dtolton writes "Paul Graham has a new article called "The Hundred-Year Language" posted. The article is about the programming languages of the future and what form they may take. He makes some interesting predictions about the rate of change we might expect in programming languages over the next 100 years. He also makes some persuasive points about the possible design and construction of those languages. The article is definitely worth a read for those interested in programming languages."

Erik K. Veland writes "According to PlayerPROLounge, the source code for PlayerPRO, the $69 professional tracker-based audio application for Mac OS & Mac OS X, has been released due to the developer's inability to continue the project full time. The software, currently at version 5.9.5 is fully matured, but needs optimizations for Mac OS X. If enough interest is garnered, a SourceForge.net project will be started. Any takers?" No word that I can see on what license is used.

Reader JonKaye contributed this review of Reviewing Practical Statecharts in C/C++. He writes "Since I am not from the embedded system world, I was a bit apprehensive about approaching this book. While I can see that author Miro Samek has a directed target for his audience, I strongly feel that this book is a 'must read' for technical developers in all areas who want to improve their program design abilities or developers who want to understand the philosophy, use, and implementation of statecharts intimately." Read on for the rest.

chill writes "Microsoft is now willing to share all the source code to WinCE that they don't license from others. This includes the rights to alter the code and sell the altered code! Of course, they want copies of the changes, but the program is FREE." There's another story at Windowsfordevices.com.

Gentu writes "There is a interesting interview over at OSNews with Fink's project leader, Max Horn. They discuss Fink's relationship with Apple, integration of their Unix/Linux ports to Mac OS X via Debian's packaging solution, ease of use on installation of the .deb packages, AltiVec optimizations and more."

David Leppik writes "The author of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, has an article about how it was designed. VisiCalc is why businesses started to take the Apple ][ (and personal computers in general) seriously. It also changed accounting forecasts forever, which triggered the investment boom that brought us the "greed is good" era. Oh, and you can still download VisiCalc in case you run DOS or Windows and have 27,520 bytes to spare."

McPierce asks: "This week I accepted an offer to work for a company in a different state (I'm located in NC, USA, and the company's located in NY,USA). As part of my employment, the company's going to give me a laptop, a PDA (Blackberry 6510) for email/development and will fly me to NY every 6-8 weeks for meetings. My question is to those who telecommute for a living and who have families at home. How do you do your work at home? Do you go out (bookstore/library/coffee shop) to get things done, or do you have a home office and boundaries setup with your family to keep them from distracting your during working hours? How about accepting phone calls from your employer? In my case, I'm concerned about getting calls outside of the normal business hours (8am-6pm) since the philosophy might be 'we'll call when we need to since you're working remotely'? Any ideas or suggestions?"

Yves Schmid writes "Open Media Toolkit is now distributed under the LGPL. OMT is a powerful C++ framework for Mac OS X and Windows, for the development of real time 2D/3D multimedia applications. Several commercial applications have been developed using OMT, including games from Disney, Hasbro, Mattel, Scitex, and HumanCode. OMT includes classes for 2D/3D rendering and animation (through DirectX, OpenGL or its own software renderer), sound, files, database, windowing, user-interface, media importer (3D and 2D), input control, etc."

cpfeifer writes "Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time. It's a popular subject when developers get together "Don't use Vector, use ArrayList, it's more efficient." "Don't concatenate Strings, use a StringBuffer, it's more efficient." It's a chance for the experienced developers to sit around the design campfire and tell ghost stories of previous projects where they implemented their own basic data structures {String, Linked List...} that was anywhere from 10-50% faster than the JDK implementation (and in the grand oral tradition of tall tales, it gets a little more efficient every time they tell it)." Want to kill the albatross? Read on for the rest of cpfeifer's review of O'Reilly's Java Performance Tuning, now in its 2nd edition.

_iris writes "I think the subject speaks for itself. Here is the link to the story on KernelTrap." In case you have a spare 32-processor machine munching grass in the back 40.

Gabor Szabo writes "For anyone interested in Perl, Yet Another Perl Conference is coming to Haifa, Israel on May 11th. Registration is now open. Though the schedule is not final yet the list of presentations is already finished. There are going to be a quite some excellent presentations including Perl and .NET. This is a great way to get involved in the Perl community."

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Vincent of Wine Weekly News fame has started a new series of interviews with the Wine developers, over at the newly redesigned WineHQ site. The first interview features Über-hacker Ove Kåven, while the second one (hot off the press) features long-time Wine hacker Dimitrie O. Paun. Cheese anyone?"

Henrik Gemal writes "In this article I will describe some very cool features in Mozilla which will enable you to quickly find and debug errors in your web site and web applications."

ggoebel writes "Extending and Embedding Perl is, as it boldly states on the cover, 'The definitive guide to XS, embedding, and the Perl internals.' This book is well organized and information dense. One could spend days sifting through the available perlapi, perlcall, perlembed, perlguts perlxs, perlxstut, and h2xs documentation. After which you'll probably understand very well references to nethack's 'You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike.' Or you could get yourself a copy of this book and find your way out of the maze." Read on for the rest of ggoebel's review.

Tony Stanco writes "The Center of Open Source & Government announces that it will publish The Open Source Reference Book 2003 [What Local/National Governments, the Defense Establishment, and The Global 1000 Need To Know About Open Source Software] This is an Open Source resource book targeting the 20,000 IT power users around the world. The Reference Book will provide a Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source. Read on for more information about what the book will include, and how you can contribute.

An anonymous reader writes "VIA has added a hardware random number generator to its Nehemiah C3 CPU. I found a recent review of its security. Interesting how it's done at the instruction level as opposed to the chipset level used by the i810 RNG (also reviewed there)."

GamerGeek asks: "I work for a small company in the Midwest. We have some old products written in Databus / PL/B. In my spare time I have been investigating the idea of rewriting these programs in Java. My main problem is that the programs store data in ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) files. Rewriting everything all at once is not feasible so the data needs to stay in the ISAM files. I am looking for a 100% java solution for reading and updating ISAM files. A Google search does not turn up anything. Is there one out there? Does anyone know the file format / process for reading an ISAM file? I would be willing to write a package myself if I had that information and open source it too."

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."