Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."

rjray writes with news that yesterday "the W3C gave their official stamp of approval-- Technical Recommendation status-- to VoiceXML 2.0. Trade publications covering this include internetnews.com. The move also recognizes the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS 1.0), and combines the two together under the heading of 'Speech Interface Framework.'" Here's the W3C press release.

the.jedi writes "With the release of GTK+ 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 due out some time next week, it seems of some the Gnome developers are looking at how they'll be coding Gnome and the rest of the Linux desktop. Havoc Pennington of Planet Gnome has written a short blog pondering and analyzing the available options as coders move towards high-level languages like java and C#. He gives a good overview and assessment of technologies like mono, OO.org's UNO framework, as well as other ways of tying new languages to the existing code base. An extremely interesting read for desktop linux hackers everywhere." Update: 03/17 14:44 GMT by T : Speaking of the future of Gnome, aeneas writes with a list of Gnome 2.6 release parties around the world (linked from gnome.org/start/2.5).

Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."

fastdecade writes "Groovy, the open-source scripting language, has been submitted for a Java Specification Request (JSR). And not without strong support from venerable J2EE practitioner/author, Richard Monson-Haefel, who labels this "the beginning of a new era in the Java platform". Groovy can use Java objects easily and compiles to JVM byte code, but it is nonetheless a scripting language at heart and a great companion for the more heavyweight Java programming language. Most JSRs concern new APIs, and this is the first JSR for an alternative language. Imagine a common platform of standardised languages talking to each other ... this looms as a big threat to .Net and a rejuvenation of the Java platform."

d3vi1 writes "Pango, Glib & GTK 2.4.0 have been released to the public. See gtk.org in general, or specifically: the announcements for pango, glib and gtk."

ijones writes "Andrew Cooke recently reviewed for Slashdot Purely Functional Data Structures, which is on my book shelf next to The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia by Paul Hudak from the Yale Haskell Group. In his review, Cooke presented an overview of some available functional programming languages, such as OCaml, SML, and of course Haskell. Havoc Pennington once called Haskell 'the least-broken programming language available today.' Haskell is a purely functional, lazy, statically typed programming language. You can read more about Haskell itself here." Read on for ijones' review of The Haskell School of Expression.

kovi writes "You might remember that game - it was ported to Linux a while ago (by Tribsoft) and is one of the 'overall top sellers' at Tux Games. Well, according to this press release from Strategy First, the newest mod for JA2, 'Wildfire,' will include full source code of the original retail release! It might not be the biggest news, and it might not even matter, but it is not very frequent in the gaming industry that source code gets released." No word on what's included with the source release, but the game's been out for a week now, so likely someone with a copy knows more. S! Apparently, the Bear's Pit Forums are discussing the code as we speak, including why shooting cows is bad.

An anonymous reader writes "The platforms for the Debian Project Leader candidates are now available here with more information about how votes are tallied. The candidates this year are the incumbent DPL Martin Michlmayr, and developers Branden Robinson, and Gergely Nagy (but if you vote for him, his tamagotchi will sit on you.)" Nagy's platform is interesting reading.

prostoalex writes "Why are networked computing environments so insecure? You've heard the story before - early computers were not designed to work in the network environment, and even most software written later was designed to work on benevolent networks. As Bruce Schneier says in the preface to Building Secure Software: How to Break Code, 'We wouldn't have to spend so much time, money and effort on network security if we didn't have such bad software security.'" Read on for prostoalex's review of Exploiting Software, which aims to balance that situation somewhat.

Paul Howe writes "Roaming around my school's computer science webserver I ran across what struck me as a great (and very prescient) idea: a fault tolerant scripting language. This makes a lot of sense when programming in environments that are almost fundamentally unstable i.e. distributed systems etc. I'm not sure how active this project is, but its clear that this is an idea whose time has come. Fault Tolerant Shell."

rhysweatherley writes "So C is dead in a world dominated by bytecode languages, is it? Well, not really. Portable.NET 0.6.4 now has a fairly good C compiler that can compile C to IL bytecode, to run on top of .NET runtimes. We need some assistance from the community to port glibc in the coming months, but it is coming along fast. The real question is this: would you rather program against the pitiful number API's that come with C#, or the huge Free Software diversity that you get with C? The death of C has been greatly exaggerated. It will adapt - it always has."

CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that will run on very different processors. PCs vary widely in their performance, and if game developers design only for the high-end, they limit their market. The article lists specific tips on how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the trunks and branches could vary based on the available processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods."

JigSaw writes "Well-known FreeBSD/DragonFly/Linux/Amiga system hacker Matthew Dillon discusses a number of interesting points regarding where the BSDs are going, the status and goals of his latest project DragonFly BSD, the status of his innovative Backplane distributed database, his exciting plans to develop DragonFly into a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI (Single System Image) which is something that no other operating system can do today, and more."

ryanjensen writes "According to an article on News.com, MySQL wrote an exception into its license to allow PHP to use its libraries. From the article: 'Because MySQL owns copyright to all the MySQL code, it can include additional license provisions to its software. The new provision, called the Free and Open Source Software License Exception, enables people to use MySQL client libraries with other open-source projects under other open-source licenses other than the GPL.'"

Vrallis writes "Ten years ago this month, Linux Journal christened their maiden issue with an interview with Linus Torvalds. It is definitely worth the read, and worth some reflection on just how far Linux has come in the last decade."

spin2cool writes "Dean Edwards has taken it upon himself to make Internet Explorer W3C compliant. How? Well, it isn't by patching the application, as you might suspect. He's created a stylesheet, dubbed 'IE7' that uses DHTML to load and parse style sheets into a form that IE can understand. Just include the style sheet in your HTML pages, and things should render correctly. The complexity of the CSS transformations is really amazing and shows off the power of this stuff."

Hagmonk asks: "I've been writing website backends in Perl, PHP, and MySQL for years now. It's always been about the functionality though, not the presentation. What I'd now like to do is offer clients a complete service - a professional backend, -and- a professionally designed front end (both from an aesthetic and usability standpoint). The thought of heading to a 'typical' website design course frightens me. I don't want to waste my time being spoonfed the very basics. I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist? In Australia or on-line?"

honestpuck writes "As titles go "Google, Amazon, and Beyond" sounds to me like Buzz Lightyear's latest slogan, but it's actually quite a good book about writing software to consume and provide web services." Read on for honestpuck's review of the book -- it sounds useful for developers on both sides of a web-service transaction, but honestpuck cautions that its value varies with your attachment to Java.

PateraSilk writes "The Results for the POVRay Short Code Contest are available here. This contest looks for the best images to be generated in POVRay with the smallest amount of code--in this case, under 256 bytes. Definitely 'less is more'."