it.

I was slightly baffled by the level of disgust Perl Buzz reported over the title of the Linux Journal article regarding the release of Perl 5.10. To me the headline was simply an editor using innuendo and word play to attract attention to a rather dull press release. I have been trying to work out if there is some cultural difference I am missing as, although the phrase “put out” is pejorative, I certainly don’t think it’s offensive enough to warrant that reaction. Maybe to an American like Andy (the author of the Perl Buzz post) it has a stronger meaning than it does to me coming from Northern Ireland.

I am also confused by the things that Perl Buzz are calling on the editors of the Linux Journal to do especially “explain to us what will be changing at Linux Journal so we think of LJ as worthy of our time, trust and readership.” Who is the “us” that Andy is referring to? Is it the editors at Perl Buzz and if so why on earth would the Linux Journal ever feel the need to explain anything to them? Perl Buzz can’t possibly assume that it speaks on behalf of the entire Perl or Open Source community and I find it detracts from anything sensible they are saying when they write as if they are.

Is the article merely an attempt by Perl Buzz to create more of a “buzz” about their blog? Because if their article is really about how wrong they think it is for the Linux Journal to print such headlines and ads why on earth are they re-printing them on the front page of their blog so that I someone like me, who never reads the Linux Journal, gets to see the material?

Marty and I will be meeting up with some of the members of NY.pm tomorrow evening at the Peculier Pub.

I went to the two opening social events of the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop on Friday night. I’m always surprised when pre-conference events are organised as I imagine that it’s the last thing the organisers want to be doing the evening before the conference begins.

The first event was hosted by Google. They had food, drink and a fairly pleasant room for everyone to meet in. Someone from the local Google office gave a quick talk on the cool things that Google were working in Pittsburgh and gave a very short pitch on encouraging people to apply for jobs at Google.

The second event was held at a local restaurant so people could go out and have a proper dinner if they needed one. I didn’t eat anything as I was having problems with timezones and jetlag and a lost appetite. But I did get to chat to some people I hadn’t met before and to catch up with some others.

I am impressed that I managed to understand the forms on the Japanese Amazon site and have gotten the author of Mastering Perl changed from Brian D. Fox to Brian D. Foy.  This isn’t the perfect way to present this name but “Foy” has to be better than “Fox”.

It took me a while to understand most of the email they sent me and I wasn’t completely sure that they were going to change the entry.  I used google translate on some of the bits I got stuck on and I’m still trying to work out why Amazon are going to ask “the fish” before the change would be made.   (I don’t know if you have ever tried using google translate for translating Japanese into English but it’s very clear that this is still in beta as it comes up with some very funny translations.)

I started checking through my travel arrangements this morning as this time next week I will be in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. Not only will this be my last Perl conference of the year but it should also be my last trip outside of Japan for a while.

I’ve travelled a lot this year and I am looking forward to a couple of months of just being in the one country.

Mint noticed that brian d foy’s name isn’t spelt correctly on the Japanese Amazon site. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this had been wrong in Japanese but it’s an English spelling of his name that’s wrong - he is listed as Brian D. Fox. This might make it a bit more difficult to find Mastering Perl on this site.

On Monday evening Marty and I went to the Shibuya.pm technical meeting. This exhausted me as my understanding of Japanese isn’t really up to two and a half hours of technical talks. I was thrilled that Gugod spoke in English as it was a relief to be able to understand something - although when he started I thought he was going to give his talk in Japanese. The only other talk I understood was the one Miyagawa gave. But I had heard an English version of this in Vienna and he used English slides on Monday night.

Marty briefly mentioned one of the differences between this and the European meetings we used to attend but there were quite a few others. The meeting was really structured. They used a bell to let people know when their time was nearly up and they stopped the talks at the end of the allocated time slot. In Europe talks tend to go over and people don’t really seem to mind. Mind you we would have been there all night if they had let this happen as there were 3 ten minute talks, 2 twenty minute talks and 12 lightening talks scheduled.

There was less banter and heckling from the audience (I am not sure that there was any during the talks). Actually there was a lot less noise in general. During the breaks people were fairly quiet. There were around 100 people at the meeting and I couldn’t work out how many of them actually knew each other.

It was noticeable that lots of the talks were on topics associated with the web. The words “mash-up”, “catalyst”, “javascript” and “jifty” occurred quite frequently. Two talks also mentioned “gungho” which I hadn’t heard of before. There was also a lightening talk on Gopher and one of testing and refactoring but these were the exceptions. The lightening talks were also serious and not the stand-up comedy these have become at the YAPC conferences.

Two of the talks had slides that contained pictures of half naked women. I can’t remember seeing this at a technical meeting before. I have no idea why this sort of picture appeared in a talk on Class::Component - but then that’s because my Japanese isn’t good enough. The second set of pictures appeared in a talk which I think was about creating a web-site with erotic content using Plagger and Catalyst. I also don’t know why the women’s nipples were covered with stars in both pictures - but I think I have a lot to learn.