David Kennedy writes: "This is a review of Brett McLaughlin's new O'Reilly title, Building Java Enterprise Applications. Volume 1: Architecture, subtitled Designing with EJBs, Databases, and Directory Servers." Read David's in-depth review, below.

An anonymous reader writes "Do you use GNOME? How about GTK+, Sawfish, Metacity, Nautilus, or any other components? Well, then you may want to check out art.gnome.org. A great site, though not fully finished, you can't be anything but woowed by the quality and sexiness of these various pieces of art for your GNOME component. Please no Desktop Wars, just appreciate the work these people put into making GNOME prettier than ever!"

cyclops asks: "I have been contemplating about going for LASIK surgery for a couple of years. I want to get rid of my dependency on glasses or lenses because I really find them cumbersome. The main thing that is stopping me now is that like you, programming is my livelihood and thus I spent a major part of my day staring into the monitor. I have readthat there is always a certain percentage of patients not regaining 20/20 vision but it's OK for them since most of them don't need that sharp vision during work. I am about to consult with a LASIK surgeon but I would love to hear anecdotal evidence about your experiences, to hear if it works out for you eventually. (I have stable myopia of -5.50 and astimagtism of -1.00 for 3 years already)." Ask Slashdot has handled this issue in the past in two previous articles: this one from 1999, and a related article from 2000. With at least 2 years since the last time this question was posed, how has medical technology improved in this aspect? For those unwilling or unable to take advantage of Laser Surgery, have other viable alternatives arisen in the past two years?

An anonymous reader writes "Neal Walfield announced the first release of RMGPT, which is (or rather, aspires to one day be) a complete, portable implementation of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 threads also known as POSIX threads. With this new pthreads library, it will soon be possible to run complex software packages on the Hurd, including the GNOME and KDE desktops, the OpenOffice suite, and the Mozilla web browser. Find more information here, including the humorous meaning behind RMGPT, and insight into a future Hurd release..."

Manuel Arriaga writes "[To the editors: I am not a professional programmer, nor will I ever be one. My income does not depend on my computing/programming skills, and hopefully it never will. So promoting free software I wrote does not help me in any financial way, no matter how indirect. libtrash is free software (GPL2), and I distribute it for free from my website. I have nothing to gain from the increased exposure, except for knowing that I am helping others. And I know slashdot isn't freshmeat... With that out of the way:] I have seen this topic discussed in the LKML multiple times by now, and many more people asking in the newsgroups why "I can't recover my deleted file on GNU/Linux". Here is my answer to that question. libtrash gives Linux a real "trash can". And it has been doing so (with varying degrees of stability) for more than one year now. If you consider it appropriate, make this information public on slashdot."

An anonymous reader writes "A discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list between Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Linux guru Ingo Molnar, and a few others debated the name of the upcoming stable kernel release. The choices: 2.6 or 3.0. Evidently there's been enough improvements, most notably the VM, that they're leaning towards calling it 3.0..."

Are Flagan writes with the review below of Hacker Culture. Flagan says this book "truly marks the entry of the 'hacker' into the realm of academia" -- a point which has both good and bad consequences. Read on to see if you might enjoy Hacker Culture as much as Flagan did.

David Kennedy writes with a review of Tom DeMarco's older Dorset House title, Why does software cost so much? (sub-title: And Other Puzzles of the Information Age.) Sounds like something to put in the same section of your library as Frederick Brooks Jr.'s The Mythical Man Month .

Brent writes "In this installment of 'Secrets of the wireless elite,' you'll learn about the prevalent technologies in the Japanese market. In addition, it shows why publishing Web sites for wireless -- while not technically revolutionary -- is where the market is right now."

JustinMette writes "Are you an independent game developer trying to make it in the industry? If so, you will probably be extremely interested to read about the upcoming IndieGamesCon 2002 hosted by GarageGames. You can read all about the conference in an interview with Jay Moore, GarageGames Marketing Manager. And yes, the conference is sponsored by a Brewery with the official "indie" beer, Spank Dog Ale! "World Domination through Collaboration" (official conference motto), Justin Mette 21-6 Productions Inc."

davidwboswell writes "Oreillynet is running an article about how to create your own browser with Mozilla. This is a follow-up to a previous article that surveyed many of the alternate Mozilla browsers currently available including Chimera, Galeon, Phoenix and Aphrodite."

some-guy writes "The Open Web Application Security Project has released A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications, Version 1.1 "While this document doesn't provide a silver bullet to cure all the ills, we hope it goes a long way in taking the first step towards helping people understand the inherent problems in web applications and build more secure web applications and Web Services in the future...""

RickHigh writes "The BEA WebLogic Server Bible is an enjoyable read. If you have been using WebLogic off and on since before EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) existed, you will still learn a bunch of new tricks. This is an excellent reference that can be read from cover to cover. The book focuses on small examples with an emphasis of deploying and configuring the examples in the WebLogic environment." BEA's WebLogic is an application server -- as such, it sits in a small enough niche that you won't find a full shelf of helpful books at your local Borders. If hosting applications for a large organization is part of your work, though, you should read on.

nafmo writes "In this day and age of quadruple-dvd games with amazingly big 3D worlds, one might think that the science of compact coding has been lost forever. Well, not so, ast the 2002 MiniGame competition proves. There are 62 games for 14 different vintage computer platforms, of which none take up more than 1024 bytes. The vote for this year's best minigame ends on 7th of October, so you'd better grab the votepack and start playing!"

owkeuflk writes "When TPJ became part of SysAdmin magazine, I was disappointed, but I stuck with them, and that is probably how they had my e-mail address to contact me that TPJ is being brought back as an e-zine, that is, if they can get 3000 pre-paid subscriptions. I might try it out, even though they are expanding coverage to include Windows -- unthrilled. I liked TPJ best when is was printed on plain, unglossy paper...."

GonzoJohn writes "Looks like TheKompany has released an ogg rippoer for CDs: "tkcOggRipper is a freely available (but not GPL) program for easily and conveniently ripping CDs into the Ogg Vorbis format. If you are not familiar with Ogg Vorbis, it is available from Xiph (www.xiph.org). It compresses smaller and creates higher fidelity files than MP3. Ogg Vorbis also doesn't have any license time bombs or restrictions associated with it as MP3 does. You can look here to see what we mean. MP3 royalties will cost you either directly as a producer or indirectly as a consumer. One problem with Ogg Vorbis has been a lack of easy to use tools for ripping CDs into the Ogg Vorbis format -- they were confusing or command line based. This led us to write tkcOggRipper, which couldn't be more easy to use. Pop in a CD, pick an ouput directory and select a "Quality" setting, and go. tkcOggRipper is currently available for Linux and Windows, and we hope to release a version for Mac OS X soon."

SpinDoctor writes "Looking across the XML bookshelf today, it's easy to see many books discussing XML in a generic manner, or more commonly how to utilize XML within Java, .NET and Perl. Moreover, despite the broad based support that PHP has for XML, there has been no book that tackled the complexities and best practices, and at the same time offered a comprehensive resource to the XML-based APIs -- at least not until now. Read on for more about the best selling Professional PHP4 XML." Read on for the complete review.

chromatic writes with the review below of Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, which explains at a level "between novice and intermediate user" (and in a minimum of space) how to contribute to Perl's own Library of Alexandria.

TeachingMachines asks: "They say that if you can't do, you teach, and if you can't teach, you teach P.E. Well, what happens when P.E. teachers become interested in programming? Wimpy educators like myself need very high-level Rapid Application Development or similar authoring environments for Computer-Based Training (CBT) so that we can call ourselves '3133t HackerZ'. Throughout my graduate training students typically used one of the two most popular authoring environments: Macromedia's popular Authorware (for Mac and MS) and Click2Learn's infinitely more powerful ToolBook (for MS only, ugh). Are there any really good authoring environments for CBT that are truly cross-platform compatible (i.e. support Linux/Solaris/Mac9/MacOSX/MS)? I ask that because a new kid showed up on the block called Norpath Elements Studio that looks to be highly integrated with Java and deploys multimedia applications cross platform. Is anyone aware of similar tools, proprietary or not?"

An anonymous reader writes "This story explains how the latest Linux development kernel is now able to start and stop over 100,000 threads in parallel in only 2 seconds (about 14 minutes 58 seconds faster than with earlier Linux kernels)! Much of this impressive work is thanks to Ingo Molnar, author of the O(1) scheduler recently merged with the 2.5 Linux development kernel."