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The deadline to submit Hackathon proposals for this year's YAPC Europe in Vienna is just around the corner. Please do not forget to submit your proposals by Sunday, 13th May 2007.

The Call for Papers deadline is less than 3 weeks away from today.

The theme for this year's conference is "Social Perl", which we hope will inspire submissions for this and related topics. If Perl has helped you or your company to get people together, or if you can report how Perl is "social" to other programming languages, or how Perl may profit from inspirations from other languages, we'd like to hear about it. Although this is our main topic for the conference, it will not be the only one, and as such we will also be accepting talks on just about any theme.

Types of talks include 20 or 40 minutes talks, 60-90 minute tutorials, or 3 hour Hack-a-thons, BOFs or Workshops. There are still some slots free!

Hope to see you in Vienna, on behalf of Vienna.pm

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 May 2007. Larry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

The current Perl QA wiki has been attracting a lot of spam recently - and we seem to have lost contact with Tyler MacDonald who as far as I know is the only person with admin access to it.

So I've moved all the content to perl-qa.hexten.net and set it up so that only registered users may edit. It's a shame to have to restrict access in that way; certainly we'll get fewer drive-by contributions as a result. On balance it's better than the message that a spam-riddled quality (quality!) wiki sends I think.

Please update bookmarks / links accordingly.

Graphcomp announces a new Perl OpenGL developer site, featuring news, documentation, tutorials, a nascent 3D gallery, and the latest binary/source distributions. In the months to come, we will be adding a forum, posting tips&tricks and increasing our list of POGL-based apps, tools and online services. We invite all OpenGL developers (whether you actively use Perl or not) to participate - we welcome suggestions for new POGL features and applications, source code contributions, and cross-language benchmarks. If you are currently using POGL, send us your screencaps and videos!

The London Perl Mongers, together with BBC Backstage have organised a one-day Perl Teach-In day to be held at the BBC Broadcast Centre on Saturday 2nd June.

You can get more details (and can sign up) at http://london.pm.org/teach-in/.

I'll be running the training, so I'll be happy to answer any questions, but note that this is _not_ a course for beginners. You'll need to already understand things like references and writing modules in order for the course to be worthwhile.

Update: Registration is now closed. We sold out in 48 hours. I guess it's true what they say - Perl really is dead :-)

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 02 May 2007. Larry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

The Nordic Perl Workshop wiki is collecting the media for its talks . I've already upload my slides for Learning Perl 6 and Why you shouldn't benchmark Perl (lightning talk edition), along with rough cuts of audio for each. They'll be on Perlcast soon :)

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 25 April 2007. Larry, Allison, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

brian_d_foy writes "It's time to nominate recipients for the White Camel award, which recognizes non-technical achievement in Perl. Coding is easy, but the people who make the hard slog to support the community and the continued usefulness of Perl are rare and valuable, just like white camels.

I invented the White Camel Award in 1999 as a part of Perl Mongers, and it's now handled by The Perl Foundation. To submit a name (and the reason for the award), send email to whitecamel-suggestions@perl.org . The deadline is May 31, and TPF will present the awards at OSCON."

yumpy writes "Tim Maher will be giving a talk called Harnessing the Power of Perl's One-Liners on April 28 and 29 at the LinuxFest Northwest conference in Bellingham WA (near Vancouver CA), and also selling autographed copies of his Minimal Perl book in the exhibit hall. The other Perl related talk is Allison Randal's Parrot: a VM for Dynamic Languages. LinuxFest NW is always a fun event with lots of interesting talks, people, and products—and it's free to boot—so those who can are encouraged to attend."

YAPC::Asia 2007 (4/4-5 in Tokyo, Japan) was again a huge success: lots of attendees (approx. 450) and interesting talks. Even if you didn't make it, you can enjoy the conference online now that Video and Audio recordings are available.

All video files are now uploaded on Google Video so you can browse all the talks with Flash player or download as DivX or MP4 movie file. They are also integrated in YAPC::Asia 2007 Sessions detail pages using Google Video embed Flash player.

For people going mobile, Podcast feed (mp3 audio) and Videocast feed (iPod/PSP ready mp4 video) files are both available.

Enjoy!

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"The current pugs implementation is just translating to the old form underneath, so it's not surprising it's a bit off. That's the sort of thing that happens when the language designer gives the language implementor whiplash. However, I rather suspect the interpersonal metaphorical meaning was lost on the physicist/comic who decided that the 3rd derivative of position should be called 'jerk'. :)"

-- Larry Wall, in 'What should file test operators return?'

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"developers shouldn't live in fear of $^O"

-- Jerry Gay, in 'Use of English pragma'

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"I don't think that it's possible to make this non-conformity a fatal heresy :-(
(gcc --spanish-inquisition)"

-- Nicholas Clark in '[perl #42110] [PATCH] Returning values from void functions'

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 18 April 2007. Larry, Damian, Allison, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

fglock writes " Here's my report on the 4 days of the YAPC-SA-2007 Hackathon, from April 12 to 15, 2007, in Porto Alegre, Brazil (during fisl8.0).

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

This week saw the introduction of the Perl 6 Microgrants. Read more about them in 'Perl 6 Microgrants. Now accepting proposals.'

mdiep writes "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.11 "Tax Bird." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 11 April 2007. Larry, Damian, Allison, Patrick, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

kid51 writes "Toronto Perlmongers are pleased to announce Hackathon Toronto, a one-day, almost-spur-of-the-moment hackathon, to be held Saturday, April 28, 2007.

A hackathon is a gathering of free and open source software developers reflecting the joy of collective hacking. Building on the tradition of previous Perl hackathons in Toronto, Chicago and elsewhere, Hackathon Toronto will encourage people to come together for face-to-face work on Perl 5, Perl 6, CPAN modules, Parrot, Pugs and ... you name it!

A hackathon wiki has been established. Go there to learn details as to participation, location, transportation, projects, logistics, etc. As we get closer to the hackathon date, log on to #hackathon on irc.perl.org."