Those who are 'into' the Perl programming language will know about the mammoth project to re-design Perl for Perl 6. Part of that was to develop the Parrot Virtual Machine - a next generation VM specially designed for the unique needs of dynamic languages (in particular Perl 6).

...well, it's been quite a few years now, but I really feel that things are starting to come together. The launch of a shiny new website for Parrot at parrot.org is another thing that helps to confirm this. (As a side note, it's good to see the site running on Drupal, although I doubt they are using PHP on Parrot just yet.)

If you are not using Firefox yet, now is definitely the time. Go check it out, even if it's only for the groovy world map!

If you use Firefox 2 and are wondering why would I be interested in Firefox 3, have a look at this quick video screencast overview.

I have been using SUSE Linux (now openSUSE) on my desktop and laptop computers for a number of years now, and have always found it to be a better desktop that's more to my liking than other Linux distros (although I am more comfortable with Redhat on servers).

If you haven't heard of Magento yet, it is now time you should. The web based Magento software is a next-generation e-commerce system that puts previous open source 'shopping carts' to shame.

I have been putting the beta versions of Magento through their paces for the last 6 months, and while it is still early days, I am thoroughly impressed.

The version 1.0 release is a significant milestone, which I'm sure will make waves.

Go check it out: www.magentocommerce.com

The Creative Coast is 'the north yorkshire coast creative industries network'. Our most recent event was a Get Blogging night where we launched the Creative Coast Blogs, and helped to set up free blogs for some of the members.

I had heard of the Flock web browser before, and even downloaded and had a play with it, but since I'm not a seriously networked blogging geek it didn't grab my attention.

Quite excited about this! openSUSE 10.3 is ready to go, having had the goldmaster release announcement made yesterday. It is not supposed to be available for public download until 4th October, but for those who know where to look downloading has begun.

When it comes to office productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs) lots of people only know about Microsoft® Office - Word, Excel and PowerPoint (or perhaps the useless Microsoft® Works that came bundled with their PC).

Well, if that's you, I'm glad to be able to inform you that there is a growing number of 'office' suites, that not only provide a good alternative to Microsoft® Office but are also absolutely free!

In the last few days there has been a new release of the increasingly popular OpenOffice software (version 2.3), as well a an announcement from IBM, making the Lotus Symphony office software available for free download!

A number of times I have been frustrated with simplistic verification of email addresses, not so much because they are incomplete, but because they actually get it wrong.

I did at one stage make a serious attempt understanding and implementing the perl regular expression for checking emails (in accordance with the internet specification RFC822) that is found in the Perl Cookbook, however after reading Cal Henderson's excellent write-up on Parsing Email Adresses in PHP, I realise why it wasn't a helpful place to start (it incorporates more than just the address spec).

So with Cal's advice there is no excuse for web developers to continue to guess at what an email address should be, just do it to the spec (RFC822)!

The original is in PHP, and others have rewritten it for Ruby, and Python...

Here is my contribution, a JavaScript version:

Well, the day has come, and just like they said openSUSE 10.2 has been released.

One of the primary FTP mirrors for downloading SUSE has been GWDG, which I have usually found has the files ready for download before anywhere else. So even though the official openSUSE website has not yet made mention of the release, you can download the ISO images here.

So like many other enthusiastic openSUSE users, I have my bittorrent client fired up and busy downloading this new improved release. So while I am quite busy with work at the moment, as soon as I get a break I will have the DVD ready to test out :)

Watch this space and I'll post a note on how things go and what I think.