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

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

TPF's been a busy little foundation lately. Interesting things are taking shape, and you'll be seeing announcements about some of them very soon. Be sure to stay tuned. Much of this progress is a result of the excellent feedback we've received from the community. pleasant feedback, but it's useful all the same.> But we're a greedy bunch, and making progress just makes us want to make more. That means we

Here's Christopher Laco's "Mango" grant application. NAME: Christopher H Laco EMAIL: claco@chrislaco.com PROJECT: Mango AMOUNT: $1500 DURATION: 2-3 Months, starting immediately. SYNOPSIS: Mango is a Web 2.0 Ecommerce Solution built using the Handel and Catalyst frameworks. PREFACE: Since graduating college, I've spent the last 10 years working on various forms of ecommerce solutions. Most of that time has been in connecting various website checkout processes to backend business systems using

Here's Brian Ingerson's "Port PyYAML to Perl" grant application. Name: Ingy döt Net Email: ingy@ttul.org Project Title: Port PyYAML to Perl Amount Requested: $3000 Synopsis: PyYAML is a pure Python implementation of the YAML 1.1 specification It is considered the highest quality YAML implementation to date. It has an excellent API a comprehensive test suite, full unicode support, very good tagging/type support, follows the spec precisely and is written in

The latest round of grant voting has ended and I've informed all of the applicants of the status of their grant. Two grants were approved this quarter "Porting PyYAML to Perl" and "Mango", a Web 2.0 ecommerce application built using the Handel and Catalyst frameworks. The full applications will be posted after this. The PyYAML port is to be done by Ingy and was approved because frankly, YAML support in

My job as Parrot Grant Manager is basically to make prepare a report every two months for NLnet, who are the funders behind the big Parrot grant Here is the grant report for June and July of 2006: Since the last report, there has been a change in title for several of the Parrot contributors. Allison Randal has taken on the mantle of chief architect. This means that she will

I have posted all the bids. If you seen any horrible errors in my cut-and-paste, let me know perlfoundation.org or post a comment.

The Boston.pm bid follows: Update: Applied some formatting updates from Bob Clancy to address cut-off columns on some tables. NAME SYNOPSIS CRITERIA Estimated Costs Site 1: Northeastern University Introduction Meeting Room Costs Banquet Costs Possible University Staff Costs A/V costs Speaker Costs Other Costs Site 2: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Readily Accessible Location Public Transportation

The Philadelphia.pm bid follows: YAPC::Philadelphia 2007 Overview Why Philadelphia? Because Philadelphia is less than an 8 hour drive for one third of the nation's population. Because it is home of the cheesesteak. And most importantly because we are hosting YAPC just before Independence Day, a day the city participated in creating. Each year Philadelphia celebrates with more than a week of activities at the Sunoco Welcome America festival complete with

The Houston.pm bid follows: Overview Proposed Dates Facilities Location Rice University University of Houston Downtown University of Houston Internet Access Cost/Affordability Low Cost Experience Attendee Cost Conference Budget Audio/Visual and Equipment Other Fees and Services Accommodations Food Service/Catering Dining Catering Internet Access Alternative Accommodations Transportation Getting to Houston

After a flurry of last minute activity and a submission at 11:58 PM EST last night, the bidding period for hosting YAPC::NA::2007 is now closed. I'm happy to report that we have three bids, two of them from confederations of multiple PM groups. First, let me clarify that I did extend the bid deadline by one day because of some confusion with one of the groups regarding the due date.

I think the title says it all. August 1 is the deadline, so get your hosting bids polished up and submitted. As discussed here previously, once the call for venue is officially closed

As spelled out in my original Call for Venue August 1st is the closing date. At this year's YAPC::NA, the YAPC BOF drew some interested parties from Texas who were considering a bid. I also believe Boston.pm were going to re-submit, but I haven't heard anything from them recently. Did you attend this year and have a blast? Can you keep YAPC::NA going? We need you to make it happen

It's that time again! If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org Grant applications must be in by the last day of July and we will be awarding the grants at the beginning of September. First, please read about how to submit a grant Read that carefully as grants are

In the interest of providing more examples of bids from the past to help future bidders, I'm posting the Buffalo bid here. Read on for details. Note that we had a wiki up with details, pictures, etc., but the wiki has since gone away. Proposed dates: To keep with past years, it seems June 16-18, 2004 would be best. However, we can be flexible with other dates in June. Facilities.

There are only two weeks left until YAPC::NA 2006 begins at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The schedule includes great subject tracks, including Perl 6 Parrot and Web Frameworks YAPC::NA 2006 also includes keynotes by Larry Wall and Damian Conway Registration is still open and costs only $100. In addition, three additional courses taught by Damian Conway, Randal Schwartz and brian d foy are available following YAPC::NA 2006

I was going to announce Nicholas Clark's progress on his Improve Perl 5 when I announced this quarter's grant votes. However, the summary below isn't quite accurate. It was sent to me on May 11th, and as of a May 20th email to me, I'm informed that even Nicholas' TODO items have been accomplished, along with documentation of user pragmata. His grant appears to be finished and a great

Just a quick update about the grant applications for May, 2006. Regrettably, no applications were approved. We generally don't publish the rejected applications because we don't want to make the applicants feel awkward, but I do have the unenviable task of informing the applicants not only that their grants were not approved, but also giving them a rough summary of why the grants were not approved. For this round, it

Between Parrot and Pugs Perl 6 is slowly but surely getting to a state where it's actually usable. We created the first mailing list for "Perl6 users". Eventually most of the regular perl mailing lists will be for both Perl 5 and Perl 6 users, but for now it makes sense to have a list specifically for users of Perl 6 Subscribe by sending a mail to perl6-users-subscribe@perl.org

Jeremy Fluhmann responded to my Call for Venue post saying he'd be interested to see the other bids when they get posted. This brings up a good point: when should the bids be made public? My thought was that they would be made public after the Conferences Committee has selected the host group. This allows people to see what we voted on and it's a good reference for next year.

Can't figure out how you're going to get to Chicago for YAPC::NA this year and wish it was in your city? Want to meet Perl luminaries, but aren't sure how? Want to contribute to Perl without writing a new MVC framework? If you answer yes to at least two of these questions, you might be just the person we want to host YAPC next year. But you can't host if

Josh McAdams and Pete Krawczyk have just released the YAPC::NA 2006 schedule on the conference website. This year there will be four rooms of talks going on for the three days of the conference. We are lucky enough to have both Larry Wall and Damian Conway giving keynote addresses. Of course, there will be a lot of Perl 6, Pugs, and Parrot talks, was well as the usual barrage of

"Allison":http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/allison-randal-20060412.html posted the "Artistic License 2.0 public review":http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/20/2042256 announcement to use.perl.org today. bq.. Part of the Perl 6 RFC process in 2000 identified the need to update the Artistic License 211 and 346 From 2000-2001, a group of interested Perl users on the perl6-licenses mailing list worked on a first draft of an updated Artistic License. In 2003, The Perl Foundation started an extensive review process with independent legal counsel

Something I think we can all do in the Perl community is help spread the knowledge of how to use this marvelous tool. There are so many layers to the onion, and some people may only know about the outermost layer. The other day I saw an entry in Erica Sadun's blog where she'd hacked together a quick Perl program for some user interaction that then generates URLs and fires

Here's the latest status update for Nicholas Clark's Improve Perl 5 grant. As usual, he's gotten quite a bit done. Completed "Reblessing references interacts badly with overloading" For blead I've moved the flag for "overloading" from the reference to the referent, which logically is where it should always have been. This isn't binary compatible, so isn't a viable solution for 5.8.x. For that, the flag stays in the same place,

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP a one-day, low-cost conference on Saturday, September 23, 2006. This year's theme is "Perl at Work." The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is modeled after the highly successful Perl workshops held in Europe over the last several years. The day is designed to provide you with a comfortable, exciting, and enjoyable learning experience. The Workshop

A recent thread in the London.pm mailing list got people saying that they wanted to donate some time to The Perl Foundation, but didn't know where their efforts could be used. Here are two places to start: Jim Brandt, who organized YAPC::NA 2004 in Buffalo, is looking for volunteers to help with a Perl-based conference system. See his TPF blog post for details I'm looking for someone to write up

Every year the group of past recipients gives out three new "White Camel Awards":http://www.perl.org/advocacy/white_camel/ to recognize a few of the many people who give their time and energy to help the Perl community. Since we don't know nearly as many of the contributors and contributions as we'd like, we are looking for input on who should be considered. Keywords: Community service Unsung heroes better than well known ones

As TPF Conferences Chair, I try to help eager, excited organizers put together a YAPC. Ever since I ran YAPC in Buffalo in 2004 I've wanted to put together something called Conference::Toolkit that would solve all of the YAPC web-site needs. Well, given my TPF duties, I honestly don't have the time to do this right. And I want it done right. I want to put together the best conference

I've been remiss in noting that YAPC::Asia::2006 is right around the corner. But if you're in Tokyo and want to go, it appears you're a bit too late. They've sold out! They have a great line-up of talks and speakers If you're already registered, have fun!