Programming

Favorite Programming Language Features? 312

Posted by Cliff from the obscure-and-useful-programming-idioms dept.
johnnyb asks: "I'm curious what everyone's favorite programming language features are. I'm looking for both the general and the specific. I'm especially looking for features that few people know about or use, but are really useful for those who do know about them. What are your favorite programming language features?"
Businesses

Collaboration Tools for Cross-Site Development? 12

Posted by Cliff from the working-together dept.
Coordinator asks: "The company I work for has software development activities going in in several sites located around the world. We are looking for tools to help with cross-site collaboration. I am concerned about a one solution fits all approach, as well as something that requires too much time and effort to maintain on the part of our existing developers. A commercial product, or an open source product with a good support base would be very reasonable. What experiences have others had when trying to build a cross-site development environment either from scratch, or with existing tools or vendors. We are looking at some of the obvious places like sourceforge.net, gforge.org, and collab.net. Furthermore, we are looking at content management systems for knowledge base solutions such as TikiWiki or egroupware."
KDE

KDE 3.3 Beta "Klassroom" Released 446

Posted by timothy from the more-of-a-good-thing dept.
twener writes "The KDE team has announced the Beta 1 development version of the upcoming KDE 3.3 release. This release is named 'Klassroom' following the 'Kindergarten' Alpha; the goal is to make this child visit the "aKademy" KDE World Summit in August. Most planned features are there, next week starts the feature freeze. Source and provided binary packages are listed on the KDE 3.3 Beta 1 Info Page next to the KDE 3.3 Requirements List."
It's funny. Laugh.

Write Poetry In UML 18

Posted by timothy from the or-just-translate dept.
Martin writes "We'd like to announce the first Unified Modeling Language Poem Contest - UMLyrics 2004. Realize the power and shortcomings of UML by writing new or paraphrasing existing poems with UML. The winner is determined with a Google-based voting system - have fun!"
Google

Outfox, Outsearch With Firefox 55

Posted by timothy from the feel-unlucky dept.
Scrivs writes "This article goes into detail showing users how to effectively utilize the hidden search powers of Firefox. Instead of using the basic search that just sends you to an 'I'm Feeling Lucky' page from Google, you can customize the browser to perform any type of search you want."
Programming

Hacking Quartz 298

Posted by michael from the seven-on-mohs-hardness-scale dept.
Exposed writes "Meaty interview with Rich Wareham who is known to Linux users for his libdvdnav library which is used by Xine and other linux players. On OS X he created Desktop Manager, the GPL solution for VirtualDesktops on the Mac. Highlights are secret APIs in OS X for VirtualDesktops, who steals GPL source and why beginner programmers are at a disadvantage now."
Data Storage

Large, Free, and Interesting SQL-ready Datasets? 73

Posted by Cliff from the drop-in-data dept.
Jon H asks: "I'd like to teach myself various platforms or technologies, involving accessing databases. The problem is, my ideas for projects to learn on usually are boring, toy projects, involving lots of boring data entry in order to create a useful database. Things like personal library databases. This doesn't particularly interest me. It would be much easier if I had a big, interesting dataset which I could load into an SQL database without too much trouble. Then I could spend my time on the php, or WebObjects, or JBoss, or whatever. I'd like something more real than the usual toy demo databases. Something weighty, 20 megabytes and up, big enough for poor software design to cause performance issues which might not be seen in smaller databases. Ideally, it'd be in a form that could easily be loaded into an SQL database, perhaps even including a schema. Any links would be appreciated. Do such beasts exist?
Security

NIST Issues Windows XP Security Guide 253

Posted by michael from the step-1:-reformat dept.
routerwhore writes "NIST Special Publication 800-68 (zip file) has been created to assist IT professionals, in particularly Windows XP system administrators and information security personnel, in effectively securing Windows XP systems. It discusses Windows XP and various application security settings in technical detail."
Books

Classic Coding Tome Updated 48

Posted by timothy from the new-words dept.
Tim Halloran writes "Steve McConnell has updated his book 'Code Complete' a 960 page language agnostic tome about code construction. This is the best book of its type I've ever encountered and the update is welcome (as the first edition is over a decade old...I suddenly feel as I'm getting old :-). More information, and a sample chapter are here. As a programming team lead I have provided this book to team members to get them critically thinking about how they write code."
Programming

Reduce C/C++ Compile Time With distcc 292

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-for-the-power-users dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Some people prefer the convenience of pre-compiled binaries in the form of RPMs or other such installer methods. But this can be a false economy, especially with programs that are used frequently: precompiled binaries will never run as quickly as those compiled with the right optimizations for your own machine. If you use a distributed compiler, you get the best of both worlds: fast compile and faster apps. This article shows you the benifits of using distcc, a distributed C compiler based on gcc, that gives you significant productivity gains."
Debian

Debian Project Votes To Postpone Policy Changes 230

Posted by timothy from the deep-structure dept.
jonoxer writes "A little while ago members of the Debian project voted to make changes to the Social Contract. As previously reported on Slashdot, the end result looked likely to be a delay in the release of Sarge, the next Stable edition of Debian, until 2005. But on Saturday Debian developers voted to postpone the changes until after Sarge releases, effectively affirming that the changes need to be made but making a pragmatic decision to not let the next release be delayed as a result. The official voting page doesn't show the result yet, but it's been semi-officially announced."
The Internet

Jakob Nielsen Interview on Web Site Redesigns 248

Posted by timothy from the be-sure-to-add-lots-of-useless-flash dept.
securitas writes "CIO Insight's executive editor Brad Wieners interviews Web site design usability evangelist Jakob Nielsen about design mistakes like poor search, discusses organizational resistance and common barriers to doing usability reviews, concluding with Nielsen's Adobe PDF and pop-up pet peeves, common redesign errors and budget advice when it's time for a redesign, either for your Web site or company intranet. And just to make it more usable and readable (so you don't have to click through multiple pages), you can read the entire Jakob Nielsen interview on one printer-friendly page with fewer graphics and a bandwidth-saving document size for people using dial-up Internet connections. You might also like to read a previous Ask Slashdot from March 2000 and Jakob Nielsen's answers to those questions."
Programming

Photon Soup Update 116

Posted by timothy from the happy-4th dept.
rkeene517 writes "Two and a half months ago I posted an article asking for spare computer cycles. I was swamped by emails and volunteers. After the first weeks most dropped out. The die-hards kept running the program and we simulated 45.3 billion photons. The pictures are here. Thanks to all that helped out. I will be submitting the images to SIGGRAPH 2005 and a paper. (P.S. Never post your email address on slashdot. I got 900 emails! ouch.)"
GUI

RDF For Desktop Metadata? 167

Posted by timothy from the lateral-migration dept.
claes writes "There is an article "Metadata for the desktop" that suggests that RDF should be used to describe data in desktop environments. This is an interesting idea. RDF is already used by Creative Commons to attach license metadata to its works. Mozilla also supports it. RDF was designed for the web, but can it also find its way to the desktop? And what metadata is most important to describe?"
GUI

FourHead: One PC, Four Users 496

Posted by timothy from the four-times-the-fun dept.
LoganGD writes "A reseach group from UFPR university in Brazil, C3SL has managed to make one Linux box run four terminals at the same time. That means four mice, keyboards, displays and users with just one CPU. The way they managed to do that can be found at the FourHead project webpage. The fact that one computer science laboratory can suport up to 60 users whit only 15 PCs is really attractive for low-resource groups and countries."
Security

Online MD5 Cracking Service 401

Posted by timothy from the computable-truth-is-out-there dept.
toast writes "Did you forget your password but have your /etc/shadow? If so, this site is for you. Submit a MD5 hash and within a few days you'll have an answer. Of course, once Slashdot has its way, you'll have to wait a few years for an answer.. At least now I'll always know what f3789b3c1be47758203f9e8a4d8c6a2a means.."

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