Here's my first Help Wanted entry. SOAP::Lite needs your help. Byrne Reese has posted a good assessment of the state of the SOAP::Lite Read on for details. To start, SOAP::Lite works. That is, it works well for easy things and you can get it to work for complicated things. But it needs help and it's going to need more help in the near future. SOAP is becoming more and more

I often hear this: "I'd get involved in Perl, but all the cool stuff is done and there's no room to make a name for myself. No one needs another DBI module..." or even: "All the cool kids are using because they don't have CPAN yet and they can become the uber-programmer for the cool modules." Well, to these I say, "Nonsense!" There is a ton of work to be

December brings three different online calendars for the Perl community. First, the traditional Perl Advent Calendar informs you about a snazzy module every day until the 25th, with requisite RSS feed for those of you practicing one of the three virtues this holiday season. Next, for Catalyst users, or those who'd like to start, the Catalyst Advent Calendar brings a daily tip for those interested in this increasingly popular framework.

I read today in the November 15th issue of Software Development Times that buffer overflows are no longer the most common update security problem reported by CVE cve.mitre.org The three most common types of security vulnerabilities in 2005 were cross-site scripting SQL injection and buffer overflows So far in 2005, buffer overflows has lost the #3 place to PHP remote includes. The good news is that Perl has long had

This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006. Nick joined the Perl community in the early days of Perl 5. He consistently contributed to the perl5-porters mailing list and later became pumpkin for 5.003_02 where he added the initial implementation of the PerlIO layer. Nick is probably best known for his work on

Mark Stosberg wrote a great article on perlmonks called "Take Back Your Modules" about the responsibilities module users have for the modules they use.

John Wang has a great blog entry titled Perl 5 Powering Web 2.0 that points at all the web apps out there that are done in good ol' Perl 5. You don't have to have Rails to do amazing things with the web. You want frameworks, we got frameworks!

The Chicago Perl Mongers and The Perl Foundation are proud to announce the Fall 2006 Chicago Hackathon, the weekend of November 10-12, 2006 in suburban Crystal Lake, IL. It will be a round-the-clock weekend of programming on Perl-related projects with your colleagues in the open source community. Dozens of programmers from the open source community in the midwest, as well as others from around the US, will be getting together

Over the past several years, one key aspect of the migration plan to Perl 6 has been the Ponie project, a fusion of the Perl 5 runtime with Parrot. Sponsored by Fotango, Artur Bergman and Nicholas Clark did a heroic job cleaning up Perl's internals to make it possible to replace some components of Perl 5 with Parrot, one piece at a time, while still keeping the core of the

The Perl community has released a fix to the sprintf function that was recently discovered to have a buffer overflow in very specific cases. All Perl users should consider updating immediately. Dyad Security recently released a security advisory explaining how in certain cases, a carefully crafted format string passed to sprintf can cause a buffer overflow. This buffer overflow can then be used by an attacker to execute code on

The Perl community has updated the core module Sys::Syslog to help alleviate a security hole in the Webmin web administration package. All Webmin users should update immediately to the updated version of Sys::Syslog. Dyad Security released a security advisory explaining how arbitrary, untrusted data can get passed by Webmin into Perl's Sys::Syslog module as a sprintf format string. This allows an attack to create arbitrarily large strings, overwhelming server resources