Arno contributes a link to Paint.NET, a free-of-charge raster-graphics program for Windows XP machines. "Quote: 'Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's."

Python for Series 60 has been released on the Forum Nokia website. The release notes included in the package seem to give a fairly realistic image of the current status, and the demo apps and documentation seem to be quite good. The supplied documents even hint that there might be an OpenGL-API in the future. Alas, the emulator package seems to be for Windows only, as are the required S60 SDKs.

An anonymous reader writes "a consortium of European research institutions and open source software companies have paired up to manage the complexity of large scale, modular projects by establishing a program called EDOS, Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software. Planners intend to move away from centralized builds and storage to a distributed process, form a language-agnostic bug testing system and turn to theoretical computer science to safeguard dependencies."

avitzur writes with a link to the story behind the Macintosh Graphing Calculator. An excerpt from this strange account: "It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation."

Robert Accettura writes "In a rather comical spirit, Seth Spitzer (of ex-Netscape fame) is asking Thunderbird users to donate one dollar (or about 0.77 if you're in Europe) to Scott and David, the lead engineers of Thunderbird. Unlike Firefox, with quite a large community submitting patches, Scott and David have been working with much less community aid, and still managed to deliver a very solid product. This is a little way to thank them for managing to do so much with so little to keep our inboxes free of spam and easy to use."

gManZboy writes "We've been hearing about self-healing systems for a while, but (as is usual), so far it's more hype than reality. Well it looks like Mike Shapiro (from Sun's Solaris Kernel group) has been doing a little actual work in this direction. His prognosis is that there's a long way to go before we get fully self-healing systems. In this article he talks a little bit about what he's done, points out some alternative approaches to his own, as well as what's left to do."

Robert Nagle writes "Over the last year, Zope and Plone have gained mindshare as open source web application servers. In the last few months, two books have come out about how to use, extend and administer Plone. One is Andy McKay's Definitive Guide to Plone (available for free online), and the other is Julie Meloni's Plone Content Management Essentials." Read on for Nagle's review of both books.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems like some of the members of the Apache Software Foundation are a little angry with the PHP Community because they don't recommend using Apache 2.0 with PHP. Since PHP is installed on half of all Apache servers this is a major issue for them. A number of high-profile PHP community members such as John Coggeshall and Chris Shiflett have blogged about this decision in light of a recent posting by Apache Software Foundation Member Rich Bowen which called PHP's anti-Apache2 stance FUD. Is there any real reason for the PHP community to start recommending Apache 2.0, especially when the 1.3.x series of Apache is rock solid and proven? Note Rich did later commend PHP for being a great product, so it's not all flames."

r3lody (Ray Lodato) writes "Just because Linux is under the GPL, some people believe that it's pretty standardized. Actually, each distro has its own little additions and, consequently, quirks. Writing an application to work reliably under all variations is not a slam-dunk. The Linux Standard Base Specification seeks to provide the common ground that all Linux apps should adhere to, and therefore make reasonably sure that they will work as advertised. Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base is a reference manual for application developers to make sure their programs will work across the Linux map." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

rayk_sland writes "Users of the Rosegarden Sequencer project will be gratified to see it featured in O'Reilly's Linux DevCenter web magazine. I am a devoted fan of this program, which allows the user to sequence music using classical music notation, and has many other sequencer features I haven't even properly fathomed (read the article.) The Rosegarden project has recently released a 'pre-1' beta. Almost time for those party streamers..."

Carewolf writes "KDE's 'looky' has a new challenge. This time to contribute SVG wallpapers for KDE 3.4. The four best wallpapers will ship with KDE 3.4 when released next year and the best gets a choice of gifts from corefunction.com. Join now to help make KDE 3.4 the best looking KDE release ever."

sammykrupa writes "Google suggest Javascript code dissected and rewritten for all of you web developers out there. Cool piece of web reverse-engineering!" Joel Spolsky astutely notes that this will raise the bar in terms of how people expect the "internets" to work.

baijum81 writes "GTK 2.6.0 has been released. As usual Pango and Glib have been released along with it. Release notes are here: GTK, Pango and Glib."

The ever popular Make Something Unreal Contest is coming to an end, and the finalists have been posted on the official site. From the post: " Epic Games announces the finalists for the Mod category for Grand Finals of the NVIDIA $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal Contest. To even make it to the Grand Finals is an amazing accomplishment for these dedicated and creative teams. To be selected as a finalist for the Grand Finals is to be the cream of the crop. "

Simone Klassen writes "The Hardened-PHP Project has announced several serious and according to them, easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities within PHP. A flaw within the function unserialize() is rated as very critical for millions of PHP servers, because it is exposed to remote attackers through lots of very popular webapplications. The list includes forum software like phpBB2, WBB2, Invision Board and vBulletin. It is time to upgrade now."

The H1-B visa program allows many thousands of non-American technical workers (about half a million at the moment) to hold jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the U.S. -- jobs which are seemingly difficult to fill from the American labor pool for a variety of reasons, and which are eagerly filled by employers who find that qualified, talented people come from countries all over the world. N. Sivakumar's first-person account of being an Indian programmer working for companies in several U.S. states over the past decade illustrates a side of the H1-B system that doesn't get talked about much: the experience of skilled, highly educated workers taking jobs in an environment that offers, besides welcome employment, various levels of hostility and resentment. Read on for my review of his book, Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, Did I Steal Your Job?

carlmenezes asks: "I volunteer when I can to help a poor educational institution in India with their computing needs. As you can imagine, most computers are from donations and very little money (if any) can be spent on software licensing. Therefore, the installed software is all Open Source and I do all of the software installation by myself. I have already installed Linux on 16 PCs, with Firefox. The default desktop is KDE and the kdeedu package (klettres in particular) has several loyal fans. Incidentally, the kids don't find it hard to use at all and the lack of 3D doesn't bother them in the least :) I would like to ask the community about a good source code analysis tool. I have already installed Source Navigator. Is there any other comparable open source tool?"

Junks Jerzey writes "The long awaited long suspected-to-be-vaporware BlitzMax game programming language has been released for Mac OS X. Linux and Windows versions are set to follow "soon," making this a truly cross-platform, OpenGL-based game development system. Don't be scared by the BASIC monicker: this is a modular programming language that lets you get under the hood if you want, but also includes OOP support and higher-level features. But of course C++ game programmers will still shake their heads in a puzzled fashion, ignoring all the amazing games written by hobbyist programmers. If nothing else, write a cross-platform OpenGL demo in ten lines of code!"

An anonymous reader writes "Various news sources are reporting the 4.0 release of the free Java-based NetBeans IDE. You can read the anouncement, or proceed directly to the downloads. Perhaps the most significant improvement is that the IDE's native build system is the latest version of Apache Ant. I see this as a distinct advantage over its competitor Eclipse (and NetBeans is pure Java). If you create desktop applications in Java, you may wish to read up on the NetBeans 'platform' as well. Enjoy."

nile_list writes "Edward Felten of the very fine Freedom to Tinker has written a 15 line P2P program in Python. From the post on Freedom to Tinker, "I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless." Matthew Scala, a reader of Freedom to Tinker, has responded with the 9 line MoleSter, written in Perl."