e8johan writes "The Qt 4 Resource Center features articles regarding the next generation of Qt. Being the basis for the next generation of KDE and being available under GPL for all major platforms Qt 4 will make it even easier to develop powerful cross-platform applications."

Simon P. Chappell writes "One of the perks of regular book reviewing is that, periodically, you'll check your mail box and discover a book waiting for you. A serendipitous surprise! I don't review all such books that I receive, but this one, Spring Into HTML and CSS by Molly E. Holzschlag, stood out from the crowd and I felt that I should share my thoughts on it with you." Read on for Chappell's brief review.

An anonymous reader writes "A brand-new visual development environment for Linux is in public beta now. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be available for free when it ships in August. The company has also done away with their email registration requirement. Download the public beta now from REAL Software."

nmb3000 writes "MSDN recently put up a case study of Bungie.Net (much more detailed than a previous one), the homepage for the creators of the Halo series, and its transition from Perl to .NET and ASP. From the study: 'The Bungie.net site is the online companion to the wildly successful Halo 2 video game for Xbox, released in November 2004 by Microsoft. The site also acts as the community hub for all things related to Bungie games. Built with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Bungie.net serves up more than 4 million pages per day, accumulating 300 gigabytes of online game statistics per month from more than 1 million games played daily.' This is an interesting look into the creation and integration of the very large and interactive website which was voted 'Most Innovative Design' by IGN Entertainment in 2004."

vitaly.friedman writes "Bookmarks for web-developers, a list of useful tools supposed to make the life of web-workers easier, includes over 500 manually selected resources, tutorials, references and examples related to web-development. The "Web-Dev-Bookmarks" also includes links to other catalogs and lists related to web-design and web-development."

johnnyb writes "For those who haven't been paying attention, Blender has been gaining features like mad over the last year. The Blender Foundation has just released 2.37, which adds soft body support, force fields, and deflection for realistic cloth, skin, and other effects. This in addition to all of the smaller additions, and all of the work that has gone into previous releases. If you haven't tried Blender yet, now is the time!"

tbray writes "The hardware guys are getting ready to toss this big hairy package over the wall: CMT (Chip Multi Threading) and TLP (Thread Level Parallelism). Think about a chip that isn't that fast but runs 32 threads in hardware. This year, more threads next year. How do you make your code run fast? Anyhow, I was just at a high-level Sun meeting about this stuff, and we don't know the answers, but I pulled together some of the questions."

Costa Galanis writes "The LA Times is reporting that a poker tournament will be held where engineers will be able to pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other in a tournament similar to the upcoming World Series of Poker main event, with a 100,000 dollar cash prize for the winning program. The article mentions how the recent rise in popularity of poker has encouraged many to try and create the poker equivalent of chess' Big Blue, the chess playing computer program that defeated the world's top chess player in a widely publicized event, and also talks about how many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos."

AlexJeff writes "Yesterday Real open sourced the server source code of its Network Optimized FileSystem (Asynchronous FileSystem). Actually it "dual-licensed" it under its open source (RPSL) and commercial licenses. According to a posting on the Helix Community, the Asynchronous FileSystem provides asynchronous access to the OS file-system and is mainly used to help resolve timing issues with Network File System(NFS). This functionality provides improvement capacity in 'Helix DNA-powered servers, especially on frameworks that use Network File System.'"

Thorsten Holz writes "A few hours ago, the UCSB International Capture The Flag (CTF) contest ended. The CTF contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other. It is the biggest contest worldwide and different from the DEFCON CTF because it involves nine educational institutions spread worlwide. Our team (called '0ld Eur0pe') managed to get second place, although our VMware image was 'rm -rf'ed during the contest! The final scoreboard shows the result and some impressions can be found at our homepage." Update: 06/12 00:17 GMT by T : Thanks to reader Bob MacSlack, who spotted my goof and corrects it thus: "The article incorrectly attributes the contest to UC Berkeley. UCSB is actually UC Santa Barbara."

Xcott Craver writes "We have just announced a new annual contest, the Underhanded C Contest, to write clear, readable, innocent-looking C code that implements malicious behavior. The object is to hide evil functionality that survives visual inspection of the source. The prize is beer."

mu-sly writes "Ajax and Rails - probably two of the biggest buzzwords in web development at the moment. In this article over at ONLamp, Curt Hibbs introduces the incredibly powerful Ajax support that is part of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It's a great read, and serves as a gentle introduction to the cool stuff you can accomplish with ease using the Ajax features of Rails."

Richo99 writes "The editor at UI Hall of Shame takes us for a walk through a house designed by bad software developers. It appears Ed is getting a bit tired of really bad software designs in popular shareware titles. It is interesting because how much of a crime these apps perpetrate isn't obvious until you apply the same logic to everyday things, like the design of a house. I especially love the access to the garden. "

digidave writes "It was slow to catch and a lot of people didn't get it. A lot of people still don't get it, but you can't argue with its success. June 8th, 2005 marks the tenth anniversary of PHP. Here's to ten more wonderful and exciting years."

cronostitan asks: "We are a small software development department inside a big print media corporation. As in most departments nowadays, we have very few people but a high workload. We are currently working on a code rewrite of an in-house CRM application. Beside this big project, there are always a number of urgent, smaller projects coming in with a timeframe of 1-3 days that we do 'in between.' There is no way to delay these small things, as these are always of the highest priority." What's needed here is a time tracking system that automatically adjusts completion dates based on the current workload. Read on for more details of cronostitan's situation.

Rollie Hawk writes "Microsoft's latest attempt to reconcile with the European Commission's antitrust rulings against the company may result in another victim. It seems their offer, if accepted, will strike a considerable blow at a leading competitor in the realm of file and printer sharing. The popular open source suite Samba stands to be the recipient of a backhanded slap from Redmond if the offer stands and the European branch of the Free Software Foundation is taking it personally. Though Microsoft is offering to make some information regarding interoperability available to competitors, it's only under the condition that implementations are not open source. According to FSFE president Georg Greve, "the proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a free software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software." How is Samba being specifically targeted? Greve argues this is because "Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market.""

An anonymous reader writes "Most emacs/vi users know this, but it seems the more I use the mouse, the less output I am making. The keyboard does seem to make much more of a mind-meld than the imprecise mouse. Paul Tyma hits it on the head."

nellardo writes "If you've been programming C++ for any length of time, you probably have the book, Effective C++, by Scott Meyers on your shelves. Well, this book has just hit its third edition, and it's a major re-write and re-org. Do you need this book? If you program C++, yes, you probably do, even if you have a previous edition. Don't let the "Third Edition" faze you, because it has lots of new insights into the vagaries of the C++ language. And if you're new to C++, this is pretty much a must-own book." Read on for the rest of Nellardo's review.

so sue mee writes "There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done. When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks. Evan Robinson has an article at the International Game Developer's Association site talking about the harsh realities of crunch time, and why the gaming industry should stop using it." From the article: "It is intuitively obvious that a worker who produces one widget per hour during an eight-hour day can produce somewhere between eight and 16 widgets during a 16-hour day. As we've seen, that's the essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity. But worker productivity is largely dependent upon recent history."

DLWormwood wonders: "As a long time Mac developer, originally as a hobbyist and then a professional, I'm feeling pessimistic about the future of the platform now that Apple is embracing Intel and abandoning the few remaining 'Mac' technologies (like the PowerPC and OpenTransport) left to the platform. With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance. (If it wasn't for the poor past performance of VPC, I would not have gotten my first Mac programming job.) Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'"