Sowbug writes: "Perl programmers rejoice! Mason 1.0 was released today, though prerelease versions have been in operation for years at websites like TechWeb, Salon.com, and AvantGo. Congratulations, Jonathan Swartz (principal author of Mason)!" I don't know much about Mason, but it seems like another cool addition to the Cold Fusion/PHP world of embeddable code in Web pages.

David Korn is the author of the famous Korn shell, ksh, which deserves consideration next to the ubiquitous bash. Quote (regarding the AT&T research group he's part of): "We don't write anything in Perl anymore, because [ksh93] has all the functionality built in." He's also an AT&T fellow, and heads up the UWIN project, which "provides a mechanism for building and running UNIX applications on Windows NT, Windows 98, and Windows 95 with few, if any, changes necessary." This is the software that allowed some crazy folks to run GNOME on Windows several weeks back as well. (And is available for no-cost personal use.) This is the same David Korn you may remember from this picture. I met him at a recent NYLUG meeting when he spoke about the Advanced Software Technologies collection of tools, now Open Source, and he graciously agreed to field questions in the usual Slashdot interview style. So please leave your questions in the space below --1 question per comment, please -- and Korn will get back to you with answers in the near future.

dlc writes: "Linux Weekly News interviews Larry Wall. 'Until now, the process of the design of Perl has been evolutionary. It's been done by prototype and modification over time. I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.'"

kchayer asks: "I'm looking for an open-sourced system we can use to track workorders for help and problem requests on campus where I work. It seems that all products with similar functionality are designed more for bug tracking and correcting in the software development process: dcl, bugzilla, request tracker (not exactly what I want, or fully-featured enough), to name a few. While those are nice programs, and can be fudged to do what I want, I am interested in something specifically designed to track requests for help solving computer problems among students and our various staff/faculty departments on campus."

Eric Priepke writes: "I have 2 "Pinball 2000" machines, both of which I've added ethernet to. Via that ethernet, it's possible to telnet in to the pinball machine and get to a shell. I'm using that shell to dump out a bunch of statistic information on the games, and then build a web page with a backend perl script. Any time my games are on, the local FreeBSD box notices and updates the web pages every 1/2 hour." The link is to a mirror. Really impressive hack. Revenge from Mars is among my favorite pinball tables. Since Williams is giving up on Pinball 2000, it would be sweet to see if we couldn't make new games out of the old hardware.

tf23 writes "ApacheToday's got an article about mod_perl and shared memory. The article is part IV of the improving mod_perl series. For any perl/apache coders (or anyone coding with Slash or Bender) this is a good read.
Quick links to the other parts:
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part III: Code Profiling and Memory Measurement Techniques
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part II: Benchmarking Applications
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part I: Choosing Operating System and Hardware"
This is in part one of our holy grails, caching all of the comments for current stories. It would make those near 2000 comment stories a lot easier to stomach for the Web servers.

antis0c writes: "I am in the process of starting up an ISP, and I've been trying to find some really good Open Source Billing Software. I've looked around quite a bit, and the only truly Open Source solution I found was Freeside. It seems to offer a lot of what I need; Real-time credit card processing, MySQL database backend, Radius and Apache support, and all the general account management things you expect, but the user interface really leaves much to be desired. It doesn't feel very secure at all as it uses a lot of suid scripts and suEXEC in Apache and it also requires a lot of 3rd party Perl Modules (21 to be exact) which getting them all to work properly in conjunction with Freeside seems like a harder task than jumping through hoops of fire. My question is, what kinds of Billing Software have you guys used, and [what are] your good/bad experiences with it?"

A number of people have been wondering what's going to happen to TPJ ^[?] in light of Earthweb's (the owner of TPJ) sale of most of its properties to Internet.com. Many rumours have been flying around and Jon Orwant has decided to clear things. I've put his status update below.

I've been collecting parts to convert an old broken arcade cabinet into a home for Mame/Snes9x/DGen. I've got buttons and joysticks and a machine, and even wrote a really nice GTK Perl menu system to select games, but now I have to decide if I want to replace the (small very burned out) arcade monitor. I could throw in a 19" SVGA monitor, or I could try to get an arcade monitor and figure out a way to make it run nicely under X. I'm leaning towards the SVGA monitor simply so that I have more resolution options, but there's a part of me that would love to use either the existing arcade screen (despite the burn in) or replace it with a different one. Does anyone have advice for making such a monitor work under XFree?

sachachua asks: "I'm a sophomore taking up computer science, and since I'll be graduating pretty soon - March 2003 - I'm trying to figure out what to do in order to better prepare myself for the future. I'm really into programming, and I'm considering going for a practicum or an internship in some software company that can really help me develop my potential. I do a lot of web work with PHP, Java and Perl, and I pick up new languages easily. =) However, it's a bit difficult because I'm way over in the Philippines, which is a Third World country. Since it's so far away, my campus doesn't get visited by all those companies that court other graduates. And even if they do manage to find me, there are all sorts of visas to arrange. But the international exposure will be really great, and I want to meet other geeks. =)"

ChetPan asks: "I'm doing some development for a couple of student-run sites at NC State University. We want to make dynamic portal-like customizable pages, but aren't really sure what to use to output the actual HTML, since the main concern here is performance. We have most of our code in Perl modules and we're wondering about the main (heavy traffic) pages. I don't know much about embperl or eperl and how they compare to regular mod_perl under Apache. Are there other embedded Perl solutions? Would we get a performance boost by using PHP? Unfortunately I haven't seen much neutral comparison of the different embedded types on the Web. I would especially appreciate seeing some benchmarks and/or statistics on the topic."

Reader Whizziwig writes: "My CD player worked fine, but I was carrying around at least 36 CDs in my bookbag all the time, and breaking some. I also looked at all the mp3-cd players, I didn't see any that looked great, skip-protection & display-wise, plus it still meant carrying around a case of CDs." To deal with this, he bought a honkin' 6-gig MP3 player; read below for the review he contributed.

arkman writes: "In this morning's e-mail ActiveState has announced the availability of the beta release of the Komodo Integrated Development environment on Windows and the technology preview of Komodo for Linux. The relevant information can be viewed at their Web site. Komodo is ActiveState's cross-platform IDE, and it supports Perl, Python and Java Script." Looks very promising; I hope it doesn't suffer from the problems that certain other Mozilla-based products do.

Kaufmann writes "Good old Perl guru Nathan Torkington has an article on O'Reilly's perl.com about "What every Perl programmer needs to know about .NET". It's quite short and, unsurprisingly, favourable to .NET (although not to Microsoft). Points to the SOAP module on CPAN and a bunch of other stuff. It contains a nasty error, though: claims that Java is the only language that compiles to the JVM. Check it out anyway."

micantos writes "Check this out! Apparently somebody is claiming they've done the unprecedented, recorded the first "perfect" Pitfall game. Personally I liked Pitfall II a lot more... finding that damn Quickclaw was fun..."

richw showed us an excellent story talking about why language advocacy is bad. Its an excellent piece, and although many of the points he writes about are specifically related to Perl Programming, many of them can be equally applied to the irrational ways that people approach things like politics or Slashdot discussions.

grovertime asks: "As a screenwriter-cum-Web developer, I have a pet project to create a Slashdot for the entertainment industry. I have been playing around with the Venezuelan version of Slashcode, namely PHP-Nuke. As it is PHP-based rather than Perl-based, it cannot support frames within my Dreamweaver-built site. I would like to merge the two so as to extend the capability of the site to containing streaming audio and video, etc. Has anyone wrapped PHP (particularly Nuke - or even Slashcode) with a Dreamweaver constructed multi-media site?"

Chromatic, indefatigueable, has come up with another review. This time through the door he's gathered his reactions to Perl for System Administrators, one of the growing list of titles to help bridge the gap between SysAdmin and programmer.

djoyce101 writes: "I run a public message board based on Infopop Ultimate Bulletin Board. The BBS has now grown to over 4300 members with nearly 3,000,000 requests per month. The dynamically generated pages are growing in size everyday, but my available bandwidth is not. My question is this: Is there any way to make Apache compress everything in realtime? (as long as the client supports gzip content) The server is averaging about 300MB per day, all of which can be compressed to about 50MB. I've found PHP scripts that can do this, but the BBS is all perl. Does anyone know of a way to get this done?"
You might look at mod_gzip. There are also some mod_perl compression modules which might help you out.

cardhore links to this O'Reilly piece about Freenet, detailing what's actually on the anonymous data cloud these days. It reads, in part, "But if we were to indulge ourselves and construct a demographic of the average Freenet user from Freenet content, he'd be a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn." I wonder what will be there (or in equivalently untraceable data pools) in five years.