Chris Nandor wrote in to tell us that Larry Wall has announced his vision for perl 6 as part of this keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. You can read an announcement at Perl.org or read Chris's summary of things (like information about the from-scratch rewrite being planned!)

For those of you who think Ask Slashdot is lacking in the technical questions department, I hope this query from (yet another) Anonymous Coward will spark your interest: "I have written a forking server in Perl that is exibiting a phase change in its response characteristics around 10 simultaneous connections. As the number of simultaneous connections passes through 10 connections the connection time increases by two orders of magnitude and becomes very random. At the same point the transmission times drop slightly and continue to have small standard deviations. Although I posted this question to a variety of Perl and Unix usenet usegroups over a week ago, I never received a response. Since the most important part of the post is the performance plot, I placed it and relevant code snipits at: http://www.geocities.com/nawkboy The memory, io, and cpu usage never exceeded more than 80% at any time during the tests and were seldom above 50%. The test results were very similar between remote and local clients. The server is running on a Sun Enterprise 420R running Solaris 2.6. I do not understand the behavior and would appreciate any guidance in understanding it."

mobiux wrote in about the resurrection of Packard Bell PC's. michael.creasy told us about Darth Vader's MBE. An anonymous coward wrote in to tell us about the GameSpy interview of Martin Feldhausen, inventor of the 'extra life.' Thanks for helping me get through all those games! mcryptic shared the link to an online gallery of mousepad art. payneinthe told us that Randal Schwartz uploaded pictures from the Perl Whirl. Another anonymous coward told us about someone's visual response to the loss of Paul Steed at id. HerrNewton noted the symphony written primarily for dot matrix printers, and rasterbator told us about a web site for the distribution of free GNU and Open Source related artwork. Ant sent in the link to Star Wars Origins, and illumina mentioned RSA en/decryption in JavaScript. Have a good weekend, everyone!

profBill asks: "I'll be directing the "senior development project" this year for the Computer Science students in our department. The senior design project is supposed to give students a chance to bring together all their skills on a group project for some "practical" application. My overall goal this year is to have each group develop an e-commerce solution for local businesses near the university. I'd like them all to use open source software for various reasons (they're interested in it, it is easier to get hold of the software, just to show it can be done, to give them broader experience, etc.). The businesses are very interested and I think it will be a great experience all around. So the basic tools are things like PHP, MySQL, Perl and Apache but what else would be helpful? Note I don't want turnkey solutions, I want the students to develop the entire solution, from loading the OS to the final working system. What about Web page development? What about interfaces for end users? What have you used? What other issues? Opinions of the Slashdot community would be greatly appreciated." Now this sounds like an extremely cool project. I wish more colleges would look to do practical things like this with their students.

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

Never content to rest on his laurels, chromatic has again supplied us with a no-nonsense, informative book review. This time it's of O'Reilly's Programming the Perl DBI, for those of you unwilling to let any TLA go unconquered. If you're building a Web site or learning MySQL (or any other database) and want to combine Perl skills with data storage, he's got a few words for you. [Updated 13 June 3:20GMT by timothy:] Heck, it's a double header! PotPieMan gives a different perspective on the same book, all below.

Kaufmann writes: "In this interview with Joe Johnston (on O'Reilly's Perl.com), Larry Rosler (of HP, one of the people who helped put the 'ANSI' in 'ANSI C') shares his thoughts and advice on the value of standards, optimising Perl code, how Sun should handle Java, and programming in general. Will we ever see a Perl Language Subcommittee too?"

ara818 asks: "I have written a 4,000-line personal web assistant using Perl. After getting everything to work I am now working on making the code run faster. The problem I keep running into though is that there are so many ways to do the same thing in Perl that I don't know which is faster. Right now, I am working on intuition but I'd really like a site or book that could give me at least a few pointers or some guidelines. Is there any such resource available for Perl, or for that matter, other popular programming languages?"

More information below -- for your edification and amusement -- on black holes (if they exist), Napster (a happy outcome for once), comparitive computer languages (after Chris Rijk's Java / C comparison) and more. Even a (gasp) positive statement about Microsoft. Hope you enjoy it.

A whole load of people submitted questions related to this Inter@ctive weekly article but HarryHood got thru first "...and it got me thinking about the prevalence of offices completely free of Microsoft Office. Of all the communities on the Internet, I would think the /. community would have the largest comglomeration of users that work in such environments. So can we get an informal vote and some comments on the ideal Microsoft Office-less setup?" There are several issues which Free Software still has to address, the largest of which is compatibility. Read on for a choice helping of some related questions that have recently fallen into the bin.

broken77 asks: "At the company I'm working for now, we're starting a new project, and at the same time are looking to find some kind of "standard" method of making our CGI-like perl programs. CGI.pm and cgi-lib.pl have been used in the past, but we're investigating some kind of embedded perl solution similar to ASP or PHP. I should mention that Unix-ASP and PHP are not options (I don't really need to go into the reasons). Also, Perl is definitely the language we will be using. We're looking mainly at ePerl, HTML::Embperl and PerlMagic Lightning. Does anyone have experience with any or all of these? Are there some benchmarks I can find? Are there any products that you've found to be better than these three that I've listed?"

afreeman asks: "We're currently transmogrifying some 100+ odd Python scripts into a workable sysadmin toolkit (we're also hiring another 30 or so entry-level Admins RSN), and are looking for a way to wrap everything together with a simple front end. For a variety of reasons, most of our hardware doesn't run X or a web server, which leaves text-mode interfaces. Besides curses, the most promising kits look to be UMenu, or TUI (for Perl). Any suggestions on approaches to quickly building Text Mode UIs, particularly with Python?"

WhyteRabbyt writes: "ActiveState have announced Komodo, an open-source IDE for Perl, Python and Javascript. The application framework is to be based on Mozilla. The press release is here." tenchiken contributed a bit more information about the project, writing: "More information is here , including the announcement a few days ago that they would be writing python and perl bindings to XPCOM. Like Perl? How 'bout client side perl!" No, it's not out yet -- but it's cool to see Mozilla as the engine behind yet another project.

chromatic has brought us yet another pithy programming-book review, this time of Damien Conway's Object Oriented Perl. This sounds like a good book for those interested in not only an overview, but a book that pushes them into at least a few practical applications -- but not one too intimidating to learn from.

Chris Redd asks: "I am involved now in a lawsuit where the basis is that HTML code is copyrightable. My question is, when can HTML code be copyrighted? Here is a brief explanation: I was brought in as a contractor to finish a website for an advertising agency because Company X (who started the job) didn't have the expertise to finish it. The advertising agency that brought me in did all the design, created the graphics and came up with all of the concepts (so they own the design/style of the site). Now the first company is suing me for Intellectual Property theft, saying I stole proprietary code. I don't see it that way, they didn't do any design, and any code they had was generated by a commercial program!" Strange, but I would think that since Company X were hired to do the job, then whatever they had developed belonged to the advertising agency that hired them. Am I missing an issue here that would make this untrue?

Reviewer Greg Smith here dissects a book aimed at programmers who want to add Perl to their stable of languages, but also useful to the Perl connoisseur. If your interest in Perl is more than casual -- especially if you're seeking practical code examples more substantial then in more introductory texts -- The Perl Black Book may be for you. (Read more.)

Kailden asks: "I've run across several references to Ruby, a scripting language that claims to be a hybrid of Perl and Python. Supposedly, this language has taken Japan by storm. I'm looking for Slashdot's verdict before jumping in. Has anyone outside the Ruby site used this language? What advantages/disadvantages have you found?"

Yesterday, due to system-level misconfigurations, www.apache.org was defaced after a root-level breakin. Those responsible for finding the holes and the ASF have been in cordial contact, and the holes have been plugged. In the process of doing that, FTP and other services on www.apache.org have been stopped. A mirror of the defaced site can be found on the Attrition.org mirror site.

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

tech_imp writes: "Yikes! Talk about swift justice. The BBC is reporting that Judges 'roaming' the streets in Brazil will be using laptops and an app written in VB to help dispense justice. I'm not sure that I would not want to trust my judgement to a VB app ... couldn't they have at least written it something more robust ... like Perl? I can see it now ... your sentence is GPF :')" Three words that spring to mind: "General Protection Fault."