LeninZhiv writes "Celebrating five years of DevelopperWorks goodness, IBM has just launched a new section dedicated to the Power architecture. Initial stories include such goodies as "the developerWorks' Power Architecture challenge" and the Linux on Power Architecture toolkit. May this usher in a new era of community support for Linux on POWER outside IBM?"

Ravalox writes "AA Helper Library, which is a set of libraries to assist in the development of AA-Lib games/applications, has made its initial release. It currently provides a few graphics primitives and a render-to-frame function so you can get a normal image out of AA-Lib. If like me you are an ascii video fan another helpful ascii library is libcaca which is currently supported in Video Lan Media Player and Mplayer."

wap writes "The language/VM/religion that everyone loves to hate is now serving another cup: Java 1.5 is ready for download. The new features of 1.5 have been discussed here before. I, for one, welcome our new virtual machine overlord. I have been using the release candidate, and startup times are noticeably faster, as is overall performance, and the new features like typesafe collections and static imports are great to have. Let the Java flames begin!"

TourmalineT writes "PalmSource has introduced Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 during their European DevCon. Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 is aimed at next-gen smartphones and provides VGA support, enhanced integrated telephony features, roaming support for WiFi and Bluetooth and enhancements to the user interface. They have also announced a new web browser and free platform development tools based on the open source Eclipse IDE."

AssaultOnBattery writes "The fine folks over at GamesIndustry.biz are reporting that Sony has found a unique solution to the problem of battery life on the PSP - making their game developers solve it for them. According to the story, Sony is going to give devs a battery emulator which will tell them if their game is within acceptable power consumption limits."

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly.

An anonymous reader writes "At php|works about a week ago John Coggeshall gave an interesting talk on object oriented programming using PHP version 5. Even if you couldn't be at the talk, his slides are available online which gives you a pretty good idea of what you can expect from the OO model. Java programmers will be pleased."

Nigel Wellington writes "Many of us have tried and are using the optimized builds of Mozilla Firefox made by MOOX. For those not aware, these builds perform roughly 20% faster than the official builds from Mozilla, are generally more stable and have extra features patched in. Well, the good news is that MOOX appears to now be making optimized builds that are localized as well to specific languages! This page has several localized builds already (German, Czech, Finnish) and by the looks of it many more are coming. If you have been looking for a solid localized build I strongly suggest these. The German M3 version has been awesome for me for the past 24 hours!" (These builds are Windows-only.)

duncanbojangles writes "SoftIntegration, Inc. today announced the availability of Ch 4.7, Ch SDK 4.7 and Embedded Ch 4.7. Ch is an embeddable C/C++ interpreter for cross-platform scripting, 2D/3D plotting, numerical computing, shell programming and embedded scripting. Finally, no more compiling a 30 line program just to see if a bit of code will work."

fernique writes "Jive Software, a leading provider of knowledge-based support software, announced today that it will license its Jive Messenger application under the GPL Open Source license. Jive Messenger, based on the open IETF standard XMPP protocol, is a Java-based server for comprehensive group chat and instant messaging (IM)."

toarney writes "This is a few days old, but I just noticed that OpenZaurus 3.5.1 was released on 9/19/04. It is the first release based on the OpenEmbedded build system. You can get it in Opie or GPE Palmtop Environment flavors. Now if I could just get that 'magic bullet' program to compile on my Zaurus."

gmletzkojr queries: "I recently was able to engage in some Pair Programming for a couple of days. However, my experience was less than rewarding. I have read books regarding the subject, and all of the case studies show praise for the effort. I found my pair programmer a bit difficult to work with. Has anyone been in this situation, and what things can be done to work around the personality conflicts?"

Marc Hedlund writes "Bloglines, everyone's favorite RSS aggregator, changed the RSS world again today by releasing the Bloglines Web Services APIs. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Blogbot will all be adding support for the APIs so that users can store their feed state on Bloglines, and read their feeds from any browser. I posted an article introducing the APIs, including a full three-pane desktop aggregator source code example, on the the O'Reilly site."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenSSH marks five years of its existence this week and a new round of internet SSH version mapping shows that it has over 88 percent of the SSH server market, according to Damien Miller, one of the developers. Read more."

davemabe writes "Microsoft is apparently releasing its FlexWiki wiki implementation as an open source project. FlexWiki is the software used to run the wikis over at Channel 9. My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?"

Gentu writes "OSNews features an interview with Mikael Hallendal, founder of Imendio HB. Imendio is the professional face of GTK+ worldwide today, offering Gnome & GTK+ consultancy services, however the company is also well known in the OSS community with their releases of GPL'ed software like the MS Project-alike Planner, DevHelp, the Jabber client Gossip, the music player Jamboree, DrWright & the popular Mono-based RSS reader Blam!. The interview digs on the increase of the industry's interest on Gnome, how GTK# and Mono fit in the Gnome development world, what's still missing from the platform and how a professional GTK+ developer thinks of Qt."

An anonymous reader queries: "After being laid off recently, I got in touch with a few uni friends. We've now decided to start developing some software in our respective spare time(s), which we may consider commercializing depending on how it goes. We've come across a problem that I am sure is not very new. We are all in different countries and different time zones. How do we best collaborate given that we have such a diverse team."

anonymous writes "The Free Software community is on a quest for the next generation development environment. Is it .Net, is it Java? Many (including Havoc) are quick to dismiss some of the gems invented by the Free Software community itself. Yes, Ruby is an incredibly consistent and clean language designed specifically to incorporate many of the best features and ideas of predecessors. Absolutely everything in Ruby is an object and practically everything can be redefined or extended on the fly. The effects and resulting power of such flexibility can be quite astounding to those who have adapted to contemporary language limitations. Now, the Ruby environment has been seamlessly integrated into KDE through Korundum, meaning that well-integrated and first-class desktop citizens for Linux can be sketched and developed in an extremely short time. Caveat: No explicit compilation is required and programming seems so easy it feels like cheating."

xiando writes "Developers aim at making Krita a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience with other light-duty image programs like Paint Shop Pro should feel right at home. LinuxReviews has a 5.5 MB preview video by developer Bart Coppens available, showing how the app looks and feels. Check it out or download the source preview packages by Daniel Molkentin to try it yourself. Developers hope to make Krita a part of the KDE office suite KOffice 1.4, scheduled spring 2005."

Thanks to Slamdance for its submission. Coming up at The Slamdance Film festival in Park City, Utah - Jan. 21 to 28 2005, programmers can compete in The Big C Independent Game Competition. "The Big C is calling for entries of all new games from emerging talent. Selected games will compete and be judged by festival attendees, with a Jury Award and Audience Award that include cash and prizes presented at the end of the festival. Game submissions should have an early-postmarked deadline of Oct. 1, 2004 and a final postmarked deadline of Nov. 14, 2004. Entrants may submit games on disk or provide a URL for judges to download." The event has an entry on the Gamasutra Calendar, for additional info.