Peter Willis writes "Looking at Freshmeat today (a part of OSTG) it seems Andrew Tridgell has released the BitKeeper-compatible source code management client mentioned on slashdot recently, called SourcePuller. As part of the downloads available for the project you can also get dump files which detail how to pull data from BK trees without the use of libsp. From the README: 'SourcePuller is not intended to be a full replacement for BitKeeper. Instead, you should use SourcePuller as an interoperability tool for situations where you cannot use bk itself. SourcePuller is missing a large amount of core functionality from BitKeeper, and thus is not suitable as a full replacement.'" Article available about the release on The Register.

busfahrer writes "Version 4.0.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection has been released. You can read the changelog or you can download the source tarball. The new version finally features SSA for trees, allowing for a completely new optimization framework." The changelog is pretty lengthy, and there's updates for every language supported from Ada to Java in addition to the usual flavors of C.

An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3. 'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.

wallykeyster writes "The Register is reporting on Andrew Tridgell publicly demonstrating how to interoperate with Bitkeeper. During his keynote at the Linux.Conf.Au, Tridgell connected to a BitKeeper site via telnet and used the mostly forgotten "help" tool. Ethical arguments of aside, what really counts as reverse engineering anyway?"

JasdonLe writes "Sourcing Mag posted an article about Roger Green and David Cook, who hope to avoid US visa regulations that usually accompany outsourcing, with their company SeaCode, and a used cruise ship, sitting in international waters three miles off the coast of Los Angeles.""

bonch writes "OpenOffice .org contributors spoke this week at a conference in Canberra. Among other things, one of the issues raised was the lack of developer contributions and a source tree that is 'just too big.' Version 2.0 was originally going to be released around this time but will now be delayed until at least June or July."

rjw57 writes "There is an article on OSNews I wrote about how the guy behind Desktop Manager goes about reverse engineering APIs from Mac OS X with a brand new example not revealed anywhere else. From the article: 'I am often asked in email how I uncovered the API calls I use in Desktop Manager which are, unfortunately, undocumented. This article aims to give a little insight into the techniques I use to reverse engineer Mac OS X in order to provide extra functionality to users and extra information to third-party developers. In this article all the utilities I use are a standard part of Mac OS X's developer tools which are freely available.'"

pankaj_kumar writes "'Tools are an aid to productivity, but you only get the benefits of the tool by using it for the right task; hammers bang in nails and screwdrivers are for screws.' This quote from chapter 9 ("Scripting") from Alan Monnox's Rapid J2EE Development applies not only to the choice of the programming language but to the whole array of software development activities thoroughly and eloquently covered in the book." Read on for the rest of Kumar's review.

hixie writes " The W3C recently acknowledged a version of the Web Forms 2.0 draft submitted to the W3C by Mozilla and Opera. Meanwhile the WHATWG has updated the Web Forms draft and released a new call for comments. Send them in!"

RMX writes "CNet is reporting that Microsoft is starting to license test software for real-world use . In particular, Visual Studio 2005 and the April "community technology preview" of SQL Server 2005 are both supposed to be released sometime in the second half of the year. But Microsoft is claiming the pre-release versions are stable already, so they're licensing the pre-released versions on the grounds that they 'are already suitable for running production business applications.'"

Jukka Laurila writes "Nokia just released a port of Perl 5.8 and 5.9 for the Series 60 smartphone platform. The port contains just the interpreter core, ie. there's no support for any of the Series 60 APIs yet, but this is still great news for all you Perl aficionados out there."

chuckfucter writes "Xorg has announced the X Window System Test Suite today. From their page: 'The X.Org Foundation, global steward of the X Window System* and Standards, announced today that ApTest and The Open Group have together donated their VSW5 Test Suite to The X.Org Foundation, where it shall be released under their standard Open Source license as XTS 5.0.2. The X Window System is released by the X.Org Foundation under the MIT ("X") License. The VSW5 Test Suite is the industry best practice in testing the X Window System.'"

dnnrly asks: "I've been writing software professionaly for a couple of years now for more than 1 company and I've noticed a recurring pattern: I get put on a new project that already has a bit of history and I get told to read the design documents and then implement XYZ. What happens is I read the document, find that it gives me a lot of information about certain aspects of the system we are building, but leaves huge gaps in others. We're going to be rewriting some of the procedures very soon and I'll be able to influence the software side so I wanted to ask Slashdot readers what sort of things have they seen in design documents that they've liked/thought are a good idea? What have they found works and what doesn't? If all else fails, where's a good place to find all this stuff out?"

ajayg writes "Drupal is IMHO one of the best open sourced Content Management Systems out there. The Drupal community has just released version 4.6.0 of their PHP based CMS which finally provides support for PHP5. The release follows 6 months of development, and includes -- among other changes -- better search function as well as usability improvements for permissions, block configuration, statistics tracking, logs, forum configuration, content administration, etc."

scrapeYurShoos writes "As posted on PVRBlog: another cool use for Ajax (or whatever you want to call it), this one culls the Now Playing xml file residing on your TiVo and transforms it using xsl into a pretty webpage or a Pie Chart."

Daniel Wigdor asks: "I'm a PhD candidate doing an internship at a major American UI research lab. They distribute an input/output hardware device to research labs, along with a Java API for the development of 'concept pieces' (here's an example from a university). Java was chosen because it was simple, and seemed, at the time, to be the language of choice for UI researchers in both the corporate and academic worlds. There is now pressure to switch from Java to C#, since they don't have the resources to maintain an SDK for both. We're not at all concerned with system performance, since this is only for concept-development: it's really just about accessibility for newcomers to the hardware. Given that, what would the community advise by way of a choice between Java and C#?"

ta bu shi da yu writes "According to news.com, IBM has placed an employment ad for a developer who would be responsible for 'enhancing the Mozilla Firefox Web browser with new features complimentary to IBM's On Demand middleware stack.' IBM might possibly be interested in FireFox integration with their Workplace software. The job is not for just anyone, however, as those who wish to apply for the job should have some cred with the Mozilla development community."

Anonymous Coward writes "PerlNomic is a game consisting of CGI scripts which allow you to submit proposals to alter ... the scripts themselves. All proposals must be approved by a voting process--at least for now. The game is styled after Peter Suber's Nomic. Deep knowledge of perl is helpful, but not required." Nomic is a really excellent game if you like mental puzzles, but somewhat difficult to get off the ground.

SilentBob4 writes "Bricolage is an example of the power of an open source project to survive its proprietary origins. As you will read below, Bricolage was originally started in-house by Salon magazine, and then open sourced by About.com. I imagined how very frustrated David Wheeler, a Salon employee, would have been had he been forced to watch the code he helped develop just die on the shelf. Never underestimate the strength of the human passion to create, and to see one's creations bloom in the light of day." The full story is at Mad Penguin."

cold wolf writes "With a new site layout and information, the Raskin Center has also just released Archy (formally known at The Humane Interface). It is currently in Alpha phase and Windows only, as an executable."