cK-Gunslinger asks: "I'm looking for some definitive, legitimate studies/research that show that using a multiple-monitor setup yields increased productivity for code development. (or disproves, as the case may be.) I've seen many online 'articles' that praise the virtues of multi-monitor setups for content creation and HTML editing, but my interest lies more in the OO design, coding, and test realm. Sites such as RealTime offer some good info, albeit not completely unbiased. And who doesn't drool over X-Top systems. I'd like to submit a proposal to our IT and Process groups recommending a "trial run" on some small project, but am having a difficult time finding enough empirical evidence to crack the budget-clench. I'd also be interested in user comments on how multi-mon setups have helped your productivity as well as how you typically use your setup (what apps, how many monitors, CRT vs LCD, etc.)"

kuwan writes "Allen Denison, Java Product Manager at Apple has just sent an email to their java-dev mailing list announcing the availability of a Java 1.4.1 Developer Preview. This preview is available to all ADC members and can be downloaded from the 'Download Software' section of the ADC web site. The preview is under a non-disclosure agreement so you won't be able to talk about it except on a private Apple mailing list. It's good to see that Apple is making progress on Java 1.4 and Mac OS X users will soon have the latest Java VM."

jukal asks: "I am in the process of writing a proposal for co-operation between Openchallenge and UNITeS (United Nations Information Technology Service) which is 'creating a global volunteer programme aimed at bridging the digital divide between industrialized and developing countries'. Currently & traditionally contributing as a volunteer means relocating yourself to the developing country to take part as a project developer/manager/specialist. My proposal to UNITeS is, in short, will be that people could participate in such software projects via Openchallenge - while staying in their home country, on their spare-time and while keeping their jobs. The local team in the developing country would, after defining and creating requirements specifications post sub-projects as tasks to Openchallenge. All the contributions submitted to Openchallenge are published under an open source license. My question is: would you for example consider donating some hours to help a goodwill project - if you could do that from home. This is of interest to me, as I would like to be sure that the time we put into building co-operating with a big organization like UNITeS and others in the future. Is not wasted. There is this thread about 'Volunteer Work Abroad' - which is good reading related to the subject. But it did not quite provide me with the answer."

autarch writes "Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason, written by Ken Williams and me, is now available at booksellers of distinction. Mason is a Perl-based templating system and application framework. The book covers Mason from the basics on up to extending the Mason core with your own subclasses. For more details check out our web site and the O'Reilly site. The latter includes the TOC and a sample chapter."

Quicksilver31337 asks: "I have recently been faced with a challenge of getting shell access via a AIM(for mobile access purposes), where Perl would be used to recieve messages (prolly from specified users only) over AIM, and pass them as shell commands, and finally, returning output to the user over AIM again. Its seems to be possible to me (maybe using Net::AIM) and I was wondering if anyone has tried something similar with success. Thanks."

gnat writes "Two New Zealand computer scientists have a paper accepted for OOPSLA called Notes on Postmodern Programming, which identifies shortcomings in traditional views of computer science. With a section on the difference between "The Matrix" and the net, a bulleted list of new approaches called "We're All Devo", and a section called "Messy is Good" consisting of nothing but a scan of a hand-drawn diagram, this is not your father's computer science paper. It's thought-provoking stuff, though. And you know they did their homework--they cite Larry Wall's Postmodern Perl talk."

Newtonian_p writes "The LaTeX source and a PDF file of the book Programming Linux Games by Loki Software and John R. Hall has been released online. According to Happy Penguin, it is not available under a free documentation license and is for personnal use only. Get it from one of these mirrors."

habit forming writes "Enjoy using Perl? Ever marvel at how Perl can "do the right thing" but still be written in C? Extending and Embedding Perl aims to take the black magic out of understanding our favorite language. In fact, the authors flat out admit they think it is unfair that only so few of us get to have one foot in Perl and one in C. Tim Jenness and Simon Cozens attempt to break down that barrier with lots of annotated code examples, direct analogies from the structures in Perl to those in C, a fine-grain look at XS and what it takes to robustly use a Perl interpreter in C."

Buhaina writes "One Gerd Knops has released version 1.0 of his Cocoa Gestures software, enabling Cocoa applications to use mouse gestures for activating common commands. This is very similar to the OptiMoz project for Mozilla and can be activated on a per-application basis."

NiN3x asks: "I have recently written a sorting algorithm that can be close to four times as fast as quicksort and never much slower. I was wondering if there are lots of sorting algorithms like this out there. I don't think I could be the only one that has thought of something like this. I am only in my second year of computer science, so I don't know a lot about these things. I have tried searching the net and can't find anything. My algorithm is NOT an inplace sorting algorithm. Can anyone point me to some sources for this type of thing?"

James asks: "My employer is a small consulting firm. Our owners have always tried to sell us as a solutions provider and tried to land project based contracts. Currently though our only truly successful business model is staff augmentation. I feel that our main failures in project based contracts is in our bidding and software development process. Our sales staff always seems to oversell our capabilities (not technically, time and money...I cannot squeeze 70 hours of work into one day). I want to better formalize our processes and was looking into the IEEE/EIA 12207 standard. Has anyone gone though the pains of formalizing to this extent their software development life cycle? If so, are there any tips, good resources to look to for insights?"

An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."

prostoalex writes "For a while academia and R&D labs explored the possibilities of asynchronous logic. Now Bernard Cole from Embedded.com tells us that asynchronous logic might receive more acceptance than expected in modern designs. The main advantages, as article states, are 'reduced power consumption, reduced current peaks, and reduced electromagnetic emission', to quote a prominent researcher from Philips Semiconductors. Earlier Bernard Cole wrote a column on self-timed asynchronous logic."

WCityMike writes "One of the programmers at Unsanity, maker of haxies, recently posted a rather shocking relevation on the company's weblog. He says that Mac OS X's Mach-O runtime ABI (Application Binary Interface) comes from a NeXTStep design for 68K processorts, and is not designed for the PowerPC architechture. Had they used the latter, things would have been approximately 10-12 percent faster. And supposedly, they can't fix it now without breaking all existing applications." The developer mentions there are workarounds in the newest GCC, but only for newly compiled programs.

Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."

taviso writes "I recently stumbled across this paper (google cache), where the author investigates the smallest possible ELF executable on linux, some interesting stuff, and well worth a read. The author concludes, 'every single byte in this executable file can be accounted for and justified. How many executables have you created lately that you can say that about?'

arizaphale asks: "I stand in front of the somewhat complex task of load testing a fairly simple distributed telecom computer system. Is there anyone who has links or references to where I can find information about some theory on which I can base my tests? Both formal theories and test methodology are of great interest to me."

subversionfactor asks: "I am a philosophy student with an intense interest in mathematics and programming. However, while I've always been able to find books about various experimental areas of mathematics, I've never seen (m)any on the subject of programming theory. Most bookstores' "Tech" sections only include how-to books and books about why dot-coms failed. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have any recommendations for books dealing with any aspect of programming theory?"

XNuke asks: "I have been searching for intelligent discussion (on dead trees or otherwise) of the issues involved in designing very complex GUIs. Things on the level of TecPlot, AutoCad, 3DS, etc, where there may be very many different views of the same data and there are many degrees of freedom for the user. I am not interested in 'where to put the buttons', but rather the nuts and bolts of making the 'Well Designed UI' work. I guess I am looking for a sort of 'Design Patterns applied to a big deskptop application' sort of discussion. It is no problem to find discussions of Model-View-Controller concepts at the component level, but at the application level there seems to be nothing. Too often the architectural level discussions encompass non-interactive, server side design issues and not the extremely chaotic problems a client side application with many degrees of freedom has. Short of wading through megabytes of source code for KWord et. al., does anyone know of any digested information? There is obviously no 'One Solution' to this, but there must be something out there."

Jeremy Andrews writes "Con Kolivas, a practicing doctor in Australia, has written a benchmarking tool called ConTest which has proven to be tremendously useful to kernel developers, having been designed to compare the performance of different versions of the Linux kernel. In this interview on KernelTrap he explains the project, noting that "a good 2.5 kernel (and that's not all of them) feels faster than 2.4 in most ways and this bodes well for 2.6." Also discussed is his high performance -ck patchsets, adding performance to the 2.4 stable kernel with the O(1) scheduler, kernel preemption, low latency, compressed caching and more..."