This morning the overnight train from Brest, a city in Belarus, rolled a few hours late into Bratislava. I jumped off to the platform, happy to be back home again. I have taken the last month away from hacking on PH, Perl 6 and my other smaller projects. Instead, I've been backpacking across Russia - from Vladivostok all the way overland to Moscow - and then spending a little time in Belarus. They're fascinating if sometimes difficult countries to spend time in, and I'll be writing about my trip in an e-book.

While I've been away, PH suffered some nasty SPAM attacks. I'm happy to see on returning that the latest forum posts box on the homepage is now free of them - I did manage to find a net connection and visit the site during the worst of the problems, and was horrified to see the mess the attackers had made of the site, and gave what input I could on the problems. The credit for resolving them goes to Brad, Nicolai and Kent, however. I'd like to thank everyone who stuck with the site during this time; what was meant to be a month of gentle development work while I was gone really didn't end up that way. Its sickening to think that some people make their money out of destroying what others are doing, and irritating that we have to spend time working against them, instead of working to improve the site.

Anyway, I'll be digging in again over the coming weeks to continue trying to make things better here, along with the rest of the PH team. I hope that we can make this a programmer's heaven, rather than the programmer's nightmare - both for you and the the PH team - that it's been during the attacks.