The Perl Foundation has received its seemingly largest donation of $100,000 from the Craigslist Charitable Fund. This donation will be used towards the maintenance of Perl 5. Craigslist is built mostly using Perl, and it uses many other open-source technologies.

Craigslist is so popular in its niche that it was mentioned on this episode of The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon wants to buy Uranium, online.

The President of the Perl Foundation, Karen Pauley, expressed his gratitude to the Craigslist Charitable Fund, saying,

This generous donation will allow us to improve the Perl 5 Core and the work done with the Core Maintenance Fund, as well as sponsor a range of Perl 5 related activities through grants and initiatives already in existence and in the community.

The Perl Foundation has received heft donations earlier. Booking.com donated $50,000 to the Perl Foundation in 2008, and Liquid Web, a web hosting company donated $10,000 to the Perl Foundation in September last year. However, development of Perl has slowed down considerably over the last decade, with new versions primarily resolving bug fixes, and including minor syntax changes. This donation should be a boost for the Perl Foundation, and should help it revamp the development of the “duct tape of the Internet”.

Perl is released under the GNU GPL and the Artistic License. It is an extremely dynamic, flexible and (perhaps the most) powerful programming language. It truly deserves these donations, and much more love.

IT departments at some companies and schools are more strict than others when it comes to browsing. If your workplace or school has blocked access to Craigslist as a part of their policy, here are a couple of things that will work.

The first option is to try some general methods that would work for 90% of the users like using a proxy or playing around with your IP. But if nothing works, just head over to CraigLook.com. CraigLook is like a mirror site to Craigslist that has all the CraigsList’s content but with tons of extra features.

CraigLook lets you search Craigslist by simply entering your zip code and the keyword you are looking for. For example “TV” in “Dallas” would automatically scan all the listings and grab the ones that have the keyword TV. It will show you total number of results along with the results in each category such as “Sale’, “Jobs” , “Services’ e.t.c. You can check the box next to any of the categories to only include results from that category.

You can also restrict search results by specifying the radius you want to search in and even specify a price range you are looking to be in. You can also choose to hide listings that don’t have an image and sort the results based on date or price. CraigLook also displays information for new items from Amazon.com.

However, the most useful features of CraigLook is the ability to save your search and even set up alerts so you receive an email any time a new listing matches your specified criteria. CraigLook can also be used to post new listings without actually going to CraigsList.

Craigslist is one of the most popular and effective classifieds website. However, visiting the site again and again and going through hundreds of listings just to look for that one particular thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. NotiFinder is a dead simple app that changes that by emailing you relevant listings.

Start by specifying your city and country and then move on to select what item/job/topic you are interested in. As soon as a classified is posted matching your specified criteria, Craigslist will send you an email with a link to that listing.  You can also choose to receive these updates once daily or once weekly. Search criteria that you specify can be pretty broad or narrow depending on your requirements. For example, in addition to specifying that you are looking for a car, you can also enter a price range for your desired car and NotiFinder will only send you an email if the car falls within your specified price range.  Similar to the price range, other categories also have additional criteria that can be used to narrow down your search results.

With an easy-to-use interface, no hassle of signing up for an account and a dead simple idea, NotiFinder is one of the most useful Craigslist tools on the web.

We would think that people are crazy, but you wouldn’t find crazier people than  those posting ads on Craigslist, the free classified site which has had it’s share of controversies over its existence.

In a really stupid and almost "come-and-arrest-me" ad on Craigslist, two men posted an ad on Craigslist for an exchange. And what was the exchange the stupid guys posted? Take a look at the image above, the guys were trading in an iPod Touch in perfect condition (sane) + Weed or what they call DANK (high quality Marijuana) (insane) for an iPad (OMG).

Oh yes, they posted this stupid ad just to get an iPad in exchange, this was surely one of the worst ways to get yourself arrested, and yes they did get arrested after a tipoff.

Once a tipoff was received by the cops, undercover cops responded to the ad and arrested two 20-year olds from Gilbert, Arizona after they were served up the dope in exchange for the iPad.

The dumbest part of all this is that those folks actually uploaded the image of the dope on a scale in the ad too. Oh and if you think that this was a dumb thing to do, we have even more dumber people out there in the world. Last year a criminal escaped from a Suffolk, UK prison and starting taunting the cops through Facebook, though he was eventually caught later, that was by far the most stupid thing to do.

And if you thought that the Internet was not a weird place, take a look at how a woman banged her head against a wall.. err vehicle and sued Google Maps.

(Source and Image Credit)