caseywest writes "For those of you attending the Open Source Conference, there is a golden opportunity to get some free coaching and consultation on your work. A Birds-of-a-Feather session on "Perl Mentoring/Code Reviews" will be given for the third year running. Some of the top Perl People will be on hand as resident experts to advise you on your own Perl projects. This is *one-on-one* coaching: No spectators, no audience, no distractions; just the kind of personal mentoring, targeted to your specific application, from some of the best people qualified to give it. We encorage other communities to hold mentoring sessions, you still have time to register your BOF, email me if you want to make it happen and need advice. "

cwikla asks: "Back in the .COM days, I worked at eGroups, now owned by a larger Company. During my time I added a couple of easter eggs to the site, which I was reminded of while watching Being John Malkovich this weekend. I checked, and ones sort of still there. If you append malkovich=1 to a message URL it would turn the message into 'malkovich' mode. It sort of still works, but over time I guess the code has been a changin' so it's kind of spotty. Oh, there are others that still are in there, but where's the fun of telling all the secrets? Any other folks done anything equivalent, especially on mainstream sites?"

dooling writes: "Perl & XML is a well-written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It states in the preface that it is written for Perl programmers who want to learn about XML and what is available in Perl for XML processing. It achieves this goal, but little else. When you are done reading this book you will have been given an overview of Perl and XML, know where to begin to attack an XML document, and know where to look to find more information." For dooling's more complete review, read on below.

PacketStorm asks: "There's always an argument between TCP and UDP users. TCP users complain that UDP is non-determinstic and lossy, while UDP users complain that TCP is slower and nobody needs all the features anyway. So the question is - has anyone actually seen/experienced UDP loss in high-traffic environments? Is the degeneration of UDP any better or worse than TCP in a congested environment? TCP also craps out in times of congestion, but at least you know - or do you? Experiences?"

an_mo writes "A link to a google cached document is floating around some mailing lists containing some info about microsoft software engineering. In particular the document contains juicy bits about the development of a large project like NT/2K. Some examples: Team size went from 200 (NT3.1) to 1400 (Win2k). Complete build of win2k time is 8hrs on 4way PIII and requires 50GB of hard drive space. Written/email permission required for checkins by the build team." The HTML version on Usenix's site is much nicer than Google's auto-translated version.

Michael Neuffer writes "The System Administrators Guild has started SAGEwire which is now running in BETA mode. They could use some additional readers that help them to get the quirks out of their system, so head over there and give it a good shakeout."

JewFish writes "Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, designer and implementer of the C++ programming language is switching jobs. He has accepted the COE Endowed Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. The fulfillment of this fulltime position was announced today by the head of the computer science department. Now that Dr. Stroustrup will be on faculty I sure hope they start offering a C++ course or two."

junge_m writes "Donald Knuth has released another of his by now famous pre-fascicles to Volume 4 of his epic: Pre-fascicle 2c is all about 'Generating all Combinations' supplementing his pre-fascicles 2a and 2b. Furthermore he challenges us all to do more of his daunting exercises and report our success. He thinks we are way too lazy in this respect! So come on slashdot crowd: Do your homework and get the credit from the grandmaster himself!"

Agelmar writes: "A newgroup control message was sent out for comp.lang.php today. Many servers already carry the new group, and almost all servers around the globe should carry it within the next day or two. The new group is a wonderful place to turn to for support / questions regarding PHP, and is symbolic of PHP's coming to full power, finally entering the comp.lang.* hierarchy with the rest of the mature languages. (For those who are interested, the new group passed 177-11.) Feel free to drop by the new group, and stick around!"

Sludge asks: "I just finished leading a team through a software project. It was the first of it's type for our company: financial transactions were involved, and it was therefore very fault intolerant. In order to complete this, a set of regression tests were written. For example, if the amount of money collected doesn't match up to our order table, we get notified via our cellphone's text messaging as soon as the cronjob picks it up. Lots of other implementation-specific tests exist as well. My question is, how common is this for the software industry? My company had never heard of this before I came along. Is it the norm? (When you answer, also say whether or not your company does risk management.)"

dogma01 writes "It looks like the grants to fund: Larry, Damian, and Dan have pretty much run out. :(" Keeping guys like these working on Perl is definitely a good thing(tm) if you are looking to support the Open Source Community somehow. You can donate here if you are feeling generous.

sheriff_p writes "Anyone recieving even a small amount of email is likely to have encountered Klez varients of some form in the last few months - Message Labs shows it as being the biggest email-transmitted virus of all time by some way. So just how boring is it? Virus Bulletin has an indepth look at what makes Klez tick." And today alone, Klez virus e-mails were 90% of my e-mail by bytecount. YAY Outlook!

asqui writes: "The Reverse Challenge was a contest from The Honeynet Project to essentially reverse engineer a binary captured in the wild running on a compromised honeypot. The contest ran during May of this year and the submissions have been judged and the winners announced. Dion Mendel took first place with 43.4 points out of a possible 50. The binary turned out to be a tool for performing remote DoS attacks from compromised hosts, with its instructions being cunningly supplied via the lesser known IP protocol 11. This binary is currently being used in the wild but there is little reported activity, probably because sysadmins are focused on the other more dominant protocols."

minus23 writes: "Very interesting article over at Digitalanimators.com, talking about some of the challenges faced by the crew working on the second installment in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Interesting bits include managing an off-site database of 45TBs, Linux workstations from IBM, 1400 processors, and the animation methods to be used on Gollum. It's a good thing. :)"

XaXXon writes: "perl.com has Synopsis 5 for Perl 6 up. It's a brief overview of all the changes made in Larry Wall's Apocalypse 5. Lots of stuff about the new regex syntax. I must admit, however, that I'm getting tired of reading about perl 6 -- I want to start using it." We posted Larry Wall's 5th Apocalypse in May.

aridg writes: "This week's New York Times Magazine has an article about Richard Wallace, the programmer of the ALICE AI chatbot that won first place in several competitions for realistic human-like conversation. Wallace sounds like a pretty unusual and interesting fellow; the article quotes an NYU prof both praising ALICE and saying to Wallace: '... I actively dislike you. I think you are a paranoid psycho.' A good read. [Usual NY Times registration disclaimers apply.]"

Sure, it's not the dream system with computer-controlled vents on the furnace and a genetic algorithm to optimize heat-flow, but it is pretty damn cool. This system makes use of Dallas Semiconductor Digital Thermometers to monitor temperature throughout the house. Hopefully the fellow running the project will put up the source to the Linux driver he has running the sensors. This project ties in nicely with the question posed by a recent Ask Slashdot as well.

Jayesh Sheth writes: "The Zinf Project (formerly known as Freeamp) needs your help! The Freeamp ( http://www.freeamp.org ) project, which produced the cross-platform mp3 and ogg vorbis player, is now known as the Zinf project. Freeamp distinguished itself early on as an easy-to-use music player for both Linux and Windows, with integrated support not only for the mp3 format, but also for the open source ogg vorbis format." Read on for the help this project is looking for -- in short, they're looking for some new blood.

WrinkledShirt writes: "There's a whole lot of posturing going on in the world on Internet programming right now, and with all of Microsoft's slick marketing for .NET there's never been a better time to remind the industry which platform got it right first. Enter XML and Java, Developing Web Applications (2nd Ed.) , a book that promises to show just how much of a heavy-hitter Java still is in the enterprise world. Because of the variety of technologies available for Java, Addison Wesley took the approach of bringing in a bunch of experts in the field to cover the different ways that Java and XML can work together. Considering the effort that went into coordinating this collaborative work, it couldn't possibly miss, right?" Read on to see how true that is, in Wrinkled's estimation.

An anonymous roward writes "This interview at ZDNet UK has Dave Kirk talking about how Nvidia's Cg programming language will bring movie-making and game-writing together. 'This is a big step towards convergence -- not films and movies and games being the same, but the way people create them being the same. Artists can use the same skills on both. Cg is almost guaranteed to be efficient in hardware, and any Renderman program can be translated to Cg, by hand or by a tool that someone's developing. Once that happens, all the moviemaking can take place in Cg.'"