Squidgee writes "This is the site for "LIAP: Linux In A Pillbox". It is an interesting recovery distro made in the vein of pharmaceuticals; each floppy based 'minidistro' cures one specific Linux ailment. Or, as Luke Komasta (The creator of LIAP) puts it: "My Linux project contains "pills". Each of them is good for one disease, but it doesn't work good enough for another. When you know what you need a Linux for, you may choose a good pill. And of course, as you know, there is no drug which is good for treating all diseases." It's an extremely interesting approach to Linux recovery, and one that appears to be more effective than the other varieties of floppy/mini-cd based recovery systems. Worth downloading in case you ever need it!"

mesozoic writes "News.com is running a scoop on Borland's up-and-coming development suite, code-named 'Galileo'. It'll be compatible with both .NET and Java, and is aimed at developers who don't want to be cornered into using Microsoft's entire suite of programs. I personally am very nostalgic for Borland's old DOS-based IDE, and I'll be watching for this in the future."

death00 writes "ATI has released a beta of RenderMonkey, their suite of open, extensible shader development tools. ATI showed these tools for the first time at Siggraph 2002. Should be interesting to see who wins the shader development race, NVIDIA's Cg, RenderMonkey or whatever 3Dlabs has on the go."

prostoalex writes "Come gather round Mongers, whatever you code, And admit that your forehead's about to explode, 'Cos Perl patterns induce complete brain overload, If there's source code you should be maintainin', Then you better start learnin' Perl 6 patterns soon, For the regexes, they are a-changin'. This remix of Bob Dylan serves as an epigraph to Exegesis 5."

prostoalex writes: "Daniel H. Steinberg posted an article on O'Reailly's OnJava.com discussing the difficulties and current problems with introductory Java in the classroom. The textbooks used in colleges are mostly the rewrites of C/C++ textbooks and thus start with HelloWorld program without really dwelling on object-oriented nature of Java and why it is important. In a nutshell, OOP even nowadays is treated as somewhat innovative concept in the classroom, mainly because of educators, who were taught C. Hence links and description of Rethinking CS101 Project."

prostoalex writes: "In the world of information technology, information, as the name suggests, is as important as technology itself. Erik T. Ray's and Jason McIntosh's Perl and XML is an attempt to take a look at perhaps the most popular languages for data processing. XML is an open-standard specification for documents, while Perl's natural powers lie in the area of data processing, and, as the name suggests, practical extracting and reporting." Prostalex has reviewed Perl & XML below; read on for his take on the book.

Torill writes "Celia Pearce interviews Will Wright in the article "Sims, Battle Bots, Cellular Automata Gods and Go", in Game Studies, volume 2. Wright talks about the philosophy behind his games, one of which is The Sims: 'What are you trying to do with this thing that you're creating? To really put the player in the design role. And the actual world is reactive to their design.'"

damaru writes "Linux Journal is running a story on Diffie Hellman encryption, implemented using bc. The article says, 'The GNU bc threaded code compiler, included with most Linux distributions, provides arbitrary precision arithmetic that can handle the large numbers used in modern cryptography.'"

grex writes "The FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) study from the University of Maastricht has published its final report. One of its five parts is the developer survey based basically on developers from the European Union. Results show that Debian is the preferred distribution, GNOME the desktop the majority choose and vi more popular than Emacs. But this survey also handles economic, law-related and motivation aspects among developers that make it very interesting to read."

Seth Nickell writes: "We are proud to announce the release of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines v1.0, the product of usability engineers, designers, hackers, and whatever-keeps-you-writing-calum irish wine[TM]. I hope they'll be useful for improving the usefulness of all free software, not just GNOME apps. Check out the release announcement for details and a plaintive plea for interface coordination between free software projects." (Also at the top of the new Gnome news site called Footnotes.)

Craig Maloney writes: "Bram Moolenaar's Vim editor has quickly become the clone of choice for users of the venerable vi editor. Unfortunately, until recently finding documentation for the features of Vim meant spending quality time with the help files that come with Vim. While the help files are very good, a manual/tutorial of the Vim editor was needed. Other vi books included scant pages about the improvements of Vim over standard vi, but Vim isn't only a slight improvement to vi. Vi IMproved -- Vim is the manual Vim users need to help them get the full benefit out of Vim." Read on for more of Craig's review of this book below.

dep writes "Not a lot of people know about it, but there are all sorts of KDE applications that aren't part of the main KDE distribution but which you can download from the KDE CVS tree. It's called "KDE Extra Gear," and it allows third-party developers to take advantage of KDE development resources even though their apps aren't included in KDE itself. This new program is explained by Aaron J. Seigo on Linux and Main."

Grok writes "You may have heard about a company named ActiveState before. Maybe you're a Perl programmer and have used ActivePerl, ActivePython or some of their other various programming-related tools. Well, today MozillaNews has an interview with David Ascher, a senior programmer at ActiveState, and the tech lead for Komodo, the cross-platform, multi-language IDE based on Mozilla."

JettyCatReady queries: "Ok, my company (a rather large, global financial institution) has recently blessed Linux for production use (woohoo!). Their position is that it will save them hardware costs to run on Intel machines instead of big IBM or Sun iron. No mention at all has been made of their position on open source. I'm part of a team that wants to make the case that the real savings are to be made by making use of things like Tomcat in place of BEA where we can (if all we want is JSP why pay a huge cost per server?). I even have a boss's boss who said in front of me, 'So I'm thinking, am I missing something by not using Tomcat? Do I have anything to lose?'"

When direct database access to the information you need isn't available, but web pages with the right data are, you might pursue "screen-scraping" -- fetching a web page and scanning its text for the appropriate pieces of text in order to do further processing. LWP (Library for WWW access in Perl) is a collection of module to help you do this. mir writes: " Perl & LWP is a solid, no-nonsense book that will teach you how to do screen-scraping using Perl. It describes how to automatically retrieve and use information from the web. An introduction to LWP and related modules from simple to advanced uses and various ways to extract information from the returned HTML."

BorrisYeltsin writes "The Parrot project has just released a functional compiler for Parrot. Almost all of the previous Apocalypses have been implemented as well as some other toys, including but not limited to: Ruby and Python parsers, BASIC and Scheme interpreters and a Forth compiler, the team are now working on Perl 6 regexes. Check it out at cvs.perl.org."

mbadolato writes "I'm surprised this hasn't been reported yet. Over at use.perl they're reporting that when the current issue of SysAdmin comes out, this will be the last installment of The Perl Journal. It's a shame. TPJ originally was stopped as a stand-alone, but was then included into Sysadmin. Now that's going too. We all owe a big thanks to all the contributers, and to Jon Orwant, for providing us a great resource in TPJ over the years."

An anonymous reader writes: "Brand Huntsman (the creator of the Bochs Front-End, among other obscure things) has been developing an integrated language/operating system for the past few years now. The Operating System is called BRiX, and it uses a language called Crush, which is woven tightly into the core of the OS. On his project web page he has posted the source code to his preliminary compiler, which runs in Linux and outputs optimized assembly from Crush source code. The Crush language itself is heavily influenced by Forth, LISP, and Ada, and provides strong typing and extensive namespace security." Update: 08/19 00:03 GMT by T : Note, the project page URL has been updated, hope it now works for everyone :)

Jucius Maximus writes "As announced on the Ogg Vorbis site, PS2/Linux developer Brad Barclay has built Ogg Vorbis libraries for PS2 Linux. I'm not seeing any encoder tools there yet, but this has implications in third party multimedia development on the platform, making it potentially cheaper for people to develop applications with music due to Vorbis's non-hostile licensing."

Bill Kendrick writes: "When I thanked the folks at OSNews for mentioning me in their interview with Michael Speck their response was a list of questions for my own interview. Well, I've answered them. Enjoy! While I'm glad some people consider me 'up there' in the ranks of Open Source game development, I honestly think there are far more deserving folks... Like Sam Lantinga, Steve Baker, and the people developing FlightGear, to name a few."