chromatic writes "On the heels of Larry's most recent revelation, the mad scientist of Perl (Damian Conway) has followed up with Exegesis 3. His article gives working Perl 6 code examples of Larry's design decisions." Lots of good stuff in here.

andy@petdance.com asks: "Any programmer who's used an online programming resource or community has had the frustration of answering programming questions for non-programmers. This is especially true with web-centric technologies like Perl and PHP. I've always wondered where to point these newest of the new, and O'Reilly's latest Ask Tim article addresses this. Unfortunately, Tim suggests picking up an ORA book on ActionScript, which seems a bit too specific. Are there any good introductions to the concepts of programming? And is any such book necessarily tied to a language?"

mccormi writes "The Perl Journal is back. It's been rolled into Sys Admin Magazine as a quarterly supplement for the print publication. On the web side, the archive articles are all up now here. See articles from Vol 1 Issue 1 on regex by Tom Christiansen and cgi programming by Lincoln Stein" I'll take it any way I can get it. TPJ was one of just 5 publications I subscribe to (and 2 of them are comic books so I don't think that counts ;)

rob_99 writes: "The third installment of the Apocalypse is out!" You may have missed the first or second Apocalypses. This one is roughly "all about operators".

Slashback tonight with more on poseable Python figures (sorry Guido, the other Python -- your turn will come), Brian K. West (sigh), preserving transient websites for historical purposes, and giving away Free software.

shelflife writes: "ST5, according to NASA, will usher in a new era of small, smart spacecraft. Why send a human into space when you can send a computer? And why send something almost as heavy as a UNIVAC if a laptop will do? Compact nanosatellites will have everything you'd want in a full-size, luxury satellite. They will have the attitudinal and navigational capabilities needed to maintain proper orbits, and they will be capable of complex, high-bandwidth communications functions."

Sheik Yerboutii asks: "The recent downtime caused by the Code Red and NIMDA worms has prompted my Manager to start considering moving away from IIS to Apache. I've been tasked with finding out just how difficult it will be to move to the new webserver. I've got to find out things like how to install and configure it (relatively easy, it's all documented at www.apache.org) but also, things like what do we de now that we've been working in VBScript ASP for about 6 moths?" We posted a similar question to this one, just over a year ago. Any changes or additions to the advice given in that discussion?

Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for conducting this interview with [Miguel De Icaza], and sending it on to me. I've posted the interview below here - interesting answers, and very thorough. Well done, Dare.

Garfycx asks: "Hi everybody! This week Slashdot linked to a story about Java and its roll over C/C++. While reading it I remembered one of the first strategies to make Java a de-facto standard - the browser-applet. as far as I know it did not make it, and I don't see many of them in cyberspace. But in combination with servlets they may come up again. I am not quite sure who is in need of applets but I wondered why there never was a browser-plugin for languages like Python or Perl. I would like to hear about reasons why there is no effort to expand the capabilities of websites with language-plugins. Couldn't there be a universal CORBA-like plugin for Mozilla to be used by most languages or such?"

er0ck asks: "My first job out of college was working for an Internet Startup. They gave me some books and told me to learn Perl. Our office was a refurbished factory, with lots of light and open space. Best of all, we could bring our nerf toys in to work (and use them!). Four months later, the company went under. Several dot bomb jobs later, I work for my state government. Is anyone still having fun at their tech job?" I think that with the economic downturn, more companies are concentrating on survival more than being "fun". Are there any "fun" tech jobs left, or have they all suffered from the Economic Darwinism of the early 21st century?

Reader Bob Johnson wrote this detailed review of Hacking Exposed followup Hacking Linux Exposed -- especially in light of the various color-coded Windows viruses still on the loose, this might be a good present for your your local Windows administrator as well, but both Bob and the authors are clear: GNU/Linux systems may be more resistant, but are not immune to cracking.

Russ Nelson writes "OSI has approved four new Open Source licenses. The X.Net is BSD with jurisdiction specified (note that RMS says that the GPL is not compatible with such licenses,) the New Artistic, currently that used by Perl (one paragraph added), the Sun Public License is Mozilla 1.1 with minor differences, and the Eiffel Forum License. We also modified the rationale for Open Source Definition clause 9 to remove the word "contaminate" referring to the action of the GPL."

nealbutler writes: "This is up on perl.com, and I suppose a lot of people have seen it, but I think it's cool enough to warrant an article! wxWindows, the free C++ Crossplatform GUI framework is now available for perl! I've wxPython, and it rocks, so Tk/Perl's days may now be numbered...My main development platform is (unfortunately...) Win32, and Tk/Perl doesn't have half as much Win32 stuff as wxWindows does (e.g. accessing proper windows dialog boxes, etc.)."

Kellym writes: "Sun Microsystems and Philips Digital Networks are putting their chips on MPEG-4 in the battle to determine the streaming media standard of the future. The companies have agreed to expand their year-long relationship to promote and develop MPEG-4 technology for broadband and wireless markets. The companies have partnered on marketing and have agreed to share technologies. In the most recent deal, Philips licensed Sun's StorEdge Media Central server technology. Philips said it will include the technology in a WebCine Server MPEG-4 system it is developing to run on Sun's Solaris Operating Environment and Sun Cobalt servers."

blackcoot asks: "I'm currently suffering through an undergraduate class in AI where it appears that the first commandment of implementation is 'Thou shalt use Lisp of suffer the wrath of the TA'. I've been hacking away at Lisp for the past week now, and I've come to two conclusions: I hate Lisp; and Perl seems to have all the closure features that made Lisp so good in the past for AI [i.e. judicious use of eval(...) and a little creativity can replace Lisp's (lambda ...) ]. I'm looking to learn as much as possible from this class and hopefully not die implementing the projects in the process, so I'm hoping some of you out there can either point me in the direction of a decent Lisp manual or help me formulate arguments in favor of letting students use Perl as the implementation language." I can surely emphasize with blackcoot's troubles with Lisp, but can Perl emulate the features of Lisp that make Lisp good for AI? Might Perl have some advantages over Lisp when it comes to writing AI code?

Thanks to Pudge of Slashteam for pointing out that very early version of Parrot has been released. You may recall Parrot from The April Fool's joke - but it's coming to life.

CosmicDreams writes: "Last April fools, I was indeed fooled by a slashdot article that claimed that Python and Perl developers were going to join forces and merge their current development trees into a new computer language called Parrot. It seems as though my foolishness was well placed. Today I came across this story In the article, it talks about the ongoing progress of the language and what plans the developers have for the near future. Now I'm so confused I don't really know if this is for real or not. Does someone know if this is the same Parrot programming language. I don't want to place my foolishness foolheartedly."

dannycarroll asks: "I've not heard this mentioned yet so I'll bite. This weekend (depend on where you live) the Unix system clock hits 1.000.000.000 seconds since the Unix Epoch. I heard about one or two applications that are vulnerable to a date overflow but I am wondering how many more are out there, unknown. It's not the Y2k bug and consequences are far from it, but it seems to me that there has been too little attention paid to this potential problem. As an example, I wonder how many Perl scripts out there use 9 digits for the date-stamp field instead of a delimiter?" I've been hearing about this from several different directions and it took me by surprise. I would think that most programs out there are using time_t or at least 32-bit integers by now if they are storing seconds-since-the-epoch (you would think we actually had learned something from the Y2K chaos). Are there any well known programs that might break because of this?

A reader writes: "A fine application of expensive medical equipment: producing neat desktop pictures by taking an x-ray of the guts of a PowerBook G4. Guy Mullins has the details." The actual photos are on a separate site.

Erik Tjernlund writes: "Oh, where art thou my lovely new programming language? Stop fiddling around with those perl magnets and use a real poetic computer language: The Shakespeare Programming Language. Not a compiler, but it converts to C. Cool 100+ line Hello World example. Amazing what CompSci-students can create when they really should do real work."