JayBonci writes "It may come as a surprise that within the pages of 'Perl 6 Essentials' lies what could be two books, despite its length. If not for lack of cover space, it could easily bear the names "Perl6 for Perl5 programmers" and "Parrot in a Nutshell". Both topics are concise and clearly covered, despite their relatively different audience." Read on for the rest of Jay's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Although the C language has been around for close to 30 years, its appeal has not yet worn off. It continues to attract a large number of people who must develop new skills for writing new applications, or for porting or maintaining existing applications. This article provides a set of guidelines that can help you with your coding."

Jeff Carroll writes "Developers building Java applications for wireless handheld devices have been looking forward for some time now to the release of devices supporting version 2.0 of the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC), and version 1.1 of the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP). These new releases contain support for features demanded by developers that didn't make the original releases. In support of CLDC 2.0 and MIDP 1.1, Roger Riggs and his team of authors from Sun, Nokia, and Motorola have released Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, Second Edition (since I don't have a copy of the first edition, I can only evaluate the new edition on its own merits)." (Read on for his review.) Update: 07/23 16:31 GMT by T : Whoops -- that's CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0, not the other way around.

GlennZ writes "Today, Trolltech has released version 3.2 of QT. This release includes a completely rewritten, faster font-rendering engine and a lot more. Go download it today!"

Aneusomy writes "From Activestate: 'Compiled by Dr. John Graham-Cumming, a leading anti-spam researcher and member of the ActiveState Anti-Spam Task Force, the ActiveState Field Guide to Spam is a selection of the tricks spammers use to hide their messages from filters, providing examples taken from real-world spam messages.' The hope is that Activestate and others can contribute to continually expand this guide, so that anti-spam filters improve."

BSD Forums writes "Dustin Puryear attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) this year in San Antonio, Texas and presents this report. USENIX offers attendees an interesting mix of papers and talks by academia, well-known industry professionals, and researchers working for companies across the world. What exactly did he really learn from this conference? He says research is as strong as ever within USENIX and open source communities. Samba is making significant progress with the ever emerging Active Directory networks. FreeBSD is emerging as one of the few key OSes of choice for web hosting. Finally, he says that Microsoft is competing for server business with their Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX products."

MmmmJoel writes "After months of delays, and on the heels of OpenGroupware.org, version 1.0 of Kolab has finally been released. Commisioned by the German government to develop a Free Software groupware solution, Kolab is the server piece of Kroupware, which will be integrated into the KDE 3.2 desktop. The Kolab KDE Client was released concurrently at 1.0. This release has been announced on Slashdot before, with an initial planned release for December, 2002."

__past__ writes "REAL software just announced that the next version of their REALbasic IDE will add support for building native Linux applications, in addition to the Windows, Mac OS classic and OS X targets. Given that it will include a converter for existing Visual Basic projects, this could be a usefull tool for migrating existing apps written in everybody's favourite language to free platforms, something that other projects like Gambas or KBasic don't address."

JimCricket writes "Art & Logic has published a new article: Embedding Mozilla in Mac OS X Cocoa Apps . The author presents a detailed step-by-step guide for Mac OS X developers that want to use Mozilla within their applications."

Pieroxy queries: "I recently had a look at various ways to draw a graph (lines, bar chart, pie chart...) for a web-based enterprise application. As we need some interactivity, the GIF image generated on the server-side is not an option. Here is the list of technologies I can think of: Flash is probably over kill and a closed technology. Java is very flexible but slow (to start and run). SVG (discussed here) still requires a plugin. VML is supported only on IE5+, but it is natively supported. Which one of these technologies is the more flexible and interactive? Is it reasonable to require a plugin from the end users of our enterprise application? Is IE5+ a wide enough target for an enterprise application?"

Ashcrow writes "The feasibility for DirectFB to replace XFree86 just a little stronger thanks Maurizio Monge very first alpha release of Trolltech's Qt library for use in DirectFB. You can check out some screenshots or go straight to the source. And yes, it has been released as Free Software."

Simon P. Chappell writes "The Eclipse IDE has thundered into the collective consciousness of Java developers since its release by IBM as Open Source Software. Up until this time, the majority of available documentation at the Eclipse website has been for plug-in developers, with scant attention given to the rest of us that actually want to use the tool for anything else. This book restores the balance and brings much needed help to those interested in this IDE." Read on for the rest of Simon's review, about which he says "Full Disclosure: I received a free, review copy of this book, so feel free to assume that I've been bought off and have traded my technical integrity to put about an inch of dead tree on my shelf."

orv writes "When Andreas Mohr found that his new wireless networking card wasn't supported under Linux rather than returning the card and getting himself a supported one, he decided to set up a project to write his own drivers instead - http://acx100.sourceforge.net. Companies such as D-Link had initially promised to release linux drivers for these cards but later backed down from that promise and announced that Linux would not be supported and that customers should not hold on to the cards in the hope of getting them working, as shown on their current FAQ. Texas Instruments, the makers of the chipsets upon which these 802.11b+ cards are based refused to release code or specifications for the cards, no doubt for similar reasons that were recently discussed here. The fact that the current alpha release is certainly as good, and in some areas better, than the binary drivers that escaped from one of the card manufactureres speaks volumes for the quality and determination of the team to create their own drivers."

McDoobie writes "Ada Core Technologies has released their new GPS Integrated Development Environment for download. It's intended to be a professional-grade development environment along the lines of Microsoft Visual C++ or Sun's Forte. You can grab it at http://libre.act-europe.fr/gps/. Check it out. You might like it."

Sanity writes "Many probably saw the recent announcement of Freenet 0.5.2. This release represented a vast amount of work - primarily in reducing Freenet's CPU and memory requirements. However, streamlining Freenet's current functionality isn't all we've been working on. I just finished an article that describes the most fundamental improvement to Freenet's core algorithm since its original design over three years ago, it is called "Next Generation Routing" and has the potential to dramatically increase the speed with which Freenet retrieves information. It could even make Freenet faster than the World Wide Web in many circumstances, all without compromizing anonymity and while remaining immune to the /. effect."

carrowood writes "A survey was conducted questioning open source developers from both large and small projects concerning their quality assurance practices. A research paper based on the survey result was just published in the Journal of Systems and Software. Some comparisions between QA practices of open vs closed source projects are made with some interesting observations. While on the whole it looks like open source QA can be as good as that in traditional software development, there were a few areas pointed out where the open source community does not do so well, such as regression testing and setting release dates. A thought provoking read."

JakusMinimus writes "The developer of BitKeeper has issued fighting words to RMS and he has responded on the LKML,. I remember the flap about this way back when Linus decided on BitKeeper, now it seems many of the non-free concerns were warranted."

Gord Bowman writes "For anyone familiar with XML and, specifically, with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), you may be aware that SVG is increasingly being used for the creation of data-driven Web applications. But everyone has been doing so by handcoding script and/or XSLT, without the benefit of an IDE to help. Seeing such a need for a tool, my company (Corel) set about creating one." and 'lo, dSVG was born. Gord Bowman is the lead developer of dSVG and would like you to take a look at the dSVG specs (you can find the link, in the full article) and offer your comments.

Weird_one writes "Discover magazine's current issue has an intriguing article involving using genetic algorithims to evolve an animation of a walking individual."

PlainBlack queries: "Our company has been developing an open source project for a couple years now that has gotten pretty popular. The one thing we haven't yet figured out how to do well is packaging. It seems like every operating system has it's own standards for packaging, and installers, and for each OS we support, we end up adding a lot of time to our packaging process. So my question is, what do all of you do to package your apps? Do you just release source tarballs? Do you manually package your RPMs, EXEs, DEBs, DMGs, BINs, PKGs, [and MSIs] by hand? Do you have an automated build process that creates all the packages? If so, how does it work? Is it available for other developers to use?" There are tons of installers listed on SourceForge, but which one allows the creation of OS packages without too much hassle? Duplicating work, especially software installation procedures, across all supported OSes, is time consuming. Is there an easier way?