FunkyGibbin' asks: "I've just started with a new company that has outsourced a project to translate a 4GL language - some 1.5 million lines of it - into J2EE. It's way behind schedule, and keeps on tripping over itself at acceptance test points (one item is fixed, others are broken). The outsourcing company chose as their conversion tool IBM's Rexx. They don't parse the 4GL to a syntax tree and then generate from that. They 'match patterns' which then generates the output. In addition, they're not even using the object oriented features of Rexx; it's in procedural Rexx! They have no regression test suite that runs through the original system and the newly generated system to ensure that they produce the same result [this apparently was 'our job' to do it manually]. Frankly, I consider the outsourcing company to have adopted completely the wrong approach, but I'm happy to be proven wrong if compiler construction or language translation experts can tell me that Rexx was their best choice, or even a reasonable choice! Any and all information gratefully accepted - this project has so far cost many dollars, and the board is unsure what to do with it."

AlainRoy writes "A new article was just published in First Monday, which suggests that most open source projects have rather few developers." He excerpts from the study, done by Sandeep Krishnamurthy: "Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge...most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1."

RoosterT writes: "QNX released its new IDE, called Momentics, for the QNX Neutrino RTOS today. Why is this significant? It is the first commercial product based on the Eclipse platform. The new version of the OS and a 'Standard' version of the IDE are both available here. There is also a nifty reference platform for hacking QNX onto an iPAQ."

FeeDBaCK writes: "As many of you may not know, Wine is currently being ported to Mingw for the ReactOS project. An update to the status of some of the Wine native Dlls under Windows was posted to the wine-devel mailing list. What this means is that there are now some Wine Dlls, which contain no Microsoft code, that appear to be interchangeable with the official Microsoft Dlls with no apparent loss in functionality. These Dlls include imagehlp.dll and riched32.dll. This comes as a great win for Wine, and brings them one step closer to bringing Windows applications to Linux." There's still a list of not-yet-functioning ones, but this is nice news.

Simon Cozens writes "The Apocalypses are Larry Wall's explanation of the design of Perl 6. In Apocalypse 5, Larry turns to redesigning regular expressions. He set out to intentionally 'break' a lot of the regular expression culture we're all used to, and these are the results - and they're mindblowing."

BlackGriffen writes "Anyone who is interested in making their own Gameboy Advance ROMs can go get an unofficial GBA SDK . With this and a flash ROM kit from someplace like lan-kwei.com, we could see a flourishing indie game making community. Available for Linux and Mac OS X only (for now, it's open source)."

retsofaj queries: "Almost all of the introductory programming books I've looked at focus on syntax, with possible digressions into a bit of semantics. What I haven't found are any great discussions that go beyond syntax and semantics and make it all the way to conceptual models. My goal is to develop a set of resources that can be used in an introductory course that teaches students programming starting with conceptual models, as opposed to starting with syntax."

mbadolato writes "use Perl; is reporting that the long-awaited Perl 5.8 has just been released in the form of RC1. It is a release candidate, and is not recommended for use in a production environment, but downloading and testing is strongly encouraged. Read the story for the announcement, and also read perldelta to see what's changed." I think this might be the best .0 release in Perl 5's history, and is will also be the first release of perl to ship with full support for Mac OS X (perl 5.6.1 had a few nagging issues), as well as Classic Mac OS.

Karin Kosina writes: "Real-time Free Software solutions are moving forward with the first release of ADEOS, a hardware abstraction layer allowing a real-time kernel and a general purpose kernel to co-exist. RTAI will eventually use ADEOS services, thus offering a real-time kernel based on a principle clearly different from the 5,995,745 US Patent. Read the official press release by Philippe Gerum, Karim Yaghmour, Paolo Mantegazza et al. for details."

An Anonymous Coward writes "LinuxDevices.com has just published a very detailed review by Jerry Epplin of the new book by Craig Hollabaugh, Embedded Linux -- Hardware, Software, and Interfacing, published by Addison Wesley Professional. Quoting briefly from the review, "A system developer planning to use Linux for an embedded design is faced with a number of decisions, not the least of which is whether to use a packaged commercial Embedded Linux distribution or to devise a homebrew solution from the available free tools and components. The custom approach has much appeal because of its low cost and radical flexibility, allowing one to choose any approach or tool rather than those chosen by the toolkit vendor. But with this flexibility and low cost comes the chaotic documentation typical of Linux. Thus, books like [this one] fill a significant void . . .""

Ryan writes "Apple recently published an article on using CVS with Mac OS X. 'This article covers some of the most commonly used features of CVS, with emphasis on using CVS with static and interpreted web files (HTML, PHP, Perl, etc).'" It's a decent article, a good primer on how to get started, and it's nice that Mac OS X comes with a CVS server. Personally, I really dig maccvs for my CVS client, and there are plenty of other clients for Mac OS out there too.

asqui writes "The First Annual Google Programming Contest, announced about 4 months ago has ended. The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee. His project converted addresses found in documents to latitude-longitude coordinates and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates, thereby allowing you to limit your query to a certain radius from a geographical location. Good for difficult questions like "Where is the nearest all-night pizza place that will deliver at this hour?". Unfortunately there is no mention whether this technology is on its way to the google labs yet. There are also details of 5 other excellent project submissions that didn't quite make it."

Aengus asks: "We have a round of job interviews coming up and the people we will be interviewing will be of different backgrounds, so we are looking for a core set of general questions that you could apply to any IT/CS candidate that would display that they knew what they were talking about. ie questions that are not language or job specific. So far all we have come up with 'What algorithm is your favourite or most commonly used?'....." What questions have you been asked on interviews you have participated in?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "This whitepaper at linuxdevices gives an introduction to Asterisk, an open source project which implements a Linux-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform. Asterisk turns a Linux system to the task of switching calls, and offers a large number of features to support communication in a business environment. According to the whitepaper, "Asterisk can do just about anything in software that a traditional PBX would do with specialized hardware. It unifies systems to provide tremendous possibilities for information services. Seamless use of Packet Voice allows Asterisk servers to intercommunicate throughout LANS, private WANS, and the Internet. Asterisk provides a sophisticated solution for IVR platforms, wide hardware interoperability, flexible wide area phone networks, and advanced telephony features -- all at reasonable cost." Apparently, Asterisk is supported on the Linux-based snom 100 VoIP phone, which has an embedded computer based on a Motorola PowerQUICC processor with 16MB of RAM and runs a Linux 2.4.18 kernel."

Dare Obasanjo writes: "XML namespaces are an integral aspect of most of the W3C's XML recommendations and working drafts, including XPath, XML Schema, XSLT, XQuery, SOAP, RDF, DOM, and XHTML. Understanding how namespaces work and how they interact with a number of other W3C technologies that are dependent on them is important for anyone working with XML to any significant degree." Some heavy reading below, as Dare completes the thought.

paul_harrison asks: "I am trying to introduce a new P2P protocol. It's technically superior in several respects to existing protocols, but there's one big problem: too few people using it. Now this is not a new problem, there's even a name for it, "Network Effect". It crops up all over the place: which websites become popular, which formats and protocols people use, which operating systems people use, even which side of the road people drive on... So my question is this: how do things like these overcome network effects and become popular?"

josephfeller writes: "'Meeting Challenges and Surviving Success: The 2nd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering' was held last week at the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2002), in Orlando, FL. The 15 workshop position papers and the workshop introduction are available for free download."

Daniel Grund writes: "I noticed Macromedia has an SDK to help programmers write software that can generate SWF files. So, being curious, I skimmed their licensing agreement to see what I could see. Amusingly enough, sections 3f and 3g actually give the SDK user the legal obligation to debug their code! Of course, only bugs that cause the SWF files to be erroneous are required to be fixed. However, in theory, if you wrote a program that makes buggy SWF files, you could be sued by Macromedia (but only if you do it using the SDK I guess.) How's that for pressure on the Quality Assurance people; you not only annoy the customers if you fail, you also get the company sued."

Twintop writes "Taken from the PHP.net homepage: 'A Beta version of PHP for NetWare is available on the Novell Developer Kit site. This version is based on the 4.0.8 (development) version of the PHP source code.' --- Well, even if it is an old version, it's better than nothing for NetWare peeps."

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has spoken with Larry McVoy, BitMover founder and primary BitKeeper author. BitKeeper, a distributed source control system, has been adopted by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds and condemned by free software icon Richard Stallman. In this interview, Larry looks back through the years, describing his exposure to computers and Linux. He also discusses the history of BitKeeper, from writing NSElite for Sun (which turned into their still used SCM, Teamware), to his desire to keep Linus from burning out, to the present day solution. The choice to not license BitKeeper under the GPL is also explained. Larry discusses much beyond Bitkeeper as well, exploring some of his other interests. Find the full interview on KernelTrap."