Only one grant was approved this quarter, but it's fantastic. Nicholas Clark, the current 5.8 Pumpking has applied for an $11,000 grant to improve Perl 5. Some of what he intends to do: Fix bugs affecting Unicode handling, Class::DBI, Tk and PAR. Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl. Support source filters as part of code references in @INC

From time to time people decide to leave the grant committee and new members join. Recently, Nicholas Clark, a long-time grant committee member, decided to step down. He'll be missed as his knowledge of both Perl and the community are extensive. However, we wound up electing two new grant committee members, Thomas Klausner and Ben Tilly. On the off chance you don't know who they are, I suppose I should

Sometimes people might question the tangible value of going to a conference. You're out of the office for a few days, so you lose that work time. You attend a ton of sessions and you're drinking from a fire hose, so after about half a day you feel totally overwhelmed. Does any of it stick? I can tell you for sure that it does. The other day someone in my

This year the Toronto folks managed to record audio and video for the YAPC::NA conference sessions, as reported on use.perl.org After a few months of availability, Fulko Hew has shared his stats with me: 7 mail-orders 111 CD downloads 953 DVD downloads private duplications 4 Terabytes Given that the DVD was 4.23 Gig, that's a lot of bits, both for the sender and receiver. I don't think that

Our friend chromatic wrote up a summary of some of the things that happened in Perl last year. Oh, and happy new year everyone! :-D

As I mentioned previously, I recently attended the Gartner Open Source Summit. While there I participated in a new type of session Gartner has started moderating called a round table session, and I think it's a really cool idea. When you attend a Gartner conference, you are eligible to sign up for one-on-one sessions with the Gartner analysts. This is a nice perk, since you usually have to pay for

Ponie is the project name for Perl 5.12, a bridge between Perl 5 and Perl 6. Ponie will bring Perl 5 to Parrot, the virtual machine at the heart of Perl 6. A project of this size and complexity takes plenty of talent, and plenty of support, to complete. The first phase of the project has come to an end, and a new one is beginning. In July of 2003,

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

If you have been wondering how you can help out, here is one way A quick introduction: If you don't know me, I am looking after many of the perl.org services with Robert Spier. When I started I helped look after the majordomo system it was running on then Soon after I moved the lists and the websites we hosted to a computer under my desk at "ValueClick":http://www.valueclick.com/ where I

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

Last week I attended the first annual Gartner Open Source Summit Gartner is a major IT market researcher and consultant, specifically for large businesses. The fact that this conference exists speaks volumes for the penetration of open source in all sorts of IT shops. OSS hung under the radar for quite a while because it doesn't show up in any of the traditional data that analysts use to measure market

If you've read through the first few posts here on the brand-new TPF blog The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. Of course, much of my "help" has consisted of me asking others to do the real heavy lifting. Many of the items in Richard's earlier summary of activities are a result of me poking and prodding,

One of the things we're trying to improve over here is reporting. Not only do People Want To Know what it is that we're doing, but being a not-for-profit we have some regulatory needs to get our reporting act together. Over the past week I've been working on the reporting strategy for the Steering Committee. Progress has been made on this front. I've created a draft reporting template that seems

Below is the bid submitted by the Vancouver group. Location: Vancouver, Canada. Located on the west coast of Canada, Vancouver is a novel choice for YAPC. Vancouver is the largest city in the province of British Columbia and the third largest city in Canada. It's surrounded by water on three sides and is nestled alongside the Coast Mountain Range. Vancouver is home to spectacular natural scenery and a bustling metropolitan

Below is the bid submitted by the Chicago group. Chicago was selected to host YAPC::NA::2006. Overview Who we are Why Chicago? Dates and Location Facilities Facility Location Facility Layout and Capacity A/V and Internet arrangements Cost Summary Individual Costs: $245 Travel Conference Fees Per Person: $55 Conference: Possible! Accommodations Low-Cost Arrangements Hotels Transportation