Rehovot Perl Mongers - First meeting - Matlab and PDL

While trying to restart the meetings of the Israeli Perl Mongers I got an offer from Dr Jaime Prilusky, the Head of Bioinformatics in the Weizmann Institute of Science to hold the meetings in one of their class-rooms. As we used to meet in Tel-Aviv or Ramat Gan and Rehovot is a bit further away I thought it would be better to split this up and organize these meetings under the name Rehovot Perl Mongers or in short, Rehovot.pm. I keep looking for a place in Tel Aviv or Ramat Gan for meetings there.

Actually Rehovot.pm was created a long time ago by Jaime but it was sleeping so we are trying to wake it up...

The meeting will take place on Tuesday November 17, 2009 between 18:00-22:00

Location

Room 101 in the Levine Building (number 30 on this map and on this larger map. The Weizmann Institute is a few minutes walk from the Rehovot train station, shown in the maps.

Speakers

Hadar Levi Aharoni
Avishalom Shalit
and Gabor Szabo.

Content

18:00-19:00

First we will give an overview about Matlab. What is it used for, how is it used, what are its advantages and disadvantages compared to other solutions.

Then we will talk about PDL - the Perl Data Language.

I am sure I'll also show the current state of Padre in a few minutes.

19:00-22:00

We'll start to work in pairs or small groups learning to use PDL in general and as a replacement of Matlab. We will write example scripts and add to the documentation of PDL with a focus on the PDL for Matlab users, a document I started to write a few days ago on the PDL wiki.

The class-room has Windows computers and we hope that we will be able to setup PDL there but it would be great if you could bring your notebook.

Who should attend?

I think both Matlab users without Perl experience and Perl programmers without Matlab experience will be able to learn and to contribute. So both groups are welcome! Even if you don't have much experience in either of those you can come and see what are we doing.

Fee

Entrance is free of charge.

RSVP

If you are planning to come to the meeting please send me an e-mail so I'll have a rough estimate of the number of people expected.

PR

Please send a message with a link to this blog entry to people in companies and higher-educational institutes that could be interested.

Preparations

If you would like to make some early preparations you could start reading about PDL or even install it on your computer and start playing with it. The folks on the PDL mailing list are quite helpful!

You can sign up to Sourceforge and request to be added as an editor to the PDL wiki.

Contact

In order to further follow the activity of the group you can sign up to the newly restarted mailing list of Rehovot.pm or the mailing list of Israel.pm or the announcement list of all the Perl Monger groups in Israel.