Pseud0 writes "Just announced on the OpenSSL announce mailing list. The affected versions are "[...] OpenSSL 0.9.6d or earlier, or 0.9.7-beta2 or earlier or current development snapshots of 0.9.7 to provide SSL or TLS is vulnerable, whether client or server. 0.9.6d servers on 32-bit systems with SSL 2.0 disabled are not vulnerable." Get your updates here."

solferino writes: "Anthony Towns has posted a fairly detailed 'retrospective' on the release of woody and an 'introspective' on the future release of sarge." This is a long, informative read for anyone interested in how the complicated Debian release process plays out behind the scenes. ("Grep for 'realistic schedule'. Doh.")

Lomby writes "Following the spirit of the kernel schematics poster, I wrote a script that generates a diagram that depicts the rpm packages installed in your system, along with their dependencies. You can find more details and a download link at freshmeat."

David Rusenko asks: "I've been taking a datastructures class at CMU as part of a summer CS program. One of these structures we have gone over is hash tables. After going through many different probing methods (linear, quadratic), multiple hash functions, and double hashing, I was all too curious to know if these are the best methods currently known. Some other interesting ideas came up, such as using the Fibonacci numbers for probing, but I haven't had time to test them yet. Any comments?"

Anonymous Lazy Boy writes "Yesterday saw the official release of Valgrind 1.0.0. Valgrind is a C/C++ programmer's dream come true: effortless memory allocation checking, uninitialized memory access, leaks etc. Purify for Linux has arrived, only better: contrary to its commercial (non-Linux) sibling, checking is performed directly on the executable, no re-linking necessary. The technology behind Valgrind is highly fascinating and explained down to the very gory details in the documentation."

An anonymous reader writes "In a neverending effort to spread the word about free quality online programming books, here is a Python programming book. 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python', by Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Jeffrey Elkner is a copylefted work available in multiple formats at Green Tea Press: HTML , PDF, LaTeX. Compliments of the online books what's new page."

acidblood writes "GCC 3.1.1 has been released. Many improvements in performance, code optimization, standards compliance, and a few bug fixes in the C++ ABI (full changelog here). Download from the main GNU FTP or use the nearest mirror."

You'll remember last week, I asked for recommendations of the Best Websites for developers. This was a -great- thread and in the story, I mentioned that I was planning on doing the same regarding books this week. So here it is. What do you, the slashdot reader consider seminal works? What would you consider great introductions to technical topics? If you are interested, check it out...

3flp asks: "We've heard all about those coding projects where 90% of the code is done by one person. Unfortunately, on my current project it's me :-(. It's a comms DSP project with a lot of C & some assembly. My team of 4 will hopefully produce about 20k lines of code. Now comes the problem: we just got to our first small integration stage (we do try to do them early & often), and it turns out the other guys have got nothing. No code. I want to ask Slashdotters, people who have the experience with small software projects, how would you go about it? How to bring other less experienced coders up to your level and beyond? Or at least how to make them suck less, and if they get stuck on something, to just come and bloody ask for help?" This is something almost every developer has had to deal with. For those of you who have experienced this, what did you do about it and how did things turn out?

briandonovan writes "A new edition? Given all of the changes in the web programming landscape since the 1998 publication of the previous edition, David Flanagan's JavaScript : The Definitive Guide (JS:TDG4), 4th Edition was overdue. Flanagan delivers a book that more than measures up to its predecessor - JS:TDG4 includes a substantial amount of new material and, as a whole, has been extensively updated. The crushing gain in browser market share by Microsoft's Internet Explorer offering, the maturation of the Netscape 6.x,7.x / Mozilla browser suite and its entry into the fray along with a slew of other Gecko-based browsers, promulgation of newer versions of the ECMAScript specification (accompanied by new implementations in JavaScript and JScript), and the publication of successive W3C DOM Recommendations are all reflected in this edition."

testYourGUIS asks: "I work with a company that tests consumer and business software for various venues. One of the programs we rely on heavily is called Rational Visual Test, which is a VB-like compiled programming language that works directly with Windows API to simulate mouse clicks, text entry, menu pulldowns, and so on. We use them to stress-test various applications, collect the results, and then send the vendors a spreadsheet showing what we found. Recently, pressure has started to produce the same results on Mac OS X and possibly Linux applications. I was wondering if anyone knew of such software that works on Mac OS X, and how to go about doing this for Linux?"

C. Michael Pilato writes: "This overheard while eavesdropping on announce@subversion.tigris.org: Gentle coders, The ever-growing cadre of Subversion developers is proud to announce the release of Subversion 'Alpha' (0.14.0). Since we became self-hosting eleven months ago, we've gone through ten milestones. This milestone, however, is the one we've always been working towards; it's a freeze on major features for our 1.0 release. From here out, it's mostly bug-fixing. We hope this announcement will lead to more widespread testing; we welcome people to try Subversion and report their experiences on our development list and issue tracker." Subversion, a source control system akin to CVS, has been in the works for a couple of years now.

drc writes in that MacSlash notes that, according to the Apple gcc3 list, "The gcc3 project has been 'closed' for Jaguar, meaning that at this point there is almost no chance that there will be any further changes to the compiler that ships with Jaguar." If you really want to play, break out CVS and get to it.

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Borland is giving us Kylix for C++ after all. Kylix 3.0 is available in Open, Professional, and Enterprise versions. Time to start banging out those CLX apps! The Register also has a story about this."

Theovon asks: "I have only released one open source project so far (link below), and I have never submitted patches to any other, so I am very unfamiliar with some of the politics. I have a new open source project I am considering releasing sooner rather than later, but I want to know how to keep control over it long enough to get into it everything I want. Specifically, what I want to know is how to deal with unwanted suggestions by contributors. By unwanted, I mean submissions which may be nice but which would cause the project to deviate significantly from where you are trying to head. I think it's important to publically address this issue, rather than doing Google searches and piecing together a perspective of it on my own. think there may be many developers out there whose work could benefit us all but who are wary of what might happen if they were to let loose before they had achieved enough of their goals. In my ignorance and paranoia, I have been pondering the various negative consequences of an early release, and I would like to see what Slashdot has to say about these concerns."

corz writes "Just when you thought you were finished upgrading the webserver, 'The PHP Group has learned of a serious security vulnerability in PHP versions 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. An intruder may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the web server. This vulnerability may be exploited to compromise the web server and, under certain conditions, to gain privileged access.' Here's the bugtraq announcement." The hole is in the parsing of HTTP POST headers and can allow arbitrary code to be run on vulnerable machines. PHP thoughtfully decided to release a new version, 4.2.2, today with the fix. You can find a copy of it here (mirror).

Philippe Fremy writes: "I have just published and translated into English a comparison between Qt programming and MFC programming, which was written by Pascal Audoux (a fellow coworker). I am interested in feedback and would love to add quotes from developers that have used both toolkits." Here is the English version ("Qt vs MFC") as well as the French one ("Qt contre MFC").

An anonymous reader writes "When an i386 running Linux panics, a function in the kernel called 'panic_blink' causes the system's LEDs to blink. Andrew Rodland recently posted a creative patch to turn that steady blink into a useful message in morse code!"

Todd asks: "Does anyone have good suggestions or advice regarding techniques for determining the checksum of a serial data protocol? I am currently working on a fun little project using a digital display sign which uses an unknown serial protocol. I cannot move on with the project until I figure this dreaded checksum out."

Recently, I've been entertaining the idea of getting into a little Java programming for a side project I'm working on, and I realized that I really don't know where to start. This led to a larger question of what the best books and websites are for pepole new to a language. What about for the experts in a language? So this week, I was wondering what slashdotters thought are the best websites to go to for information on the major languages (like C, C++, PHP, Perl, etc) and the important topics in programming (x, gtk, win32, etc). I obviously have some opinions on some of the better places to visit, but I wanted to see what slashdotters thought. (hence the paucity of links in this story) Where do people find the authorities? My intention is to ask about web sites this weekend, and books next weekend.