use Perl

The Third Italian Perl Workshop is confirmed and being worked on. You'll see updates in my journal, in newsgroups (at least it.comp.lang.perl), and on the #nordest.pm IRC channel on slashnet.

I was writing an email at work one day, but got to thinking – is this too wordy? I finally remembered that prose readability is often measured with something called a "fog index" (how foggy is your writing?)

For 2006 Q1, only one grant was approved, but it's fantastic. Nick Clark is going to spend some time fixing some long-standing issues with Perl 5. Thanks Nick!

Some issues which will be resolved:

• Fix bugs affecting Unicode handling, Class::DBI, Tk and PAR.
• Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl.
• Support source filters as part of code references in @INC
• Complete lexical pragmas, a milestone on the way to 5.10
• Further memory saving for 5.10 - previous work saved >33% for hashes and arrays
• Merge Larry's p5-p6 work into core, which will allow others to start contributing to it.

See the Perl Foundation blog for more information.

ActiveState writes "ActiveState, the leading provider of tools and services for dynamic languages, announced yesterday that it has been acquired by ActiveState Software Inc., a new company jointly owned by the employees of ActiveState and Pender Financial Group Corporation, an investment company focused on technology and healthcare. All of ActiveState's business, assets, and liabilities were acquired from Sophos, Inc., a subsidiary of Sophos Plc., for the purchase price of US$2,250,000."

YAPC::Asia 2006 Sessions are out. Details of some talks are only available in Japanese yet. We'll announce the finalized timetable and authors' bio some time in the beginning of March. Tickets for YAPC::Asia have been selling really well, and getting close to the state of SOLD OUT. Register now if you're interested.

We have one week until OSDC. Today I went to pickup Larry from the airport. Audrey, Balas and Gaal came from Tel Aviv and then together we went to Jerusalem. Audrey and Gaal were sitting in the back seat of the car with an open notebook and hacking Pugs. Larry - as much as one can do anything after 18 hours flight - was trying to divide his attention between the conversation back there and the view. I also have pictures from the dinner with Larry Wall in Jerusalem.

brian_d_foy writes "The San Francisco Perl Mongers will hold a demonstration of several Perl IDE's on Tuesday, February 28, 2006: Matisse Enzer's Two Alpha blog has the details. The demo will include Emacs with perlnow.el; EPIC/Eclipse; and ActiveState's Komodo."

There's a new feature in Slash: promotion of journals to story. When you post your journal, you should now see a checkbox to "Submit" your journal entry as a story. If you click that, then your journal entry will end up as a submission for the editors to post, or not.

larsh writes "Just a quick note to inform people that the deadline for submissions of talks to the Nordic Perl Workshop 2006 is approaching. The workshop will be held in Oslo, Norway, on the 15th and 16th of June, 2006. The main topic of this year's workshop is "Managing Complexity." The deadline for talk submissions has been set to March 1st. For further information, please visit our homepage."