It seems the Chicago hackathon organized by Andy Lester and Pete Krawczyk and sponsored by the Perl Foundation has sparked some interest from other groups. We think these events are a great way to support Perl, use your donations effectively, and keep things rolling on various active projects. Now we need some ideas on how we should keep things going. I think hackathons will largely be regional events. This is

Here's the latest grant update as sent to NLNet During October and November, Allison has continued working on the PDD for IO, which she hopes to finish soon. Parrot 0.4.7 was released on November 14th. This release includes design work on bytecode files, embedding, concurrency, and objects. The bytecode file PDD is complete, and is beginning to be implemented. There has been significant design and implementation work on the Perl6

This just in from the Boston Perl Mongers Boston.pm will be presenting the inaugural "New England Perl Workshop" at Northeastern University on Saturday, March 10th, 2007. We are following in the tradition of the Pittsburgh, London, and Nordic Perl workshops in having two tracks of talks with opportunities to socialize. We're also hoping to include a hackathon. We hope to draw a mix of interested participants from New England and

Parrot ’s first ever Bug Day is this Saturday, 16 December 2006. The core Parrot developers will be in #parrot on irc.perl.org all day to: Review tickets in the Parrot RT queue Answer questions from newcomers Fix bugs Add features Improve the documentation or tests or… Recruit and encourage new developers If you’re curious about Parrot, please join us. You don’t have to be an expert programmer. If you can

Sorry this hasn't been updated lately. Our company is shutting down their offices and I have to move to London. Needless to say, my life has been in a bit of a turmoil as I try to get things sorted out Now, on with the grant update: Christopher Laco's Mango grant is being postponed until January. We're still waiting on an update regarding Ingy dot Net's grant to port PyYAML

Robert Fulkerson sends notice of a set of a Perl lightning talks in Omaha, NE, on December 5th at 6pm. "Everyone's invited to come visit the UNO CSCI 2850 class's semester-ending lightning talks. This semester's talks are in room 256 at the Peter Kiewit Institute at 67th Pacific. They'll start at 6 PM and last until 7:30. Unfortunately, we don't have any funding so there won't be any drinks or

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.

The first standalone Perl Hackathon has been a rousing success, and The Perl Foundation is looking forward to sponsoring two or three each year around the country, or around the world. From Friday November 10th to Sunday November 12th, over thirty Perl hackers converged on the Country Inn Suites in Crystal Lake, IL, a far northwest suburb of Chicago. For three days, nearly around the clock, we worked, talked, ate,

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

Perl Foundation board member, conference organizer and Perl oldbie Nat Torkington is interviewed in this article from Linux Format

This call for proposals is delayed because I managed to set up my calendar notification incorrectly. My apologies if this has inconvenienced anyone. Also, after this, I'll be on vacation for a week and a half, so I won't be able to respond right away to grant submissions, but I'll catch up with this when I get back. If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl

Here's the latest Parrot Grant Update In August and September, Allison has been working on the PDD for IO, which she expects to finish sometime in October or November. Because IO, events, and threads are so inter-related, some of the IO work will spill over into work on the PDDs for events and threads as well. Parrot 0.4.6 was released on August 9. It includes support for several new languages,

For those curious, the YAML grant's status is being tracked by Ingy döt Net at this wiki I'll chase down more info on the Mango grant and post it here. #perl-yaml-grants-mango

The Chicago Hackathon http://hackathon.info is excited to have Krugle part of the proceedings. Krugle http://krugle.com is a search engine for source code, projects, and technical information across the web, and they want your feedback. The Krugle team wants to hear from Perl programmers about how Krugle can be more useful to the Perl community. On Saturday, Krugle will be hosting a demo of Krugle, as well as feeding us pizza.

Long-time readers might remember my plea for a conference module to allow YAPC organizers to organize rather than hack the website. Well, I'm very pleased to announce that I was able to get in touch with the YAPC Europe folks and the ACT folks and they have agreed to work on making ACT the default YAPC web site framework. One of the main issues with ACT was that it hadn't

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.

Pat Eyler pointed me to his interview with Kevin Tew of the Cardinal project Cardinal is Ruby running on the Parrot virtual machine.

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 Perl Foundation in conjunction with the YAPC::Europe Foundation are happy to announce Houston and Vienna as the venues for next year's North American and European YAPCs. The votes were close again this year for YAPC::NA and we had three excellent bids from Boston, Houston, and Philadelphia. With the evaluations complete, the Perl Foundation's Conferences Committee has selected Houston, Texas, as the venue for YAPC::NA::2007. The proposal was a joint