Thanks to Pudge of Slashteam for pointing out that very early version of Parrot has been released. You may recall Parrot from The April Fool's joke - but it's coming to life.

CosmicDreams writes: "Last April fools, I was indeed fooled by a slashdot article that claimed that Python and Perl developers were going to join forces and merge their current development trees into a new computer language called Parrot. It seems as though my foolishness was well placed. Today I came across this story In the article, it talks about the ongoing progress of the language and what plans the developers have for the near future. Now I'm so confused I don't really know if this is for real or not. Does someone know if this is the same Parrot programming language. I don't want to place my foolishness foolheartedly."

dannycarroll asks: "I've not heard this mentioned yet so I'll bite. This weekend (depend on where you live) the Unix system clock hits 1.000.000.000 seconds since the Unix Epoch. I heard about one or two applications that are vulnerable to a date overflow but I am wondering how many more are out there, unknown. It's not the Y2k bug and consequences are far from it, but it seems to me that there has been too little attention paid to this potential problem. As an example, I wonder how many Perl scripts out there use 9 digits for the date-stamp field instead of a delimiter?" I've been hearing about this from several different directions and it took me by surprise. I would think that most programs out there are using time_t or at least 32-bit integers by now if they are storing seconds-since-the-epoch (you would think we actually had learned something from the Y2K chaos). Are there any well known programs that might break because of this?

A reader writes: "A fine application of expensive medical equipment: producing neat desktop pictures by taking an x-ray of the guts of a PowerBook G4. Guy Mullins has the details." The actual photos are on a separate site.

Erik Tjernlund writes: "Oh, where art thou my lovely new programming language? Stop fiddling around with those perl magnets and use a real poetic computer language: The Shakespeare Programming Language. Not a compiler, but it converts to C. Cool 100+ line Hello World example. Amazing what CompSci-students can create when they really should do real work."

murger burger writes: "You have forgotten to report the linux beer wanderung, it has been taking place this week in Bouillon in Belgium. We just did a tour around the villages of Apach, Perl and Borg."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "This two-part article at Wireless NewsFactor examines the risks of malicious code on wireless platforms and what companies can do to combat potential threats. The gist of it is that wireless viruses/worms/trojans are unlikely to spread unchecked, and it digs pretty deep into why that is the case."

ryarger writes "Woo Hoo! After a seeming eternity of wait, there is finally an implementation of stored procedures for MySQL. It uses Perl as the stored proc language, too!" Also note that this piece of work was done by OSDNs own Krow. Very cool work I must say.

Dmitry Dvoinikov writes: "I'm very excited about the web scripting language I had to learn and use with the company I currently work for. It's absolutely unknown to public, used in may be dozen of places around the world. But it's so great, I thought it deserves more publicity. So, here is the introductory article about the BOA web scripting engine. And here is its homepage if you are interested." If you know any PHP or perl, the small "hello webreaders" comparison is interesting (and Yes, favors Boa;) ).

Last week you asked Bradley Kuhn, VP of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) questions about working with RMS, his views on software freedom, and much more. He's answered at length below, on everything from becoming a saint to the "web app loophole," perl, and the next iteration of the GPL.

Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "Check this out for sheer genius...This guy has posted to Perl Monks a script that uses the Perl Eliza module to respond to spam. Check it and contribute your suggestions for improved vocabulary." The downside of course is that spammers never set their reply correctly (which I think is forgery, and should be treated as such) so this is probably more academic then useful, but its definitely funny.

ShoeHorn writes: "Here is a good article (1st of a 4 part series), that introduces you to the Ruby language. If you are currently a programmer coming from the likes of C++, Perl, or Python, you will see some strong similarities (especially to Python)."

O'Reilly has put up an interesting interview with Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, the guys behind the llama book (Learning Perl). In addition to all the perl stuff, Randal gives his take on Smalltalk, Ruby, and Python. And (not surprisingly) they plug the newest edition of the book.

Björn Schotte writes: "All sessions including abstracts were published today on php-conference.de. Also, online registration is now possible on the signup page. There are more than 60 sessions plus power workshops on the pre-conference day, plus an extra so-called Open Source room where Open Source PHP projects can present themselves for free. Also, a Q&A panel with nearly all members of the PHP Core Group will be organized where you can ask them about things like "What about the future of PHP?" / "Will there be an engine for PHP/Perl/Python together?" etc."

saihung writes: "I pitched a Linux-based file and print queue server to a department at a local university, and they accepted with one caveat: that I also implement print quotas and accounting. The accounting isn't really a big deal, but I've looked high and low and found nothing even approaching comprehensive quota support. Does anyone know of a print quota system for *nix that doesn't amount to "here's a few perl scripts that don't work"?" There are several printing systems under development, but I don't have any idea which would be the easiest to implement a print quota system. Anyone?

Tim O'Reilly writes "Brian Jepson, a long-time perl hacker who's been working with Microsoft on some of O'Reilly's books about .Net, and with Miguel on mono, rebuts Petreley's warnings about mono."

So, we've gotten a lot of submissions about various things related to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Michael Tiemann had a few words before the convention; Dan Gillmor wrote a column about it; Fred Baker made a few flameworthy remarks. For whatever reason the whole conference seemed to be dominated by the Mundie-Tiemann debate. See our earlier story for some good links, or watch the debate video, or just read some post-debate coverage here or here. And if you haven't heard enough from Mundie, you can even read his post-debate letter.

David Mentré writes: "The ICFP 2001 programming contest TASK is now available. The objective is to write an optimizer (aka compressor) for an HTML-like language. It must work for arbitrarily big inputs and in a limited wall-clock time. Can you guess what will be the winning language? ;)" We already announced the contest, but now that the task is available, it might be fun to look at. So what will the contestants come up with? Anyone think perl might be the language of choice? :)

Anonymous Coward writes "I'm sure I'm not the first to report this, but Perl.com put up a synopsis of Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl. "

Craig Maloney contributed this review of the Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0, which he calls "the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there." Like others in the same series, this package from O'Reilly assembles several related titles onto a single, searchable disk to save endless page-thumbing, but not without a few glitches.