Polymake is a versatile tool for the algorithmic treatment of polytopes and polyhedra. It offers an unified interface to a wide variety of algorithms and free software packages from the computational geometry field, such as convex hull computation or visualization tools. The 2.9 series are test versions towards the "next generation" polymake. They introduce an interactive shell, the XML-base file format, more efficient C++/perl interface, and many other new features. WWW: http://www.polymake.de/