Randal L. Schwartz, [@merlyn] a name to conjure with…

Some of us met Randal at Astricon 2009 and he’s been a part of VUC whenever he’s had the time. Randal’s an author, a narrator, a programmer and a fun guy to hang with. Somewhere in the call about lag, packet loss and latency, we took advantage of Randal’s visit to catch up with what he’s been up to. One of his recent activities was doing some narration work for StarShipSofa, an award-winning Sci-Fi (oh, sorry, “speculative fiction”?) podcast. Randal has written and co-written several books on Perl: Randal Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom
, Learning Perl (4th Edition) Covers Perl 5.8, Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules.

Randal is also well-known as co-host on FLOSS Weekly the great open-source show, part of Leo Laporte’s TWIT Empire and for his long career in Karaoke.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-330735.mp3|titles=Part 2 March 5 2010]

Tim Panton reports in via satellite from Nuie where they were installing an open mobile phone system.
Voipathon plans world domination with a 24 hour live Internet conference.
Randal L. Schwartz chats with us about language choices, perl, python, FORTH, PHP, Squeak Smalltalk.
“Violent” arguments about port knocking and how to protect SSH by using less obvious ports, etc.

Besides the few people I had time to grab, you’ll see stills of Allison Smith, Randal L. Schwartz and VUC regular Barry Kline. Allison is an amazing person when you consider how many people want to meet and talk to her (to hear that voice you’ve heard recordings of for years). She deals with it well, here’s someone who makes you feel special. Randal has always been one of my heroes and one of these days we will have to do some live video together just for grins. You’ll also get a quick glimpse of the indefatigable John Todd, aka, “tie dye man” and another VoIP hero, Olle Johanssen. Sorry Zoa, I misspelled Zoiper and can’t re-edit just now.