An anonymous reader submits: "Digital Defense reported a remote root vulnerability in Samba that has existed in Samba source code for over 8 years. If it hadn't been caught from a wild packet capture, who knows how many more years it might have gone on. Fixes for this, and at least three other vulnerabilities have been fixed today. This is a serious threat to many thousands of people.. Did you plan to spend your Monday upgrading to Samba 2.2.8a?" elijahao supplies some more information: "All stable versions are affected (2.x), but the 3.0 series is not. Here is a link to the News page. Check out a mirror near you to get the Source or Security patches from 2.2.7a, 2.2.8, or 2.0.10."

simpl3x writes "Symbian is apparently going to open source their Basic-like development language used on the Psion platform. Here is a link via the Register. Interesting things seem to be happening in the mobile space, and although Psion had some very nice technology, they never seemed to get anywhere in the U.S. Any comments on developing for Psion, or Symbian for that matter? I am interested in the development environments people prefer."

Anonymous writes "Some bastions of capitalism are getting into the open-source spirit -- not only using the software, but contributing code fixes and other mods, according to an article in today's Computerworld."

PyTHON71 asks: "I've been asked the head of the Wichita State University Anthropology department to help fix his growing biological anthropology collection database. It's currently in Access (insert boo's and hisses), but he is willing to have it developed in a reliable open source format. Now, there are a lot of university departments out there that need to have specialized work done on a small budget. They can't rely on just any developer, because the developer has to know biological anthropology (in this case) as well as MySQL, etc. And since it's not in the Hacker Code to duplicate work that's already been done, I was wondering what specialized database projects are out there & available for general use (not the data, just the structure)."

Chilliwilli writes "Spending more time cursing your code than writing it? Well now there's an answer. feckfeck (a language in the vein of Whitespace and Brainf*ck) will help you get back that precious time by converting your foul words into code. You've heard the hype surrounding VLIWs, well here are FLIWs (4 letter instruction words). The great thing is the more angry you get the more code you'll write. For those programmers on performance related pay this is great news."

Jules V.D. writes "The OpenOffice.org group on Friday announced a kit that lets programmers build new modules for open-source alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite.This new SDK is an add-on for OpenOffice.org 1.0.2. It provides the necessary tools and documentation for programming the OpenOffice.org APIs and creating your own extensions (UNO components) for OpenOffice.org."The highlight of this SDK is the new Developer's Guide. This comprehensive guide provides, in 900 pages, a detailed description of the OpenOffice.org API concepts, the OpenOffice.org UNO component model and how to use the API in the context of the different application areas.""

ggoebel writes "Programming Web Services with Perl is principally a book on implementing solutions using XML-RPC and SOAP in Perl. It also covers complementary and alternative standards such as WSDL, UDDI, and REST in some detail. And on the periphery, it finishes with a whirlwind tour of developing message routing, alternative data encoding within XML, security, transactions, workflow, internationalization, service discovery, extension, and management techniques and specifications." Read on for ggoebel's full review.

JulesVD writes "There is an article from Linux Journal about the latest plans for Linux audio functionality from the first developer's conference in Germany. Developers from more than a dozen countries attended this successful conference, representing organizations such as SuSE, Linux Audio Systems, Stanford University, IRCAM and Centro Tempo Reale. Topic discussions included in-depth presentations of the rapidly evolving Linux sound system, a look at the details of programming for professional audio standards and a survey of recent applications and audio-centric Linux distributions." Mmm...interesting reading (blantant plug for cool program), but I think the most important question is will it make Scrubby happy?

infinite9 asks: "I've been given the task of writing the coding standards for my corporation. I've been in IT for 12 years, so many things are obvious. Recently though, my employer has standardized on C# and .NET, and since I'm new to the technology (isn't everyone?) I'm not sure what to include. I've included a paragraph about signing assemblies with a standard key pair as well as a few other odds and ends. Apart from the obvious statements that apply to any language like good comments, good variable names, and maintainable code, can anyone suggest other C#/.NET related things that I should include?"

Skinnytie asks: "I was recently asked by the CEO of the company for which I work to find a resource from which to better understand what to do in the event of a disaster. 'I'm on it, Sir' was my response, and I ran back to my desk and started writing contingency plans and trying to imagine what to do if a meteorite strikes our co-lo facility. I quickly came te realize that there is far more that *could* happen (the CTO gets hit by bus, or the in-house server room gets abducted by aliens...you get the point) than I am even prepared to write plans for. I thought I'd hit the Slashdot audience up for some ideas/horror stories regarding avoiding, dealing with and getting past whatever disasters that have occurred at your development houses. Have at you!"

William Walker writes "The Economist has an article in its new issue describing attempts to write a programming language for quantum computers, if and when they appear. It does a good job of putting the challenges of qubits versus regular bits into layman's terms. ... The original paper is here."

tadghin writes "I was recently talking with Jeff Barr, creator of syndic8 and now Amazon's chief web services evangelist. He let drop an interesting tidbit. Amazon has both SOAP and REST interfaces to their web services, and 85% of their usage is of the REST interface." Read on for some more thoughts and information on REST and Web services, including information about a free Web services seminar on April 22nd.

Chris Beasley writes "I have a PHP book that's 567 pages long. I have two SQL books: one has 377 pages; the other has 719. Yet I consider 295-page 'Build Your Own Database Driven Website using PHP & MySQL' by Kevin Yank more valuable than any of these books. Why? Because, while I may find only a quarter or, at best, half of these books useful on a regular basis, all 295 pages of Yank's new release are of value to me on a daily basis."

mactari writes "Java client application developers should take a look at Sun's J2SE Client Developer Survey. Swing's relative slowness has always made a Java app with a GUI look and feel slow, and Sun might finally be doing something about it. Questions on the survey suggest Sun is considering moving away from a crossplatform look and feel (eg, Metal) towards native looks by default. If Sun is going to follow the suit played by IBM's native widget toolkit, SWT, or do things on individual platforms like Apple has done with its hardware accelerated version of Aqua-Swing, Java might finally find its way to becoming a competitor on the desktop."

wendyg writes "Thought some folks here might be interested in this interview with Patrick Ball, in which he talks about the work he's doing coding human rights violations into databases that can then be used for data mining to bring the perpetrators to book." This story from last October ("Why Human Rights Requires Free Software") mentions Ball's work in this area; this interview adds a broader look at what he's doing and why.

kerz writes "mozilla.org today released a new version of it's famed roadmap, this time with some pretty major changes. First and foremost, they plan on ditching the large Mozilla suite in favor of Phoenix and Minotaur. Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient. MozillaZine has the scoop..."

TheAncientHacker writes "While Java coders wait for SUN to be willing to accept any public standards for the Java language and runtime, Microsoft's C# and its underlying CLI, already standardized by ECMA, are about to get a second certification. This time by by the granddaddy of certification groups, the ISO."

Duane Gran contributes this review of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, writing "The title of this book is a mouthful and the author, Martin Fowler, confronts headfirst complex topics of concern to software developers and architects. Fowler is a respected figure in software engineering circles, and his latest book is an attempt to codify best practices he learned in the trenches and through peer relationships. Many of the patterns will resonate with experienced developers, but Fowler's talent explaining abstract concepts will afford even the most grizzled reader many 'aha!' moments." Read on for the rest of Duane's review.

asa writes "Mozilla 1.4 Alpha is out. This release features dynamic image and table resizing in Composer, smooth scrolling (see release notes for enabling this feature,) and usability improvements to spam filtering. In addition to these feature improvements, 1.4a also contains fixes for performance, stability, standards support and website compatibility. This is an alpha release so expect bugs, and don't use it unless you are willing to live with the risks inherent in such a release (ie. crashes, data loss, etc.). More information is available in the release notes."

BBEdit users with a lot of money and fast reflexes can order something not available from most software companies: yroJJory writes "For the duration of the day, Bare Bones Software is offering BBEdit 7 for $250,000. The new pricing option includes: hand delivery of the product by a Bare Bones employee in a gorilla suit; a breaking-of-the-seal ceremony; Interpretive reading of the manual; and one year of feature request implementation service. And to think...I just paid for my license last week. Shucks."