An anonymous reader submits "David Naylor has reviewed the browser recognition capabilities of seven free website statistics services. Among other things, he kills the myth that many Opera users go unaccounted for in website statistics because of the default UA spoofing. Furthermore, he shows that the quality of browser recognition ranges from absolutely abysmal to near perfect."

nazarijo writes "You can usually tell someone who's been writing a lot of code by how they write code. That may sound like a tautology, but it's got a deeper meaning than that. What editor they use, what idioms they use to avoid common pitfalls, and what organization patterns they employ all tell you what kind of programmer you're meeting. When you first start writing code, so many things are inconsistent and just plain wrong that it's almost embarrassing. I know that when I look over older code that I've written I feel sheepish about it. But how do you grow as a programmer, and what really makes a good programmer beyond language familiarity?" Read on for Nazario's review of Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, a book which attempts to instill deeper knowledge about programming than just "knowing how."

crazy_speeder asks: "I'm looking for programming tools for the whole development cycle, including documentation. The project I'm working on will use C++ and Java. What has been your experience using tools like C++ Builder, Netbeans, Eclipse, JBuilder, Doxygen, ClearQuest, Rational Rose, g++, and any compiler, debugger, or IDE that you may have used. I need tools that will handle auto documentation, unit testing, design, file editing, and the like. As far as platform goes, Linux is the target OS while Linux or Solaris will be the host OS."

gManZboy writes "In part 2 of its special report on Quality Assurance (part 1) Queue magazine is running an article from Keith Stobie, a test architect in Microsoft's XML Web Services group, about the challenges one faces in trying to test against large codebases."

2d is the new 3d writes "PopCap Games has Open Sourced the framework used to make their hit downloadable web games. From the press release: 'The PopCap Games Framework provides developers a quick and easy way to get their projects off the ground, allowing more time to be spent on game design instead of compatibility bugs and multimedia programming issues. For the first time, casual game developers will have access to a refined, reliable framework that has been tested in dozens of games played by millions of customers. ...The PopCap Games Framework is available now at developer.popcap.com. It currently supports Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP operating systems."

acz writes "The Hack In The Box Security Conference 2004 videos (Part 1 and Part 2) have just been released today via bittorrent. HITBSecConf2004 attracted to Kuala Lumpur some of the biggest names in the security community to present their latest research. John T. Draper AKA Captain Crunch was present and Theo de Raadt did a fine speech on Exploit Mitigation techniques. For a live performance, you can catch up some of the speakers and the HITB crew over at BCS2005 in Jakarta on the 23rd-24th of this month. If you're in the Middle East or Europe, there's HITBSecConf2005 - Bahrain taking place 10th-13th April in Bahrain. See you guys there."

An anonymous reader writes "AltiVec? Velocity Engine? VMX? If you've only been casually following PowerPC development, you might be confused by the various guises of this vector processing SIMD technology. This article covers the basics on what AltiVec is, what it does -- and how it stacks up against its competition."

flyboy writes "In a similar vein to the remakes of the Origin's Ultima series games reported in 2001 and 2004 a group of Wing Commander fans has remade Wing Commander: Privateer. Unlike the Ultima remakes, the Privateer remake is finished at version 1.0 with 3d graphics and the whole storyline. For the new kids on the block, WC:Privateer was a much loved trading game similar to the more venerable Elite, which appears also to be in the process of a remake. As a linux fan I was most happy with the remake's use of GPL 3d engine software and release of Linux, Macintosh and Windows versions. See Screenshots here."

bonch writes "Richard Grimes of Dr. Dobbs Journal wrote an article entitled Mr. Grimes' Farewell, in which he discusses what he feels are inherent flaws in .NET, and how he is abandoning his .NET column. Grimes argues that .NET is merely thin wrappers to Win32 calls (Avalon uses message functions that date back to 16-bit Windows), that Microsoft has abandoned confidence in both .NET and sales of Longhorn, and that the framework itself is too large and poorly implemented, most of it ported from past APIs like WFC and VB. Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's Visual C# Project Manager, has responded in his blog. Richard Grimes appears in the comments to defend his criticism, referencing first-hand disassembly of .NET APIs using ildasm. Scott Swigart has also responded to the criticism of Visual Basic .NET. Apparently, Mr. Grimes struck some nerves."

An anonymous reader writes "Mike Connor, one of the core Firefox developers, is raising a flag concerning the Mozilla Firefox methodology of development. From his blog: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews." In an earlier entry, he raised concrete concerns about the community involvement. Asa Dotzler recently elaborated on the process, as previously covered on Slashdot."

David Parmet writes "Using data from indeed.com (an aggregator for job sites), Brandon of devnulled did an evaluation of the state of the job market in the US for developers. Some interesting findings - there are more Linux jobs than Solaris jobs. Unix is still competitive with Windows (only 24,000 fewer job listings for Unix than for Windows), Java is beating .Net and overall there seem to be a lot of enterprise / corporate IT jobs available. Indeed has a web services API / XML interface available here, so if you want you can do the analysis yourself."

eth8686 writes "Microsoft is aiming to have its first cluster version of Windows ready in time for a supercomputing conference this fall." From the article: "The next version of the Compute Cluster edition will extend to Microsoft's .Net programming infrastructure, letting developers write software using the C# programming language, he said."

elmartinos writes "With official permission from the data protection committee in the Austrian Office of the Federal Chancellor, quintessence (an association for the re-establishment of information civil rights) has data mined an extensive mailing list related to the Biometric Consortium, which is part of the NSA. Heise (Google translation) writes that a quintessenz activist was able to get access to the mailing list through social engineering, and used a PHP script to extract 1GB worth of data. Quintessenz is using the open source tool Weka for data mining, and Kea for text mining. The first chapter of the gathered information is available online."

An anonymous reader writes "Curt Hibbs has released Part 2 of his tutorial Rolling with Ruby on Rails to the O'Reilly ONLamp site. The first part was published in January. Topics covered are database transactions, callbacks, unit testing and caching." From the article: "In Rolling with Ruby on Rails, I barely scratched the surface of what you can do with Ruby on Rails. I didn't talk about data validation or database transactions, and I did not mention callbacks, unit testing, or caching. There was hardly a mention of the many helpers that Rails includes to make your life easier. I can't really do justice to all of these topics in the space of this article, but I will go into details on some of them and present a brief overview of the rest, with links to more detailed information."

SomeGuyNamedMike writes "I realize the thought of using Flash and Actionscript is considered beneath many Slashdotters, but here's this piece, anyway: Macromedia is receiving (and answering) a a lot of flack from several blogs over its decision to package Yahoo! Toolbar with its Flash player. Will your company develop Flash content knowing Macromedia is using its runtime as its own marketing piece?"

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a summary of a lengthy discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list, in which Linus Torvalds has suggested using an alternative numbering scheme for kernel development. The current 2.6 kernel has been different than older development trees, as active development has been happening at a rapid rate in the officially "stable" kernel, instead of forking the expected 2.7 "development branch" for this effort. In Linus' latest proposal, he suggests using the same odd and even arrangement where an odd number signifies a development release, and an even number signifies a stable release. The difference being that this will all happen under 2.6 and thus at a much more rapid rate. For example, the upcoming 2.6.12 release would focus on fixing bugs and thus be more stable, while the following 2.6.13 release would include new functionality and thus could be less stable."

James Edward Gray II writes "If you've ever wanted to know more about the agile programming methodologies, Integrating Agile Development in the Real World is a fine place to look for the answers to your questions. Various agile methodologies are explained, compared, and contrasted within. A good look is taken at how they work, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they compare to the more traditional approaches of software development. This proves to be a strong introduction and overview to agile programming practices." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.

gManZboy writes "Original author of Make and IBM Researcher, Stu Feldman has written an overview of what should be (but is sadly perhaps not) familiar ground to many Slashdotters: Quality Assurance. He argues that QA is not equivalent to 'testing', and also addresses the oft-experienced (apparent) conflict between QA-advocates and 'buisiness goals.'"

sebFlyte writes "Alan Cox' speech at FOSDEM sounds like it was interesting... according to this ZDNet report on it he has some interesting views. For one, he says: 'Linus is a good developer, but is a terrible engineer.' He also has a few digs at Torvald's methods surrounding security fixes, and some other interesting insights in the kernel development process: 'Sometimes you see a fix and think "this is perfect, move my fix into the kernel tree." Later you think, "I must have been drunk. Don't apply that patch."'"

Amit Mathew writes "The OGRE (Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) team released version 1.0 (Azathoth). OGRE is currently the premiere open source graphics engine and is used in several commercial projects and hundreds of academic and hobbyist projects. OGRE has an active user community and features advanced shader support, multiple shadow techniques, and much more!"