craybob queries: "I'm a developer for a small software group that will soon migrate from using Rouge Wave to using the C++ STL. I just left the week-long Software Developers 2002 conference, where I heard the great minds in software tell us all of the best ways to take full advantage of the STL. (I just wanted to give a quick thanks to Stephen Dewhurst and Scott Meyers) From this I came away with the feeling that this is the Holy Grail of C++. I'm sure these guys are right and that it is great, but the truth is that I'm a skeptic, so what are the downsides to the STL?"

David Kennedy writes: "Java Tools For Exteme Programming: Mastering Open Source Tools including Ant, JUnit and Cactus by Hightower & Lesiecki is a welcome addition to my bookshelf at work. It tackles a gap in the Java book market in dealing with the thorny issues of testing, integration and deployment." The rest of his review is below.

Initri writes "I read a news article (here) on Gamespot that the Freespace 2 source code has been released by Volition. You can download it there, or you can also download it here. Since I don't have the game installed anymore, I wasn't able to try out the code, but it did successfully compile under MSVC 6.0. Looks like there's a lot of learning potential here." Freespace 2 was one of my favorite games, and I wasted many hours playing it.

Ben Jackson asks: "I subscribe to the phone company's voicemail offering because it can take messages even when the line is busy. Although I would prefer vgetty, I can't afford to have several lines and a hunt group just to avoid missing calls. What I'm looking for is a tool you could call `fetchvmail' -- it would use a voice modem to retrieve voicemail and forward it on as a MIME attachment. Does anything like this exist?" We already have mgetty-voice and its ilk, why not something like this? Since many phone companies are now providing voice mail with the service, this would be a very useful utility indeed.

Agelmar writes "A Request for Discussion (RFD) for the creation of comp.lang.php has been posted to news.announce.newgroups. This RFD begins a period of discussion on whether or not the new group is a good idea and/or appropriate. After a period of approximately 21-28 days, a Call for Votes will be posted, at which time people can vote on the creation of the new group. (There can be no voting at this time)."

Embedded Geek asks: "There's an interesting opinion piece at Embedded Systems Magazine about [embedded] programming being a dead end job. The author cites burnout ('Pushing ones and zeroes around doesn't sound like a lot of work, but getting each and every one of a hundred million perfect is tremendously difficult.'), prestige, and skill obsolescence as big reasons for programmers to quit or to go 'over to the dark side' and join management or marketing positions. While the piece primarily addresses embedded programmers, the issue is rising for IT workers and other tech workers. When the age issue is combined with the export of jobs offshore, it makes me nervous just to be pushing 35..." Even though the market is going thru a rough patch, and the number of detrimental aspects to programming are increasing (ageism and so forth), I still do not feel that programming is a dead end job. Computers are going nowhere folks, and as long as they are around, programmers will be necessary. People who are in this career for the money or the prestige may not like it after a while, but the people who are in this for something else will tolerate quite a bit before deciding to opt out. The simple measure here: "as long as you love doing it, you'll keep doing it." Isn't this true for any career?

linderdm queries: "I am a perl web programmer who has taken a new job that requires me to do web 'programming' using XML, XSL, and Oracle XSQL. My minor experience with XSL so far has been horrible! It is so hard to do things that were very easy in Perl (looping!?!) and just seems incredibly verbose. I am curious to find out what the Slashdot community's experience has been with web programming in procedural languages (Perl, Java, etc) then switching to tag based XML/XSL. Am I wrong to be trying to do procedural programming with XSL?"

Yokaze writes: "Intels C++ and Fortran compilers are now available for Windows and Linux. The compiler for Linux provides higher compatibility with the GNU C-compiler including compability to the upcoming GCC-3.1 C++-ABI (binary compability) and support for several GNUisms in the syntax (PDF). To quote Intel: 'The 6.0 release of the Intel C++ compiler has improved support for the GNU C language extensions and is now able to build the Linux kernel with minor work arounds for both the IA-32 and Itanium architectures.' Little reminder: Running such a kernel is, of course, not supported by the kernel developers. Evaluation copies are available for download, but requires previous registration."

Bryan Richard writes: "In the grand tradition of shameless self-promotion, I thought you might like to hear about my print zine Py. The first issue is already out and the second ships in June 2002. Articles in the first issue range from extending Python with C by Alex Martelli, author of the forthcoming Python in a Nutshell, to CGI template processing to scientific programming with Numeric. Learn all you like at www.PyZine.com. In a small way, picking up where OSPJ left off."

An Anonymous Coward queries: "OSGi is a Java technology for allowing third party venders to control your domestic appliances (Fridge, Front Door, Security System etc). I have been tasked to implement OSGi apps, but cannot find any working examples, is anybody working on OSGi applications?"

emmetropia writes: "PHP 4.2.0 has been released, with experimental Apache 2 support, and lots of other improvements and fixes. Check it out!"

SlashDotDashDot asks: "As a developer for 20+ years, I've developed a fairly fine tuned way to find 'The Zone' for optimal programming - a combination of furniture arrangement (PC and chair), lighting and music. I also have a pretty good sense of what time of day is best for working on a particular set of problems. But this is what works for me. My company is growing and I'm needing to mediate working conditions between my clients and consultants. This has me wondering what others have found important for finding 'The Zone' in their programming lives. How fast can you get there? How long does it last? What do you do that helps keep that state? What are the major interrupters?" We also touched on this issue in a similar article, last year. However, many of you may have ways of attaining "the zone" that don't depend on any of the factors listed above. If you have a method that works for you, please share. It may work for others.

snyperm writes "stepwise.com indicates that the April 2002 Developer Tools have been seeded to developers and is scheduled for release sometime in the coming weeks. The improvement of gcc 3.1 alone is noteworthy as arstechnica indicates there should be somewhat substantial increases in speed ahead for Mac OS X. One step closer to 10.2!" Also included, according to the story, is a ProjectBuilder 2.0 beta.

Reader the_rev_matt writes with this review of Hungry Minds' Zope Bible. He finds both merit and shortcomings in this book, and suggests that "Bible" may be too grand a word for this decent-but-spotty work. Read on for his reasoning.

Havoc Pennington wrote a piece on creating good user interfaces, with special attention toward GNOME 2. See also the advogato thread.

Pelerin writes "In the latest Crypto-Gram, Bruce Schneier has written an interesting essay with some thoughts about the current lack of business incentives for the deployment and production of more secure software. His main recommendation/prediction is this: "Step one: enforce liabilities. This is essential. Today [...] the marketplace rewards low quality. More precisely, it rewards early releases at the expense of almost all quality. If we expect CEOs to spend significant resources on security -- especially the security of their customers -- they must be liable for mishandling their customers' data. If we expect software vendors to reduce features, lengthen development cycles, and invest in secure software development processes, they must be liable for security vulnerabilities in their products." Schneier's five-step plan for thinking about security is also good.

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm just getting ready to plunge into a new project, and joy of joys have been given complete freedom when it comes to the implementation language - so long as the program will build and run on both x86 Linux and Windows. Now, I don't need a GUI, this is systems stuff only (processing binary executables in fact, so lots of bitfiddling and big nasty algorithms over hairy data structures) so pretty much all I need are standard IO libraries. C is currently at the top of my list..but what other language should I be looking at? I'm happy to learn a new one, and have the go ahead to do it..like I say, they want absolute speed. Can someone suggest a better language? C++ is out, it does come with a speed hit (using C++ properly anyway, not as a souped-up C). If I'm gonna take the speed hit, I may as well consider something like Ocaml which might let me claw the speed back with better algorithms and data structures.."

asa writes: "Today mozilla.org made available for download binaries of Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1. RC1 will be used to gather feedback and crash data in preparation for an RC2 or a final release. Please hammer on these builds, report bugs and send in talkback reports. New to RC1 are fixes for about 2000 bugs including more than 150 crash fixes so grab a build and let us know what you think."

Moridineas writes: "Since the wine project decided to change from an X11 style license to an LGPL license, a BSD fork has emerged, called Rewind (for 'Re-engineering Windows,' or something like 'Rewind to the old Windows days' in the words of Ove Kaaven) and currently hosted at http://rewind.sourceforge.net (but looking for a new home). The announcement of the fork and some additional information was posted to the wine-license mailing list [winehq.com]. At least one company [transgaming.com] has already stated that they will not be able to work with the LPGL wine (citing among other things, possible DMCA violations) and will be actively helping Rewind (with cash and code it seems)."

Anonymous Coward writes "Herb Sutter, a C++ luminary, recently joined Microsoft's Developer Platform and Evangelism Division, where he acts as a liaison between Microsoft and the C++ developer community. In this interview he speaks about his new job, the role of C++ in the .NET framework, and the current state of C++."