Brian Donovan contributes this review of Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, the most recent of several books geared toward helping people use the common Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP combination to produce database-backed websites. Read on for the review.

roarl asks: "Is anyone working on an Open Source bounds checking system? (A system that checks a program at runtime for array out of bounds access, reading uninitialized memory, memory leaks and so on). I've been using BoundsChecker for some time and believe me, there are situations where you know you are going to spend hours debugging unless you let BoundsChecker sort it out for you. But it annoys me that I have to transfer (and sometimes port) the buggy program to Windows each time. I'd much rather stay in Linux. Insure works on Linux. I haven't tried Insure for some time, but last time I tried I wasn't especially impressed. Purify seems still not to support Linux, but on other Unix platforms it works great. The problem with all of these products is that they are so da*n expensive. So it makes me wonder, are all Open Source programmers doing without them? If so, what can we expect of the quality of Open Source developed programs? If not, is there a free alternative?"

whitefox writes: "The Seattle Times has an interesting article in today's edition on what is public domain. After sharing the experience one software writer had with businesses and people shying away from BitTorrent because they didn't understand the concept of 'public domain,' they take the reader on a tour of how public domain is being defined by groups such as Creative Commons and to the battle of copyright-extensions in Eldred v. Ashcroft."

davorg contributes his review of Writing CGI Applications With Perl, writing "There are a very large number of Perl CGI books in the shops. Unfortunately the number of good Perl CGI books is far smaller. I'm happy to report that this book is one of them." Read on for the rest.

Robert Hart writes "With people such as Microsoft and ADTI suggesting incorrectly that if you use GPL software in house (without distributing it to third parties) you must make your code publicly available, actual examples of people using GPL software internally would seem to be the best response (pragmatic examples to back up the 'theory'). I am interested in hearing about examples of corporations and government agencies, from around the world, using GPL software as part of an inhouse development effort. As there is also a potential for time/money saving by doing this, there is a possibility that this may lead to some research to put numbers behind this."

AlphaAlien (from neonerds.net) writes: "Another Microsoft Programming Language -- AsmL. AsmL is the Abstract State Machine Language. It is an executable specification language based on the theory of Abstract State Machines. AsmL allows you to test incomplete code due to it being executable on the fly. This doesn't mean it'll execute invalid code though, only that you can execute code segments for instant experimentation (similar to the test-debug function in Visual Studio, but more flexible/powerful). In case you're not tired of all these new Microsoft languages, here's another, Pan. Pan is an experimental embedded language and compiler for image synthesis and manipulation, based on principles from functional programming. The Pan compiler turns descriptions of images and image effects into efficient machine code for use with either a stand-alone program, DirectXTransform for web-page embedding (viewable with IE 5.5 or later), or as a PhotoShop plug-in for use with hosts like Adobe PhotoShop and JASC PaintShop Pro (has only been tested with latter at this point, but should work with former)." You can download Pan from here.

IceFox writes: "TrollTech announced the winners of the Qtopia/Zaurus contest this morning on the businesswire. theKompany won the grand prize (10K, laptop, big flat tv etc) with its jabber application. The winners of the new laptop are: Taskman, Froot, Powercord, smssuite, Korganizer, with honorable mention to KinkattaLite. I think Puzz-le should have won. Check out many Zaurus applications here."

Whatever Fits queries: "We are trying to integrate our own specialized development environment. We are currently using Visual Studio and the add-in feature of that, but would like to get away from the Microsoft tax and have had to rewrite our software from scratch for reasons outside this scope. The current project includes adding specialized features to the IDE to handle our project types, extra tool-windows for user interaction, and an external process to run the compiled code. The compiled language is even open for debate right now, but would have to be something rather common or easy to learn. I really want to try to run Perl with SOAP for our backend. This is going to run on Windows systems but I am hoping to go for something cross platform for future extensibility if possible. What IDEs can be recommended that offer this kind of extensibility and keep the price per copy reasonable? I have a small list already built, but I have no experience with any of these but Visual Studio and would like to hear both success and horror stories of integration."

No_Weak_Heart writes "After a brief hiatus, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has returned. Here's the story at Wired about this grassroots coalition which works to promote the adoption of web standards by authors, tool makers and in browsers. In a related vein, the Boston Globe has a comfy chat with Tim Berners-Lee, the guiding force behind many of those standards."

cpfeifer asks: "I'm joining a small startup that needs a knowledge management solution. I know that 'knowledge management' is seen an empty buzzword, but after working at a company where the communication is very poor, I see the value of allowing folks to post their own news instead of having it filtered through some sort of corporate newsletter. I've seen the commercial portals (Plumtree & others), but after seeing a couple of OSS publication systems (phpNuke, Slash), I think these would fit the bill quite nicely." Aside from some of the basic features found in weblogs (posting, archival, sorting and searching), what else is necessary for the proper maintenance and use of such a system? How hard would it be to adapt existing weblog-ware to this task?

Twintop writes: "PHP.net has released the a new version of PHP 4 to include the new Zend 2 Scripting Engine. This alpha update adds more increased support for Java and .NET technologies. More can be found on PHP.net and Beta News.com."

Steve Streeting writes "Version 0.99b of OGRE (Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) has been released! OGRE is a well designed, flexible and easy to use 3D engine released under the GNU Public License. This version adds highly customisable, scriptable particle systems, generic billboard support, compatibility with VC.Net, performance improvements and various bug fixes."

Bitten-by-BIOSbugs asks: "My job involves porting PC BIOS code supplied by one of the Big Names to my employer's products. In my experience, this code seems to be so full of holes you could strain pasta with it. However, the vendor seems not to care when I report bugs, and rarely have fixes been made available. What is the experience of other Slashdot readers regarding the quality of commercial BIOS products?"

Goalie_Ca writes "Neonerds.net has learned of an implementation of the ML programming language for the .NET Framework. F# is essentially an implementation of the core of the OCaml programming language . F#/OCaml/ML is a mixed functional-imperative programming language which is excellent for medium-advanced programmers and for teaching. In addition, you can access hundreds of .NET libraries using F#, and the F# code you write can be accessed from C# and other .NET languages. See the F# Homepage."

Well, here we are: Moshe Bar's answers to questions you posted earlier this week. Read and enjoy.

BagOBones writes "Tired of waiting for your source to compile? Dreaming of having your own cluster and having something useful to do with it? Well Trolltech might have the answer. Trolltech Teambuilder lets you turn your network into a clustered C/C++ compiler."

Mark Bainter writes "If you haven't checked out kbuild lately, you should. The new build system Keith Owens has put so much time into has a long list of benefits, including much shorter build and rebuild times, and greater accuracy. It appears his system is well liked by most, kernel developers (though not all). So the question is, why won't Linus merge it? Keith has been announcing for some time that it is ready to merge, and has worked very hard on trying to keep everything up to date as the development kernel continues to change, yet his requests to merge seem to be largely ignored. Linus did weigh in on the topic, but his views don't seem to resonate very far on the list, and seem rather arbitrary to me. Keith doesn't seem to be all that fond of Linus' thoughts on the matter either, and has called for an email campaign to get Linus to merge it in all at once. Perhaps instead of everyone on /. emailing their (partially informed) opinion to Linus, an open discussion amoung Linux users/developers who might not normally participate on the kernel list would lend some weight one way or another."

gigawattwarlock asks: "As an almost new Mac OS X user (I've been adminning my wife's Mac for a while now), I am used to writing Perl scripts for her Mac, which work just fine. Simply put, I have become spoiled with the GTk bindings for Perl on Linux. I love being able to use and abuse a robust GUI, quickly and easily. And to make matters worse, I find the Aqua interface near addictive ... enough so that the idea of installing another desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, et. al) just seems a little silly, and a bit of overkill, to me. Does anyone know if there are any perl bindings in the works for Mac OS X or maybe even an already existent alternative graphical library or interface within Mac OS X?"

Grizzly writes "Okay, go ahead and laugh. But there's a lot of COBOL out there, and that has kept a lot of businesses, especially outside the United States, from even looking at Linux. Linux and Main has a story on KOBOL and how it might make bringing those COBOL apps over to Linux possible."

Rob Sweet asks: "I recently got started coding for a PHP front end to RRDTool. Right now, there are only two developers but we get the impression that once a protocol is in place, we'll have several more. The question has been posed: We can use CVS to keep our code synchronized but how do we go about keeping our database schemas synchronized? The obvious answers involve using mysqldump to keep updated table creation scripts in CVS but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way..." At the very least, a file containing a list of schema changes would be necessary, but what about programs that can take two schemas, look at the differences, and return the commands necessary to make the one mirror the other?