danielread writes "In 1992 C++ Journal published an essay by Jack W. Reeves called 'What Is Software Design?' Many credit this essay as being the first published instance of assertions such as 'programming is not about building software; programming is about designing software' and 'it is cheaper and simpler to just build the design and test it than to do anything else'. developer.* Magazine has republished this groundbreaking essay, plus two previously unpublished essays, under the title Code as Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves."

Dotnaught writes "With its planned introduction on Tuesday of new search APIs and a developer network, Yahoo aims to tap the creativity of the open source community. As the current issue of Wired points out, "Yahoo makes more money and has more patents, services and users than Google." Will nurturing a developer community have any impact on Yahoo's competitive position against Google and Microsoft?"

Eugenia writes "The Gnome Project announced today that the ClearLooks theme engine will be the default theme for the Gnome 2.12 (to be released around September). This was a much needed refresh of the Gnome default desktop (old theme, new theme screenshots)."

James Edward Gray II writes "I'm not an XML junkie and I thought this was a very good book, so I'm betting that XML aficionados will love it. Effective XML covers 50 best practices that all developers should know and use. This amounts to a book of distilled wisdom that will push you a good distance up the chart of XML mastery." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.

DaffyD writes "Refocusing its vision for AOL Instant Messenger, America Online is endeavoring to revitalize the service by opening up its community and presence to third parties. In addition to partners such as CareerBuilder, AOL is seeking to enlist independent developers to build extended AIM services and hopes to offer a plug-in architecture by the end of the year. ICQ recently added such functionality through its open XML-based Xtras feature. Maybe AOL is feeling the heat from alternatives such as Gaim and Adium."

esarjeant writes "In addition to a number of other security features, anti-virus vendors are starting to push buffer overflow detection. This will be part of Microsoft's future direction with Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and is already integrated with McAfee 8.0i. So it looks like everyone is going to upgrade all of their software again, will software vendors be able to keep up with the support calls?"

i_frame writes "C|net is reporting in an interview with Tom Rizo, director of product management in Microsoft's SQL server unit, that 'the company is thinking about including the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 in Microsoft's shared-source program for disclosing product source to customers'. Is Microsoft reinventing themselves, and are they ready to learn the benefits of open source?" From the article: "It's not finalized. It's not anything there, but if a lot of customers demand it, we'll definitely look at doing shared source with SQL Server..."

Yosef writes "Jon Udell uses his experience from using and hacking the free software BitPim to say that developers of such less-known projects are the true heroes of open source: 'For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.'"

Saravana Kannan asks: "I have been coding in C for a while (10 yrs or so) and tend to use short code snippets. As a simple example, take 'if (!ptr)' instead of 'if (ptr==NULL)'. The reason someone might use the former code snippet is because they believe it would result in smaller machine code if the compiler does not do optimizations or is not smart enough to optimize the particular code snippet. IMHO the latter code snippet is clearer than the former, and I would use it in my code if I know for sure that the compiler will optimize it and produce machine code equivalent to the former code snippet. The previous example was easy. What about code that is more complex? Now that compilers have matured over years and have had many improvements, I ask the Slashdot crowd, what they believe the compiler can be trusted to optimize and what must be hand optimized?"

justinarthur writes "It looks like the content from Netscape's DevEdge site will going back on the air following months of downtime after AOL pulled the plug on the popular web development resource. The website contained what was considered to be the authoritive JavaScript documentation as well as nifty resources for web developers including the popular "Multibar" sidebar for Gecko-based browsers. According to MozillaZine, the newly reached agreement with AOL allows the Mozilla Foundation to "post, modify, and create new documents based on the former Netscape DevEdge materials." In response to this agreement, the Mozilla Foundation is starting a new project named "DevMo" that will be managed by Deb Richardson of LinuxCare, LinuxChix, and the Open Source Writers Group." Exciting, as the DevEdge program has effectively been out of the loop since July of 2003.

cfelde writes "On Friday, IBM said it is contributing some 30 open-source projects to SourceForge.net. IBM also said it is expanding its own developerWorks Web site with more resources including training in PHP and other popular technologies." This probably dovetails with IBM's new full on support of the PHP language.

Game technology developers Havok and Epic both plan to introduce the newest iterations of their systems at this year's GDC. Havok will be revealing the newest version of their middleware, while Epic Systems will be showing the Unreal Engine version 3 along with their new scripting tools and AI behaviors. From the article: "...seamless world support allows the creation of virtually unending environments through background management of game levels and assets. Even titles not requiring open world support will benefit from these memory management techniques on next-generation console platforms."

Christopher Reimer writes "C|Net is reporting that IBM will be getting behind the open-source language PHP for its WebSphere server software and tools. From the article: 'Big Blue's public commitment to PHP is significant because the company has the technical and marketing resources to accelerate usage of the open-source product.'" Evidently PHP is indeed becoming more popular.

An Anonymous Reader writes "In a recent presentation and post, Kent Beck (eXtreme Programming, Embrace Change) highlights Open Quality Dashboards as a means to make software development accountable. Many different approaches attempt to reduce the number of issues creeping in all along the development process. Whether a shop abides by the rules of up-front UML design or test-driven development, or a methodology somewhere in between, the ongoing burst of popularity for tools enabling continuous integration and frequent releases shows the need for unit testing to appear earlier in the development process. In this context, quality dashboards could well establish a credible benchmark for software accountability."

An anonymous reader writes "Jobo AG originally fielded its $550 Giga Vu Pro as a tool for digital photography buffs, but this small embedded computer, running a Linux 2.4 kernel, has much broader potential, according to an article at LinuxDevices.com. A free software development kit for the device is now available at sourceforge.net, along with instructions for loading software into flash memory, a tutorial on turning the device into a Doom game console, and a contributions page for those willing to share their new apps."

FalsePositives writes "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications (from Adaptive Path and via Jeffery Veen) introduces their experiences with what they are calling 'Ajax' as in 'Asynchronous JavaScript + XML' aka the XmlHttpRequest Object. It is used by Google (Google Maps, Google Suggest, Gmail), in Amazon's A9, and a few others (like the map of Switzerland spotted by Simon Willison). ... Is this 'The rise of the Weblication'?"

An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)

Eugenia writes "OSNews posted an article accounting the applications created in GTK# the past 8 months, since the release of Mono 1.0. While many of them are still in their infancy, it's clear that the platform had a healthy progress, with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other, less known gems, like SportsTracker, PolarViewer, MooTag, GFax, GIB, Sonance and Bluefunk. The 2.0 version of Mono is expected around May, but the developers advised distros and users to upgrade to Mono 1.1.4 despite being a beta."

jgoeke writes "I attended Notacon last year and was impressed how cool it was for a first-year event. This year the organizers seem to be outdoing themselves and have quite an impressive speaker list, including Fark.com's Drew Curtis, Richard Thieme and CSS guru Eric Meyer. Presentation topics range from community radio to network security to MUDs. For events, the 'Anything but Ethernet' contest looks equally promising (essentially, create the most convolunted network set-up you can NOT using Ethernet). Notacon runs from April 8th through the 10th, so thankfully there's plenty of time for me to put it on my calendar!"

prostoalex writes "Scott Mitchell published his rather extensive examination of data structures in C# 2.0 (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 add up to more than a hundred printed pages)."