I am pleased to announce that Mark Keating is joining TPF as the chair of the marketing committee. Mark is well known in the Perl community for his work with the Enlightened Perl Organisation, NorthWestEngland.pm, and the London Perl Workshop. His interest and enthusiasm in promoting Perl can clearly be seen through his blogging and the numerous projects he has worked on in the past couple of years. I am

Jonathan Leto wrote: I am still on the path of increasing "test coverage in src/extend_vtable.c":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/master/t/src/extend_vtable.t. It is much like a zen study, where you methodically concentrate on many tiny little pebbles, one at a time, moving them in the sand, to just the right place. According to the latest code coverage statistics, we are now at "72% code coverage":http://tapir2.ro.vutbr.cz/cover/latest-c_cover/src-extend_vtable-c.html, which is an increase of about 8% since my last report.

The 5th Annual Pittsburgh Perl Workshop will be held at the Carnegie Mellon University's Gates Hillman Complex on October 8 and 9, 2011. The call for presentations is now open and closes on Wednesday, May 18th. Please view The PPW announcement for more information.

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the March period. I concentrated on bugs that were 5.14 blockers, and also spent a fair amount of time working to reduce smoke failures, which isn't being charged to the grant, as that work wasn't done against RT tickets. Over the last month I have averaged 5 hours per week. As of 2011/03/31: since the beginning of

Its that time of the year, again. The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $2000 in May 2011. In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI, Strawberry Perl and Perl on a Stick, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl internals, Jouke Visser's pVoice, Chris Dolan on Perl::Critic and many others You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have

Jonathan Leto wrote: This wayward son is still on his treacherous journey to increase "test coverage in src/extend_vtable.c":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/master/t/src/extend_vtable.t. When we last left off our traveler, he explained what the mythical VTABLE beast looked like, and we shall continue with the study of this chimerical fauna. According to the latest code coverage statistics, we are now at "64% code coverage":http://tapir2.ro.vutbr.cz/cover/latest-c_cover/src-extend_vtable-c.html, which is an increase of about 10% since my last report.

I am pleased to announce that Moritz Lenz's Hague Grant for "Structured Error Messages":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/02/hague-grant-application-struct.html has been accepted. Will Coleda has agreed to be the grant manager for this project. We received a lot of positive feedback regarding this grant and we are delighted that we are able to fund this work. If you would like to help fund grants like this or any of our other projects please visit "https://donate.perlfoundation.org":https://donate.perlfoundation.org/.

Countdown... We are into the final week for students to sign up to the Google Summer of Code. The program is accepting submissions from students and mentors until Friday 8th April so now is the time to get involved before it is too late and you suffer from last regrets. What can I do? Students can suggest any topic to work on, but for those wishing to try something new,

The organizers of "YAPC::EU 2011":http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/ recently announced that they are "accepting proposals for talks":http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/news/686 at YAPC::EU 2011. They are also looking for teachers and sponsors. "Click through":http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/news/686 to read all of the details.

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the February period. Spent most of the month fixing many taint issues associated with s///, which I discovered as a side-effect of looking into the \p{$tainted} issue. Over the last month I have averaged 13 hours per week. Over the 50 weeks of the grant I have done 639 hours, averaging 12.8 hours per week. There are

The "YAPC::NA 2011 Call For Speakers":http://www.yapc2011.us/yn2011/call_for_speakers.html will come to a close at 23:59 EST on March 24th 2011. Some talks have already been accepted if you want to "take a look":http://www.yapc2011.us/yn2011/schedule.

"YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC":http://www.yapc2011.us/yn2011/ is still four months away, but that doesn't mean that we can't start planning for 2012. The call for venue is officially open! The TPF Conference Committee will be accepting bids today through May 15th 2011. What is YAPC::NA? YAPC::NA is an annual Perl-focused conference held at various locations throughout North America. The conference is a grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language promoted by

Jonathan Leto wrote: The quest to improve test coverage for src/extend_vtable.c has continued. Some dragons were slayed, a few trolls were paid tolls to cross creaky bridges of abstraction and many siren calls to hack on other code were dutifully ignored This "TPF":http://perlfoundation.org/ grant has forced me to become very familiar with Parrot vtables which is basically an API for talking to Parrot "PMCs":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/master/docs/pdds/pdd17_pmc.pod PMC can stand for Parrot Magic

We have received the following Hague Grant application from Moritz Lenz. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Moritz Lenz Project Title Structured Error Messages: Design and Implementation Synopsis A system for error messages will be designed, and implemented in

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the January period. Tinkered a bit more with overloading and tieing, and worked on the security issues associated with user-defined \p{} properties. Over the last month I have averaged 10 hours per week. Over the 47 weeks of the grant I have done 585 hours, averaging 12.4 hours per week. There are 315 hours left on the

Dear Perl Community, First of all, I would like to say sorry for the late warning. But I forgot to post here the news. As you all know, The Perl Foundation does not have any regular money income, other than donations. Although we have some relevant donations in the last years, the budget that the board assigned to the Grants Committee for this year does not make it possible to

In November, I wrote a progress report about work beginning on the Perl 6 Tablets grant. These tablets aim to offer both an in-depth tutorial and reference for Perl 6 Herbert Breunung, the tablets' author, has done considerable work since then on the overall structure of this documentation as well as describing particular details of the Perl 6 language. The tablets have reached a stage where we welcome feedback from

Jonathan Leto wrote: I have slowly but surely been increasing test coverage of src/extend_vtable.c, which when I started my grant was at 5% and is now sitting at 43%. I estimated that it would take about two weeks to get it to 50% and then another two weeks to get to 95%, but this was a bit optimistic. When I look back, giving myself a month for each would have

Kartik Thakore reported: Cleaner Code and a lot of memory and performance improvements 10 out of 11 chapters completed: The profiling chapter was dropped as there was not enough content to justify a chapter. 3 Extra chapters added. Deviation from a CPAN SDL::Manual release. Due to the nature of the Manual it is being released as a creative commons book instead https://github.com/PerlGameDev/SDL_Manual/blob/master/dist/SDL_Manual.pdf Next Steps: Get the book polished

Kartik Thakore reported: Added content for several chapters: Tetris Chapter: Cleaned up the code Started work on chapter Music and Sound Chapter: Added code and sound data files Finished Chapter Code Profiling Chapter Start work XS Effects Chapter: Explain Inline::C usage with SDL First draft completed Additional Chapter to get art content SDL Supports Inline::XS Preliminary