Use Perl is reporting that Damian Conway has been sponsored by several companies and individuals (most impressively Black Star who donated half of the needed $55k). Now Damian can continue working on amazing perl projects like Quantum::Superpositions and Lingua::Romana::Perligata for the next year! Malicose noted that Damian sponsor page explains a bit more too.

tjansen asks: "While looking into the GTK library, I notice that there are a large number of GTK bindings for scripting languages: Perl, Python, JavaScript, Guile...almost every language has its own GTK binding with its own syntax that all have to be maintained (and documented) separately. The same problem exists for all C or C++ based libraries, writing wrappers for scripting languages is just a lot of work. On Windows systems COM is used to make libraries and components accessible to scripting languages. Even if the COM interface does not fit very well to a particular language, for example because they don't use the language's naming convention, they give even obscure languages a great amount of libraries with almost no work other than writing ActiveScripting bindings for the language. Why maintain separate bindings when the community could use something like CORBA for the same thing? I think the idea is too obvious and something like this should be very useful for language interoperability in general. Is anyone working on such a project?"

Tseuq asks: "The company I work for has recently rolled out their first 'official' Intranet. Like most companies, we use a combination of Novell, NT and Unix for our file/print/application duties. We want to allow all users in the company access to certain sites on the Internet (health benefits, 401k plans etc., regardless of whether they have been officially blessed with Internet access. However, we currently use a Novell based proxy/fireall which works well for those with NDS (Novell Directory Services) ID, but there are several people in the company for whom it is not feasable to have such an ID, making authentication into the Novell proxy quite difficult (read: impossible)."

jbc writes: "As discussed over at use Perl, the Perl community is attempting to raise US$55K in donations to support Perl überhacker Damian Conway for a year so he can devote himself to worthwhile pursuits related to Perl development. Thanks to a large donation from an as-yet-unnamed corporate donor, they're apparently already more than halfway there." Update: 10/15 11:31 PM by H : To actually give, go to the YAPC site.

Well, I join slashdot (aka the "sinister Andover keiretsu") full-time today. It seems worthy of a story, although I'll limit it to the YRO section since those have been my traditional stomping grounds. There's no real news below, just some rambling and question-asking, but I hope it will be interesting nonetheless.

So last night a couple of guys (Nohican && {}) cracked into Slashdot. As they say, the weakest link in any security system is human: on one of our test boxes, we had a "clean" copy of Slashcode installed, with default data... including the temp admin password (God/Pete). It didn't take much after that to get into Slashdot itself. Hit the link below to read a bit more on the subject (but if you don't want to bother reading it, you should at least change your password).

Auckerman writes: "Mark Summerfield, of Perl Press , has written an excellent article over at OsOpinion. It's written as a letter from his future self on what life will be like in 20 years. Kinda scary and certainly worst case scenerio, but his point gets across."

conraduno asks: "I have been trying for some time to find documentation or help for openSSL and SSLeay, and I haven't had any luck. I can not find anything, I have not had one of my e-mails (to authors of SSLeay, perl SSL modules, and others) answered, and I have been overall very frustrated with the lack of information on this API. Has anyone else had these problems, and if so, what can I do about it? The best documentation I found so far was looking at the source, and I would much rather be able to talk to someone about it." It honestly sounds like the submittor has tried to contact the developers, and the timing on this submission is after the recent article that dealt with this exact subject. Pointers to SSLeay and openSSL resources, both online and offline, will be appreciated.

mholve wrote to us about an interview with Larry Wall ^[?] regarding Perl 6. Wall is, always, interesting to read. Warning - the text bit is short, most of it is video.

Fross asks: "I am Technical Architect at a reasonably large e-commerce firm, which naturally has a very large and active Website, with tens of thousands of registered users, and millions of page hits a month. The time has come to reimplement the old architecture from the ground up, and I'm looking for other (preferably Open Source, or Open Source-friendly) solutions that will give a faster, more scalable, more reliable, easily maintainable solution than the current implementation (which is running under ASP, on IIS of course). I have a fair amount of experience with Perl, some with PHP, but have never used them for something of this size. Does anyone have experience of deploying something this large with these technologies, and can give some valued information on how these solutions cope?"

Trixter asks: "Like most nerds, I receive a large volume of email that I archive in several files and directories in a filesystem. This is inefficient, especially when it comes to searching for an old or obscure bit of information. I can imagine several better ways to organize email for archival and lookup, but has anyone already done this? I want to try avoiding reinventing the wheel for the tenth time this year. By 'better ways', I'm talking about all solutions--from the Perl monger 'one 10-line script will do the trick' perl script to parse up a long mbox-format file into little bits for intelligent grepping, to maybe an elegant 'mbox-format file to SQL database' loader/translator script and a series of SQL statements to support searches. Please, help me organize my gigabytes-long, decade-long email archive!"

chromatic's wide-ranging series of instructional and reference books for the Linux administrator continues here with three more titles, this time covering two books which sound aimed at fairly experienced uers, and one more suited to Windows crossover users. (Check out Part One and Part Two of this four-part series if you missed those, especially if you're looking for some more novice-oriented books.)

qbasicprogrammer writes "The long awaited Perl 5.7.0 version has finally been released! Source code is available from CPAN. If you haven't upgraded yet, now is the time. In related news, development of Perl 6 is continuing swiftly as demonstrated by the Perl 6 Library." Check out the head's up story saying that it was coming - just a reminder this is *devel*. Don't play with it unless you know what you are doing.

On Aug. 30 several folks who have written Linux drivers and apps relating to the free barcode scanner mentioned here a few days ago were sent cease and desist orders demanding that they stop distributing the code. [updated by timothy 20:00 GMT: Please note that what flyingbuttmonkeys received is not officially a "cease and desist" letter; instead, it merely says that the longer the drivers are available, the "longer damages will accrue," citing "intellectual property rights owned by Digital Convergence." ] The barcode scanner is called a CueCat (with some lame marketroid colons that I'm not using because it irritates me when people name things like that). The code included a device driver written by Pierre-Philippe Coupard and a reader/decrypter written by Michael Rothwell. The code is afaik unavailable, but hopefully folks who downloaded it will have mirrors soon. I asked Michael to describe to me what his decoder did, and a few other questions.

A reader writes "Check the latest Kurt's Closet; he points to some interesting flaws on Debian 2.2, from a security point of view. " Kurt's Closet is part of SecurityPortal - he's got some good points, but it's also good to remember, as the article points out, that nothing is automagically secure. Always do testing on your own.Update: 08/30 01:44 PM by H :Thanks to Ben Collins, Debian guy, for sending a response which I've included below.Update: 08/30 04:32 PM by H :Kurt has written an update that will be appearing on the site soon. In the meantime, he also sent me the text - read below for more.

Nooooooo! Noooooooo! Not another Slashback! Especially not one dripping with the not-unexpected but unexpectedly-quick news which will let you use your spankin' new Rat Shack Scannin' Cat for other things. And with tons of pictures and a superb wrap-up of LWCE which puts mine to shame! Not to mention ... well, you will have to read more.

dmd writes: "Does there exist Open Source software for maintaining a small to medium sized library card-catalog? It seems all the tools are available: a perl module for working with MARC records, several for working with Z39.50 and XML, and even a web site apparently devoted to nearly this exact topic. An actual, working, catalog, however, seems to be missing. Is this something that would be valuable? I, for one, have nearly 5k volumes in my collection, and they're begging for some discipline." I'm sure cash-strapped public libraries and schools would like to be able to use free / Free tools for this, since paper books aren't going away anytime soon. Not to mention for CDs, videos, charts, museum holdings ... any ideas out there? Turnkey solutions?

embo writes: "The company I work for has been approached recently by an academic organization looking for advice on providing web space for 30,000 - 40,000 users. They are limited by budget, so I'd like to recommend something with Linux and apache. They are thinking of offering around 50 MB if disk space per user (which at maximum utilization would be ~2 TB of data storage), and no database driven content (though they want to allow CGI through Perl and Python, for example)." This is a huge undertaking. Can anyone think of solutions better than the ones embo outlines below?

jasno asks: "I've been wondering lately about the effects that the English language has had on programming languages. Have the limitations/ambiguities/peculiarities of the English language changed how we might have created, for instance, C if we spoke, perhaps, Swahili? Since English is my only language I'm curious to see what my multilingual companions have to say about this." Interesting thought. What would Perl be like if it was coded by a native Japanese speaker?

luge writes "In more than a few Lego articles posted here, I've seen the question asked "But can I use the Mindstorms under Linux?" Well, the new Lego + Linux mini-HOWTO provides the answer. There are (currently) 7 different software options in 7 different languages (including C, Perl, and Java) for the Linux-based Mindstorms owner."