It's time to crank up the Slashdot Interviews for 2003, starting with answers to your questions for Nagios developer Ethan Galstad. He went far beyond and above the call of duty here to give you what amounts to a veritable "Free Software Project Leader's FAQ" that anyone who has ever thought about starting his or her own project ought to read. Thanks, Ethan!

e8johan writes "The KDevelop team has released the final alpha of KDevelop 3.0 (a.k.a. Gideon) has been released. This third generation of KDevelop looks really promising as it features plug-in editors, many wizards (even for Kicker apps, KControl modules and KIOSlaves). Some of the features that I like best are the support for cross compilation and support for more languages than C/C++. Screenshots are here, more info here, dot.kde article here!"

An anonymous reader writes "Nicholas McGuire examines the requirements of embedded systems and suggests some key issues that need to be addressed in order to improve Linux for use in embedded applications, in this technical article at LinuxDevices.com,"

redelvis asks: "I recently came across an article by MIT's Media Lab on 'The Debugging Scandal and What to Do About It'. It's a few years old now, but it really got me thinking about how little the debugging process has improved over the last 5,10 or even 30 years. I have developed applications using modern IDE debuggers such as Borland's JBuilder, Microsoft's Visual C++, as well as standard tools like gdb and jdb. Despite the slick graphical interfaces, nice thread stack traces and local variable browsers, I still make sure I have on hand plenty of notepads, graph paper, pens and pencils so I can try to build up a picture of what state the program is in and to help me play detective in pinpointing what is going wrong with my (or other peoples) programs. Do other developers have similar problems? Do they find modern IDEs and debuggers have shortcomings in helping track down bugs? What would make a better debugger? Why do you think so much effort been invested in areas such as advanced modelling tools but so little in improving debugging tools?"

Andy Murren submits this review of Nick Christenson's Sendmail Performance Tuning, writing "The first thing that I noticed about this book was how relatively thin it is at only 223 pages. This is compared to the O'Reilly Sendmail book by Bryan Costales and Eric Allman (a.k.a. the 'Bat Book') which weights in at 1232 pages. In this case, thin is good. The second thing that I noticed about the book is the quote from Eric Allman emblazoned across the top that proclaims 'This book is great.' That's rather ringing endorsement from the original creator of sendmail. But great what? A great technical reference? Companion to the bat book? Kindling? Now here is my sound bite about this book: 'One damned fine technical book.'" Read on for the rest of Andy's review.

kylner writes "This seemed to be one of the lesser-covered news items at Macworld, but it seems that Macromedia has decided to release its JRun 4 J2EE Server for Mac OSX. What's siginificant about this release? Well, they simultaneously released Macromedia ColdFusion MX for J2EE Application Servers to go with it! It may not be a stand-alone edition of ColdFusion MX, but this is still a dream item for any ColdFusion developer with a Mac at home. It took me about 30 minutes to install on my iBook 600 (I messed up a few times since it requires a little terminal work) but once I got it up and running it just worked. All I've had time to do so far is create a variable and output 'Hello World', but so far so good."

geo writes "I created this site to describe my latest toy: a digital audio multicast receiver. LANPipe receives 16-bit, 44.1 kHz audio multicast from a PC based server. The server uses a Winamp plug-in, so LANPipe can play almost any source format (mp3, ogg, uncompressed). It even has a digital audio output. The receiver uses a custom CPU written in VHDL and implemented on a Xilinx FPGA. This was a fun project that is best appreciated by fellow hardware geeks."

WeNeedBetterTools asks: "Help! I am trying to convince the leaders of my development organization that the quality of our bugtracking tool has a meaningful impact on the quality of products we produce. Right now, the tool we have is difficult to use because there is a high overhead to creating bugs, and they are very difficult to find in the system once they're reported. My main argument is that the easier the tool is to use, the more people will be motivated to enter bugs. My managers argue that if people aren't entering bugs, it's their own damn problem, and we ought to crack the whip until they always file every bug they possibly can. I need some solid references for my position. JoelOnSoftware has a great argument for making it simple to enter bugs, but he lacks credibility with my managers by virtue of the fact that he is also selling a bugtracking tool. Can anyone point me to any solid research on the relationship between the quality of bugtracking tool and the impact on product quality?"

cshirky writes "A persistent criticism of open source is that it is more about copying features than creating new ones. While this criticism is overblown, the literature of open source is richer on the subject of debugging than design. I've written an article about Ben Hammersley's LazyWeb.org, wondering whether open source methods plus RSS distribution can do for feature requests what open source already does for bug fixes, namely parallelize the problem in ways not available to closed source development methods."

Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible. The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."

MarkRH writes "Although the issue of Sony licensing the Rambus Yellowstone technology for future (PlayStation) products has already been covered, I would humbly submit that the company's new "Redwood" chip-to-chip interconnect is equally important. Rambus seems to want PC designers to adopt this as an alternative to PCI Express and HyperTransport, although who would license this is a puzzling question."

Mirko Zorz writes "Here are the reflections on Linux security in 2002 and predictions for 2003 by Bob Toxen, one of the 162 recognized developers of Berkeley UNIX and author of the acclaimed book "Real World Linux Security" already in its 2nd edition. Read more at Help Net Security."

An anonymous reader writes "This article at LinuxDevices.com provides an overview of the recently approved Embedded Linux Consortium Platform Specification (ELCPS). The new standard is likely to accelerate the adoption of embedded Linux as a platform within smart devices and systems of many shapes and sizes."

Bill Venners writes "Artima.com has published a four-part interview with Scott Meyers, author of Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL. In Multiple Inheritance and Interfaces, Scott describes how his view of multiple inheritance has changed with time, the C++ community's take on Java's interface, and a schism of focus between the C++ and other prominent development communities. In Designing Contracts and Interfaces, Scott discusses interface contracts, private data, and designing minimal and complete interfaces. In Meaningful Programming, Scott discusses the importance of saying what you mean and understanding what you say, the three fundamental relationships between classes, and the difference between virtual and non-virtual functions. In Const, RTTI, and Efficiency, Scott describes the utility of const, the appropriate time to use RTTI, a good attitude about efficiency, and Scott Meyers' current quest for general programming principles."

joestump98 writes "PEAR, the CPAN equivelent for PHP, has finally been released as stable on UNIX platforms (not including Darwin). Combined with the release of PHP 4.3 this should help make PHP a more robust language."

Invader Zim writes "Looks like Levelord, of Ritual fame, and some folks at id, and Ensemble Studios have teamed together with Southern Methodist University to create a new school for people that want to work in the video games industry. It's called the Guildhall. Also a story about it at GameTutorials."

nosse_elendili writes "These are exciting times for those of us who use Zope, because the long anticipated Zope 3 Alpha 1 has been released! For those who don't know, Zope is a powerful but somewhat obscure free, open-source, cross-platform web application server built around Python. Zope 3 is a complete rewrite and rethinking of the Zope platform so it looks and operates quite differently than previous releases. However, if you have never played with Zope before you should probably just read about Zope 3 and stick to the stable version with the Plone content management system installed. This is only an alpha release after all and Zope3 looks and acts alot like Zope2 + Plone."

Webi writes ""XP[http://www.extremeprogramming.org/] works best for medium-sized teams where a product can be delivered in stages, and where there's freedom to experiment with some of the more controversial techniques," author Ron Jeffries said. http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20348.html"

A reader writes: "Taken from a post on http://www.hydrogenaudio.org "I got help from the fine folks over at the Gentoo forum to find you. I have been talking with jazPiper, one of the makers of portable MP3-players, and they was very interested in getting support for Ogg Vorbis. However, they had trouble finding a user base for this product. I will of course point their attention to these forums, but I hope you will help me convincing them by signing the petition, saying support for Ogg Vorbis in a portable device makes it more attractive. So please go here and sign it!" Another petition to sign!"

lma writes "Bruce Perens has convinced Prentice Hall to publish a series of books under an Open Source license. The 'Bruce Perens' Open Source Series' will be available first as hardcopy in bookstores, and the Open Source text will be available electronically a few months later. Prentice Hall is counting on people buying the books even though the electronic version will be freely available later. I like the model, since I prefer to read paper, but like the electronic version for reference."