Mirkon writes "Back in mid-February, the news was broken that Webmonkey, one of the web's most prominent web development tutorial and reference resources, was "shut down," in that no new content would be delivered. A little over four months later - though Wired News (another child of Webmonkey's parent company, Terra Lycos) says nothing, and the Webmonkey Blog (hosted on Tripod, another Terra Lycos subsidiary) hasn't seen an update since January - the Webmonkey home page boldly declares: "We're totally back! Webmonkey is alive and kicking, serving up new articles all hot-n-fresh like a stack of banana pancakes. With syrup." Is this the end of the end for Webmonkey?"

lerhaupt writes "I've started a project called Torrentocracy which is the combination of RSS, Bit Torrent and your Television. It's written as a plugin for MythTV (the homebrew Linux PVR project). This means you can not only easily find out about new torrents from various enclosure enabled blogs, but you can also start the torrent download process with the click of your TV remote control. Are RSS aggregators which support torrent downloads the next greatest thing since web browsers? What is the significance of hooking this directly to your TV? Here's a screenshot."

mastergoon writes "MyUID, which has been refered to as an "open MS Passport", has opened their doors to public beta testing. MyUID is a user database system, with the purpose of allowing virtually anyone to refer to its records using only HTTP or HTTPS. Many companies have unified login systems, like Yahoo! and Microsoft, but unlike MyUID, these databases cannot be put to use by any site. As of now there is an alpha release PHP4 connectivity API, which while not feature rich is in full working order. APIs should be available in your favourite language soon. You can view this example of a site remotely connecting to MyUID using the alpha API, and give a go at spoofing a login. They want the security of the login methods tested extensively before going production."

CowboyRobot writes "It's been nearly a year since Blaster struck, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in fixes and lost revenue. Jim Morrison of Symantec goes step-by-step in looking at how the Blaster worm got out of control so quickly, and what lessons can be learned from that event, by studying how one utility company dealt with it." The story is written as a fun, technothriller narrative; here's an snippet: "The laptops, usually out in the field, were always a hit-and-miss proposition to find on the network and deliver a patch or to have the user take the machine to a field office. That meant that on the 16th they could see a flood of traffic launched against Microsoft. The second phase of Blaster, launching a DoS (denial of service) attack against windowsupdate.com, was imminent."

file cabinet (Bram Moolenaar) writes "It has been a year since version 6.2. During that year many bugs were fixed and a few new features added. The support for multiple languages has been improved. It is now possible to use translated help files. A lot of testing has been done and all reported problems have been solved. This is the most stable Vim release ever! Release notes can be found in the announcement. Or do ":help version-6.3" after installing. Happy Vimming!"

jm.one writes "In his weblog the Mozilla developer Gervase Markham (aka Gerv) points out that Microsoft is re-constituting the Windows IE team. You can save Mozillazine's bandwidth(they've been /.ed every day this week) by directly checking out this post at Dave Massy's WebLog at MSDN. They even have set up an IE Feedback section in their channel9 wiki."

PostThis writes "After the attack to the Gnome servers a few months back the Gnome Project was left without a third party software repository (which wasn't that usable anyway). The gap was filled in very recently by GnomeFiles.org. The site was built using BeBits as a model (BeOS users still swear by it) and they are looking into filling up their Gnome/GTK+ software database quickly; they are offering prizes to Gnome developers who will submit an app during the first week of the site's launch."

superflippy writes "In his article Hiding Behind Certification, MIT's Michael Schrage argues that CIOs who rely too heavily on certifications as a measure of an employee or sub-contractor's abilities are wasting their companies' money."

jpkunst writes "Ed Willis, over at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com, gives his varied reactions to Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man-Month, after 'having finally read it in its entirety'. '[...] simultaneously you can see just how much the field has changed since the original writing and just how much has stayed stubbornly the same.'"

Read on below for tonight's edition of Slashback, with followups to several previous Slashdot stories, including the Linux-in-Munich saga, Harlan Ellison's feud with AOL, Hotmail's response to the growing space for webmail, and more. Read on for the details.

Dozix007 writes "For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace. Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages and O'Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline."

An anonymous reader writes "In More Power To The Firmware Amit Singh talks about technical details of EFI, the next-gen BIOS replacement standard Intel, Microsoft and others are pushing. This is a very informative piece where he talks of issues with legacy BIOS, how it affects those who develop in the firmware environment and how EFI plans to solve these problems. EFI usage examples are included, including a programming example. He contrasts EFI with Open Firmware as well. IMO the second half of the article is even more interesting, where sample FORTH code is provided for displaying a window/mouse pointer GUI inside the Apple/Mac firmware! And of course, there's code for a new 'Towers of Hanoi' animation using the Mac firmware (remember Hanoimania?). Aspiring Mac Firmware Hackers could also check out the suggested projects ;-)"

upside writes "It had to be done. Once The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom gave us a 3D visualization of a firewall, someone was bound to ask themselves 'What does your firewall sound like?'."

David Son writes "On the celebration of Youth Day (June 16) in South Africa, a volunteer group of Linux enthusiasts (SLUG - Schools Linux Users Group), teachers, learners and community members set about installing 240 refurbished thin clients, 10 servers and 250 network cables at 10 schools in the Western Cape, in three hours. In a carefully co-ordinated effort called Operation FreeTux, SLUG members displayed their support for the Open Source movement by implementing Linux and K12 educational software at the 10 schools simultaneously, and at the same time transferring skills and knowledge to the school community."

Alex Reynolds writes "'Are pop critics doing a good job? What does it mean to do a good job as a pop music critic? What is the difference between good and bad pop music criticism?' Loren Jan Wilson's innovative Pitchformula project takes the archives of music criticism and journalism from the popular Pitchfork web site and analyses them for commonalities in content, determining what attributes make for a 'good' or 'bad' evaluation. From this data, Wilson sculpted his compositional and performance technique to write rock music that should win critical acclaim."

AceMarkE writes "Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software has posted an article entitled "How Microsoft Lost the API War". He covers why the Win32 API is important to Microsoft, what they've done to keep it working, why Microsoft's switch to the .Net platform is both a good and bad idea, and why he feels the browser will be the real future of application development. Definitely worth a read no matter what your opinion of Microsoft is."

steve_deobald writes "The Mono team just released Beta 3, the final beta before we see the 1.0 release candidate and final. Binary packages can be had for Red Hat, Fedora, and SuSE. Although not officially released, the new website is up and running. Also of note, MonoDevelop 0.4 was recently released, and has RPMs available for the first time."

An anonymous reader writes "Doug Bagley's famous Great computer Language Shootout more or less died in 2001 out of lack of support by its own author. A group of developers have decided to revive it and update it with the latest versions of each compiler and interpreter available on the Debian distribution. The good news is, a wiki has been set up so that people can help improve the shootout, discuss the implemetations of the programs, and suggest optimizations."

Doc Ruby writes "The TreoCentral community has announced a bounty for the first BlueTooth SDIO driver delivered for the Treo 600 (PalmOS 5). The thread shows the development of both the requirements of the quarry, and the contributions to the bounty. If this process works, is 'open funding' of development the next wave of the emerging online community? How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?" Update: 06/16 19:43 GMT by T : Updated the bounty link to a server better able to handle it.

SnoopTodd writes "Ars Technica has an interview with Scott Collins of Mozilla. 'That's the thing I learned to lust after as a programmer. It's not my ability to solve one problem, to plow this field, but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses. The ability to make something that touches not ten people, not a hundred people, not a thousand people but a hundred million people. I want Mozilla to be there again. IE is a browser with no soul. I want it to be Mozilla because I think that people who care deserve a browser with a soul.'"