The Perl Journal February, 2004
ActiveState has announced a Perl Haiku Poetry Contest in two categories: valid Perl programs that adhere to the three-line haiku format, and haikus written in English on the subject of "Why I Love Perl." Though it will be too late by the time you read this to dash off a submission (the deadline for entries was February 8), all the entries will be posted on the ActiveState web site for the enjoyment of the community. Winners will be judged by the ActiveState development team "on the basis of originality, creative imagination, characterization, artistic quality, and adherence to line limits." First place winners in each category will receive licenses for ASPN Perl, including Komodo Professional Edition; second place winners will take "an ActiveState prize package" valued at $50; and third place winners get ActiveState T-shirts. See http://activestate.com/Corporate/PerlHaiku/ for full details.
Sam Tregar has added diff and grep functionality to CPAN. If you go to a distribution page, you will notice an addition to the "Links" section: an entry for "Tools." Clicking the tools link allows you to run diff and grep on the module's source code. "I'd like to thank Graham Barr for allowing me the opportunity to add these features," Tregar wrote on use.perl.org, "and, of course, for creating and maintaining search.cpan.org. CPAN just wouldn't be the same without it!"
The Perl conference schedule for 2004 is starting to fill up. A Dutch Perl Workshop has been announced for March 5 in the Netherlands; the talks will all be in Dutch, which "may help Dutch speaking people to absorb information faster than from books," as organizer Mark Overmeer notes, but "also makes the meeting useless for people who do not understand Dutch." So if http:// workshop.perlpromo.nl/ is Greek to you, then you might want to skip this one.
YAPC North America has issued a call for participation (http://yapc.org/America/cfp.shtml). The conference, which is now in its sixth year, will be held in Buffalo, New York, June 16-18. Standard talks will be 20 minutes, but provisions have also been made for 5-minute lightning talks, as well as long or extra-long talks, and 3-hour tutorials. A display of poster presentations will also be set up in the main hallway.
The German Perl Workshop, scheduled for June 29-July 1 near Stuttgart, is also in its sixth year. The call for papers advises that "the conference language is mainly German, but you can easily present your talk in English if German is not your native tongue." Proposals for short talks of 15 to 20 minutes, long talks of 40 minutes, and half-day tutorials are all welcomed. For more details, see http://www.perlworkshop.de/2004/docs/cfp.html.
Finally, if the whirlwind of Perl activity around the globe leaves your head spinning, Dave Cross' Perl conference list at http://dave .org.uk/perl_conf/ may help to sort it all out.
Nicholas Clark released Perl 5.8.3, "a maintenance release for Perl 5.8, incorporating various minor bugfixes, including eliminating a couple of errors in Perl's UTF8 handling," after a single release candidate. A SCALAR method is now available for tied hashes, and find2perl now assumes -print as a default action. Perl 5.8.4 should be out some time in April; after that, further 5.8.x releases will follow a roughly quarterly schedule.
Quick on the heels of last month's news that the UK consultancy group Fotango is sponsoring Andy Wardley in his work on Version 3 of the Template Toolkit, Fotango has announced that it will also provide a grant to the Perl Foundation to support Abhijit Menon-Sen's work on new profiling tools for Perl. The donation will fund Menon-Sen over the next 10 months while he develops "a generalized instrumentation framework for the Perl programming language."
Fotango hosts a page explaining the company's interest and investment in open-source projects at http://opensource.fotango.com/. "Fotango started life as an Online Photo album and in fact, still operates as one, despite the dot.com crash," the site explains. "In 2001 Canon Europe acquired Fotango, and this made it possible for us to keep our team together and become much more active as a company in the open-source community."