use Perl

Enjoy!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7561943.stm

Following the Perl 5.10 release, I've now updated http://perldoc.perl.org with the Perl 5.10.0 documentation.

The Perl 5.8.8 documentation is still available though, at http://perldoc.perl.org/5.8.8.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dayintech_1218

And, as Barbie pointed out, it's very kind of Wired to even name check the software that ran the conference website and currently runs the Birmingham.pm website too ... Labyrinth :)

(*) If you don't recognise it, it's the Birmingham Perl Mongers T-shirt we gave out to attendees at YAPC::Europe 2006 :-)

I've finally got pod2pdf (used to create the PDF files on perldoc.perl.org) updated for compatibility with the latest version of PDF::API2, and packaged up into a proper CPAN release.

It is available from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/pod2pdf or http://search.cpan.org/dist/pod2pdf.

I've put together a set of scripts to dynamically apply Perl syntax highlighting to code examples on web pages.

It uses Perl::Tidy to perform the highlighting, and the OpenThought Ajax library to run the requests asynchronously so that initial page load times will not be affected by the extra processing.

Files and examples are available from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/syntaxhighlighting.

As part of the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour, I recently gave my "Excel on the Command Line" talk to the Gloucester Linux User Group.

A few days later I received an email from one of the attendees who'd tried out the accompanying software, XLSperl (which lets you use Perl one-liners to process Microsoft Excel files), with a few suggestions.

So, after a few train journeys spent hacking code I've released a new version which has the following improvements:

• The %F and @F variables (in autosplit mode) are tied, so modifying $F{A} also changes $F[0]
• You can now create Excel files from XLSperl, using the new "XLSprint" command
• XLSperl can now process plain text as well as Excel files (for easy conversion of text data into XLS format)

Source code and binaries for Linux x86, Windows, and Mac OS X (Intel) can be downloaded from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/xlstools.

And coincidentally they sold Perl beer!

Which was not bad at all ;-)

Issue 67 (November 2006, out now) of UK magazine Linux User and Developer is featuring a 4-page review of the YAPC::Europe 2006 conference - "Code, Curry, and Community".

There's plenty of photos as well, including Larry Wall, Brian McCauley (nobull), Simon Cozens, Jonathan Stowe (gellyfish), Steve Pitchford (lilstevey), Karen & Marty Pauley, and many others at the Conference Dinner - so if you attended, you may well see yourself in the magazine!

Cheers,

JJ
http://perl.jonallen.info