chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Larry Wall's Ninth Annual State of the Onion address from OSCON 2005. In previous talks, he's used screensavers, music, and Unicode to explore Perl and open source. This year, he introduced the cast of characters in the Perl community in terms of spy movies and metaphors."

After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn't quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. You can use our sourceforge project page to submit bugs and we'd really appreciate the feedback. Thanks to Tim Vroom for putting the HTML in place, Wes Moran for writing the HTML in the first place, and Pudge for writing the code to convert 900k users, 60k stories, and 13 million comments to comply. And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.

barryhawkins writes "It's safe to assume that people who are thinking of learning GNU Emacs or improving their Emacs skills are motivated. These people probably know their way around a command prompt, and likely know that Lisp is more than just a speech impediment. They need a book that offers expert advice without wasting time or insulting the intelligence of the reader: Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition is that book." Read on for the rest of Hawkins' review.

wicked coding asks: "I'm a professional software engineer and I'm planning on building my ultimate setup for longer hours coding and hacking, but I'm kinda stuck when it comes with what to choose. What hardware would you choose to use, if money was no object? Obviously there may be some constraints on space. Leave no stone unturned, I'm looking for suggestions on desks, seating, lighting, keyboard and pointing device, monitors and even the computer system itself. Ideally it needs to be as comfortable and ergonomic as possible. What software would you choose to use, if the intended targets were Java and OO PHP5? Currently I'm using Eclipse on Gentoo. Is there a more suitable IDE that works with most popular OSS (and not so OSS) languages including XML, SQL, CSS, PHP, Perl, Java, and C/C++?"

honestpuck (Tony Williams) writes "I have to admit that I can bristle at books that try to preach, so Perl Best Practices was on a hiding to nothing when I came to review it. I also have to admit to being torn about the author -- after all, he is one of those poor fools who insist on living in cold, unenlightened Melbourne, while I live in vastly superior Sydney. On the other hand, how can I dislike a man who manages to place a quote that involves my favourite character, Lady Bracknell. from my favourite comic play, 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' in the first few pages of his book?" Read on for Williams' review.

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

Joseph Brenner writes "Every now and then, a beginning programmer asks if there's any point in learning to program in Perl 5, when Perl 6 is going to change everything soon. There are a number of answers to that: one is to point out that Perl 6 is still years away, another is to point out that it is promised that Perl 5 code will run under Perl 6 without modification (a module that begins with the traditional "package" statement is Perl 5 code; if it begins with the new "class," then it's Perl 6)." Read on for the rest of Brenner's review of Scott Walters' Programming in Perl 6 style using Perl 5, a book which answers that question a whole different way.

andphi asks: "How has volunteer F/OSS experience helped or hindered Slashdot readers in finding paid programming jobs? I have been involved with a F/OSS game engine development project (Adonthell) for a few years now. I've become the primary story and plot developer for the project. I hardly even look at the code, though I do try to follow the traffic on the developer's list. I've learned C++, VB6, Perl, IA32 Assembler, and exposed myself to a great many other languages (JavaScript, HTML, XML, SQL, C, awk, sed, bash, etc.). But I wonder, what can I do to sell myself using my post-graduate project involvement?"

turnitover writes "And here I thought their revenue was all based on projected lawsuit returns. But no, The SCO Group actually has turned out something that does something -- or does it? In any case, looks like eWEEK has reviewed OpenServer 6. From the review: though the company 'seems like an unlikely outlet for open-source software, the company has extended OpenServer with updated versions of Samba, Perl, PHP and other key components.'"

Craig Maloney writes "Just about everyone out there who has ever typed #!/usr/bin/perl has encountered Learning Perl (otherwise known as "The Llama Book") in one form or another. You may have learned some of the intricacies of the language from this tome, or you've seen someone recommend this book to potential Perl programmers on-line. Learning Perl is generally in the top three recommended books for new Perl programmers, next to Programming Perl ("The Camel Book"). Now in its fourth edition, Learning Perl returns with updates covering the stable 5.8 series of Perl. The changes are subtle, but the improvements make for a clearer and more readable book." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

An anonymous reader asks: "This summer I have the opportunity to work in a bio research lab creating a web site for data about proteins. Part of my job is to do bioinformatic analysis of the proteins to determine what types of support their are for the preliminary gene predictions. I have been using DNA Stryder (a Mac program) for sequence alignments plus translations from DNA sequences to protein sequences, and I was wondering if any of the Slashdot crowd knew of similar programs for Linux? I have looked into Bioperl , Biopython, EMBOSS, and BioConductor, but they seem to be more oriented towards servers and less towards stand-alone applications. What programs would you suggest, especially those that might be geared more towards biologists rather than computer scientists?"

Chip Salzenberg writes "In April of this year, Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA, told police that they feared I was misappropriating trade secrets. That very afternoon, police raided my house with a search warrant to seize every computer in the house, paper files, CDs, and DVDs... even my wireless router and cable modem!" Chip was the pumpking for perl's 5.004 release. Keep reading for his description of his current legal troubles, and for a shortcut into what he says prompted his former company's actions, read his letter warning about abuse of open proxies.

Ridgelift writes "Learning to develop web applications with Ruby on Rails has gained a huge amount of interest lately, but for people wanting to learn Rails there are no books on the subject. That's changed now with the pre-release of Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails , the latest book from Dave Thomas and the author of Ruby on Rails David Heinemeier Hansson. It's really 3 books in one: a full Rails tutorial, an in depth guide to the components that make up Rails, and an introduction to developing applications using the Agile development model. There's even a quick introduction to Ruby, the language Rails is built with." Read on for an early review of the beta book. Full disclosure: Reviewer Miles K. Forrest points out that he has read earlier versions of the book's manuscript and provided critiques to the authors.

nmb3000 writes "MSDN recently put up a case study of Bungie.Net (much more detailed than a previous one), the homepage for the creators of the Halo series, and its transition from Perl to .NET and ASP. From the study: 'The Bungie.net site is the online companion to the wildly successful Halo 2 video game for Xbox, released in November 2004 by Microsoft. The site also acts as the community hub for all things related to Bungie games. Built with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Bungie.net serves up more than 4 million pages per day, accumulating 300 gigabytes of online game statistics per month from more than 1 million games played daily.' This is an interesting look into the creation and integration of the very large and interactive website which was voted 'Most Innovative Design' by IGN Entertainment in 2004."

JamesD_UK writes "mod_perl 2.0.0 has been officially released into CPAN. Enhancements over mod_perl 1 include threads support and a perl interface to the Apache Portable Runtime. More details on the release can be found on CPAN."

Craig Maloney writes "Anyone who codes in Perl can relate to working on other people's code. Sometimes the code will thankfully include "use warnings" and be a joy to maintain. More likely, though, the code will have so many warnings that the useful output is long gone in the stratosphere of your scroll buffer. Even good code written for earlier versions of Perl can become aged and decrepit, requiring elderly modules that may or may not work with newer versions of Perl. Maintaining this code can be a hassle, but fortunately Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code (referred to for the duration of the review as Perl Medic) provides some very useful tips for getting through these migrations, and will help the next person maintaining your code." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

Anonymous Coward asks: "After trying to merge several sets of media files that I've had laying around across several PC's (and looking at the short-comings of my own Perl script), I began looking at some commercial products and was overwhelmed. Does Slashdot have advice for organizing MP3 collections and what software works well for them?"

Jukka Laurila writes "Nokia just released a port of Perl 5.8 and 5.9 for the Series 60 smartphone platform. The port contains just the interpreter core, ie. there's no support for any of the Series 60 APIs yet, but this is still great news for all you Perl aficionados out there."

Anonymous Coward writes "PerlNomic is a game consisting of CGI scripts which allow you to submit proposals to alter ... the scripts themselves. All proposals must be approved by a voting process--at least for now. The game is styled after Peter Suber's Nomic. Deep knowledge of perl is helpful, but not required." Nomic is a really excellent game if you like mental puzzles, but somewhat difficult to get off the ground.

m1cajah asks: "I've been trying to find an 'all-in-one' package for creating (and migrating to) online manuals and am having some difficulty finding what I'm looking for. I'm hoping Slashdot can help. We have a large number of manuals (designed for paper-based presentation) that suddenly need to be provided online to our customer base. Yes, the PHBs have changed the landscape on us once again. This will, once configured, be managed totally by the documentation staff and analysts (none very tech-savvy). It needs to be really easy to use because I would like to say there's a huge budget for this (as well as for training), but there isn't. Lower cost is good. Free is better.Can any of you point me to some other options?"