Dan writes "FreeBSD's Kris Kennaway says that the following FreeBSD ports are scheduled for removal on November 7 if they are still broken at that time and no PRs have been submitted to fix them. If you are interested in saving these ports, please send your patches to the maintainer. If the maintainer is unresponsive or the port has no maintainer, then please submit them via send-pr."

Qa1 writes "Guido von Rossum, creator of Python, was recently interviewed by the folks at O'Reilly Network. In this interview he discusses his view of the future of Python and the Open Source community and programming languages in general. Some more personal stuff is also mentioned, like his recent job change (including the Slashdot story about it) and a little about how he manages to fit developing Python into his busy schedule."

A writes "Back in the day, a BASIC interpreter was standard on every home computer system and everyone had to know at least a little BASIC to be able to use their computer. But who would have thought that you could write some serious networking code in BASIC over 20 years later? Just a few days ago, Lee Davison released the BASIC source code for his 6502-based Ethernet web server. The web server runs under his EhBASIC interpreter on the 1 MHz 6502 CPU and is able to blast out web pages at an amazing speed of 20-35 seconds per page!" Sure, it's not really practical, but I give it cool points.

aqsalter writes "Benjamin Reed of Fink fame is calling for help porting KDE to Mac using Qt/Mac. Interested parties should swarm the KDE-Darwin mailing list. KWrite for Mac here we come!"

Neon Spiral Injector writes "Rasterman of Enlightenment fame has finally updated the news page of his personal site. It seems that the behind the scenes work for E is coming along. He is investigating rendering backends for Evas. The default backend is a software renderer written by Raster. Trying to gain a little more speed he ported it to the XRender extension, only to find that it became 20-50 times slower on his NVidia card. He has placed some sample code on this same news page for people to try, and see if this is also experienced on other setups."

Phil Windley writes "Truly random numbers are crucial to good encryption. Most people have heard of Silicon Graphic's use of Lava Lamps to generate random numbers. There were some problems: it required special SGI hardware and software along with six lava lamps, and the solution wasn't portable. But the biggest drawback was that SGI patented the idea so it wasn't freely available. Now, some of the scientists behind the SGI random number system have create LavaRnd, an open source project for creating truly random numbers using inexpensive cameras, open source code, and inexpensive hardware. The system uses a saturated CCD in a light-tight can as a chaotic source to produce the seed. Software processes the result into truly random numbers in a variety of formats. The result is a random number that is crytographically sound, ranking at the top of its class in the NIST 800-22 Billion bit test. Its even portable, so the truly paranoid can take it with them when they travel."

Mr. McD writes "Seems like Apple is going to be pushing J2EE with Max OS X Server 10.3, again going the Open Source route, with JBoss preinstalled alongside graphical deployment tools. You can see it on the Panther Server page, in the side bar."

Dan writes "Apache Ant 1.5.4 has been released, it addresses problems relating to java, and visual age for java tasks."

landley writes "The Free Software Foundation's FTP site at ftp.gnu.org has been "compromised", and they don't seem to have full backups. They've yanked a bunch of recent packages (and their whole alpha.gnu.org ftp site), and when I asked about it they responded 'Our FTP server was compromised, yes. We are beginning to find good MD5sums for files which have not yet been restored, and they will be available again Real Soon Now. If you can provide MD5sums for any of the files listed in MISSING-FILES, it would be very much appreciated.' " Update the FSF has a statement on the FTP site explaining the matter.

WHudson writes "Relevantive AG, a German consulting firm who recently completed a study on Linux usability, posted their results in English translation today. Bottom line: Linux nearly as easy to use as Windows XP, but the wording of system and program messages could use some more clarity."

Anonymous Coward writes "Local Area Security Linux is a small 'live CD' distribution based on Knoppix that aims at being less than 185MB so it will fit on a MiniCD. It is now 107MB with FluxBox as the window manager. It contains about 100 security (forensics, penetration testing, firewall, intrusion detection, etc.) tools including Ethereal and Nessus. See a screenshot here."

TeachingMachines writes "Leslie Polzer has written a nice summary of the current state of GUI Toolkits for the X Windows System (article title of the same name). Those of you who are planning to spend hours and hours scouring the Internet for a mature cross-platform GUI toolkit may save some time and trouble by reading this summary. Leslie's review covers the pros and cons of using GTK+, Trolltech QT, FLTK, wxWindows, and the FOX Toolkit."

sedition writes "GnuCash developer Benoit Gregoire has written the State of the GnuCash Project. It is a call for help to the Open Source community regarding the open-source accounting software for Linux, Mac OSX, and more. GnuCash is one of the largest (287,853 lines of code), but least publicized Open Source projects. Now it needs developer support, as its future is uncertain."

GPez writes "The first of I'm sure many RPC DCOM worms affecting Windows is on its way, according to the Internet Storm Center. Patch those systems!" According to the site, "The worm uses the RPC DCOM vulnerability [affects Win2k through Server 2003] to propagate. Once it finds a vulnerable system, it will spawn a shell on port 4444 and use it to download the actual worm via tftp."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux is quickly becoming a dominant platform for e-business and enterprise applications. The recent release of Fixpack 2 for IBM Tivoli Access Manager recognized this fact by adding support for Linux on the Intel platform. In *this tutorial*, you'll learn how to install and configure IBM Tivoli Access Manager on Linux. You'll also walk through some simple steps that will test your installation, including the creation of a WebSEAL junction."

An anonymous reader writes "A recent flamewar ensued on the Linux kernel mailing list, this time debating the proper spelling of 'flavor', or is it 'flavour'? Even Linux creator Linus Torvalds joined the fray with some rather humorous comments. For the most part, it sounds like spellings will stay as they are, but it makes for an entertaining read."

Wiz writes "The latest and greatest version of gcc is now out - v3.3.1! As an update to the current version, it is bug fixes only. You can find the list of changes here and you can download it from their mirror sites. Enjoy!"

BanzaiBill writes with the review (below) of Christopher Duncan's The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World, writing "When this book came out a year ago, I bought it, but was in the middle of massive death march. Frankly, the first three chapters depressed me! It hit a little too close to home. Of course, I wasn't sleeping either, and that turned out to be more important than reading. After a few months of recuperation, I picked it up again. So many of the points this book makes were on the money that I felt I needed to spread the word." Read on for BanzaiBill's review of a book that addresses aspects of programming success not listed on job requirements.

An anonymous reader writes "The world's biggest festival for computer enthusiasts, Assembly '03 starts off today. Four days of coding, compos, music, games and other geeky stuff. See press release (rtf) for more..."

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about a recent benchmark conducted to compare five journaling filesystems available with the current 2.6.0-test2 Linux development kernel. The tests were conducted with a very simple shell script, mainly timing how long it takes to copy, tar, and remove directories. Looks like reiser4 is the fastest filesystem at the expense of consuming much more CPU, with ext3 trailing a ways behind."