howardjp writes: "The Perl Mongers have announced that they are starting a new magazine called The Perl Review (not to be confused with the literary journal Pearl). Its first issue was published on 1 February in PDF-only format, but the article 'Extreme Publishing' describes the process by which they plan to expand. With The Perl Journal's future still somewhat in doubt, this is welcome news."

babbage writes:"As the banner above the title of James Tisdall's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics indicates, this book is 'an introduction to Perl for biologists.' What the banner doesn't mention is that it's also an introduction to biology and bioinformatics for Perl programmers, and it's also an introduction to both Perl *and* biology for people that have never really been exposed to either field. The author has clearly thought a lot about making one book to please these different audiences, and he has pulled it off nicely, in a way that manages to explain basic topics to people learning about each field for the first time while not coming off as condescending or slow-paced to those that might already have some exposure to it." Read on for the rest of his review.

paulywog writes: "It hasn't been posted to the YAPC website yet, but the announcement was on usePerl this weekend. The site for the YAPC 2002 will be my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis. Goofy name for a school in eastern Missouri, I know, but it's a great place for conferences. ... So, if you're in the St. Louis area and are a PERL fanatic, watch for upcoming information on yapc.org or the St. Louis Perl Monger's site." See also the Yet Another Society site.

WrinkledShirt contributed this review of a Professional Linux Programming, a tome he says can "bend light" by its sheer size -- 1155 pages of multi-author, multi-language instruction and examples. Read on for his thoughts on the book's shortcomings as well as its strengths, and remember, lift with your knees, not with your back.

Dante wrote in to say "I just read this on the Linux Kernel mailing list, it's from Peter Anvin, one of the ftp.kernel.org maintainers...

Frank writes: "This series of articles on developerWorks comprises a complete guide to better programming in Perl. In this fourth installment, Teodor introduces functional programming and several essential Perl idioms important for Perl programmers looking for speed and elegance in their code, such as the map() and grep() functions, and the Schwartzian and Guttman-Rosler transforms."

chromatic writes: "Larry Wall's latest explanation of Perl 6 features, Apocalypse 4 has been posted on Perl.com. That means Damian Conway's explanatory Exegesis can't be far behind. Looks like some nice simplifications this time around."

red5 writes: "Newsforge has a report of a new "iMac-like" internet computer from the good people over at OEone. On an interesting note it uses Mozilla as its GUI. Read the article for all the details." Another submitter sent in an interview with the company.

fxn points to this "article from Dr. Dobbs's Jounal on the recent Lightweight Languages Workshop, held at MIT's AI Lab." This is a nice followup to Simon Cozen's report on the conference, posted here in November.

Pogie asks: "At my office, we've got what one could only describe as a huge Network attached storage infrastructure. We're talking multiple terabytes of applications, user trees, data files, sybase and oracle databses, etc. 'In the beginning' it was a concious decision to create a shared NFS infrastructure using NetApp Filers (I humbly recommend them over SAN solutions any day...flame on!), but our data center has grown so large, and there are so many interdependencies that we're becoming concerned that if the wrong filer goes down, our production network would be, to say the least, hosed." To combat this problem, Pogie wants to implement his filesystem in a relational database...Oracle to be precise. Read on for his reasoning.

BorrisYeltsin writes: "A couple of updates for Parrot are in a recent This Week on Perl 6, most imporantly Parrot 0.03 is out! Get it here , the release notes are here. Also Adam Turoff has got together the Parrot FAQ version 0.2 which addresses some of the more common questions about Parrot and Perl 6."

A reader writes "This NewsFactor Network article says scientists have discovered a genetic "missing link" that helps to explain how primordial pond scum evolved into the land plants that now cover the Earth. Their conclusion: A type of green algae is the closest living relative of the first land plants."

It's not a contradiction: Free software costs money. (That's because server space, bandwidth, coffee, electricity, computers, and workspace all cost money.) Besides which, the time it takes to code new window managers, programming libraries (and languages), web browsers, and all the other goodies which make a modern computer useful may be spent as a labor of love, but it's time that competes with real-world jobs, family time, vacations in the Riviera and sleep. Besides the relative few who work at work on their Free software projects, the programmers, project managers, web-site maintainers, documentation jockeys and QA volunteers behind the programs we enjoy every day don't seem to be in it for the money, so much as the thrill of releasing new software, a desire to make their own world a little better, and for plain old fun. The staffers and volunteers who put long hours and dedication into organizations trying to safeguard online freedoms are also obviously interested in rewards that go way beyond salaries. This New Year's, consider giving them a little money anyhow. Here are a few ideas; you're invited to point out projects and organizations that I've left out.

An Anonymous Coward's idle musings inspires this query: "Web-based applications are a hot topic, right now, but sometimes HTML is too simple for your applications. Using a cross-plataform, more powerful and efficient UI like Mozilla's XUL would be great." XUL is more an interface description language rather than an application language, as it still uses Javascript to handle application processing. It would be interesting to see if future browsers (or future versions of existing browsers) would add XUL bindings for other languages like PHP, Perl, or even Visual Basic if such a thing interests you.

merlyn writes "The Oregon Supreme Court declined to hear my case, leaving standing the unfavorable decision of the Oregon Appeals Court as the final authority on this eight-year-long case, well known to many sysadmin and Perl hacker alike. Details at my fors-announce posting." If you're not sure what that means, you probably want to read at least this site which offers a straightforwardly partisan look at the complicated case of Intel vs. Schwartz as well as Schwartz's own page; it's a strange world where programmers and sysadmins can be convicted for seemingly innocent activities.

chizor asks: "My programming team is considering making some sweeping changes to our code base (150+ perl CGIs, over a meg of code) in the interest of consistency and reducing redundancy. We're going to have to make some hard decisions about code style. What suggestions might readers have about tackling a large-scale retrofit?" Once the decision has been made for a sweeping rewrite of a project, what can you do to make sure things go smoothly and you don't run into any development snags...especially as things progress in the development cycle?

Puppet Master writes: "Just remembered that Perl was created on this day (12/18) in 1987 by Larry Wall..." Check out the Time Line and the discussion on use.perl.org and I'll take this chance as a reminder to donate to the Damian Conway/Dan Sugalski slavery fund.

Kellym writes "The desktop metaphor is under attack these days. Usability experts and computer scientists like Don Norman, David Gelernter and George Robertson have declared the metaphor "dead." The complexities blamed on the desktop metaphor are not the fault of the metaphor itself, but of its implementation in mainstream systems. The default hard disk icon is part of the desktop metaphor. And the icon is the cause of the complexity created by the desktop"

en4ca asks: "We have recently started using Exchange 2000 on a W2k platform with Active Directory at work. Previously, we used a mailsystem that could be easily controlled by command-line paramaters (and hence by perl). What I wanted to ask was, has anyone used perl to automate boring, mundane tasks in Exchange like mass creating mailboxes? What did you use to do this? [code would be very much appreciated] I've tried using Win32::OLE, but havn't had much success"

Kurt writes "Yet Another Society, through its newly formed Perl Foundation, is launching yet another fund drive to help support the Perl community. This year we will be supporting Damian Conway and Dan Sugalski. Damian will continue to work on a variety of Perl 5 modules and the design of Perl 6. Dan will continue his work on the implementation of Perl 6. More details are available at the Perl Foundation web site. Contributions are tax deductible, so donate today!" Many people will remember when we did this last year. I think it's been a roaring success. So go donate!