(Message perl/com/news:134) showproc perl/com/news/134 /home/mjd/bin/mailpager /home/mjd/MH-Mail/perl/com/news/134 Return-Path: mjd@plover.com Return-Path: Delivered-To: mjd-filter-vacation-deliver@plover.com Received: (qmail 3854 invoked by uid 119); 9 Jan 2001 23:33:39 -0000 Delivered-To: mjd-filter-vacation@plover.com Received: (qmail 3848 invoked by uid 119); 9 Jan 2001 23:33:38 -0000 Delivered-To: mjd-filter@plover.com Received: (qmail 3837 invoked by uid 119); 9 Jan 2001 23:33:33 -0000 Delivered-To: mjd@plover.com Received: (qmail 3830 invoked by uid 119); 9 Jan 2001 23:33:33 -0000 Message-ID: <20010109233333.3829.qmail@plover.com> To: stevem@oreilly.com cc: mjd@plover.com, ccoleman@oreilly.com Subject: www.perl.com Newsletter 9 January 2001 Organization: Plover Systems Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 18:33:33 -0500 From: Mark-Jason Dominus Hello, perl.com subscribers. * Perl News Quite a few interesting things have happened in the past two weeks. First, the venue and Call for Patricipation have been announced for YAPC 2001, which will be held in Montreal this year. See http://www.yapc.org/America/ for complete details and breaking news. Second, in case you hadn't seen it yet, Damian Conway has started the Conway Channel, a web site which will report on his year of working on Perl. As you may recall, Damian received a grant from Yet Another Society to take a year off from teaching and do nothing but write Perl modules and travel around and give talks. (If you contributed, thank you again, and note that YAS recently received 501(3)(c) status, so your contribution may be tax-deductible.) The Conway Channel is available at: http://yetanother.org/damian/ Finally, I got the following message from Jon Orwant, editor of the Perl Journal: January 2, 2001 Some folks have been asking me about the status of The Perl Journal #20, and prospective authors have been asking me about deadlines for future issues. The answers: TPJ #20 is in press and ready to print, but EarthWeb (the owner of TPJ) has told the printer to stop the presses until further notice. I am currently responding to proposals sent to me with approximately "I don't know if there's going to be another issue, but when I do I'll respond to your proposal." Since the future of the magazine is in doubt, I can't in good conscience greenlight proposals; I will not encourage an author to spend weeks writing an article when I know that it might never be printed. So I've told people who've asked what I know about the current situation: while EarthWeb has sold many of its properties to internet.com so that it can focus on "career services", it has not sold TPJ. However, EarthWeb has also made it clear that they don't want to publish TPJ any more. This story has started to leak out to the Perl community and has already mutated a bit in not-quite-correct directions, so I wanted to write this note to set the record straight. Or as straight as I can, given what little I know about EarthWeb's decisions. While TPJ's future is very much up in the air, people shouldn't take this as any indicator about Perl itself. TPJ was doing just fine back when I ran it, there's no shortage of content out there, and the magazine could easily go bimonthly and then monthly -- indeed, when EarthWeb acquired TPJ I had thought that was the plan. I still enjoy the editing, the authors enjoy the writing, and the designers enjoy the designing. What happens now is up to EarthWeb. And no, I'm not suggesting that people bombard them with email. Heck, they just laid off 100 people, so I'm not even sure who to bombard. Eventually there will be some resolution, and when there is I'll write again to let everyone know. As of December 27th, this matter is now in the courts, and so I have to adopt the "just the facts" tone of this letter without portraying my opinions. Someday I'll be able to talk more about what is happening in these strange days; until then, you'll have to conjure up your own adjectives on my behalf. Cheers, Jon Orwant * What's New on the Site? In the sixth (and last) part of his series on Perl for beginning programmers, Doug Sheppard talks about how to get Perl to detect and warn about errors. See http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/01/begperl6.html Also, Simon has (as usual) contributed a report on recent p5p activity: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/01/p5pdigest/THISWEEK-20010107.html Thank you all; I will be in touch again next week.