Post-Its from BarCampPortland

May 05 2008

(Cross-posted from perlbuzz.com) Selena Deckelmann has come back from BarCampPortland with copies of every Post-It on the topic selection board. The topic selection board at an unconference like a BarCamp is where people write on a Post-It a topic they'd like to... read more

Perl 5.10 now available

December 20 2007

This is a copy of the official announcement about Perl 5.10. 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… read more

Perl gratitude, 2007

November 22 2007

Here in the US, it’s Thanksgiving, a day of eating lots of food, watching football, and sometimes, just sometimes, expressing gratitude and giving thanks for those things that make life wonderful. Here are the things I’m grateful for in late 2007, in no particular order after the first. Google Code Google’s project… read more

Perl's taint mode to the rescue

November 17 2006

I read today in the November 15th issue of Software Development Times (an actual paper publication!) 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 (16.0%), SQL injection (12.9%) and… read more

Announcing the Chicago Perl Hackathon, Nov 10-12, 2006

August 28 2006

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… read more

More on the effects of open sourcing a closed product

July 24 2006

I’ve been spending the last few months driving the technical side of preparing Socialtext Open, the open source version of Socialtext’s core wiki product. I’ve been working with other Socialtext developers to get a huge codebase that only needed to be tended by internal developers into a form that can… read more

Calling for Parrot janitors

July 02 2006

I’ve put on my overalls and rubber gloves to help Perl 6. I’m the chief Parrot Cage Cleaner, and I’d like you to join me in helping to keep this crucial bird healthy. Parrot is the virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot… read more

How to spread knowledge: Just start talking

June 07 2006

Not everyone has the time to write a book or a blog, or speak at conferences, but you can still help spread what you know. Just start talking. Last night’s Chicago Perl Mongers meeting was a good one. We had a bunch of new folks show up, and we had… read more

Theory X doesn't work with telecommuters

May 08 2006

Thomas Wailgum’s article, “Out of sight, out of control,” in the May 1 issue of CIO magazine was an excellent illustration of why telecommuting can be a dismal failure. Wailgum imagines scenarios like a remote colleague who “seems distracted” on a phone call, presumably by texting on her BlackBerry, and… read more