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!

This year YAPC::Brasil will be held April 19-22, 2006 in Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil in conjunction with the 7th International Free Software Forum From what I've heard, FISL

I have just received the first report for Nicholas Clark's grant. So far, things are going rather well. Read on to see what Nicholas has done. I've completed the planned typeglob structure shrinking. This turned out to be somewhat more complex than I expected. Specifically: Discovered that PVGVs use magic to perform stringification. Removed this need for magic, saving 24 bytes. Discovered that pads use PVGVs for storing C variable

One of the grants the grant committee approved last year was to extend PPI towards a refactoring editor. At that time, we didn't have procedures in place to take the grant reports and post them to a common spot. Now that we have this blog, our intention is to post these reports regularly so you can see the bang you're getting for your buck. What follows is Adam Kennedy's report

In Toronto last year, there was a pre-YAPC hack-a-thon that brought together many of the Perl 6 coders in person, which can be very productive. TPF provided $600 US to cover costs, and as you can tell by the amount, the group worked as low-budget as possible. Right now, the week before OSDC Israel they are

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

Below is the bid submitted by the Boston group. NAME SYNOPSIS CRITERIA Estimated Costs Site 1: University of Massachusetts: Boston Campus Site 2: Simmons College Site 3: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Readily Accessible Location Public Transportation Facilities UMass Boston Simmons MIT Internet Access from Conference Location Internet Access from Accomodations New Location Affordable

The Perl Foundation was established in December 2001, but is a mystery to many people. Today we announce The Perl Foundation Blog at blog.perlfoundation.org Atom and RSS Perl Foundation News is the place to read updates on what members of the Foundation's working groups are working on and for other project-related announcements. Where before a working group member might post an update to his use.perl journal, or a meditation on

Most folks probably aren't aware of this, but Stichting NLnet is sponsoring quite a bit of Parrot's development. We report to them every two months about the state of Parrot so they can feel comfortable with how it's going. Unfortunately, I had too much on my plate to be the grant manager for Parrot and Dave Rolsky volunteered to step in and help out. He now communicates the Parrot development

As many folks know, the Perl Foundation Grant Committee is responsible for awarding and managing grants to improve the Perl language and benefit the Perl community. What many don't know is how this works. First, I'm Curtis "Ovid" Poe. You may have encountered me on Perlmonks or used some of my CPAN modules I currently sit on the Perl Foundation steering committee and I'm the grant secretary for the grant

I was previously posting TPF conferences-related information to my personal blog on use.perl.org. Now we have this excellent TPF blog for TPF info, so I'll be posting here. As I said in a previous post all of the bids this year were quite good. To give a little more transparency into the voting process, you can see the anonymous vote breakdowns below: Boston Chicago Vancouver 2840 2980 2690

Disclaimer This might be the first news.perlfoundation.org blog posting entered. It's not the "inaugural announcement", though. Andy Lester, the TPF SC PR guy, is crafting that now and a link to it will be posted to all the usual locations when it's ready. What this is all about This blog is hosted at The Perl Foundation. We hope to open up more communication with the Perl community by talking, mostly