mandozcode writes "I came across an interesting interview with PHP co-creator Zeev Suraski at Open Enterprise Trends on the latest upgrades for PHP5's First Release Candidate (just released a week or so ago). Sounds like lots of improvements to help make it in the enterprise, including better bundled support for SQLlite and XML. Also encouraging, looks like Zend is getting more millions in VC investment."

IceFox writes "Having fallen in love with distcc and its ability to speed up compiling (insert anyone who compiles like Gentoo users or Linux developers). I recently got the chance to dive deeper into distcc. By itself distcc will decrease your build times, but did you know that if you tweak a few things you can get a whole lot better compile times? Through a lot of trial and error, tips from others, profiling, testing and just playing around with distcc, I have put together a nice big article. It shows how developers can get a bigger bang for their buck out of their old computers and distcc with just a few changes."

Petrochard writes "For all of you programmers who are big chess fans, check out Apple's release of Chess 2.0's source code. It would be cool if somebody could make a Simpson's Chess mod." Chess is based on sjeng (logic) and glChess (interface).

Josh MacLean writes "I noticed a link to an interesting article over at OSNews comparing performance of Linux kernels 2.4.25 and 2.6.4. While the workstation benchmarks are rather mundane, the server benchmarks (including Apache and MySQL) proved to be quite interesting. The rest of the Linux geeks might appreciate this. The comment thread that's linked on the last page is turning out to be relatively amusing as well."

vinohradska writes "Businessweek has a new article on Linux on Cell Phones. It features an interview with Michael Sudol, general manager of the group at Motorola PCS that's focused on Linux. 'Rather than be held prisoner to any company's proprietary software, cellular service providers (which distribute most phones) are beginning to ask specifically for Linux-based handsets.'"

Lew Pitcher queries: "I recently attended a presentation of a code documentation tool that, among other things, produced a flowchart of the analyzed code. The vendor sells this one product for analyzing both mainframe code (COBOL, 390 Assembler, PL1, etc.) and 'distributed' code (C#, Java, C++, Smalltalk, etc). I haven't kept up with the 'modern' techniques (I prefer Nassi-Shneiderman charts, but I still have my flowcharting template), and wondered if modern 'OOP' programmers use flowcharts. If they don't, what is the preferred technique for diagramming an OOP program?"

YellowYahoo writes "Ever wondered how to combine old and new technology for fun and profit? Doing their part to continue COBOL's dominance of installed software, Deskware has developed a COBOL based scripting language designed for serving web pages. Whether or not COBOL will succeed as the next great web language, is obvously up to some debate, but there is at least one active site deployed in Cobolscript. According to their FAQ, their main advantage is leveraging existing employees' programming knowledge. Does that make it a reasonable language to use? There's certainly some justification that COBOL makes a better langauge for implementing business rules than either Perl or Java. Time to dust off (or start learning?) all those older languages!"

Douglas Hunter writes "Africa Source 2004 has wrapped up and the last of the stragglers have packed their bags and headed home. Africa Source 2004 was a gathering of pan-African Free and Open Source software developers held in Okahandja, Namibia. Organized by Tactical Tech, All Africa and Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), Africa Source was a mixture of structured and semi-structured discussions with loads of good 'ole hacking thrown in to boot. With workshops ranging from i18n to wireless hacks to running a MOSIX cluster, there were plenty of hands-on sessions for folks to attend. The first ever Kiswahili spell checker was developed and released during the conference, a testament to the activity of those involved. For more information about Africa Source 2004, visit one of the blogs."

An anonymous reader writes "Cobind Desktop takes a remarkable turn from other Linux distributions by being one of the first to include Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla Thunderbird in their first release. Though Cobind Desktop only uses XFce and not the more popular KDE, its entire design is based on a clutter-free workspace. Flexbeta.net took the time to write up a review and conduct an interview with David Watson, Co-Founder and President of Cobind Desktop. He mentions how the entire design concept of Cobind Desktop is based on a book called the Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, who is a professor at Swarthmore. David Watson believes that this concept can be applied to software design, and produce more usable products as a result." (We mentioned Schwartz's book earlier today.)

An anonymous reader writes "Believe it or not, DOS -- DR-DOS, no less -- is still alive and kicking after all these years! Devicelogics, a company founded by former executives of Caldera and Lineo in Utah, says it has begun shipping version 8.0 of DR-DOS today. The company says the most significant enhancement in the latest version of this long-lived (and 'stable') operating system is support for FAT32 large partitions, enabling DR-DOS 'to keep up with market demand for DOS-based embedded solutions built on FAT32 platforms.'"

Balinares writes "NewsForge reports that Novell has settled for Qt as its Linux desktop development environment, casting more light on their strategy to unify KDE and GNOME. This ought to be interesting. The prospect of using Mono to code against Qt makes me drool in advance. Maybe programming will suck no longer!" Update: 03/30 00:01 GMT by T : Sounds like that story doesn't quite hold water; Nat Friedman writes in this Slashdot comment that "We have not decided that we are standardizing on Qt for the desktop. ... We support development with a variety of toolkits, and our internal development is done using the right tool for the right problem. This includes Qt, Gtk, VCL, XUL and others, depending on the application."

An anonymous reader writes "Martin Pool is a Canberra-based software engineer working on open source software for HP. In 2003 he won the Australian Unix and Open Systems' Australian Open Souce Award for his work on the distcc distributed compiler. Builder AU recently caught up with Martin to talk about his work, SCO and open source software. Complete story" And, having meet him, and kinda worked with him a bit, Martin's one heckuva guy.

pyman writes "The 4th Ludum Dare game competition is being held over the April 16-18 weekend. A forum discussion can be found here, and you may register your details here. Previous compos have spawned some interesting games, as well as provided a unique insight into the creative process of the programmer mind."

petrus4 writes "IBM have put together a nine-part series on upgrading from various incarnations of Windows (NT in particular) to Linux. Although it's mainly aimed at corporate customers, it's a good read, and could help the Linux advocacy effort in general."

Ian writes "The Globe and Mail has a piece about the man behind Boolean Logic - George Boole - The Isaac Newton of logic. 'It was 150 years ago that George Boole published his classic The Laws of Thought, in which he outlined concepts that form the underpinnings of the modern high-speed computer.'"

An anonymous reader writes "I know that we have had an influx of new programming languages of late, but I feel that this one merits special attention. Theoretical computer scientists and long-time Squeak and LISP contributors Brian Rice and Lee Salzman have been rapidly developing a language called Slate. It draws on the various strengths of the Self, Smalltalk, and LISP languages. To quote from the website: 'Slate is a prototype-based object-oriented programming language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk. Slate syntax is intended to be as familiar as possible to a Smalltalker, rather than engaging in divergent experiments in that respect.' The beta release is currently being written in Common LISP."

Ben Collins writes "Prothon is a new industrial-strength, interpreted, prototype-based, object-oriented language that gets rid of classes altogether in the way that the Self language does. It uses the sensible, practical syntax and add-on C module scheme from Python. This major prototype improvement over Python plus many other general improvements make for a clean new revolutionary breakthrough in language development. Prothon is simple to use and yet offers the combined power of Python and Self. Check out the first public pre-alpha release at prothon.org."

Sim9 writes "Sun (among others) is sponsoring a $50,000 Java games competition, with the competition page explaining: 'With Java technology, developers are enabled to simplify their development process and create richer games reaching across a multitude of devices and platforms.' In my humble opinion, Java still has a ways to go in the gaming industry, but the competition could greatly help if skilled people enter."

comforteagle writes "Sun CEO Scott McNealy has finally answered the long awaited question that has been on the minds of open source and Java developers. Will Sun open source Java? No. He stated today that Sun sees no solution solved from open sourcing Java that isn't already addressed."

DrSkwid writes "With PhoenixBIOS reading your email because of such inordinate boot up times for Windows and other OSs, it was remarked in #plan9 about our 5s boot times using LinuxBIOS. My friend f2f pasted an article from Linux Journal which looks at the basic structure of LinuxBIOS, the origins of LinuxBIOS and how it evolved to its current state. It also covers the platforms supported and the lessons they have learned about trying to marry a GPL project to some of the lowest-level, most heavily guarded secrets that vendors possess."