If you are a Perl developer (or just passionate about this language), then London is definitely the city to live in. The Perl community in the city is quite active, as you can see from the number of free events available every couple of months. Last November I attended the London Perl Workshop, where a former colleague from Yahoo was giving some talks about Moose. The next month, February 19th, I will attend the London.pm technical meeting where, guess what, Moose will be the star again. The event will take place at the BBC’s offices near White City from 7pm to 9pm. If you are in town and you want to join, make sure to register as places are limited.

Bored at work? Try this out: O’Reilly Maker. This web app allows you to create your own customized O’Reilly cover.
I gave it a try and this is the result:

UPDATE. The plugin is now hosted in the official Wordpress plugin directory and can be downloaded directly from its page.

In my previous post I talked about the work I carried out for my MSc research project. Here is the Wordpress plugin that implements a simplified version of the summarization system described there.

This plugin creates an automatic excerpt of a post when it is saved or published. The excerpt created is a coherent piece of text containing the most important sentences of the post.
After installing this plugin, every time you write a post and press the save or publish button an excpert is created for that post and stored in the database. This plugin is useful also if you don’t use excerpts in your blog: it’s always useful to have a summary of your post available just to remind yourself what the post is about (it works very well with old and long posts!).
Statistical natural language techniques are used to extract the most important sentences from a document. It’s straightforward to tweak the plugin to give more importance to certain features in your text.
The code of the plugin has been optimized for extensiblity in order to make it easy for contributor developers to implement a summarizer in their own language. At the moment only an English language summarizer is available, and an Italian one is on its way.
After activating the plugin here are simple steps that you might want to follow in order to have a nice excerpt to use in your blog:

1. Write your post
2. Press the save or publish button
3. An excerpt will be created. Now you can review it, modify it and save it as many times as needed
4. If you want the summarizer to create an excerpt again delete the existing one and press save or publish

Note that the plugin creates automatically an excerpt for a post only if there isn’t already an excerpt for that post.