The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

The Perl CPAN Testers have been suffering issues accessing their sites, databases and mirrors. According to a posting on the CPAN Testers' blog, the CPAN Testers' server has been being aggressively scanned by "20-30 bots every few seconds" in what they call "a dedicated denial of service attack."

On a seasonal Perl note, the Perl Advent Calendar has been going since 2000, and it provides a Useful Perl Module for every day between the 1st and the 24th of December. Less chocolatey than your average advent calendar, but possibly more useful.

Flickr isn't just for photo sharing and social networking; it's a legitimate business tool. Learn how Perl programmers can use the CPAN Chart modules to create charts and graphs, and the Flickr::Upload module to upload the charts to Flickr.

Perl has been around since 1987 and became an early darling of web developers. These days, however, you don’t hear much about Perl. Everyone seems to be talking about trendier languages like PHP, Python and Ruby, with Perl left in the back as a neglected, not-so-hip cousin.

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.
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If you talk to Jarkko about the CPAN, he'll likely tell you that it's primarily a distribution service. It's a series of regularly updated mirrors containing some metadata and an archive of redistributable code. Many proposals for enhancements and replacements and reinventions in other languages have come and gone. Most of them have tried to add complexity to this simple base.