The State of the Onion
Note: All comments in square brackets are X screensavers that I ran for my slides. If you want to play along at home, start up xscreensaver-demo and click on the screensaver named. By the way, for any screensaver that…
Giving Lightning Talks
After the keynotes, the most popular sessions at most Perl conferences tend to be the lightning talks. Each session consists of about 10 to 15 lightning talks — talks typically lasting individually no more than five minutes — back…
Read it
Return of Quiz of the Week
Recently, Perl trainer and former perl.com editor Mark-Jason Dominus revived his Quiz of the Week mailing list; every week, subscribers are sent a Perl task of either “regular” or “expert” level. There are no prizes, but the submitted solutions are…
Read it
An Interview with Allison Randal
This week, perl.com has the pleasure of interviewing Allison Randal, one of the key figures in the Perl community. Allison has been active in the Perl 6 design process since its inception, and is the President of the Perl…
Read it
The State of Perl
A colleague of mine recently asked me about Perl’s future. Specifically, he wondered if we have any tricks up our sleeves to compete against today’s two most popular platforms: .NET and Java. Without a second’s hesitation, I repeated the…
Read it
How Perl Powers the Squeezebox
Slim Devices made their name in 2001 with the SLIMP3, a networked MP3 and Internet radio player. The SLIMP3 won a five-out-of-five mouse rating in Macworld magazine, and was featured in GQ magazine and on TechTV’s The Screen Savers….
Read it
Open Guides
First, a disclaimer. I’m not a wiki celebrity. I don’t look good in StudlyCaps. I’m not part of the wiki culture — I’ve never contributed to Ward’s Wiki, never used TWiki, am baffled by MoinMoin, and every time I…
Read it
Using Perl to Enable the Disabled
We use Perl for all kinds of things. Web development, data munging, system administration, even bioinformatics; most of us have used Perl for one of these situations. A few people use Perl for building end-user applications with graphical user…
Read it
State of the Onion 2003
This is the 7th annual State of the Perl Onion speech, wherein I tell you how Perl is doing. Perl is doing fine, thank you. Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to spend the rest of…
Read it
2003 Perl Conferences
The season of Perl conferences is almost upon us! In fact, the first of the YAPCs for this year is in less than a week. So I thought this would be a good time to give a tour of…
Read it
What's new in Perl 5.8.0
It’s been nearly six months since the release of Perl 5.8.0, but many people still haven’t upgraded to it. We’ll take a look at some of the new features it provides and describe why you should investigate them yourself….
Read it
How Perl Powers Christmas
You know, it’s not easy having the happiness of billions of children around the world resting with your organization, and it’s even harder on the IT department. The incorporated elves and pixiefolk of the North Pole, under the direction…
Read it
Lightweight Languages
What happens if you get a bunch of academic computer scientists and implementors of languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Curl, and lock them into a room for a day? Bringing together the academic and commercial sides of…
Read it
This Week on p5p 2001/10/21
This fortnight on perl5-porters (08-21 October 2001) Notes This Week on P5P 5.8.0 TODO POD Testing ${^TAINT} AUTOLOAD and packages B::Parrot Miscellaneous Please send corrections and additions to perl-thisweek-YYYYMM@simon-cozens.org where YYYYMM is…
Read it
This Week on p5p 2001/10/07
Notes This Week on P5P chromatic Call for PerlIO bugs Attributes are broken Multiple FETCHes Code cleanups Various Please send corrections and additions to perl-thisweek-YYYYMM@simon-cozens.org where YYYYMM is the current year and month. Changes…
Read it
This Week on p5p 2001/09/03
Notes This Week on P5P Testing, testing Coderef-in-@INC Default random seed local chdir() File::Spec Smoking! Various Please send corrections and additions to perl-thisweek-YYYYMM@simon-cozens.org where YYYYMM is the current year and month. Changes and…
Read it
Perl Helps The Disabled
As part of Mark-Jason Dominus’s Lightning Talks at the 2001 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Jon Bjornstad gave a talk about a Perl/Tk program he wrote to help a mute quadriplegic friend, Sue Simpson, speak and better use her computer. Jon’s…
Read it
This Week on p5p 2001/08/27
Notes This Week on P5P $] and v-strings Callbacks in the core CvMETHOD and ->can() Coderefs in @INC (again) Malloc Madness Various Please send corrections and additions to perl-thisweek-YYYYMM@simon-cozens.org where YYYYMM is the…
Read it
This Week on p5p 2001/08/15
Notes This Week on P5P POD Specification Unicode Normalisation Threading Semantics perlmodstyle Shrinking down the Perl install Various Please send corrections and additions to perl-thisweek-YYYYMM@simon-cozens.org where YYYYMM is the current year and month….
