honestpuck writes with the short review below of Sams' PHP and MySQL Web Development, 2nd Edition, which he says is aimed at "someone who has programmed before needs to know about both PHP and MySQL," and a good book for the intended audience. Read on for his thoughts on the book.

An anonymous reader writes "Developers implementing 'weekend inspiration' are more dangerous than hackers. Vnunet.com has this article about how eager developers and administrators create more troubles than hackers and viruses do for websites. How about those of us who start the week with a cup of coffee and the morning online-news? My inspiration and new ideas for development are definitely not the cause of the Monday-crash hour ... I think."

e8johan writes "The toolkit that KDE is based upon, Trolltech's Qt , has been released in a new version. Version 3.2 has better database support, better support for porting Motif applications, and more. The original announcement can be found in the Trolltech newsroom , and the download is in Trolltech's download area ."

Renartthefox writes "Rikke D. Giles has written a new tutorial for Glade II. Glade is a program designed to enable the quick building of graphical user interfaces for GTK+ and GNOME applications. However, it can be used with any desktop environment in linux, as long as the GTK+ and/or GNOME libraries are installed."

An anonymous reader writes "Urban legends are kind of like mind viruses; even though we know they are probably not true, we often can't resist the urge to retell them (and thus infect other gullible "hosts") because they make for such good storytelling. Most urban legends have some basis in fact, which only makes them harder to stamp out. Unfortunately, many pointers and tips about Java performance tuning are a lot like urban legends -- someone, somewhere, passes on a "tip" that has (or had) some basis in fact, but through its continued retelling, has lost what truth it once contained. This article examines some of these urban performance legends and sets the record straight."

Anonymous Coward writes "A useful review of Evolution Robotics' ER-1 by the boys at Techfocus. It covers: construction, customization, hardware requirements, best features, programming, durability of equipment -- and all that good stuff. One interesting factoid is that the robot can recognize objects until the object is blocked - up to 40% - by something (like a piece of furniture). Techfocus aptly points out the Orwellian implications... Another thing that rocked my world is the notion that the robot is not as much of a drag on CPU as one might suspect. TF ran the unit on an NEC Versa VXi running Windows 2000, with a 900mhz CPU and 128mb of RAM, and encountered absolutely no problems. Encouragingly, if you want to further customize your robot, why not just write a script in C or Perl -- the manual even points users toward an app primarily based in Linux. What's not surprising: it's pricey. Also some nice pictures of how the robot really looks right out of the box."

dawiz writes "LinuxGear.info writes (article is in German, this is a translation): "The new Zaurus SL-5500 ROM (V.3.10) was released last night. As Sharp didn't keep the last dead-line due to last-minute bug fixing, it's even more pleasing to see the new version that is claimed to solve most of the issues users had with the older ROMS finally released. [...] One drawback for Linux Users: there's no new Linux version of the QTopia Desktop software yet, that'll probably take another couple of days.""

reiners writes "DevX.com has an interesting interview with David Arthur (dgarthur), the 2003 TopCoder Collegiate Challenge winner. Arthur discusses many interesting topics: the similarities between TopCoder problems and math problems, why TopCoder performance is positively correlated with 'real-life' programming performance, and why game programming is where the action is."

devphil writes "The latest version of everyone's favorite compiler, GCC 3.3, was released today. New features, bugfixes, and whatnot, are all available off the linked-to page. (Mirrors already have the tarballs.) Let the second-guessing begin!"

Kimberley Burchett writes "CS researchers at Stanford University have developed three new techniques that together could speed up Google's PageRank calculations by a factor of five. An article at ScienceBlog theorizes that "The speed-ups to Google's method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual's interests or customized to a particular topic.""

Doppler00 writes "I thought this was a unique use of off-the-shelf technologies. NASA is using NVidia Geforce 4 video cards, AthlonMP processors, and Red Hat Linux 7.3 to create a super computing system to display 'up to six dimensions'." Press-releasy, but worth reading if you want to imagine the rec room of the future ;)

digicosm2 writes "It seems Sony is hosting a free programming seminar for AIBO at the San Francisco Metreon. OPEN-R is the name of their open programming platform for AIBO. All the people who are excited by the recent robot stories can now learn how to join in! But ya gotta register for it, because it may fill up fast."

chromatic writes "Perl programmers like punctuation. Python programmers like indentation. Every programming language has its own syntax, stemming from its philosophy. What I Hate About Your Programming Language examines the issues that shape languages as they grow. It's not advocacy, I promise."

BSD Forums writes "This article conveys the message that Linux, BSD, and Darwin continue what Unix started. InfoWorld's Tom Yager says that several readers took him to task for referring to Linux, BSD, and OS X as Unix. He feels that Unix has a rich legacy that deserves to be preserved and accurately conveyed to new generations of computer scientists. It rattles many of us to see that the operating systems that best exemplify Unix traditions today aren't Unix at all."

aebrain writes "Grady Booch is one of the Big Names in Software Engineering. If you use OOP or UML you're making use of his work. There's an interview with him on .NET that's interesting reading ('Language was once Key - Now it's Design'). Lots about the impedence mismatch between SQL and OOP, what the future holds re .NET and Java, and when UML modelling isn't appropriate."

An anonymous reader writes "From the latest Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: '(SCI) will be helping the Gentoo Linux development team to create a 64-bit version of Gentoo Linux for the AMD Opteron processor. SCI will initiate this relationship by providing the Gentoo Linux development team with a dual Opteron workstation as well as any other assistance required to officially support for the AMD Opteron platform. In cooperation with RackSaver, SCI will arrange for early access to future enterprise-class hardware. RackSaver has joined SCI in its efforts to support the continued development of Gentoo Linux into an enterprise-level operating system.'"

Sayten241 writes "Wired is running an article about a program from UC Berkeley in which website developers can literally sketch out a webpage using a tablet. The article states that Berkley felt that since so many web-developers sketch things out on paper before they begin, why not allow them to sketch on the computer? This program is not limited to websites however. It has also been used to help MIT design a Linux Interface (click the blue parts of the image to navigate through interface)."

An anonymous reader writes "Ever wondered how commercial Linux Web development environments stack up against those for other OS's? There's a reivew at Digital-Web of Quanta Gold, the commercial HTML editor from theKompany.com. I've always been a fan of Quanta Plus, but it's interesting to see what the commercial application has (and doesn't have). The full review of Quanta Gold can be found here."

A reader writes:"On2 Technologies, the folks who brought you the open-source VP3 video codec (now managed by Theora.org), have released our latest codec, VP6. Highlights include hi-def support with no encoder restrictions, real-time encoding at full D1 resolution, and substantial performance & quality improvements over VP5. Best of all: no "patent pooling" restrictions or external licensing fees, a la MPEG-4."

GlobE 59 writes "3D Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark announced the winners of their 1st Annual International 3DAwards this Friday (9/5). Take a look at the nominees and winners here! 3D Festival, Game Developers World and Architectural Visualization Conference is a joint conference/expo combining interests in 3D-graphics and visualization."