After years of development, version 1.0 of the Parrot virtual machine has arrived for Perl, Python and other dynamic languages. Whether the Parrot will take a firm foothold in software development is still up in the air.
Advisory Check (advchk), a small tool for monitoring installed software security, is now available in version 2.20. It has extended its source feeds and is now supported on HP-UX.
Adobe Systems has issued a prerelease version of project Alchemy, a small tool that compiles C and C++ code for programs running on ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The idea is to expand the capabilities of Web applications running on Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5.
Open source developer Tobias Oetiker, in his presentation at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego, described how he could help one thousand Windows users at Swisscom.com speed up their computers.
When an Internet provider goes down, users suffer. Alternatively, users can immediately switch to another ISP. We’ll show you a Perl script that can help you reconfigure your computer to make the switch.
A trick that anybody can learn lets you determine the day of the week from the date. We’ll apply some Perl technology to discover whether the method is reliable.
The Vim editor supports Perl plugins that let users manipulate the text they have just edited. Complex functions can be developed far faster than with Vim’s integrated scripting language.
