A while ago I blogged that I really wanted a Perl-based conference toolkit that YAPCs and other conferences could use so they didn't spend time hacking on the website when they should be organizing the conference. Well, the folks who work on ACT have been working to fulfill some of the items I presented and earlier today they officially announced that it is open source with a dual GPL/Artistic license.

We have two grant updates this time. Adam Kennedy's "Extending PPI Towards a Refactoring Perl Editor" has no new news to report. This grant is currently stalled. Shlomi Fish's work on "XML::RSS Cleanup", however, is going quite well. Read on for more information. Well, I wrote two use.perl.org journal entries about XML-RSS that detail some of my progress: http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/32081 http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/32121 What's been accomplished: 1. Moving the data files from under

Chris Laco's Mango grant application work was delayed slightly, but he's now starting on it. Below is his latest grant update, as collected by his grant manager, Adrian Howard. Well, it's that time of year. Time to pay the piper. Handel 1.0 and Handel-Storage-RDBO 0.01 are in a holding pattern waiting for releases of DBIC and RDBO, but they're done. Time to get the Mango train rolling. Done: setup

Grant vote results are in and one grant was awarded. The first Perl Foundation grant of 2007 has been award to Shlomi Fish for resolving outstanding issues in XML::RSS Shlomi has worked with Ask Bjørn Hansen, the module's maintainer, to resolve some bugs in it in the past and now plans to tackle the rest of the work. Rosellyn Thompson is the grant manager assigned to this grant. Below is

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