I'm already tired of the hoohah about "Perl 5 is dead" and the hand-wringing and the useless flapping about what we should do. I'm more interested in what is going on in Perl that none of us have heard of yet. If I didn't have family and book obligations, I'd gladly take two days off and an 18-hour round trip to Omaha, Nebraska to check out the lightning talks presented by the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Tuesday. [Robert Fulkerson](http://www.cs.unomaha.edu/faculty/people/fulkerson.html) [posted to the Omaha.pm list](http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/omaha-pm/2008-December/001955.html): > The Fall 2008 UNO CSCI 2850 (Programming on the Internet) class > invites you to an evening of lightning talks on Perl programming, > the Firefox web browser and other (mostly) web-related topics. > > Lightning Talks are no longer than 5 minutes and can be about > anything: a new idea, an evaluation, an observation, a story, a > complaint, an explanation, a suggestion, a report of success or > failure, a call to action, a description of a technique, technology, > or a lament. > > Usually we split the talks over two nights, but this semester it's going to be one, big solid night of talks. > > Where: Peter Kiewit Institute, Room 252 ( http://tinyurl.com/5g83cb ) > When: Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 > Time: 6:00 PM until 8:30 PM > > Topics > > * Writing a Greasemonkey script for FireFox to make BlackBoard tolerable > * Obfuscating Perl > * Connecting Perl to databases > * Net::SSH::Expect > * Using BioPerl for sequence analysis > * Perl Google APIs > * Acid Test 3 > * Gossamer Forum > * Perl vs. Python > * Index a website starting with a single page > * Dictionary attack using Perl > * iTunes playlist extractor: C++ vs. Perl > * Regex Creator > * Regex Coach > * History of Perl > * Software Pirating Debate (Spore, SecuROM) > * Perl 6 vs. Perl 5 > * Rapid Exploit Development using Perl > * SSH on iPod Touch > * Regex usage in Perl vs. C > * Ubuntu with Conky > * Perl-XML: XML Made Easy with Perl! > * Perl Module - GD::SecurityImage > * Gmail:Checker module > * Improving Perl program efficiency/performance > * Subversion Tortoise client search > * Perl PayPal APIs > * JQuery UI > * Talking to LCD projectors using Perl "Talking to LCD projectors using Perl"? "Rapid Exploit Development using Perl"? "Perl 6 vs. Perl 5" by someone who (I assume) is not part of the core group? Someone get this on tape and YouTube 'em, willya? I would *love* to be there. (Plus, then I could go get some [Valentino's](http://www.valentinos.com/) pizza).