kennelbound writes "For those students just getting started in a Computer Science degree or a career in software development, this guide has been written to help you understand what NOT to do when coding a project. Those with a little more experience should still read it to get a good chuckle (and hopefully the mistakes stated within will not seem too familiar!)"

James Edward Gray II writes " Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide (Second Edition), known as the Pickaxe II to its fans, is an extremely current view of the Ruby programming language. Revised primarily by Dave Thomas, a founding father of the English Ruby community, Programming Ruby is distilled expertise from a reliable source. In the past, quality English documentation of Ruby has been in short supply, but if any one volume could solve that problem, this is it." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.

tarzeau writes "Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making 'write once, compile everywhere' a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers. The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely. Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works."

Paul S. R. Chisholm writes "What makes a software development project succeed? It's not language or tools or process. It's not a simple as people; even great programmers sometimes find themselves associated with disasters. In some sense, a successful project is the same thing as a successful organization; but what makes those? We need an anti-Dilbert. In Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development, James O. Coplien and Neil B. Harrison lay out the results of their research on the subject; what they found, helps." Chisholm also offers this disclaimer: "Full disclosure: I was a member of one of the organizations studied, and I contributed to one of the patterns in the book. I know both the authors; one is a long-time friend and mentor. This review reflects my opinion of the book, not of the authors. I paid for my copy of the book." Read on for the rest.

He starts by clearing up my error in saying he was a Unix co-creator in the original Call For Questions. From there he goes on to answer your questions both completely and lucidly. A refreshing change from the politicians and executives we've talked to so much recently, no doubt about it.

hajokirchhoff writes "The first public release of The Lit Window Library (for C++) is now available at from LitWindow itself. The goal of The Lit Window Library is to speed up C++ GUI coding by a factor of 10. It greatly reduces the amount of work needed to code user interface requirements. This is not just another "better widgets" library. The library introduces two new, different concepts to UI coding: a data abstraction layer (reflections) and rule-based programming."

Nuclear Elephant writes "After four months of development DSPAM v3.2 has been released, bringing many new enhancements and filtering technologies. These include distributed computing support, implementation of Bill Yerazunis' Sparse Binary Polynomial Hashing algorithm (from CRM114), and v1.2 of Bayesian Noise Reduction. Other enhancements include SQLite support and many significant performance enhancements for PostgreSQL. DSPAM's official release is next week, but you can download the preview release now. Users of the project have also contributed towards creating a new logo for this release."

astrab writes "The Argentinian programmer Sergio Sancho, 30, won the 'Google Code Jam 2004' programming contest, whose final was held yesterday in Google HQ (Mountain View, CA), and pocketed $10,000. According to Dirson, Sergio studies at UBA (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) and works at the Research and Development Center which Core Security owns in Buenos Aires. More information also in the official Google Blog."

Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."

grugnog writes "The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of tools to assist Election Protection Organizations and their members to record and react to election day incidents and irregularities. Volunteers are needed to both code the EIRS system (which is based on open source systems: AdvoKit, PHPSurveyor, MapServer, and geocoder.us) and to volunteer technical expertise to logic & accuracy testing of voting machines and poll watching through the Verified Voting Foundation."

Brian writes "The long awaited Doom 3 SDK has been released. It is available on the official id software developer site."

Daniel Horn writes "In a flash of inspiration coming from the Obfuscated C code contest and the current E-voting scandals, I wondered if there shouldn't be a similar code obfuscation contest based on obfuscating voting results, that is, C code that appears correct but does the wrong thing when counting votes. Submit your obfuscated vote-counting code now, and the two winners will be selected on November 2 and will receive a free Vega Strike CD. Obviously incorrect code, however, is not welcome."

An anonymous reader writes "This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line."

traycer writes "Finally, professional-grade digital camera raw workflow software for Linux. Bibble 4.0 from BibbleLabs is a Qt-based commercial package (available in Lite and Pro versions) that promises to have batch workflow efficiency, raw conversion speed and image output quality rivalling or surpassing that of Phase One's much more expensive Capture One software (which isn't available for Linux anyway). Bibble 4.0 also supports tethered shooting for some DSLRs, end-to-end colour-managed workflow, and a very nice system of user-definable work queues for those with several photo shoots on the go. Now all they need is a Bibble plug-in for the GIMP..."

dkaplan1 writes "ACM@UIUC will be holding their 10th annual Reflections | Projections Midwest computing conference on October 22-24. The 3-day event will feature a job fair and numerous speakers including: Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, Andrea Pessino who worked on Warcraft 3, and many others. And be sure to check out MechMania, an intense C++ AI programming contest. Registration for the conference is $20 for meals and a t-shirt. Please visit www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference for details."

sootman writes "O'Reilly's ONLamp site has a neat two-part series on building a netboot server and diskless workstations with FreeBSD. Nothing too earthshaking but it's always an interesting topic and it's nice to see a new writeup on it every so often."

CommanderData writes "USA Today reports that US Programmers are an 'Endangered Species' and expects them to be 'extinct' within the next few years, replaced by offshoring and H-1B visa holders. They suggest people will manage overseas projects, become self-employed, or switch to other fields. What do my fellow code-dinosaurs plan to do before the asteroid hits?" A report on Newsforge (which is part of OSTG along with Slashdot) shows the flip side of the coin.

dryeo writes "IBM has Open Sourced Object Rexx. IBM Announcement. Source code has been turned over to The Rexx Language Association under the Common Public Licence. Rexx is an interpreted language which has been included in platforms such as the Amiga, OS/2 and AIX, and most IBM mainframes. For a quick overview check out Rexx for everyone."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an interesting interview with Ben Goodger, the lead engineer for Firefox. When asked to comment on critics' claim that Firefox has a better security reputation than IE because it doesn't have enough market share to attract trouble, Goodger responded with a one-two punch. "Firefox is better designed in a number of ways -- we have no "mode" that allows untrusted content to be executed automatically, for example -- no "safe zone. Another reason -- market share does not predict security. Apache has more market share than has Microsoft IIS, which has more holes than Apache." On Longhorn, he believes it will be a tough sell for Microsoft because of backward compatibility issues."

ChristopherRayAllen writes "I have just posted an article on the history of terminology associated with collaboration software in my Life With Alacrity blog: The term 'social software', which is now used to define software that supports group interaction, has only become relatively popular within the last two or more years. However, the core ideas of social software itself enjoy a much longer history, running back to Vannevar Bush's ideas about 'memex' in 1945, and traveling through terms such as Augmentation, Groupware, and CSCW in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. By examining the many terms used to describe today's 'social software' we can also explore the origins of social software itself, and see how a very real life cycle centers around the use of technical terminology."