Magazine Article:
July 2003
In print and on web.

"Indexing Arbitrary Data with SWISH-E"   Read the paper (pdf)

Presented and published at the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
This paper and talk will be similar to the one presented the preceding week at YAPC, but for a more UNIX- and system administrator-oriented audience. At the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 27-July 2nd, 2004 in Boston Massachussetts; presentation was on Thursday, July 1st 2004.

Presentation:
Wednesday, June 9 2004
New York City

"Perl 6 and Parrot"  Read the Slides (pdf)_
Perl 6 is more than an incremental upgrade to Perl 5. It's "the community's rewrite of perl", and will add deep features and language changes while retaining backward compatibility with the huge code base of current perl software. While Perl 6 as a language is still in the design phase, many decisions are being made, and development is underway on Parrot, an underlying virtual machine intended as a platform for Perl 6, as well versions of Scheme, BASIC, Befunge, and other languages. In this talk Josh will cover why the world needs Perl 6, the over-arching Perl 6 design philosophies, some Perl 6 language features that are in discussion and how they differ from Perl 5, and new features that have no Perl 5 analog. Josh will also discuss Parrot's design, which is driven by three principles: speed, abstraction, and stability, and provide an overview of the current status of Perl 6 and Parrot.
Talk was at Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Avenue, New York, NY , June 9th 2004.

Presentation:
Friday, June 18th, 2004
Buffalo, New York

"Indexing and Retrieving Data with Perl and SWISH-E"
SWISH-E is a powerful, fast, and flexible system for building and querying indices. Perl's text handling prowess coupled with SWISH-E's special features and perl API provide a substantial and robust system upon which to build searching systems.
In this talk we'll cover SWISH-E core concepts; Current challenges when using SWISH-E with human languages and perl and future plans for SWISH-E development.
We'll also discuss non-trivial real world examples including Sman, a real-world open source project that uses SWISH-E and perl to provide an enhanced version of 'man -k' and 'apropos' , and 'swished', a mod_perl-based concurrent and persistent swish-e server written by Josh and available at joshr.com/src/SWISHED (see also the matching client library, SWISH::API::Remote). Such a server has long been on the SWISH-E "to do" list.
Presented at YAPC::NA 2004. in Buffalo, New York, on Friday, June 18th 2004.