Perl

Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8 161

Posted by michael from the layered-and-makes-you-cry dept.
zachlipton writes "Perl.com has posted Larry Wall's State of the Onion talk from this year's Open Source Convention and The Perl Conference. Through the use of various screensavers, Wall talks a bit about himself, and of course, Perl and Perl 6."
The Internet

LOAF - Distributed Social Networking Over Email 273

Posted by michael from the do-you-loaf? dept.
FamousLongAgo writes "LOAF (List Of All Friends) is an extension to email that lets you send out address book data without compromising your privacy. LOAF appends a hash-like data structure to each outgoing email, and collects similar attachments from the people who write to you. These files can be queried to see if they contain a given email address, but they can't be reverse-engineered to reveal the list of addresses used to construct them. LOAF lets you check whether someone emailing you for the first time is a complete stranger, or appears in the address books of some of your trusted correspondents. And as a decentralized application, LOAF offers an interesting alternative to current social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster."
Wireless Networking

Wi-Foo: The Secrets of Wireless Hacking 107

Posted by timothy from the in-the-ether dept.
prostoalex writes "Wireless LANs seem to be enjoying the tremendous amount of interest lately, if you judge by the number of book covers and articles written on the topic. It's no wonder that this year the sales of WLAN equipment will grow 20% and generate $2.1 billion - everyone seems to be installing a wireless network in their office, their apartment complex or their own backyard. With extending the network into the radio world one is always extending the opportunities for unwelcome visitors to become part of the network. This book is a hands-on guide on hacking wireless networks followed by the recipes and principles to protect WLANs." Read on for the rest of prostoalex's review of Wi-Foo .
Operating Systems

Cygwin in a Production Environment? 111

Posted by Cliff from the is-it-ready-for-prime-time dept.
not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm working for a company that does all of its programming and script development in a Unix environment (90% of our work is either Bash or Perl scripts that communicate with an Oracle database). We've recently gotten a new customer and for reasons beyond our control, the server must be a Windows box. Since we want to reuse our existing scripts that we've spent a considerable amount of time developing, we're looking into Cygwin as an option. Has anyone run Cygwin in a production server environment for any extended period of time? If so, what were your experiences with it?"
Perl

Parrots, Pythons And Things That Go Splat 43

Posted by timothy from the stage-condom-is-a-slippery-meme dept.
ajs writes "As you may know, there was a contest between Dan Sugalski and Guido van Rossum over the performance of Parrot running Python byte-code, and the loser was to take a pie in the face. Well, in the end it was between Dan and time and Dan lost... he was unable to get the Python bytecode translator to work sufficiently well for the contest (it was fast, but not complete), but when Dan conceded, Guido was gracious enough to decline to throw a pie, what a sport! The Perl community, however, was not quite so gracious (they wanted to see Dan take a pie for the team), and the final event ended up being a benefit for the Perl Foundation. Meanwhile, see Dan's Blog for details on what sorts of Parrot goodness came of this."
Perl

CPAN: $677 Million of Perl 277

Posted by michael from the wooden-nickel dept.
Adam K writes "It had to happen eventually. CPAN has finally gotten the sloccount treatment, and the results are interesting. At 15.4 million lines of code, CPAN is starting to approach the size of the entire Redhat 6.2 distribution mentioned in David Wheeler's original paper. Could this help explain perl's relatively low position in the SourceForge.net language numbers?"
Programming

Komodo 3.0 Released 54

Posted by michael from the tools-of-the-trade dept.
darthcamaro writes "Looks like Komodo 3.0 has been released according to this article on InternetNews.com: If you use Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP and XLST in any combination than you've probably heard of Komodo and if you haven't you should have - it's the only IDE that I know of that handles all of those languages (in one real slick environment too)...and it looks like version 3.0 has also got an updated object browser and a new debugger that I'm looking forward to trying out."
Printer

Comparing New vs Refubished Printers? 40

Posted by Cliff from the getting-your-money's-worth dept.
GraWil asks: "Does anyone have advice on purchasing a color laser printer? I'm trying to decide between getting a new small 'personal' color laser or a used/refurbished workhorse. For the roughly the same money, I can either buy a Xerox 6100 or a refurbished Tektronix 740/750 or even a tabloid sized 790. I've had mixed luck with color HP and Lexmark printers but I'm open to any suggestions at this point. There are a fair number of reviews but none of them ever compare new with the old."
Programming

Favorite Programming Language Features? 312

Posted by Cliff from the obscure-and-useful-programming-idioms dept.
johnnyb asks: "I'm curious what everyone's favorite programming language features are. I'm looking for both the general and the specific. I'm especially looking for features that few people know about or use, but are really useful for those who do know about them. What are your favorite programming language features?"

Searching for the Best Scripting Language 673

Posted by michael from the less-filling!-tastes-great! dept.
prostoalex writes "Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode. sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points they were essentially tied for first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the 'Hello world' examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development."
Programming

Hackers & Painters 112

Posted by timothy from the why-cats-paint dept.
honestpuck writes "Paul Graham has delivered final proof that he is a marvelous essayist with his volume of fairly diverse writings, Hackers & Painters. I first came across his writing with his article, "A Plan For Spam," on using Bayesian filtering to block spam and found it a well written and informative technical article. I next came across him some time later when he wrote an essay on his web site entitled "Hackers & Painters," and once again it was well written, informative and (more importantly for an essayist) thought provoking. I was excited to hear he had published a volume of writing and pleased when O'Reilly sent me a copy, despite my pleas that I did not have time to review it." He found time, to your benefit; read on for honestpuck's review.
Perl

Periodic Table of the Operators 323

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whats-the-atomic-weight-of-a-regex dept.
mAsterdam writes "At his code blog Mark Lentcner writes: "A while back, I saw Larry Wall give a short talk about the current design of Perl 6. At some point he put up a list of all the operators - well over a hundred of them! I had a sudden inspiration, but it took a few months to get around to drawing it..." You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered."
Software

Challenges in Releasing Open Source Software? 24

Posted by Cliff from the determining-the-hurdles dept.
Chris Vaughan asks: "Me and my Co-Workers at the Advanced Computing Research Lab are just about ready to release our first Open Source package on SourceForge.net I ask the Slashdot community what hurdles they had to overcome and how much involvement do they still have in their project years later. Also what types of licensing did you pick and why did it suit your project best? Our project, MyPBS is a PHP/MySQL/Perl frontend accounting package for the Portable Batch System (PBS). Which is used to account for super computing usage. I appreciate any comments you may have."
Software

Weblog System Features Compared 269

Posted by simoniker from the immovable-weblog-object dept.
prostoalex writes "The question of the best weblogging system out there arises quite often, especially after the new licensing scheme introduced by MovableType. Here's a rather detailed breakdown of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11 software packages, 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP and MySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 are licensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD. Mark Pilgrim explains why licensing is suddenly important."
Perl

$20,000 in Perl Contest 44

Posted by Hemos from the more-money dept.
[rvr] writes "Are you a Perl hacker? Do you want a Apple G5 with a 23" screen, a 17" PowerBook, a Thinkpad or iPods? Six Apart, the company behind of Movable Type and TypePad, is running a contest of plug-ins for Movable Type 3.0. The total amount of prizes is $22,000. The deadline is June 18, 2004."
The Almighty Buck

Age Discrimination, Indian-Style 400

Posted by timothy from the tim's-run-approaches dept.
theodp writes "In April, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano told investors Big Blue hopes to dodge an estimated $6 billion in liability stemming from a judge's ruling that IBM violated U.S. federal age discrimination laws. In May, IBM closes on its $150-$200MM purchase of Indian outsourcer Daksh, whose age requirements for job applicants make Logan's Run seem progressive. On its Opportunities page, Daksh states that Customer Care Specialists should be between 21-25 years of age and Team Leaders should be no older than 27. Early Daksh investors included Citigroup and we-don't-need-no-stinking-unions Amazon."
Programming

Alternatives to Autoconf? 108

Posted by Cliff from the dodging-the-complexities dept.
Despairing Developer queries: "Once autoconf was a great way to make widely portable programs. But now when you have to spend more time sorting out incompatibilities between autoconf versions, breaking battles between autoconf compatibility wrappers and configure.in compatibility functions that tries to outsmart each other, and on top of that see the list of dependencies increase (it's not that fun to compile perl on unicos) and performance diving rapidly, what is your escape plan? Is there a drop in replacement for autoconf? Is there something else out there that is as portable as autoconf to use instead?"
GNU is Not Unix

Pike 7.6 Released 67

Posted by timothy from the fighting-words dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today version 7.6 of the Swedish programming language Pike was released. Some of the noteworthy additions are support for the Bittorrent protocol, the OBEX protocol (to communicate with cellular phones), IPv6, PGP and Bz2. If you want to beat the crap out of your Python/Perl program speedwise, try porting it to Pike..."

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