CodeDemon writes "It looks like the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21 working group has made some headway in reviewing new proposals for the C++ language. The long anticipated upgrade for C++, C++0x, may be just around the corner. Head on over to check out the proposals yourself."

Kourino writes "Today on LKML, Linus released 2.5.75, which he said will be "the last 2.5.x kernel from me", and that he and Andrew Morton are going to start a 2.6-pre series soon. While this certainly does mean things could get interesting soon, don't hold your breath about seeing the actual 2.6 for a while; there are still many areas that need work. This essentially means that the development branch is going into maintenance mode, and new features probably won't get in after this point. Changes of note in 2.5.75 include a merge of the anticipatory scheduler from Andrew Morton's -mm tree and updates from several architectures."

A not-so Anonymous Coward enters this query: "I keep finding myself on projects where a quick and dirty solution will bring in money for the company, and a correct (ie, properly documented, well engineered, process followed, etc) solution will get us left in the dust. When the Q&D solution succeeds, I'm left trying to explain why it can't be the FINAL solution (to PHBs and Marketroids that were fully informed of the situation prior to any work getting done). Most recently, work I did in record time was used to help bring in several large contracts, and then I found myself in hot water for not having followed process et al. So, to Slashdot: is it better to do the quick thing and greatly increase the chance of $uccess now, or to do the correct thing and avoid pain later (assuming there is money to pay for the pain later)?"

Dare Obasanjo writes with a link to his article "A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML" on xml.net. It starts off "In recent times the landscape of APIs and techniques for processing XML has been in the process of reinventing itself as developers and API designers learn from their experiences and some past mistakes. APIs such as DOM and SAX which used to be the bread and butter of XML APIs are giving way to new models of examining and processing XML. However although some of these techniques have become widespread amongst developers who primarily work with XML they are still unknown to the general body of developers. Nothing highlights this better than a recent article by Tim Bray one of the co-inventors of XML entitled XML is too Hard for Programmers and the subsequent responses on Slashdot." Read the entire article to learn more about the state of the XML art. Added in the missing link.

moksliukas writes "Perl 5.8.1 RC1 has been released. A major change is that due to security reasons, the "random ordering" of hashes has been made even more random. As always, there are other numerous changes, including some improved utf-8 handling support, deprecation of 5.005 style threads, $* magic variable, pseudo-hashes and a number of other improvements. As usual, perldelta summarises all changes."

Nice2Cats writes "I stumbled across this and can't find a mention of it here yet: SCons, a stable alternative for the vilified make. Built-in support, they claim, for C, C++, and Java, built-in support for use with SCCS, CVS, and BitKeeper, supports .NET, and works with Linux, *BSD systems, Windows NT, and Mac OS X. I'd love something to would finally get rid of the awkward (no pun intended) make, and having a system based on Python would make it double good. Maybe one of the serious C/C++ programers here could give a verdict on if this is the dragon slayer we've been waiting for."

blogologue writes "Harvard Business School has an article up discussing The Organizational Model for Open Source. It has some good points, and I think it sums up what many of us know, but haven't quite been able to put into words yet: 'People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source projects possible.'"

Gentu writes "Nicholas Blachford (engineer of the PPC-based PEGASOS Platform) wrote a long and detailed article, comparing the PPC and the x86 architectures on a number of levels: performance, Vector processing and Power Consumption differences, architectural differences, RISC Vs CISC and more. The article is up-to-date and so it takes the G5 into account too."

VladDrac writes "Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python programming language, announced at OSCON last night that he's leaving zope.com, to work for a new startup called 'Elemental Security', founded by Dan Farmer (known from several security tools such as Satan). Guido leaving Zope.com will also probably mean that he will be no longer involved in Zope3 development, but hopefully he'll have more time to spend on Python development." Guido says that he's excited about his new employer, but that nothing substantial will change about Python as a result of the move. "It's just that I'll be working from the West coast." Python is "already quite secure," he says, and will be the basis of an upcoming security product ("just getting started") from Elemental.

Bodrius writes "Salon has a short but interesting article called GOTO considered joyful, about E. W. Dijkstra's manuscripts, as published by the University of Texas, and their bloggish nature. I'm not sure if the blog analogy is that accurate, but the articles are a must read for computer scientists and geeks in general." (Annoying but free click-through system for non-subscribers.)

caseywest writes "Today at his State of the Onion speech during the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Larry Wall announced the Ponie project (somewhere within his legendary humorous presentation). Ponie involves rewriting central parts of the Perl 5 interpreter to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, including a C API emulation layer to make existing XS code work. Arthur 'sky' Bergman is sponsored by his employer Fotango to develop Ponie. Currently, a press release and a FAQ are available. More details will be available in due time."

HBergeron asks: "Rather then post this as another YRO in the litany of new government datamarts there is a more fundamental question for all the coding Slashdot readers out there. This story, in Government Executive magazine, outlines the range of programming glitches in what is a relatively simple database. As a matter of public policy (and taxpayer money) is this level of non-functionality to be expected in these sorts of projects? Is the contractor just ripping off the taxpayers with bad code? How hard is it to write software like this that works?" The article focuses on the SEVIS database, but have others noticed similar trend in other government information systems?

PotPieMan writes "I recently finished reading JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development, a book for JSP developers wanting to improve their skillset. Read on for my review." It's not a new book, but still relevant.

Ursus Maximus writes "If you have read an introductory book or two about Python programming, but you are far from being an expert, then you will benefit a lot from reading this book. If you are a competent programmer in any other language, you will benefit from this book. If you are an expert Python programmer, you will also benefit from this book." Ursus Maximus's review continues below.

fruey writes "Following Reasoning's February analysis of the Linux TCP/IP stack (putting it ahead of many commercial implementations for it's low error density), they recently pitted Apache 2.1 source code against commercial web server offerings, although they don't say which. Apparently, Apache is close, but no cigar..."

Rob Lanphier writes "RealNetworks just released the source code to their SMIL 2.0 implementation (along with JPEG, GIF, PNG, and WBMP implementations) as part of the Helix Community initiative, under the OSI-approved RPSL. Some neat tricks to do with the code: superimpose images on top of video, or transition effects between videos, using standard W3C-defined markup. More tech details in the Helix community datatype project page, or look at the SMIL production topics page. A precompiled release with this code will be coming out very soon."

TheBoostedBrain writes "Mike Perry and Nasko Oskov have written a very complete article about reverse engineering. It provides an introduction to reverse engineering software under both Linux and Windows."

Ingo Struck writes "The Open Web Application Security Project released the VulnXML db for early access to the public. VulnXML is a description of static known vulnerabilities. It provides all necessary information to let an execution engine automatically craft and launch appropriate HTTP, SOAP or WebDAV requests and analyse the response whether the attack had success. Besides it provides some human readable classification of the described vulnerability. A tool to execute VulnXML records is currently being developed and will help developers to check their web applications against a suite of well-known vulnerabilities described in a portable format."

jkauzlar writes "When thinking about a software product's architecture there are two viewpoints to consider: the marketecture (or the marketing architecture) and the tarchitecture (the technical architecture). Oftentimes an architecture is designed without consideration of the market toward which the product is directed and even a technically superior product can fail against competitors with an inferior product, but who understand the market a lot better." This book tries to remind programmers (and managers) about maintaining the right balance of these things; read on for the rest of jkauzlar's review.

cpfeifer writes "Paul Baranowski takes a moment to reflect on Open Source Project Management in his blog. His reflections are based on the first two years of the Peek-a-booty project." Interesting comments on media coverage, choice of programming language, when to release a project, and more.