Proposed North of England PerlMongers group

[g0n]

Thanks to the comments of various people over the last few days at YAPC::EU, in particular cog's talk on wednesday, I seem to have talked myself into arranging a perlmongers group.

Currently there's a big gap in the map between Nottingham and Edinburgh, relieved only by a red dot in Hull. While that would be OK-ish for me (at least some of the time) it's not a lot of help for perlers in Leeds, Manchester, and points further north and west - I guess Nottingham is reasonably close for those in the Sheffield area. The WYPUG.pm group listed at pm.org seems to be inactive. From conversations with the potential members who were present at YAPC::EU, the idea would be to have quarterly meetings, varying venue to try and keep things fair to everyone. Manchester and Leeds are candidates for a first meeting, as they are reasonably central and well served by public transport.

We're provisionally calling this the NorthOfEngland.pm group. Alternative suggestions are welcome (although suggestions such as 'Whippets.pm','FlatCaps.pm' etc. are likely to be ignored ;-)).

Anyone interested in joining can subscribe to the temporary mailing list http://g0n.net/mailman/listinfo/northofengland.pm. When you subscribe to the list, please post a message introducing yourself, giving some indication of where you're located. We can register with pm.org when we've settled the geographic scope and name.

I'll cross post this to

• use.perl
• local LUGs

Other suggestions and comments would be very welcome.

Update: It seems there are still some DNS problems with that domain (ISP--), if you can't resolve the link, you can still get to the mailing list by sending a mail with a subject of 'subscribe' to [e-mail]. In the meantime I'll make Yet Another attempt to get the DNS sorted.

[theorbtwo]

UpNorf.pm ?

[Milamber]

Any interest so far from my brethern in Geordieland? Or is there some work required on a CPAN module that translates the local vernacular into human readable English?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict
use Acme::Geordie

while (<>) {
     /$EXPRESSION{"Dinnae dunsch uz, wa Geordies!"}/
     and print q{"Don\'t crash into us. We are Geordies and will hurt 
+you.\n"};
     /$EXPRESSION{"Ye oop?"}/
     and print q{"Are you up?\n"};
     /$EXPRESSION{"Why aye man!"}/
     and print q{"Of course.\n"};
}

The above is a shameless ripoff of Regexp::Common, and probably wouldn't work the way I thought it would...but what the hell :-)

[BrowserUk]

Ganon! Geraway wiya!

[grantm]

I'm guessing Ecky-Thump.pm might fall into your "likely to be ignored" category too :-)

[g0n]

Well, various things happened/went wrong with that:
• my DNS provider emigrated, allowing all my domains to lapse without telling me
• the server broke
• lots of people joined the mailing list, and Cumbria.pm got set up, but nothing happened further south
• my personal life went a bit awry, which left me without much time to devote to things perl for a few months
So I'm trying once again. The general feeling after a few months of messages passing back and forth was that the whole north of england was too large a scope (something I thought might be the case) but the mailing list would be handy for allowing individual groups to share information.

The mailing list is back up and running at http://www.hexten.net/mailman/listinfo/northofengland-pm. I'm hoping to start Leeds.pm up again (pm.org tells me it's inactive). Anyone interested in this, or in setting up another group in the area, please join the mailing list.

[osfameron]

The mailing list link doesn't work for me, complaining that g0n.net doesn't exist. I'm interested (sort of, as I'm currently shuffling between Liverpool and Florence)...