Random BedHead Ed writes "After years of development, Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV is finally on its way, and will be released September 6th. The program will feature interviews with prominent nerds, such as Bill Joy and Macintosh programmer Andy Hertzfeld. But far from being a normal television show, it will be downloadable. As Cringely explained last week in his column, BitTorrent and the expansion of broadband made this the right time for such a move. The show will be available at pbs.org/nerdtv/, where there is currently an information page. Larry Lessig points out that the show will be distributed under a Creative Commons license - the specific license is not specified, but Cringely and PBS say that noncommercial use and redistribution will be allowed."

Philip Howard writes "Pretty much every form element has been conquered by CSS so far, letting us create stylish, integrated forms to tie in closely with our site designs for that UI polish graphics artists love to have. Radio Buttons and Check Boxes, however, have resisted most attempts to style them consistently, accessibly and elegantly- perhaps because nobody cares enough to come up with the solution. However, these elusive form elements have finally been conquered with a simple combination of CSS and Javascript and a little HTML wrapper. The solution is easy and quick to implement, is accessible (working with tab and space) and elegantly degrades where CSS and/or XHTML is not available."

Nice2Cats writes "A little message on Apple's Developer Connection tells us that Cocoa for Java will get no new features after 10.4. The full text is: 'Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.' Is this bad for Java, or bad for Apple, or bad for both, or doesn't anybody give a damn anyway?"

/ASCII writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++, has written an essay [PDF] on the features of the upcoming C++0x standard. In his essay, he argues that new features should whenever possible go into the standard library and not into the language, but that the language needs to shave of a few rough corners to make it easier to use for novices."

node writes "Pixel Kill has up a summary of the talk Bill Van Buren recently gave in London on the development of Half-Life 2. It's an interesting insight into some of the design decisions that resulted in such a fantastic game, plus there are some bits about the direction they're taking the upcoming expansion."

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Eric Seidel, Apple WebCore developer, Safari may soon have 'experimental SVG support.' He ported KDE's new DOM architecture KDOM as well as their Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation KSVG2 and render tree library KCanvas to WebCore. A new section devoted to SVG is also up on the WebCore site. Does this all mean that SVG will now go mainstream, finally?"

reardonsteel writes "All of the Drupal websites were offline for about two days because of a server meltdown at the organization's hosting provider. The main Drupal website is back up with a single temporary page and they've announced a fund-raising drive to raise US$3000 for a new server to be hosted at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University's server farm. Drupal is the leading open-source (written in PHP) content management system and is used to power tens of thousands of websites, blogs, community sites, etc." At this point, all they need is an actual server, too: the OSL has agreed to provide rack space, bandwidth, power, backup facilities and support.

atlantageek writes "Is the IT job market improving? Is the growth in Unix or Windows? Should I study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce? Identify the recent trends with CJ Miner, a small tool I've written that has been monitoring the Computer Jobs website for the last year."

prostoalex writes "Robert Scoble interviewed Steve Ballmer on the topics of blogging, innovation at Microsoft, Microsoft's work with developers and other things. Video is available in WMV format." From the interview: "Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so. I don't think they've done much interesting at all. What about Oracle? I don't think they've done much innovative at all. What about the open source guys? Ah, the business model is interesting but we haven't seen much in the way of technical innovation. People cite Google. Google has done some interesting stuff."

derek_farn writes "At a very late stage Addison Wesley decided not to publish my book, 'The New C Standard: An economic and cultural commentary'. Now that the copyright issues have been sorted out I am making the pdf freely available. You can download the pdf (mirror 1). The organization is rather unusual in that the commentary covers each sentence of the C Standard (actually the latest draft of C0X, excluding library) one by one (all 2022 of them). One major new angle is using the results from studies in cognitive psychology to try and figure out how developers comprehend code. The aim being to try and produce some coding guidelines that reduce costs (ie, reduce the time needed and bugs created). The book also contains the results of lots of measurements (over 400 figures and tables) in an attempt to back the arguments being made -- another unusual feature since most software related books don't publish any figures to back up what they say. Other subsections discuss common implementations and differences between the latest draft standard and C90/C++. More background on the project is available from the Inquirer.

An anonymous reader writes "After suffering manpower shortages and other issues, Debian says it has finally addressed concerns that it was falling behind on security. Debian's elected leader Branden Robinson yesterday flagged an inquiry into the processes by which security updates are released, citing a potential lack of transparency and communication failures. It was also an appropriate time to add new members to Debian's security team, as several have been inactive for a while, Robinson said. Debian initial security problems can be found in this earlier Slashdot posting."

SQL31337 writes "Jecology is a life simulator created in the spirit of Conway's Game of Life. It touches on many topics such as cellular automata, ecological balance, and the food chain. There is only one type of creature in Conway's Game of Life(CGoL). They reproduce, but do not mutate or evolve. They do not have to find food, but instead simply die based on scarcity or overpopulation. Jecology encompasses these aspects of ecology with a more complex simulation, but retains much of the elegant simplicity found in CGoL. Jecology is not merely a life simulator, but an ecology simulator. It is also an example of a complex system arising from simple rules, as described in A New Kind of Science. Screenshots and info about Jecology here."

Knight2K writes "Recent articles about casual gaming have given me the itch to try my hand at writing some games. I haven't written any since my college projects, and they never followed any formal game design practice or patterns (unless it was unconsciously). I'd like to start just by writing simple board games and card games that my family liked to play that have no digital counterparts as far as I know. Eventually I might want to branch out and do 3D work. I mostly work in Java right now, but I'd re-learn C++, if needed. My question: what books would you recommend to a beginning game developer? Good introductions to game theory would be welcome, but also language or platform-specific suggestions are useful as well: OpenGL, Symbian, C++, Java, J2ME, etc."

theodp writes "CNET reports on Microsoft's reputation for arrogance in its personnel practices, citing the experience of Arthur Sorkin, who responded to an unsolicited invitation to interview with MS back in 2000. But instead of trying to sell him on the company or the job, interviewers challenged him with a technical 'pop quiz.' Sorkin, who holds a PhD in CS, withdrew his application. During the past year, Microsoft called Sorkin to say it had scheduled a phone interview with him for another job, although Sorkin hadn't applied for it and no one had asked if he was interested."

An anonymous reader writes "A recent internet-draft pointed out a number of security flaws in the design of the ICMP protocol. Most open source projects and vendors have addressed the flaws to some level, but this interesting article on KernelTrap examines the true extent of the problem, and how so far only OpenBSD has implemented all possible counter-measures. Theo de Raadt is quoted saying, "here we have a 20 year old protocol, a part of the Internet infrastructure that hasn't been touched in 10 years and we were all sure was right, and now is cast in doubt.""

Robert J. Berger writes "The Ruby on Rails team announced that "After the longest gap between releases since Rails was made public and after more than 225 fixes and new features, the final major release before the 1.0 milestone has arrived." This is a major update to what is to many developers consider the new tool for developing sophisticated interactive database driven web applications. It integrates backend Model/View/Controller object-oriented model with AJAX based clients so that the developer can focus on the app and not on the details of basic mechanisms. You really can do much more with much less coding. The new release adds a completely rewritten visual effects engine, drag-and-drop capability including sortable lists, and autocompleting text fields to Rails. All building on top of an upgraded version of Prototype, the javascript foundation for Ajax in Rails ... Check out the very cool demos at script.aculo.us."

Anonymous Coward writes "Scott Delap's ClientJava.com has an interview with the developers behind Columba, an open source Java email client. They answer questions about Columba development and general Java/Swing issues desktop Java applications face nowadays."

chromatic writes "A constant question for software developers is 'What is the nature of programming?' Is it art or science? Does creativity or engineering lead the design and implementation of a program? John Littler talked to several well-known and well-respected programmers (including Guido van Rossum, Andy Hunt, Bjarne Stroustrup, Paul Graham, and Richard Stallman) to find their answers; he shares their thoughts and his own in Art and Computer Programming." From the article: "What the heck is art anyway, at least as most people understand it? What do people mean when they say 'art'? A straw poll showed a fair degree of consensus--art is craft plus a special degree of inspiration. This pretty much explains immediately why only art students and art critics at a certain sort of paper favor conceptual art. Conceptual art, of course, often lacks a craft component as people usually understand the term."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Traditional Oriental ink painting is more easily done with real brushes than with a computer program because you need to model how the ink is flowing into an absorbent surface such as paper. In this brief article, Technology Research News writes that "researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed a brush-and-ink-style paint program, dubbed MoXi, that uses a model of pigment particles in water flowing into paper." These virtual Chinese brushes simulate in real time the ink dispersion and could be available on your PC within two years. This longer overview contains more details and references. It also includes pictures generated with MoXi. Finally, it looks at a potential trademark problem over the name MoXi."

miller60 writes "A bunch of popular PHP-based blogging and content management apps are vulnerable to a security hole in the PHP libraries handling XML-RPC, which could allow a server compromise. Affected apps include Wordpress, Drupal, PostNuke, Serendipity, phpAdsNew, phpWiki and many more. The presence of the security hole in a large number of programs is among the factors leading the Internet Storm Center to warn that the environment is ripe for a major Internet security event."