News

Four short links: 2 September 2009

The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- you'll be surprised. Age before beauty! Judge It Now -- fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster. BlockChalk API -- These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly...

Maybe software services could harm free software after all (and other news from the Open Source convention)

Opening dispatch from OSCon: another look at the effects of Software as a Service on opens source plus awards, APIs, and more.

Four short links: 27 Mar 2009

Design, Perl, Heresy, and Ephemera: Product Panic: 2009 -- Bruce Sterling essay on design for recession-panicked consumers. As is usual with Bruce, I can't tell whether he's wryly tongue-in-cheek or literally advocating what he says. Great panic products are like Roosevelt’s fireside chats. They’re cheery bluff. The standard virtues of fine industrial design—safety, convenience, serviceability, utility, solid construction … well,...

Unix's Magical Moment, as Foretold by Tom Christiansen

Today I received the following from Tom Christiansen, author of several of our bestselling Perl books, frequent speaker at OSCON, and Perl consultant extraordinaire. He asked that we publish this special news on his behalf. If you're at all interested...

New York Times Settles Linking Suit

In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated...

CGI is Dead; mod_perlite is Alive!

PHP's application deployment model is difficult to beat. Perl has lacked something similar for years -- until now. Byrne Reese and Aaron Stone address the gap between CGI and mod_perl with mod_perlite, one of the features Perl 5 needs most.

Craig Newmark Interview: A Brief History of Craigslist

A brief conversation with Craig Newmark from this year's Personal Democracy Forum 2008. In this interview Craig talks about the founding of Craiglist, how he came to found one of the most popular sites on the web. Craig also discusses his work with the Obama team and some of the important customer service issues facing Craigslist.

What are Your Force Multipliers in Software Development?

Programming language features and tools are obvious force multipliers for software developers. Development practices are less obvious. Here are some of my favorite productivity improvements.

Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2 by chromatic, Doug Sheppard Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl.

A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10 by chromatic, Doug Sheppard Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using modern Perl productively.

Using Amazon S3 from Perl by Abel Lin Amazon's Simple Storage Service provides a simple, flexible, and inexpensive way to manage online data storage. Amazon's S3 modules for Perl make storing and retrieving data in your own programs almost trivial, leaving Amazon to worry about hosting, scaling, and backups. Abel Lin shows how to store, retrieve, and store data with Amazon S3.

Reverse Callback Templating by James Robson Many programmers know of the two main systems of templating. One embeds actual source code into the template. The other provides a mini language with loops, conditionals, and other control structures. There is a third way -- a reverse callback system. James Robson explains this best-of-both-worlds approach by demonstrating Perl's Template::Recall module.

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