They must really want to make it easy for us to attend YAPC::Asia this year: the venue is beside our apartment!

Karen was reading Perl Buzz and noticed that Perl6 on Parrot will be called “Rakudo”, which is a shortened form of “rakudadou” or 駱駝道, the “way of the camel”. But I think that “rokudo”, a shortened form of 六道輪廻, would be a better name; it even has the number 6 (六) at the start.

Now that Karen is expecting me to write more Perl scripts to analyse collocates I think it’s time to install the Text::NSP module from CPAN.

Karen and I were talking about linguistics and textual analysis, and how she wanted to analyse the writings of the Perl community. So, to make a start we decided to write a short Perl script to extract word level n-grams from some text so we could start looking for interesting collocates.

$n=4;
undef $/;
@txt = split /\W+/, lc <>;
for($i = 0; @txt-$i > $n;  ++$i) {
    print "@txt[$i..$i+$n]\n";
}

(N-grams of 5 elements seem to be a good size for collocates, so we set $n=4.)

To look for interesting collocates we simply piped the output of that script through sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail . As test data I ran the script against version 2 and 3 of the GPL. In version 2 the most common n-gram was “work based on the program”; but for version 3 it was “the gnu general public license”. That isn’t a particularly interesting result, but I’m sure we will find some when we look at more than 2 source documents.

Karen and I went to the Shibuya.pm technical talk tonight. Most of the talks were in high-speed Japanese so we didn’t understand very much. But we need to start practising, and Perl talks are better than normal conversation because we can, at least, understand the Perl bits.

On the way home we were comparing the Tokyo tech talks to ones we have seen in Europe. There are a lot of similarities, but we noticed one trend: in Europe the focus is on how you can do something, but here it is on what you can do.

Karen has already mentioned our joint YAPC::Europe talk called “My First CPAN Module“. We probably should rehearse it, or at least talk about it when I’m not watching South Park. I did read the outline she wrote, and I’m sure I could easily talk for at least an hour by following her plan.

We decided to do this talk together because we have different viewpoints. I’ve uploaded modules to CPAN so it makes sense to me. Karen was able to investigate the upload process from a first time perspective and so could spot the confusing parts. We hope that the combined perspective will make the talk useful.

At YAPC::Asia Ingy told us all about Sporx, explaining that it was a combination of Spork and Takahashi, and so should be pronounced “Sporkahashi”.  When I began to tell Karen about “Sporkahashi” she said “That was clever” when I had only mentioned the name.  Because she knew little about Spork and nothing about Takahashi she had assumed the “hashi” was 箸 instead of 橋.

Well, Karen wouldn’t have thought about the kanji characters, but she knew that “hashi” (箸) meant “chopsticks”, so she thought a “spork and chopsticks” name was a smart idea from Ingy.

I don’t think anyone else spotted that.  The “hashi” (橋) in Takahashi (高橋) means “bridge”; 高橋 is a surname that means ”high bridge”.