Today the Perl Foundation announces the release of Perl 5.10, the first major upgrade to the wildly popular dynamic programming language in over five years. This latest version builds on the successful 5.8.x series by adding powerful new language features and improving the Perl interpreter itself. The Perl development team, called the Perl Porters, has taken features and inspiration from the ambitious Perl 6 project, as well as from chiefly

The Minneapolis Perl Mongers have announced the date of their one-day Perl workshop. Mark your calendars now for Frozen Perl 2008 February 16th, 2008. Frozen Perl will be an all-day workshop held at the University of Minnesota. Pricing has not yet been announced, but I'm sure it will be under $100. If, like me, you found it to be a bit too far to get to the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

After a running the Perl Foundation Grant Committee for almost two years, Ovid has decided he needs to step down. Naturally, this means we need someone to step into this role and we're hoping to get new people into the Perl Foundation. Running the Grant Committee is a very important volunteer position with specific responsibilities. These include: Every three months, putting out a call for grant proposals and organizing

The 2007 White Camel awards for contributions to the Perl community were awarded at OSCON. Norbert E. Grüner, for years of service helping to organize conferences and workshops throughout Europe, as chair of The YAPC::Europe Foundation. Allison Randal, as leader and manager of Perl 6 Parrot, plus her revisions to Perl's Artistic License. Tim O'Reilly, for O'Reilly Media's long-time support of the Perl community, back to to 1997 with the

What sort of programmer uses Perl? Do most Perl programmers use it as a primary language, or just write the occasional script? And are there really as few women as conventional wisdom says? Kirrily Robert wants to know, and wants anyone around the world who uses Perl to help by answering a simple five-minute survey at perlsurvey.org Kirrily's goal is to "take a snapshot of the Perl world as it

For a year or two now, I've hosted the Perl 6 and Parrot wikis on my home server, on a not-too-fast DSL line, at rakudo.org. They've now been moved to the wiki infrastructure at perlfoundation.org, on a dedicated box. This means much better performance, so if you've tried the wikis before and found them slow, check them out now. The moved wiki workspaces are: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/ Perl 6 http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot/ Parrot http://www.perlfoundation.org/hackathon-chicago/

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is a low-cost technical conference held at the University Center on Carnegie Mellon University's Oakland Campus The workshop will be held on October 13–14 2007 You can sign up for the announcement mailing list at Google Groups 06/22/07 Announcing PPW 2007 October 13,14 2007 The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP 2007, a two-day, low-cost

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.13 "Clifton." Parrot parrotcode.org is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages. Parrot 0.4.13 can be obtained via CPAN or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html Parrot 0.4.13 News: Languages: Updated Lisp, Lua, PHP Python ABC, WMLScript, and Tcl Perl 6 passes all of the sanity tests. PGE supports latest Perl 6 grammar syntax.

On Saturday, 16 June 2007, please join us on IRC in #parrot to work on closing out as many RT tickets as possible in the parrot queue https://rt.perl.org/rt3/ This will help us get ready for the next release of parrot: 0.4.13, scheduled for Tuesday 19 June 2007. You'll find C, Parrot assembly, Perl, documentation, and plenty of tasks to go around. Core developers will be available most of the day

It's a new year and time for the White Camel process to begin. The White Camel awards are given each year at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention by The Perl Foundation for community-oriented, rather than technical, contributions to Perl. The list of previous winners goes back to 1999. The nomination process is open to the public, and we welcome your involvement. If there's someone who's served to make Perl better,

Hackszine.com has an article about how to run Perl programs on your Apple TV so that you can have little menu options to look up the weather and whatnot.

James Keenan writes: Toronto Perl Mongers are pleased to announce Hackathon Toronto a one- day, almost-spur-of-the-moment hackathon, to be held Saturday, April 28, 2007. A hackathon is a gathering of free and open source software developers reflecting the joy of collective hacking. Building on the tradition of previous Perl hackathons in Toronto, Chicago and elsewhere, Hackathon Toronto will encourage people to come together for face-to-face work on Perl 5, Perl

From Jesse Vincent and Leon Brocard: We're pleased to announce that we've selected Phil Crow as the recipient of the second Perl 6 microgrant. Phil is the hacker behind the Java::Swing module that allows Perl programmers to put a Java Swing GUI on their application without writing any Java and he'll be using this knowledge to convert Java declarations to Perl 6. You can find details of the project he's

From Jesse Vincent Leon Brocard: We're pleased to announce that we've selected Steve Peters as the recipient of the first Perl 6 microgrant. Steve has been instrumental in helping to ensure that Perl 5 has stayed incredibly portable for the past few years. Steve's starting to turn some of his attention to Parrot. You can find details of the project he's planning in the text of his grant application:

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

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

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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