BShive writes "Software Architecture: Organizational Principles and Patterns covers the VRAPS model and the organizational aspects of Software Architecture. Patterns and Antipatterns are explored that resolve or complicate problems depending on the criteria involved. A Pattern that solves one situation might become an Antipattern in another, as not all situations need the same solutions. This fact is something forgotten too often in software projects. Architects, coders and even managers might benefit from the information contained in this book. Being able to identify and solve problems in a project and its organization is important for any large software project no matter where you are in the development chain." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.

r0.ini writes "Nice step-by-step introduction guide on how to make that cool app for your T720." Worth a read even if you never intend to write a program for your cell phone, for the comparison between BREW and J2ME (and implicitly between Verizon and AT&T).

Wee writes "I just saw two pretty nasty vulnerabilities in MySQL were announced today by a German company called e-matters. From the annoucenment: "We have discovered two flaws within the MySQL server that can be used by any MySQL user to crash the server. Furthermore one of the flaws can be used to bypass the MySQL password check or to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running mysqld. We have also discovered an arbitrary size heap overflow within the mysql client library and another vulnerability that allows to write '\0' to any memory address. Both flaws could allow DOS attacks against or arbitrary code execution within anything linked against libmysqlclient." Version 3.23.54 fixes the issues in 3.x. I couldn't find a patched version for the 4.0 beta."

Rober Matthews writes "Naked Objects is an open-source Java-based framework that makes it easy to develop business systems from 'naked objects' - behaviourally complete business objects that are exposed directly to the user. By simply writing Java classes that represent the business entities, and including only business behaviour, this framework provides a unique user interface that allows the user to directly manipulate the objects, and a mechanism to automatically persist them. See nakedobjects.org for details."

idot writes "Millstone 3.0 is a java LGPLed library for the development of networked applications. The developer doesn't have to deal with HTML or individual pages, but rather writes a very swing like continous client application. A terminal adapter converts the abstract UI together with a Java Servlet container to the desired themed client side code. In case of Web applications HTML complete with or without JavaScript. Press release millstone home page complex go example game It seems to be a very mature framework, whose first two iterations were used only internally by the developers. It will be interesting to test this library against JSF, tapestry etc. in terms of developer usability and scalability."

tierra writes "Indiviuals writing their own games is one thing, but try building your own console. Russ Christensen, and his team put together in class, dive into the fun of using an old Nintendo system to house their customized XSA-50 Board. They also uses a XSA Extender to hook their personal console up to a monitor instead of a TV. They programmed Tetris and Space Invaders for their console using a system they call CASM."

Steve Mallett writes "I've just posted an interview I did with Tim Perdue, former co-'head honcho' responsible for developing SourceForge. You'll either love it or hate the interview, but it's on his new project GForge, a fork of the previously open source code running SF, while he shares some insight in what seems like a miracle that SourceForge was built at all." Obviously Slashdot's parent runs SourceForge, so insert whatever mental disclaimer and conspiracy theory you want here.

dnotj asks: "The boss (who is very technically astute) says: NO to using pthreads in any of our production applications. He wants us to do things the old fashion way (fork(), exec(), shared memory, etc). His reason for this is that he doesn't understand pthreads (by his own admission). Hence, he is limiting us to using methods and techniques that he understands. He is reasonable and would see our side (the developers) if presented with enough understanding in a satisfactory format. What I'm looking for are document technically detailed yet directed more towards management. Not something on the level of 'pthreads for Dummies', but more along the lines of 'pthreads for Managers'. Any suggestions? URLs or Books are fine."

Gentu writes "Genesi released today an extensive feature list of MorphOS, the pre-emptively multi-tasking operating system for PPC. MorphOS/Pegasos is a brand new platform (the last full OS+HW platform released was 7 years ago with Be's BeBox) so it is very modern and it has support for 3D cards, USB, SMP while it also features partial Amiga application binary compatibility! Additionally, OSNews today features an interview with the Eclipsis Project Manager, Nicholas Blachford, about MorphOS, and they include three exclusive screenshots of the OS."

Longjmp asks: "Once again I though about how often programmers find themselves in a situation where they may have a specification for their work but, as it turns out later, the specs didn't really meet the customers' requirements. Techies and customers almost always speak a completely different language and likely the specs were written by a tech person who doesn't quite comprehend the customer's workflow, or sometimes even worse, by the customer himself, trying to 'speak tech' without having the technical background. In either case, the resulting product would be right out of a Douglas Adams novel: 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.' How often do you (as programmers) get a chance to talk to customers directly or watch them in order to understand their workflow? How often did you as a customer (or user) talk to the techies? What are your experiences?"

DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is running an article regarding tests devised to differentiate from human and computer intelligence. One example are captchas, which can consists of a picture of words, angled and superimposed. A human will be able to read past the superposition, while a computer will not, and thus fails the test. It also goes a bit into some of Turing's predictions of what computers would be like by the year 2000."

prototype writes "Trolltech has released a maintenance release to Qt bringing the version up to 3.1.1. This release fixes some build issues with the professional edition as well as problems reports on Solaris and HP-UX, changes to build with Borland Kylix and a bunch of other minor updates. This bugfix release maintains both forward and backward compatibility (source and binary) with Qt 3.1.0. The full changelog on the release can be found here. Patches are also available using xdelta 1.1.3 (but not for Mac OS X as size of the the resulting patch is nearly as large as the complete package)."

Chip asks: "The small business for which I work is preparing to release a free software title for Windows and hopefully Mac and Linux as well. This software is something I believe many people around the world will find useful without ever having to pay a dime. Does anyone have experience with releasing free software on a small budget? Any advice would be very helpful. We have a few months to prepare for beta launch and I am nervous about getting the word out, crashing our servers, etc..."

Miguel de Icaza writes "We have just released the new version of Mono the new version includes a working version of ASP.NET. The release includes a sample web server that "hosts" the ASP.NET runtime (it can be hosted anywhere, for instance in Apache, with mod_haydn). The web features of ASP.NET would not be very useful without the support of a backing database. The new version of Mono includes database providers for Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, ODBC, OleDB, Gnome Data Access, SqLite, MySQL and of course, Postgres. The C# compiler is now 37% faster due to some nice optimizations on the JIT engine and in our class libraries. You can use it to develop GUI applications using Gtk#. Screenshots for mPhoto and the GUI debugger (which can debug both JITed apps and native applications). "

woobieman29 writes "KDE.news reported on Saturday that the KDE 3.1 release that was scheduled for this week has been delayed until early January. This is happening due to some security concerns that have arisen during a security audit of the 3.1 CVS tree. Kudos to the KDE team for making sure that the product is fully baked before release.!"

Rob Lanphier writes "We just released the Helix DNA Producer, a multi-format media-encoding engine for creating streaming broadcasts, on-demand streaming content, and downloadable audio video files. It supports RealAudio, RealVideo and Ogg Vorbis, and includes many input and output filters, variable bitrate encoding support, option for two-pass encoding, audio gain control, Firewire support. Press release is here and a couple of stories are here(1) and here(2)." Here's a page that details the licenses under which the code can be obtained.

axehind writes "There's a article on Newsforge about the conference titled "Linux Cluster: the openMosix Approach" that took place in Italy on Nov 28th. It's really interesting to see what openMosix clusters have been used for. From game clusters to scientific research . It includes links to the conferences slides and some of the papers."

mad.frog asks: "I recently upgraded my ancient version of Quicken to the latest (Macintosh) version, with the intention of being able to download my credit card transactions directly from my bank into Quicken, rather than entering all that stuff by hand. As it turns out, almost no banks support doing this for non-Windows platforms (not surprisingly, Intuit doesn't point this out on the package). But here's the weird part: the information downloaded is just an xml-like text file (.QFX). Anyone know how (or why) they would make such a generic file platform-specific -- what business advantage does Intuit (or my bank) have in restricting how I use this information? Also, does anyone happen to know details of this (apparently undocumented, Intuit-specific) format so that I can hack mine into submission and use this data anyway, even if it's not on my bank's Platform Of Choice?"

gstover writes "As a personal programming project recently, I used a genetic algorithm to find a better sequence of increments for Shellsort. It found at least one sequence that out-performs the best previously known by about 5 percent. Here is an article about it (also here). I believe this is the first time a genetic algorithm has actually improved Shellsort."

chromatic writes "Dustin Puryear has written a nice article summarizing the new and upcoming features of Samba. He's included a nice overview of what will be available when version 3.0 escapes. Let's hear it for interoperability!"