VeryVito writes "You can tell Flash programming is beginning to grow up: It's not just for designers anymore, but for real, honest-to-goodness tech geeks. As evidence, I present The ActionScript Jabberwocky. Enjoy!" It's almost as good as reading it in the original Klingon.

Iggy writes "After reading the article on 'The MySQL License Question' by Timothy R. Butler at Open for Business I just have to wonder, is this company's wording on the MySQL site indicating the company is backing away from Free Software, specifically, the GPL? Great reading and certainly thought provoking."

Bruce Perens writes "Many system admins have learned how to use syslog to log events of remote systems. But when the kernel crashes, its final messages never get to syslog. If you don't have a remote console manager, you won't see them, unless you run netconsole."

Several large companies have recently released previously proprietary software into the open source wilds. The splashiest announcement along these lines was from CA, who opened their Ingres r3database -- and offered up to $1 million in incentives for development of Ingres migration tools. For those of you who want to earn a piece of that money, and for all of us who have questions about how and why CA is cozying up to open source developers, the person with the answers is Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group. So ask, already. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Sam by email, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

Quickfoot writes "PostgreSQL has won the LJ Editor's choice award for database servers the second year in a row and three times total (2000, 2003 and 2004). With the upcoming features in version 8.0 PostgreSQL is posed to do even better in 2005."

An anonymous reader writes "In February at the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In, technologists from the Dean, Kucinich, Clark and Kerry campaigns laid down arms to share tech plans while their respective camps were still battling it out in the primaries. A (private) list and requirements for fall campaign organizing ensued. Just six weeks ago, a few of the developers converged in San Francisco for a show and tell of their emerging free software tools. Today, the AdvoKit project was the first to tag beta, hoping to kick-start the campaign software revolution in time for November 2nd."

Durin_Deathless writes "XCode 1.5 is now available to the general public through ADC. Highlights include dead code stripping, remote debugging, Subversion support, and improved editor speed. There's also a new GCC, which is supposed to compile faster, and lots of AppleScript changes. Also, code completion now works in Java and AppleScript." djabbour writes "Blizzard Entertainment develops its games simultaneously on the Windows and Mac OS X platforms. This article claims Xcode Tools 'play [a] critical role.'"

RSpencer writes "The Low Level Virtual Machine project has released version 1.3. There are full release notes available. LLVM is a source-language agnostic toolkit for building compilers, optimizers, and jit or interpreted virtual machines. LLVM provides extensive optimization support, three mid-level IR formats (bytecode, assembly, and C++), three backend targets (x86,Sparc,PPC), full documentation, and a very simple and unique design. This new toolkit approach to compiler related tools is quickly attracting new developers who are making significant contributions to the work. Visit the home page where you can learn all the details. LLVM is funded by the National Science Foundation, MARCO/DARPA, and supported by UIUC's Computer Science department and other developers."

Tobi Oetiker writes "Last year, Thomas Graf a 22 year old Swiss CS student, and a few friends, organized a half day Unix conference. Because it was quite a success Thomas decided to do it BIG this year. He took a break from university and went to work. So Switzerland is getting its first true Unix conference this year from September 2nd to 4th. People like Rik van Riel, Theodore Ts'o, David Mosberger, Martin Michlmayr and many other big names will be in Zurich. More on the SUCON'04 website."

sixstring355 writes "Intel has released the first functional version of its Centrino/IPW2200 chipset driver. for Linux (kernel 2.6.4+). Posts to the ipw2100/2200 developer mailing list report connection speeds of 450KB/s. See the feature list for more details."

Rusty Nuts writes "JavaWorld has a great article on the future of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). Are you frustrated learning EJB 2.1 or already know EJBs but loathe its complexities? Hold on a bit more for the the future of EJBs is looking brighter for you."

aldheorte asks: "If you are a developer you have probably, over your time on various development projects, seen lots of projects with really awful code and some projects with really good code. You may also have observed that sometimes the projects with really awful code have a few excellent developers involved, while projects with only intermediate or mediocre developers are able to maintain a pretty good quality of code overall. The lucky few may have even seen that legendary situation of great developers and great code. I have always been mystified by this apparent discrepancy and I think a recent article on CSS development in a team environment may hit the nail on the head: 'The quality of code generated by a team rarely owes as much to the skill of the individual members as it does to the level of communication between them.' I am interested in the experience of others here on Slashdot. Have you observed this discrepancy between individual talent and a project's quality of code as well? How much of the success or failure of communication is based on the members of the team themselves as opposed to the management of the team, especially with respect to allowed time and deadlines?"

bus_stopper copies and pastes: "The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment." We've mentioned this project before but this story goes into a bit more depth about the goals and motivations of the developers.

kwelch007 asks: "As a Windows developer, I've been dreading the release of SP2, and the potential problems it could cause for my apps. So far, I've only run across one Win32 API function that doesn't work anymore. But, I haven't found any sites for developers detailing issues that others have discovered! Are there any sites/forums that developers can consult when attempting to determine why their code doesn't work with SP2, or even a BugZilla or similar to report such problems?"

An anonymous reader writes "Following on from the marvelous recent James Gosling interview highlighted in Slashdot last week, it would seem that a renewed momentum is building up for his cross-platform creation, if this editorial is anything to go by. It's called 'Java is Back!' But did it ever go anywhere?"

Gentu writes "OSNews posted some exclusive screenshots of a new project in the Mono community: Cocoa#. Apparently there are a couple of Apple engineers helping out the project that allows developers to create graphical Cocoa applications under Mac OS X using the C#, Python or Basic language. Mono seems to be doing well in the Windows land too, allowing developers to use GTK# instead of Windows.Forms to create multi-platform apps."

GnuVince writes "Paul Graham has posted a new article to his website that he called "The Python Paradox" which refines the statements he made in "Great Hackers" about Python programmers being better hackers than Java programmers. He basically says that since Python is not the kind of language that lands you a job like Java, those who learn it seek more than simply financial benefits, they seek better tools. Very interesting read."

Thalinor writes "Registration for OSCOM.4 with Apache Tracks at ETH Zürich, Switzerland from Wednesday, September 29th - Friday, October 1st, 2004 is now open. The program has many interesting talks for people interested in content management and Apache technologies."

Chris Burkhardt writes "iDevGames officially announced the start of the uDevGames Game Development Contest yesterday. The contest challenges participants to create a Mac OS X game in three months time, which will then be subjected to public vote, peer vote, and a panel of judges, with the best in a variety of categories receiving prizes. iDevGames has issued a press release." Previous winners of the competition include the rather smart Argonaut 2149.

AnamanFan writes "The Mozilla Foundation, with Novell and IBM, announced the formation to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation on the Mozilla platform. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the W3C. The project enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT. Is this one step away from the corporate world's dependence on ActiveX? We can only hope."