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."

drift factor asks: "I work for a small company with about 200 Linux desktops, all identical aside from hostname and IP information running Redhat from a kickstart install. Currently, when something needs to be changed on all of them (say, the default gateway) we either have to ssh into all of them and do it manually, or write a Perl script to do so for us. Is there a good remote configuration system that will also allow some level of automation, i.e., I tell it what IP I want the default gateway to be on each machine and it updates them for me?" If you manage a large server farm and have used or written utilities that do this, please share your experiences.

$Bob writes "The best and brightest of the Perl community are showing up to drive you insane. Test you strength in the 5th Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest!" Name your variables after the stooges! Write Spagetti! Its good!

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Helix Code has just released the first preview of its admin tools. Just now there are only three utils. They are glade front-end using perl back-end." Nifty way to attack the problem. I tend to prefer handling things like this the old fashioned way, but this kinda stuff is critical for the newbies. I mean, who wants to know what file you edit in /etc to change your DNS server, or what the syntax is to mount a remote NFS partition? (Ok, I want to know, but for those just joining us, it's probably not the happiest learning curve figuring this stuff out.)

At 11:30 AM PDT today, Bennett Haselton of Peacefire is scheduled to begin speaking to the COPA Commission. The occasion is their third and final hearing on the subject of blocking software, aka censorware. Our highly hilarious report on the second hearing may still be fresh in your memory; this time around, Bennett takes on the products FamilyClick, CyberSentinel, and SurfWatch.

woggo writes "The Jakarta project quietly posted the release of ORO Matcher 2.0 this week; Dan Savarese has donated it to Apache under an open-source license. For those who don't know, ORO is a great regular expression package which supports Perl and awk-style pattern matching and substitution in Java -- something that servlet authors generally need. ORO alleged it would come out 'in early June,' but better late than never. This new version looks really cool, and requires Java 2. Download it here."

Jeremy Pruitt asks: "I'm wondering if there is a way for me to do some perl scripting on a handheld device. I know there is no port for WindozeCE yet, but I also know there are a few BSD/Linux ports for handhelds. Can I run Perl on these ported versions of BSD/Linux? If so, does anybody recommend a handheld/OS combo that I can do some scripting on?"

eponymous poltroon writes "On SourceTalk, Simon makes a good case for the news about Perl 6 being a well-managed hoax. " That's his best case scenario: he outlines the major issues surrounding the recent structural changes announced to coincide with Perl 6's development.