jpkunst writes "As reported on undeadly.org: an interesting interview with OpenBSD developer Marc Espie about the internals of and the philosophy behind the OpenBSD ports and packages system."

ruipaulo writes "When Google announced the "Summer of Code", its program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, the NetBSD Project understood the value of this project and entered as a mentoring organization. Over a period of two weeks, students researched the list of possible projects and discussed their proposals on the public mailing lists and in private with developers and other users alike. After evaluating over 100 distinct applications, the NetBSD Foundation is now pleased to announce the list of projects that have been chosen. See the associated press release for all the details."

iseff writes "The ICFP Contest (reported first here) is now underway. There's probably still some time for us slackers to code up something for the first round. This year's problem is similar to the board game Cops and Robbers. What I find cool about this year is the split into two parts -- code the original spec, then wait, get a new spec, and modify. Plus, any language is accepted, even though it's a 'functional programming' contest."

behdad writes "Google's Summer of Code final per-organization project breakdown is out. The Apache Software Foundation is on the top of the list with 38 projects allocated out of total 410 slots, followed by KDE, FreeBSD, and 38 other mentoring organizations. The accepted applications will be posted early next week. More than 8700 applications have been submitted. Thanks Greg Stein and Chris DiBona for the hard work."

Nora writes "developerWorks has posted a slightly expanded version of the paper presented at LinuxTag today by IBM's Linux-for-Cell maintainer Arnd Bergmann (which was mentioned on Slashdot a few weeks ago). I searched the LinuxTag site to post a link to their copy of the paper also, but I couldn't find one (but my German is not so good, so it's probably my fault). In addition to the abovementioned paper on the SPU file system, we have also published an interview with Arnd Bergmann in which we learn more about programming for Linux on Cell, and programming for Cell in general -- and also that there is no such thing as the so-called 'Cell Workstation' that some of us have been looking forward to for a long time (apparently, it's just the Blade board prototype that many of us have already seen). And of course, much more. "

Omar Khan writes "The New York Times reports, 'Even as it lays off up to 13,000 workers in Europe and the U.S., IBM plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers.' Slashdot previously covered the black-and-blue strike, in which the union wondered, 'if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.'"

Matt wrote to mention a MacWorld story discussing a new initiative by auction site eBay to open source parts of its search functionality, in order to expand their coder resources. From the article: " The software will be available under a new program called Community Codebase, which was announced at the eBay Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday. The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network. (Pay Pal is owned by eBay.) It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications. An example is a Java application that allows TiVo users to search and bid on items via their digital video recorder boxes. Other examples include a Firefox toolbar, various Pay Pal toolkits and an application used to extract information from Pay Pal's database and putting it into Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheet software."

cobrabyte asks: "My team has recently been given the task of implementing internationalization (i18n) in our MySQL databases (PHP-interfaced). Essentially, for every article X, we need it presented in any number of languages (once translated). As we were working on gathering the necessary procedures, we were very surprised to find that there's not much organized information regarding i18n using MySQL and PHP. Is the topic of i18n too new to garner any usable info?"

Nagappan writes "The GNU/Linux Desktop Testing Project (GNU/LDTP) is aimed at producing high quality test automation framework and cutting-edge tools that can be used to test GNU/Linux Desktop and improve it. It uses the 'Accessibility' libraries to poke through the application's user interface. The framework has tools to generate 'AppMap' by reading through the user interface components of an application. The framework also has tools to record test-cases based on user-selection on the application. As of now, GNU/LDTP can test any GNOME application which is accessibility enabled: Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, any Java application (UI based on swing) and KDE 4.0 applications based on QT 4.0. We encourage you to join the project and help us to create robust, reliable and stable test tool/framework for Linux Desktops. Thanks to Luis Villa for trying to integrate GNU/LDTP with GNOME tinderbox."

An anonymous reader submits "It's official. CodeWeavers is planning to support Mac OS X on Intel chips. Many say this could stifle Windows to OS X ports of apps, but nonetheless this may make it a lot easier for people to switch to OS X from Windows."

Will Stewart writes "You have doubtless read that Silicon Valley Watcher reported on Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D, online version of San Francisco and eventually other major US cities, but you may not have seen the picture of where the trucks are kept and Berkeley's unrelated research project and published technical research (PDF file)."

sultanoslack writes "More from the world of usability in KDE -- there's an interview up where Albert Astals Cid, the KPDF maintainer, and Florian Grässle, a usability engineer from OpenUsability on working together to make KPDF more usable and some of the challenges in working together in a developer / usability engineer team. We've been seeing more from the OpenUsability folks lately, and they'll also be present doing a talk and staffing a booth this week at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Open Source conference." This interview-with-screenshots provides a neat look at the interaction of usability concerns and software development.

Vern Ceder writes "I really expected to love Data Crunching. The Pragmatic Bookshelf has come up with some very good and, well, "pragmatic" texts in the past so I was looking for more of the same. Even better, the subject of the book was the routine data extraction, massaging and formatting that I (and a lot of other coders) spend so much time on. I was really looking forward to adding a couple more pragmatic tools to my coding toolbox. Unfortunately (as you may have guessed), I really can't say I love Data Crunching. It's a good book, but there are several minor points that keep if from being a truly great book." Read on for the rest of Ceder's review.

alphapartic1e writes "Yahoo! News writes "The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005. Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis. "If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research.""

manganese4 writes "They've been discussed before in relation to Google, but the American Chemical Society has launched a new effort against perceived competitors. They are attempting to limit the government's ability to freely publish the results of scientific work paid for by tax dollars. The British journal Nature and the Univeristy of California reports on efforts by the ACS in attempting to shutdown a free database, PubChem, of molecular structures because it competes head to head with the fee-for-service Chemical Abstract Service. Their rationale is that the government should not spend taxpayer dollars on something private business is already doing. Luckily the government has not backed down."

tezbobobo writes "Well, Open Solaris has only been available a matter of days and already there are new projects available. SchilliX is an OpenSolaris-based live CD and distribution that is intended to help people discover OpenSolaris. When installed on a hard drive, it also allows developers to develop and compile code in a pure OpenSolaris environment. More details are available on the author's blog."

bakotaco wrote with news from the Summer of Code site: "We're Expanding the Summer of Code... After spot reviewing the applications we've received for the Summer of Code, we were struck with their high quality. As a result, we were able to increase the funds available to support 400 students, double our original number of 200. While this doesn't allow us to take all applicants, we thought that this would be a terrific thing to do for the mentoring organizations, the students, open source software and computer science."

Reverberant writes "Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell's original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1." From the article: " The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 - but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple's software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs' second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations - the most famous current example being Apple's iTunes Music Store."

Ridgelift writes "Learning to develop web applications with Ruby on Rails has gained a huge amount of interest lately, but for people wanting to learn Rails there are no books on the subject. That's changed now with the pre-release of Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails , the latest book from Dave Thomas and the author of Ruby on Rails David Heinemeier Hansson. It's really 3 books in one: a full Rails tutorial, an in depth guide to the components that make up Rails, and an introduction to developing applications using the Agile development model. There's even a quick introduction to Ruby, the language Rails is built with." Read on for an early review of the beta book. Full disclosure: Reviewer Miles K. Forrest points out that he has read earlier versions of the book's manuscript and provided critiques to the authors.

An anonymous reader writes "Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"