I've just completed a book review for my LUG:
We have been given quite a few books by O'Reilly and Apress to review. I can't say that every book we have been given has been reviewed, but quite a few have, and I feel we've made some contribution to the community.
Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.
As recently announced, the fifth Italian Perl Workshop will take place in Pisa (Italy) on October 22nd and 23rd. 120 people subscribed already, and more are expected by the first day of the Workshop. A full list of the accepted talks is available.
Two major Perl events will take place in Italy, thanks to the effort of the Italian Perl users and the Pisa.pm users group.
Here are the details!
The guys at Perl.it are at it again! The fourth Italian Perl Workshop is taking place next September in Pisa, Italy.
Perl is an amazingly powerful and succinct language. Although not the most fashionable, Perl is consistent and supported on a vast range of platforms, probably even more than Java. Better still, it gets in and does the job quickly with very little fuss. Perl by Example written by Ellie Quigley and published by Prentice Hall is a comprehensive, example based, and thorough book.
The best thing for a programming language is to be powerful and popular at the same time. Perl was like that some time ago, but over the years it has slowly lost its appeal, even while retaining and increasing its power. And Perl 6 has just come too late to save the day.
Welcome to an introduction for the beginner to the basic manipulation of the MySQL database with free software. The purpose of this article is to show how universally straightforward it is to get started with installing and applying a high-grade enterprise ready database like MySQL, and to learn how to manipulate it via numerous free software approaches.
Whether you are a professional or amateur scientist, engineer or mathematician, if you need to make numerical calculations and plots quickly and easily, then PDL (Perl Data Language) is certainly one of the best free software tools to use. PDL has everything that similar high-level, proprietary, numerical calculation languages (like IDL or MATLAB) have. And it certainly comes with all the features you would expect to have in a numerical calculation package.
In the Debian project they refer to packages that no longer have mantainers as orphaned. I think it's a good definition, and I'd extend it to free software packages that are no longer developed.
There are a lot of orphaned packages around, some actually deserve it but unfortunately there are also some that are promising or very good, and now they are almost dead. But, since we are talking about free software, every good developer is encouraged to pick one and try to push it a bit further
Pro Perl Parsing is a well-written tome on the subject of various ways of pulling information out of sources such as the HTML, RSS, XML, CSV, the command line and text. More correctly put, the book discusses the extraction of data and some analysis via Perl. The author Christopher M. Frenz understands the value of using CPAN modules and describes parsing through pleasantly brief code examples.
The book’s coverI've been programming in Perl for years - over ten now in fact - and I've written numerous books and articles on Perl and Perl programming. I've also worked with Python and written books and articles on Python programming, including a guide to migrating Perl applications to the Python language. For a while I really saw Python as an alternative to Perl, but after so many years and experience with Perl and what was possible with the language it is difficult to move on from the 'Perl comfort zone'.
Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.
TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.
Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels
A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.
Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.
When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.
Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?
