use Perl

A frenzied weekend saw the tutorials get selected. We won't notify everyone until early March, but we're getting started on the confirmations now. Don't panic if you don't hear anything right away--Vee's doing the confirmation stuff while she's on a road trip, so it's not all going out at once.

We also selected five or six talks per track, and the submitters of those will also be contacted. The rest of the talks get selected by Mar 1. I couldn't select just five from Perl--I think I ended up selecting seven. The selections are to populate the brochure with content, and picking only five representative excellent talks was impossible.

It's so weird how each year's conference has a different personality. How I word the CFP or who I beg for talks doesn't seem to affect the final results--it'll be what it'll be, and this year it's gonna rock. I found a beautiful mix of "what you'll need to know now" and "what you'll need to know tomorrow". Thanks to everyone who submitted talks.

As usual, my biggest problem is space. I could darn near fill all of OSCON with Perl tutorials and talks if I wanted to. We've moving the "State of the Onion/Union/..." talks (the topic-specific keynotes by Guido, Larry, Rasmus, etc.) to all be evening events, so we should buy more space in the other tracks that way.

--Nat