Josh Bennett writes "1UP has a recent interview with Splinter Cell Chaos Theory Producer Mathieu Ferland where he talks about the difficulties in developing the game. In the article, Ferland said there are 120 people working on the game. That's not unheard of for a big budget EA game, but those games come out every year and the new Splinter Cell is taking more than two years at this point. Interesting read."

Daniel Shefer writes "Joel on Software is a collection of essays from the Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software web log. Spolsky is also the author of User Interface Design for Programmers (previously reviewed on Slashdot) and is the principal of Fog Creek Software. In this book, Spolsky distills his technical knowledge, wit, and years of experience into an engaging collection of essays on programmers, programming and the software world. Spolsky covers everything from the technical aspects of writing code to software project management, and even offers insights into software marketing." Read on for the rest of Shefer's review.

Eugenia writes "OS enthusiast Thom Holwerda gave a spin to the latest version of QNX RTOS, a very capable OS that unfortunately doesn't get a lot of press. With the recent sale of QNX Software to Harman International the future of the free-for-personal-usage version of the RTOS is uncertain. Nevertheless, the article presents quite a few aspects of the OS, including an introduction of the Neutrino kernel, installation, the Photon MicroGUI, hardware support, usability and more."

Media Girl asks: "As someone considering the vast array of GNU/open source CMS systems out there (and right here), what have been the experiences, insights and opinions of developers on the various programs out there, such as Slash, Scoop, Drupal, PHPslash and the various Nukes? CMS Matrix has a nice comparison grid of features, but there seems to be a lot left between the lines, and the Perl powerhouses are left out of the matrix. How do the typical components (blogs, articles, comments, karma) compare? What about modality, security and speed under heavy loads? What about the quality of ongoing development and activity of the app's community? What's leading edge and not bleeding edge? And what about the Perl/PHP debate? Can we take a snapshot of this realm of open source web development applications and hash it around a bit?"

zenrender writes "With all the craziness regarding EA_Spouse's blog entry, it looks like some more organized groups are starting to chime in: Open Letter from the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). See Also Quality of Life White Paper, also from the IGDA."

CyNRG writes "The little guy. The one-person software company. Can it still exist today? That's me. I'm once again, after many years, writing my own commercial software to sell. A few things have changed: the patent feeding frenzy. This is my main concern. My perception is that one must verify that you don't infringe on any patents when developing new cool software, and that the explosion of patents granted by the USPTO has reached epic proportions. If this perception is true, then that makes it almost impossible for the Lone Coder to create something new that doesn't infringe on other patents. The amount of money required to perform the due diligence research seems like it would be greater than the amount of money needed to develop the software, or even the total revenues that the software could ever generate. Please someone tell me I'm wrong!" Is he?

James Edward Gray II writes "Apress sent me a copy of Holub on Patterns for review, and for that I'm extremely grateful, because this is a gem of a book I would not have liked to miss. Odds are, most object-oriented programmers will feel the same, so allow me to share the highlights." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.

gManZboy writes "Brad Meyers (and co) of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon have written an interesting paper about the state of natural language programming. They point out that well understood HCI principles aren't finding their way into relatively new languages like Java and C#."

mconnors writes "A morguefile is a place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file. The term is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats although the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers as well. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits: the World Wide Web's morguefile."

An anonymous reader writes "Recently I've found myself in a bit of a bind with artwork. My programming contracts have been rather small, barely enough to pay myself let alone an artist. The art needs aren't intensive, mostly icons or sprites depending on the project. Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya) my art production output is rather poor. Are there any other developers who have learned to be self-sufficient? Are there any resources available to educate me on the finer points of making graphics that look professional?" One resource for the less-artistic among us is the collection of free SVG clip art at freedesktop.org, though it won't give advice for creating new art. What are some others?

meestaplu writes "After several months of development work, Blender 2.35, the latest version of an open source professional 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program has been released. The new version adds a full undo system, better mesh modeling, curve deformations, and many bugfixes. The program boasts an active user community at Elysiun.com, where new users are sure to find the help they need. Development happens at Blender.org."

krozinov writes "The goal of this paper is to try to answer the following three questions: How do you reverse engineer a virus? Can reverse engineering a virus lead to better ways of detecting, preventing, and recovering from a virus and its future variants? Can reverse engineering be done more efficiently? The paper is organized into five sections and two appendixes. Section 1 is the introduction. Section 2 reviews basic x86 concepts, including registers, assembly, runtime data structures, and the stack. Section 3 gives a brief introduction to viruses, their history, and their types. Section 4 delves into the Beagle virus disassembly, including describing the techniques and resources used in this process as well as presenting a high level functional flow of the virus. Section 5 presents the conclusions of this research. Appendix A provides a detailed disassembly of the Beagle worm, while Appendix B presents the derived source code of the Beagle virus, as a result of this research."

thecombatwombat writes "Music activism site Downhillbattle.org has started a fund to pay a bounty on a peer-to-peer plugin for Gaim. With new laws threatening peer-to-peer, Downhill Battle thinks this is the future. Regardless, it's an interesting funding of open source."

g8oz writes "The New York Times covers Wal-Mart's obsession with collecting sales data. Fun fact: 'Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.' That much information results in some interesting data-mining. Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold?"

andrewuoft points out this BusinessWeek article on the budding technology sector of Ukraine; the article points out that Ukraine has -- "after the U.S., India, and Russia -- the fourth largest number of computer programmers in the world" and that "Even today, scientific institutes each year churn out some 50,000 science or technology graduates. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians don't see why their country can't become a big player in the global technology market, like India."

just fiddling around writes "In a terse notice on their developer website, Sony electronics has announced that developer support for the Clie line of handhelds will be terminated on December 31st, 2004. This follows the June 2004 decision to suspend new Clie product development for the US and Europe while Sony 'reassesses the direction of the conventional PDA market.' Meanwhile, already subscribed developers can still access the developer resources provided by Sony. According to the PalmInfoCenter story Sony has pledged to 'continue the same level of service and support for Clie handheld users and to honor all existing limited warranties. The current Clie lineup is contining to be sold and supported while supplies last.'"

interactive_civilian writes "Wired (among others) is reporting that the Transportation Safety Administration plans 'to order all 72 domestic airlines to turn over the passenger records -- which can include credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses and health conditions -- in order to stress-test a centralized passenger screening system called "Secure Flight."' They are hoping to reduce the number of "false positives" in the no fly lists. If the information were to be made available, it would be interesting to see how many names that would not have been allowed to fly were allowed to."

As a follow-up to yesterday's story about a frustrated EA employee's spouse, several readers wrote in to report that EA is now facing a possible class action lawsuit from disgruntled employees. Besides the Gamespot coverage, Kotaku has a discussion of it as well. To add to the "frustrated EA worker" momentum, a former employee named Joe Straitiff has posted about his experiences as well. From his post: "So I'm posting under my real name -- you have to stand up to this type of thing or it will continue. And every company will become EA so that can compete... Remember, you can't spell ExploitAtion without EA."

Ricardo Wagemaker writes "GccInstaller is a automatic games installation software created to facilitated the installation of games on JDS Linux. Although still in development, with GccInstaller it will be easier to install games than it is to play them. Every time GccInstaller is launched it will check for a update and show you what the current version is, as well as a list of games available to Gccinstaller. Just select install and it will download patches to a temp area and install them on your local system."

Andreas(R) asks: "While planning the design of my small programming language, and would appreciate some lessons learned from experienced programmers which have already tried this. I was investigating whether to start from an existing compiler and extend it. The compiler will be based on yacc, or bison. The programming language will be interpreted, object oriented and have higher order programming. Perl 1 seems like a decent starting point, as it's yacc based, and 5000 lines of code. Later versions of Perl are too large to get a good understanding of the whole program in a short period of time. Perl also has the right license (GPL). Is Python out of the question for such a project, since it's not GPL? What other small languages can be used instead? How do I go about designing a small programming language in practice, using what I already know about compiler theory?"