This month, in fact this Wednesday, we have another set of talks for the technical meeting. Both Colin and JJ have offered to present some short talks for us, and I hope we'll have time to review a video from a YAPC or Perl Workshop talk too. If you in or around Birmingham, feel free to come along and join us. All our meetings are free, and all are welcome.

From now we'll be retuyrning to a bi-monthly technical meeting schedule, with meetings being either talk/video presentations or a hackathon. We'll let you know in advance which is which. If you would like to present a talk next year, please get in touch and we'll see what we can schedule.

This year Birmingham Perl Mongers are celebrating their eleventh year. If you're in or near Birmingham tonight, we will be at The Dragon Inn on Hurst Street (near the Arcardian, Glee Club and Hippodrome Theatre) from about 6pm. Please come along and help us raise a glass to everyone who has been a part of our little corner of Perl.

The August Social Meeting will be held at The Selly Park Tavern on Wednesday 10th August. Due to the unrest and Birmingham City Centre closing its doors, thanks to a minority group of ill-informed and opportunistic idiots, we can't hold the social meeting in the city centre. Selly Park is close to the Edgbaston Cricket Ground, The MAC, Cannon Hill Park, The Nature Centre and Pebble Mill, with both the 45 and 47 buses travelling along Pershore Road stopping close to the front door of the pub. Hope to see you there.

Due to the holiday season, and general lack of planning, the technical meeting this month will be a slightly less technical meet. It'll be more of an informal technical discussion / social meeting, so please feel free to come along with questions and ideas for future technical meetings.

See our technical meeting page for more details.

Mike Kemp will once again being presenting another security based technical talk at our February Technical Meeting. This time he'll looking closer to home, by investigating the current Fon routers used by BT for their hotspots.

In addition Barbie will be taking a look at a basic testing tool to validate XHTML compliant web pages for static and dynamic websites.

The meeting will start at 7.30pm on Wednesday 23rd February 2011, at the Birmingham Science Park Aston. See our Technical Meeting page for further details.

On the 8th September 2010, Birmingham Perl Mongers celebrated their 10th birthday. While there are several other groups around the world who have been in existence longer, I think we are the second longest (uninterrupted) running group in the UK.

Mike Bissett (who was our special guest last month, when he paid us a visit while on holiday, as he now lives in Australia) and I started Birmingham Perl Mongers on our return from OSCON in 2000. We sent off the necessary forms and got ourselves setup on the perl.org servers during August, launched a website, and had our first official meeting in the Hogshead on Newhall Street, on Wednesday 13th September 2000.

Since those early days our numbers have grown, we've been involved with several different projects, hosted a YAPC and a QA Hackathon, held many technical meetings with numerous special guests and generally had a great time.

For our Birthday, JJ and his wife Penny, baked us a cake, decorated appropriately. Photos from last night are now online.

Here's to the next 10 years.

This month the Birmingham.pm Social Meeting is something rather special. We'll be celebrating TEN years of Birmingham.pm. While there are several other groups around the world who have been in existence longer, I think we are the second longest (uninterrupted) running group in the UK.

Last month we had a special guest in our midst, when Mike Bissett came to visit, who I co-founded Birmingham.pm with after our trip to OSCON in 2000. We started small, and have since ebbed and flowed over the years. We are still have a core group of regular attendees, several who pop along when they can, and around 80+ members on the mailing list. Thanks to everyone who has helped to keep Birmingham Perl Mongers interesting over the years, and we'll raise a toast to all those that can't make it this Wednesday.

For those who can get along, please feel free to invite colleagues, friends, partners (and anyone who might enjoy a drink ;)) and help us celebrate our tenth birthday with an evening of beer, food and good company this Wednesday at The Dragon Inn on Hurst Street.

There are unofficial reports that there may be cake too!

I should be there from about 5.30pm onwards, so you're more than welcome to join me earlier if you want. See you there.

Once agan we welcome Richard Wallman along to our May 2010 technical meeting, with a talk about Catalyst. Specifically looking at how it can ease the development and deployment of websites. Using personal experiences, Richard will be covering how Catalyst has helped him from concept to deployment.

In addition, Barbie will be taking time to review the work of the CPAN Testers 2.0 project. Taking a look the inspiration behind the project, and the progress made so far. Finally looking at some of the future plans.

As always, all are welcome, so please feel free to invite friends and colleagues along. See you there.

Have you got something interesting to say, a new project to promote, or have just learnt a new way of doing things with some cool modules? Birmingham Perl Mongers are looking for willing speakers to come along and present some interesting talks to us.

While our main focus is most definitely Perl, we do feature other languages and technologies from time to time, so please don't be afraid to offer a talk, just because it doesn't feature Perl. However, if it does feature perl so much the better :)

Our technical meetings are slightly different this year, as we're now featuring technical presentations every 2 months (i.e. March, May, July, September, November), with the intervening months covering a hands-on technical workshop where we can hack each others code, teach 1-to-1, or help improve a particular CPAN module.

So if you have a talk you could present, please get in touch and we'll add you to the itinery.

Birmingham Perl Mongers are delighted to be able to announce that they have once again sponsored the hosting and SSL certification required for the CPAN Testers for a further year. Comprising a growing set of databases and dynamic sites to present the reports data in a variety of different ways, the CPAN Testers server has become a vaulable asset to the CPAN authors and users alike.

The funding for the next year covers the costs of hosting the server for a second year, following our support of the project for 2008/9. For further information, please read the article posted on the CPAN Testers blog.