belswick writes "UW has posted a paper titled "Measuring and Analyzing the Characteristics of Napster and Gnutella Hosts" at Washington in PDF form. Interesting reading for those who implement P2P software, with actual measurements, tools, and topologies. You 3l33t H4x0rz are ACM members, R1gh4?" You can get a cache of the PDF and view it online as well.

descubes inputs: "An XL compiler bootstrapped two days ago (that means it compiled itself). Take a look at the project homepage to discover this language, designed around concept programming ideas, which is a sort of cross between C++, Lisp and XML. Much help is now needed to improve this rudimentary first iteration." One thing to note is that the C++ version of the compiler came in at 4500 lines, while the XL equivalent came in at some 2700 lines. This seems to imply that XL may be easier to work in than C/C++. Might XL someday be nudging the old workhouse out of a job in the near future?

geoff313 writes: "It would appear that Microsoft is making a real push for the migration of existing COBOL applications to Windows and their .Net platform. Micro Focus, a company who makes COBOL migration products and last year became a member of Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, announced their Net Express with .Net product, a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003. It allows for COBOL code to be integrated and manged with other code in Visual Studio. In an interview with eWeek he declares that 'Micro Focus and Microsoft are bringing the mainframe to Windows and .Net'. This makes me wonder, are there any Open Source projects working to provide for this eventual migration? Gartner estimates that over 75% of business data is processed by an approximately 200 billions lines of COBOL, so this seems like a huge potential market to lose to Microsoft."

JimCricket writes "The world's most popular embedded web server has gained something embedded developers have long wished for: support for a small (~50kB) SSL library designed specifically for embedded use. See the press release. The GoAhead WebServer, SSL, and Device Management Framework (from Art & Logic) can now be built into a secure, small-footprint, embedded web application platform."

A not-so-Anonymous Coward writes: "During a Sun developer 'chalk talk' Thursday, Joe Keller, Sun vice president of Java Web services, said the company will release a preview of the tool, known as Project Rave, that the Santa Clara, Calif., company introduced at its JavaOne conference in June. Sun has touted Project Rave as a rapid application development tool akin to Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Basic. In fact, Sun had its developers study Visual Basic to a great extent while building the tool, Sun sources said. Sounds like .NET is going to get a run for it's money."

LogError writes "Many documents discuss the actual insertion of HTML into a vulnerable script, but stop short of explaining the full ramifications of what can be done with a successful XSS attack. While this is adequate for prevention, the exact impact of cross site scripting attacks has not been fully appreciated. This paper will explore those possibilities."

IgD writes "Kylix, Borland's Linux port of their popular Delphi compiler has been covered on Slashdot before. LinuxWorld is reporting that Kylix development is in limbo. Many speculate this is a politically correct way of saying the project has been abandoned. There hasn't been any updates to Kylix 3.0 in well over a year. One user who attended BorCon this year wrote in his blog that Borland didn't have any updates to Kylix planned for 2004. This is really disheartening news. Why didn't Kylix sell? Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?"

Qbertino writes "The 3-day Blender Conference 2003 has closed as of last Sunday. It was a successful one, with the front line of open source 3D people attending, such as Eskil Steenberg introducing his Verse Virtual Collaboration Server and giving talks and insights into the low-level details of Verse and programs accompanying it, such as his high-end full-range color-correction tool Nil, Loq Airou, the 3D Sketchpad and Connector, a Server monitor/server-app-debugger for Verse. All with over the top OpenGL-accelerated user interfaces. An impressive set of avant garde software engineering indeed. GPLd, of course. Almost one and a half hours of exceptional blender artwork and animations were presented, along with the nominated Suzanne Awards 2003 entries. Results can be seen here." Read on for some more details from the conference.

An anonymous reader writes "Manfred Spraul has released a GPLed driver for the ethernet device found in motherboards based on the Nvidia Nforce/Nforce2/Nforce3 chipsets. Drivers provided by Nvidia on the other hand, are closed. Andrew Morton has integrated this driver in the 2.6.9-mm2 release of his mm tree. And if you are using a 2.4x kernel, you may want to check out this post."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices reports that MontaVista Software has open-sourced several key software components for Linux-based consumer electronics devices. The company says it hopes the contributions will become part of standard Linux and will foster the evolution of Linux as a platform for digital consumer electronics devices. The open source contributions -- and their SourceForge locations -- include: Dynamic Power Management (DPM) to extend battery life and reduce power consumption; High Resolution POSIX Timers to enhance real-time performance; Variable Scheduling Timeouts (VST) to extend the stand-by time of battery powered devices, such as mobile phones; and Protected RAM File System (PRAMFS) to protect data from errant writes. Additionally, MontaVista says it plans to contribute Prioritized Work Queues (PWQ) technology, to enable prioritization and configurability of driver code for enhanced responsiveness."

darksoulz writes "Associated Press stories from TheKansasCityChannel.com and TheChamplainChannel.com have an interesting report today. It appears that the U.S. Government has given a $5.5 million grant to the University of California, Berkley and the University of Southern California so that they can build a model of the internet, so they can hack it. They are trying to find better defenses against hacking, without breaking the real Internet. The first phase is scheduled to be completed by February."

BSD Forums writes "The Apache Axis team is proud to announce the release of Apache Axis C++ v1.0 (Alpha). This implementation of a C++ SOAP engine provides a stable platform for developing Web services using C/C++ as well as a client side library for developing C/C++ client applications. New features include SOAP engine with both client and server support; partial support for both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2; WSDD based deployment with dynamic deployment tools and more. Both binary and source are available at Apache mirror sites."

msh104 writes "The Mono project just released a nice status update for Mono. They also preview a roadmap for what the future will be like. It's quite nice to read if you want to find out if writing .Net programs for Linux will have a future for you. The Mono roadmap is available here." And gibbon writes "The DotGNU Project announced the availability of the DotGNU 0.1 CD-ROM release. It runs on many platforms and the CD contains documentation, packages for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and MS Windows. It is now possible to use the base class libraries and XML. System.Windows.Forms and the web services are coming along well, too. The announcement contains more information and download links."

Anonymous Software Agent writes "Cougaar release 10.4.6 has been posted . As always, all source code is available via anonymous CVS. Cougaar is an open-source Java-based architecture for the construction of distributed agent-based applications. It is the product of an eight-year DARPA-funded research project in highly scalable and survivable multi-agent systems. Cougaar is currently used in next-generation military logistics systems, commercial applications, and research projects. Cougaar release 10.4.6 adds survivable yellow pages and white pages services, and multiple other performance and reliability improvements."

Daniel B. Cid writes "I wrote the article '8 steps to Protect your Cisco router' (PDF). This small text gives to the reader eight steps (very easy to understand) showing how minimize your Cisco router exposure, by turning off some unused services, applying some access control lists and applying some security options available on that."

t482 writes "Charles Simonyi (ex Xerox Parc & Microsoft ) says that Software "has become a field where we focus on incremental improvements in processes. That course is futile, because it can never solve the problem of human imperfection." Even as software collapses under the weight of its own complexity, we've barely begun to exploit its potential to solve problems. The challenge, Simonyi believes, is to find a way to write programs that both programmers and users can actually read and comprehend. Simonyi's solution? To create programming tools that are so simple and powerful that the software nearly writes itself. "Software should be as easy to edit as a PowerPoint presentation," Simonyi asserts."

Simon P. Chappell and Eric Kaun contributed reviews of Jess in Action, Ernest Friedman-Hill's introduction to Jess, a pure Java rule-based system developed at Sandia National Laboratories. Kaun writes "Jess in Action presents the Jess rule-based framework, and explores it through four meaty and well-chosen examples: a console tax forms advisor, a console PC repair assistant, a Swing HVAC controller, and a servlet-based purchasing agent. The examples vary greatly in their designs and styles of interaction between Jess and Java, and expose patterns in a concrete context. It's especially nice the way each example builds on the functionality of the one before, such as a text-based question/interview module that is extended into a Swing GUI." Chappell points out that the book's author is also Jess' creator, so he speaks from authority. Read on for both reviews.

zoobab writes "Some belgian linux hackers met this week-end to hack some wireless access points based on the samsung4510 chip. They have succeeded in compiling and booting a uClinux kernel on a Dlink 614ap+, which is equipped with the infamous acx100 wireless chipset. There's still some work to do, but if you want to help, open your 22mbps AP and try to built your own JTAG adaptator to get access to the flash..."

colinmc151 writes "As part of Geekcruises' Linux Lunacy cruise to Alaska, Linus Torvalds was interviewed and answered questions about where he sees the future of Linux with a particular eye towards developers. Great stuff."

securitas writes "Motorola launched its A760 Linux and Java smartphone in China today. The dual-mode GSM/GPRS phone uses a version of MontaVista Linux, Motorola's i250 chip for communications, Intel's 200 MHz PXA262 chip (based on the XScale PXA250) for computing with 256 MB RAM, and software that includes a personal information management application, digital camera, a video player, MP3 music player, and an instant-messaging tool. The A760 is the first of Motorola's Linux-based phones. Eventually Motorola plans to use Linux in most of its phones."