ActiveState writes "Tell us why you love Perl. ActiveState is pleased to announce the ActiveState Perl Haiku Poetry Contest. Do you love Perl as much as we do? Then prove it with your passion, creativity, and wit! Categories include Best Haiku Poem Written in Perl and Best Haiku Poem About Perl. All entries will be featured on our website. Winners will be selected by ActiveState's Perl development team. Prizes will be awarded for the top three entries in each category and include licenses for ASPN Perl featuring Komodo Professional Edition, and cool ActiveState gear. The deadline for entries is 12:00PM PST, February 8, 2004. Winners will be announced on February 10. Full contest rules are also online. Good luck!"

David Barber asks: "I've just started learning Java, and to my exceptional disappointment it is as case-sensitive as C. I'd like to ask Slashdot readers to make the case for case-sensitivity in a programming language, because I can't see it. Although I've used C on and off since 1976, I also have a history of Fortran, COBOL, PL/I, assembler, and other legacy languages that were never case sensitive (perhaps due to the single case nature of card punches). Today I use modern languages including Visual Basic which preserves case for pleasing appearance, but is not case-sensitive itself (it will correct the case for you in the IDE, which is quite nice). In all my years of programming I have never seen the rationale for making a programming language case sensitive. It simply makes typing it in harder, and mistakes easier, yet we persevere with maintaining it in modern languages like Java. Without making this into a religious war, can someone make the argument of why case-sensitivity in a language is 'a good thing'? And don't confuse this with handling case-sensitive data, which is fine."

An anonymous reader queries: "Most 64-bit processors provide a 32-bit mode for compatibility, but 64-bit pointers are becoming essential as systems move beyond 4GB of RAM. Also, the large virtual address space is very useful for several reasons - allowing large files to be memory-mapped, and allowing pages of memory to be remapped without ever requiring the virtual address space to be defragmented. However, 64-bit pointers take up twice as much memory, which immediately affects memory footprint. This is especially an issue on embedded platforms where RAM is at a premium, but even on systems where RAM is plentiful and cheap the extra memory footprint reduces cache performance. Have Slashdot readers done any research into the actual effect of using 64-bit pointers in a 'typical' application? What proportion of a real program's data is actually pointers?"

FreakerSFX asks: "My son has shown an avid interest in video games like most kids his age. What's different now is that he insists that he wants to learn how to build his own game. He's 9 and fairly gifted from a mathematics and computer standpoint and certainly capable of learning basic programming. What tools/books are recommended for a neophyte computer game programmer?" I remember one of my first exposures to computer languages was Logo, which was a language that seems perfectly suited to young children. There is a Windows version available here that seems like it would be perfect for the development of simple games, especially for youngsters. What languages, and language resources, are you aware of that might be suitable for youngsters with an interest in creating games, and learning programming?

ChopsMIDI writes "Announced today at MySQL, is the new GUI for MySQL: The MySQL Administrator. This integrates database management and maintenance into a 'seamless' GUI. 'Easily perform all the command line operations visually including configuring servers, administering users, and dynamically monitoring database health. Other common administrative tasks such as monitoring replication status, backup and restore, and viewing logs can also be performed through the MySQL Administrator graphical console.' This sounds like a pretty sweet tool, but sadly, it's not available for downlodad yet, but it does have some nice screenshots."

gletham writes "The Nokia 6600 coupled with the Opera browser is a powerful tool for browsing the web, but, to reduce his data traffic charges and get just the information he wanted, Philipp Lenssen used his own web site to feed RSS content to his Nokia 6600. In this interesting article Philipp explains in detail how he went about it."

JS_RIDDLER noted a Toronto Star article about a sort of contest to crack some encryption and win a million bucks. The article is a bit fluffy, but it getst the point across... we wasted all those RC5 keys ;)

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I'm looking to buy a cell phone that is reasonably accessible to hacking. Not illegal stuff, I'd just want to be able to write and load programs on the phone myself. I particularly want access to the GPS in the phone. I'm not picky about what language or environment I have to use as long no hardware mods to the phone are required and I don't have to pay someone an arm and a leg for a developers kit. Can anyone recommend something (just normal sized phones please, not the big PDA hybrids) they've had good luck with?"

DrFishstik writes "From the Fedora Project Page: "A test release of Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Like the original x86 architecture release, the AMD64 architecture has three binary ISO images and three source ISO images. This is a single (we hope and intend) test release specifically to check hardware support; the package set is the same versions as an updated Fedora Core 1 for x86 system will have.""

Paul Kucher writes "A second preview of GIMP 2.0 has been released. From gimp.org: "Lots of bugs have been fixed since the last release and you are encouraged to try the new pre-release. It is now available from ftp.gimp.org or from one of the mirrors. Plug-in authors, please consider to port your GIMP plug-in to the 2.0 API. Now is a good time to do that." I have posted some screenshots here."

danalien writes "Before a early Feb. release of the (stable) KDE 3.2, KDE has today announced the first 'Release Candidate', and hopefully the last pre-release, for its 'Open Source graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations'. Get it from download.kde.org, or use Konstruct if you don't feel like calling configure by yourself."

Alexander Limi writes "Just in time for some light weekend reading, O'Reilly's OSDir.com has published a byte-sized interview with the two founders of Plone. This is a nice follow-up to the earlier discussion on Slashdot, and covers a lot of the unanswered questions people directed to us earlier as the surprise winners of the O'Reilly COMDEX competition."

An anonymous reader writes "The first Open Source Awards 2004 have been announced. These newly created awards aspire to be the Nobel Prizes of the open source world. Congratulations to the developers of Valgrind, VideoLAN, JACK, and Pango."

jonknee writes "MobileTracker notes that Nokia has made it clear that the Perl scripting language is coming to its popular Series 60 devices. This will be a huge boon to mobile software. Just look what happened to the web when CGI got popular. A time frame was not announced."

balster neb writes "CNET News.com has a piece titled 'Seeds of Destruction' on monoculture in software and its effect on security. The article talks about similarities between software attacks such as last year's MSBlast, and agricultural catastrophes such as the Irish Potato Famine. Isn't this another good argument against monopolies?"

double-oh three writes "It's an even numbered year, and that means that 2600 is holding the party again this summer. The 5th HOPE conference has been announced and scheduled for July 9th to 11th(a Friday-Sunday weekend), again at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. This year's 'theme' for the conference is Propaganda, and if this is anything like H2k2, it'll be by the phone companies. And for those of you who are clueless, here's a roundup of the last HOPE con."

christodd queries: "After years of programming in PHP and C++, I've finally delved into the world of Javascript and DHTML. The biggest hurdle I have come up against is the various web browser DOMs. I find that I spend much time googling for variable names, and guessing which variables do what. My favorite tool is a good debugger, and this is where I'm having problems. There is a commercial product by Netscript due out this quarter for $190.00, and there is a very young open source project at BiteSizeInc, but I have yet to find anything production quality. How does everyone else debug browser DOM issues?"

DeadSea queries: "When you find that somebody is violating the GPL by distributing your code or a derivative of your code as a closed source product, how do you go about handling it? I have found two violations of the GPL for my Java Utilities, in the last month. The Free Software Foundation says that the copyright holder is the only person empowered to act. If you are the copyright holder, how do you communicate with the offenders? I know folks here must have dealt with this before: Linksys, SCO, Castle Technology, United Linux, and others. Personally, I would like to believe that with a little nudging (and without lawyers), I can resolve the things. As such, I would especially appreciate any example letters or other documents that might be effective."

ngunton writes "When is "good enough" enough? I wrote this article to take a philosophical look at the tendency for software developers to rewrite new versions of popular tools and standards from scratch rather than work on the existing codebase. This introduces new bugs and abandons all the small fixes and tweaks that made the original version work so well. It also often introduces incompatibilities that break a sometimes huge existing userbase. Examples include IPv4 vs IPv6, Apache, Perl, Embperl, Netscape/Mozilla, HTML and Windows. "

nadamsieee writes "EETimes is running a story that proclaims that the embedded Linux tools market is a myth The author, Dan O'Dowd, sites variety of problems (challenges?) with embedded Linux ranging from poor real-time performance to lack of broad developer support. Dan concludes: "Considering all of the possible support avenues, Linux support ends up being lower quality and more costly than the alternatives of using a homegrown operating system or purchasing a proprietary one." Maybe Dan should check out the success stories at LinuxDevices.com or perhaps try a more traditional embedded OS that also happens to be Free."