There are a couple of things I can point to in my off and on times doing programming that stand out for me. One of them was having the top performing project in my Perl class’ “Prisoner’s Dilemma” competition.

Work had kept me from writing anything extensive, so I bashed out a short program that randomly chose to hold out or talk depending on what the other “prisoner” previously did. Somehow my little 10-line program won by nearly 10,000 days over the second place program.

As Perl advocates already know, there’s more than one way to accomplish something with the language. A bunch of those people will get together in Chicago next week to attend the YAPC:NA 2006.

Wall will deliver the opening keynote, while Object Oriented Perl author Conway provides the closing address. A number of sponsors, Google and O’Reilly among them, appear on the home page in support of the various conference events.

Each conference day starts at 8:30 am and ends at 5 pm. Events vary from novice-oriented talks on avoiding common pitfalls (you did remember the shebang, didn’t you?) to adopting Ajax as a Perl programmer for website development, to talks on Perl 6 and Parrot.

Bloggers with technical inclinations may be interested in Jonathan Rockway’s talk about blogging software based on the Catalyst module. A synopsis of the talk appears on the conference site:

Attendees who prefer quicker events will like the Lightning Talks to be held on Wednesday the 28th. These five-minute talks will see 16 speakers each take the stage to talk about anything related to Perl, good, bad, or just plain confused.

While quite a few attendees will probably show up for the arrival dinner, a few contrarian souls have put up an announcement for an “anti-arrival” dinner instead, to take place at an alternate location. But that doesn’t seem to have the support the arrival dinner at the Goose Island has.

Also, The Perl Foundation will conduct an auction on Tuesday the 27th. Among the items up for bids: a week at the Big Nerd Ranch. There will also be a silent auction, with an emphasis on “silent” as the website noted talkers will be either “taken out, lined up against a wall, and be shot” or “forced to code in Cobol or Python.”

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

An exact date for the conference has not yet been set, although it should take place in late summer or early autumn. This seventh recurrence of the annual event will be held in Birmingham, England.

According to an official announcement, “the site will be updated with newsletters, articles, and news over the coming months.”

It provides information about the conference, and details about Birmingham itself, in the event any conference attendees should want to wander away for a bit. Among the site’s current top headlines is the theme for this year’s conference: “The Accessibility of Perl.”

The official wiki of the conference has also been launched.

Individuals will have to register to access that site, a decision the organizers made “due to the amount of wiki spam that has plagued other wikis.”

But registered users should have fairly free range: “there are a couple of pages only admins can edit, but pretty much everything else you’ll have access to.”

YAPC owes its existence to Perl Mongers Perl user groups, which began the tradition by holding smaller meetings in the Eastern U.S.

It has branched from there into a series of conferences held all over the world with the goal of uniting the Perl community. There are four YAPCs at present: YAPC: NA, YAPC: Europe, YAPC: Asia, and YAPC: Brazil.

The up-in-the-air date of the upcoming Europe conference is apparently drawing the ire of some would-be attendees, but the organizers still will not (or cannot) provide one.

Beyond the late summer/early fall estimation, they “don’t want to get any more specific in case people start ordering airplane tickets and booking hotels, and we have to alter the date due to unforeseen circumstances.”

The YAPC: Europe website, as interesting and useful as it would be otherwise, will be especially important to finding out when organizers actually intend to hold the event.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.