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?

James Morris writes: "Here's an update on the Linux Security Modules project (LSM). In April last year, the NSA proposed SELinux at the first Linux Kernel Summit. Following feedback from Linus, the LSM project was initiated by Crispin Cowan to develop a generic access control framework for Linux which would allow different types of security policies to be implemented as loadable kernel modules. Rather than having to choose one security model, LSM aims to provide a framework for incorporating a variety of advanced security mechanisms into Linux with a minimal effect on the base kernel. This week, Chris Wright (the principal maintainer) formally announced patches for the 2.4 and 2.5 kernels. Chris will be presenting LSM at this year's Kernel Summit and giving a talk at OLS, hopefully kicking off discussion on acceptance of LSM into the main kernel. Projects which have already been ported to LSM include SELinux, LIDS, DTE, Openwall and Posix.1e Capabilities. Check out the newly re-vamped web site for downloads, documentation and general information."

Anonymous Coward writes "We have just finished a study that shows how user interface design flaws allow users on Kazaa to share their personal files without their knowledge. In a laboratory user study, only 2 out of 12 subjects were able to correctly determine that Kazaa was sharing their entire hard drive. We looked at the current Kazaa network and discovered that many users are sharing personal information such as email and data for financial programs such as Microsoft Money. To see if other users on Kazaa were aware of this and taking advantage of users ignorance, we ran a Kazaa client for 24 hours with dummy personal files. During this time, files named "Inbox.dbx" and "Credit Cards.xls" were downloaded from our client by several unique users. The tech report is online, or see our lab web page."

ignipotentis asks: "I've been given the task to find a multi-platform (windows, macintosh, linux) version control system. Currently, CVS is being used, and it isn't working quite as we expected it to. We are creating large Flash files and CVS is having problems keeping everything straight. It apparently doesn't like the large file sizes. I was wondering what other decent version control software is available that doesn't require a huge sum of money?"