Bruce Byfield points out his NewsForge (part of OSTG) article about something good coming out of the conflict over Java in OpenOffice.org. It begins "A dispute between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and OpenOffice.org (OOo) over the increased use of Java in the upcoming version 2.0 release of OOo is over -- at least for now. The two groups have found a short-term solution, and are working together on ways to keep the dispute from happening again." The story provides a decent background on why it matters, and shows a surprisingly conciliatory attitude on both sides.

N3wsByt3 writes "Many will have heard about the anonymous P2P-system Freenet. What many probably don't know is, that a big change is at hand: the Freenet developers have decided to drop all support for the 0.5x version, to skip version 0.6 and to completely revamp the 0.7 build into some kind of poorly described, presumably scalable darknet. The main coder even threatened to quit if such a darknet would be rejected. So, is it finally going the right way with the development of Freenet? Maybe not, since they seem reluctant to provide real data and rather rely on security through obfuscation, and then there is still the problem of their general inability in regard to pooling human resources, which, for any OSS project, is of the utmost importance." Obviously, the article submitter has his own feelings on Freenet, but notwithstanding that, what's the latest scuttlebutt from within the Freenet crowd?

plasticmillion writes "Greasemonkey is a revolutionary Firefox extension that many feel has enormous implications for the future evolution of the web. By making it easy to write client-side scripts that modify webpages as you surf, it shifts the balance of power from content creators to content consumers. Since its inception, it has given rise to an impressive array of scripts for everything from enhancing Gmail with one-click delete functionality to preventing Hotmail from spawning new windows when you click on external links. In recent Greasemonkey news, Mark Pilgrim just published a comprehensive primer called 'Dive Into Greasemonkey', a must-read for those who want to try their hand at writing their own scripts. It should be noted that Greasemonkey is not without controversy, but this has done nothing to reduce its popularity among web programmers. Even Opera has jumped on the bandwagon with their own version of user scripts. To illustrate the principle to /.ers, I whipped up a handy little script called 'Slashdot Live Comment Tree', which lets you expand and collapse entire threads in an article's comments."

An anonymous reader writes "From the article: Microsoft's announcement that it will enter the AV market next year, with initial trials starting next week, could be a sign of many things to come, says SecurityFocus's Kelly Martin. " Not unexpected, given their recent purchase.

Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"

An anonymous reader writes "According to Dish Network they are accommodating 'requests for the portions of the DISH 921 DVR source code that are subject to the GNU Public License, or GPL. In compliance with the terms of the GPL, we are making this source code available to the public to download. Please note that the DISH 921 DVR software also includes some proprietary elements that are not subject to the GPL. You cannot create a working DISH 921 DVR software build without the additional proprietary code. Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail.'"

AmiChris asks: "At work I need something that can dump sequential entries for several hundred thousand instruments in realtime. It also needs to be able to retrieve data for a single instrument relatively quickly. A standard relational database won't cut it. It has to keep up with 2000+ updates per second, mostly on a subset of a few hundred instruments active at a given time. I've got some ideas of how I would build such a beast, based on flat files and a system of caching entries in memory. I would like to know if: someone has already built something like this; and if not, would someone want to use it if I build it? I'm not sure what other applications there might be. I could see recording massive amounts of network traffic or scientific data with such a library. I'm guessing someone out there has done something like this before. I'm currently working with C++ on Windows. "

An anonymous reader writes "There's an article in the May issue of the WebSphere Developer Technical Journal at IBM's developerWorks site on Pairing PHP with Java to meet the needs of a familiar web application scenario. The example consists of a Struts application deployed on WebSphere Application Server, which serves as the private content management tool, and a PHP 5 site to display that data to the public. Both parts of the application share a single Apache and DB2 instance."

sultanoslack writes "Over at NewsForge a story just popped up on the usability experts from OpenUsability and some of the issues on working with KDE development teams, specifically the KDE PIM team. There's some interesting content on the different working styles of the two groups as well as a little bit on some of the improvements that were part of the recent KDE 3.4 release."

Martin Ecker writes "Following up on last year's first installment of the "GPU Gems" book series, NVIDIA has recently finished work on the second book in the series titled GPU Gems 2 - Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation, published by Addison-Wesley. Just like the first book, GPU Gems 2 is a collection of articles by various authors from game development companies, academia, and tool developers on advanced techniques for programming graphics processing units (or GPUs for short). It is aimed at intermediate to advanced graphics developers that are familiar with the most common graphics APIs - in particular OpenGL and Direct3D - and high-level shading languages, such as GLSL, HLSL, or Cg. The reader should also be proficient in C++. As with GPU Gems, GPU Gems 2 is not for beginners. For professional graphics and game developers, however, it is an excellent collection of interesting techniques, tips, and tricks." Read on for Ecker's review.

davidwr writes "UKBuilder.com reports that Borland's structured exception handling (SEH) patent affects Winelib. Winelib allows you to compile Windows-targeted code to run natively on Linux. Because of the patent, gcc does not include support for SEH, which is widely used in the MS-Windows world. There are workarounds, but you won't like them."

hdm writes "The first edition of the Uninformed Journal introduces reverse engineering by ripping apart the MineSweeper game included with Windows XP. This paper covers the basics of the Windows Debugger and steps through the entire reverse engineering and cheat code development process."

Gamasutra has the happy news that Europe will host a Game Developer's Conference this year, in late August. The event is to be held in London, and will be sponsored primarily by The Independent Games Developers Association. From the article: "The GDCE conference program builds upon the Future Vision theme, unveiled at the 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this past March, and will feature three days of lectures, keynotes, panels, tutorials and roundtable discussions. Specific details of speakers will be announced in the near future on the official GDC Europe website."

karvind writes "Yahoo is running a story on how OpenOffice 2.0 Faces Opposition over Its Use of Java. According the article: "The problem, according to some free software voices, is that OO.o relies too much on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s proprietary Java programming language in an open-source project. In particular, free software advocates are objecting to the use of Sun specific Java code for such OO.o 2.0 features as the new, Microsoft Access-like database management program, Base and Writer's (OO.o's word processor) document wizards." Linus Torvalds also moved to an open-source solution for software configuration management system."

theodp writes "In Johnny Can So Program, CS Prof Norm Matloff calls BS on CNET stories like Can Johnny Still Program? and Can the U.S. Still Compete?, saying it's a shame that CNET fails to cover the real threat to American technological competitiveness, the hidden agendas of Chicken Littles like Jim Foley of the Computing Research Association, David Patterson of the ACM and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, all of whose organizations have a vested interest in playing the education card."

rammerhammer writes "Sharing files amongst different platforms has most always resulted in using samba -- a program based around the windows file sharing protocol. Chungles aims to provide a nice, graphical, easy configurable file sharing alternative. It's written in Java, uses SWT for the UI, and JmDNS (Rendezvous/ZeroConf/Bonjour) for discovery of computers running Chungles."

robotsrule asks: "Having been in the computer industry a while I distinctly remember the pain of making the 16-bit to 32-bit transition, when Windows made the change to 32-bit support. Any developer who remember the joys of thunking and other kludges that were meant to help code conversions also remembers the arcane marathon debug sessions too. I have not been keeping up with the latest Microsoft Longhorn technical news, or the plans that the Linux community has for 64-bit platform support. Does anyone out there have a reliable prediction for the amount of system shock we are facing when either Longhorn or 64-bit Linux comes out? Will I lose all my favorite 32-bit development tools again as I watch the backward compatibility support dry up as the 64-bit O/S platforms are adopted? Or are the O/S manufacturers making happy noises about long-term support for existing development languages and tools?"

Craig Maloney writes "Anyone who codes in Perl can relate to working on other people's code. Sometimes the code will thankfully include "use warnings" and be a joy to maintain. More likely, though, the code will have so many warnings that the useful output is long gone in the stratosphere of your scroll buffer. Even good code written for earlier versions of Perl can become aged and decrepit, requiring elderly modules that may or may not work with newer versions of Perl. Maintaining this code can be a hassle, but fortunately Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code (referred to for the duration of the review as Perl Medic) provides some very useful tips for getting through these migrations, and will help the next person maintaining your code." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

Simon P. Chappell writes "This is a hard review to write because I feel that I should be biased in favour of this book. I was one of the original reviewers of the book proposal. I read it and said "Yes, they'll be lining up around the block for a book like this!" Well, maybe those weren't my exact words, but I did offer my endorsement. After all, the Jakarta project of the Apache Software Foundation has an excellent reputation for quality Java code products and the Commons is quite the supply of diamonds in the rough. What could go wrong?" Read on for the rest of Chappell's review to find out.

emmjayell writes "You've been there, loaded up a new application (think server-based app like Apache or Samba ...), it's working okay for a few days or a few months, then the intermittent problems start. Usually it's the CEO or someone else of relative importance that is the first victim. You can't readily duplicate the problem, so you go to find out where the application put's it's logs - maybe it's in var/log/messages - maybe in it's own directory - sometimes it's right there and available in some administrative GUI. So what makes you happiest when diagnosing the problem? Do you want tools to access it? UI or command line? Do you want it formatted to use tools like cut and sed? Do you have any examples of an app that does a great job with system logging and diag logging? Background: My team is working on an application that is gearing up for a first release. We have a logging framework in place already (we are using Apache: logging.apache.org/) -- so that covers how we are logging, but not what we should log and how it should be laid out for optimal use."