Daniel Stone writes "In results released by Project Secretary Manoj Srivastava today, Bdale Garbee was elected Project Leader ahead of Raphael Hertzog and Branden Robinson. Congratulations Bdale! And no CmdrTaco, the debs are not (quite) yet ready, but they *are* very close." The elections page has more information.

proub writes "If you're one of the zillions of designers who love your Visibone web-safe-palette mouse pads or posters, thought I'd mention that they seem to have added an "unsafe palette" poster as well. If you haven't seen them before, suffice to say it's a great way to find safe color combinations that work (the Color Lab doesn't suck, either). I refer to the web-palette poster constantly when doing www work, nice to have a similar version for GUI design where you have the whole big messy world of colors available."

cascadefx writes "It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, PerlBox, written in Perl and Tk. I found this posted in response to an article on Perl Monks asking if Perl was obsessed with CGI?. Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting." I wonder how fast it runs?

Dejected @Work writes: "At JavaOne it was hinted that Sun and the Apache Software Foundation have worked out how open source software could participate in the JCP (Java Community Process) but the precise resolution was not disclosed. This developerWorks interview with Jason Hunter (Apache rep. for the JCP) clear things up a little and specifically explains what this means for open source developers and the JCP."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox usability column details how kids use the web. Even if you don't design sites for kids, some of the results are very interesting. As you might expect, kids like sound and animation more than adults. They're also much more likely to click on ads ... but mostly because they don't realize that's what they are. And although there are some differences, the testing shows kids really aren't that different than adults, preferring consistent, simple and clear interaction. (And they hate slow load times, too!)"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "A lot has happened since Borland open sourced their Interbase database. Borland has since come out with a new closed source version of Interbase, forcing the Phoenix group to fork the codebase, calling their new database Firebird. Over the past month they have come out with Firebird version 1.0 for various UNIX variants, Windows, and Mac OS X and are now working on moving the code base from C to C++. A great description of Firebird is found here. To show your support, order Firebird on CD."

Anders Schneiderman asks: "I'm involved in a project that's planning to create open source toys for educating people around complicated policy questions (e.g., policy on prescription drugs). We'd really like to use Flash as our main language, but we're concerned about the fact that the major Flash development tools cost $500--more than some of the community group folks we want to involve can afford. I took a look at Sourceforge, and while there are plenty of projects that offer ways to create Flash for free, there didn't seem to be any v.1 general development tools. Did I miss something? If you want to build Flash and you don't want to pay $500, how do you do it (aside from copying somebody else's, which as Bill Gates told us is just bad, bad, bad)? And if there aren't any powerful open source tools for it, any thoughts on why?"

green pizza writes: "Linux Kernel 2.5.8 has been relased. Major improvements include readahead cache tweaks and support for hot-swap PCI on certain IBM machines." Here's the changelog; if you want to experiment with the bleeding edge, check out the list of mirrors provided by kernel.org.

Philippe Fremy writes "Thomas Capricelli, Mickael Marchand and me are pleased to present the first ever stable version of KVim, finally bringing "the power of VIM with KDE's friendliness". This release contains a port of the standalone editor Vim 6.0 to Qt/KDE (2 and 3) and a KDE KPart Component. The component can currently embed either of GVim or KVim in Konqueror (screenshots), with out-of-process embedding. Further work is required before proper support for KDevelop, KMail and Kate is available, but things are moving forward." As everyone knows, Vim is the best (only?) text editor, and KDE is the best (only?) desktop system. Heh.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "John Looney recently posted to the lkml, asking about the possibility of one computer serving multiple users. That is to say, multiple keyboards, mice, monitors, etc, hooked up to a single server. The advantages of such a setup in a lab type environment are obvious. The following discussion ranges through several technical issues with such a configuration, including a kernel limitation of one virtual terminal active at a time, and the typical lack of quality in long video cables. However, none of the issues raised are unbeatable. James Simmons, for example, has been working on cleaning up the virtual terminal code, with many related fixes already merged into Dave Jones' tree."

Nathan Yocom writes: "pGina is a GPL'd extension for the authentication portion of Windows 2000/XP. Why replace that portion of the OS? Because we don't like being forced to have a Windows server around just for user authentication. So pGina uses plugins to achieve modularity. This allows for user authentication via ANY number of means, both existing and future. For instance, there is already some work being done on an LDAP plugin, a SMB plugin, an SSH plugin and others (SQL, Kerberos, etc). For those who aren't developers it is easy to install, and for those who are developers, a simple yet powerful plugin SDK makes it easy to develop plugins. (Technically pGina should work in NT 4 as well, but we have NOT tested it)"

An enthusiastic Anonymous Coward writes: "Id Software and Activision released the sources of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Single-player and multiplayer included. Unbelievable! Another great surprise from Id Software!" Update: 04/14 15:19 GMT by T : Note: don't get your hopes up -- these are the sources for the game code, not the engine.

mbadolato writes: "php.net has the latest 4.2.0 Release Canditate, RC3. The release contains support for the recent Apache 2.0.35 release as well as numerous collected bug fixes. For more information, see the PHP QA website."

zulux writes "Microsoft is actively encouraging WiFi (802.11b) hardware manufacturers to strip their devices of costly electronics, and use Microsoft software/drivers to make up the slack. And you thought WinModems were bad!"

Jeremy Geelan writes "The editor-in-chief of the world's largest journal devoted to Java wonders whether, with the arrival of Microsoft's C# programming language on the scene, Java perhaps has only 5 years or so left to live. Javaland has erupted! This is a little like Bill Gates wondering out loud whether to send Scott McNealy a Christmas card. But is Alan Williamson right? Read this short article and decide for yourself."

Consul writes " DAKOTA, a powerful toolkit for doing engineering analysis, has now been released under the GPL. Space Daily has the details about the tookkit."

skunkeh writes "Google have released the first beta of their Web APIs package. Used in conjunction with a free license key this SOAP based web service allows developers to execute up to 1000 automated queries a day, but is currently available for non-commercial use only. The download comes with Java and .NET code examples and includes a WSDL description for use with other SOAP supporting languages." There's also a write up about uses on Userland.

TedCheshireAcad writes: "A story at the Register asserts that MS's 'Trustworthy Computing' campaign has failed once again, with eight new IIS vulnerabilities discovered. The vulnerabilities include such delights as a buffer overflow in the ASP ISAPI filter, improper HTTP header handling, FrontPage Server Extensions problems and more goodies. Both IIS 4 and 5 are vulnerable. Thanks to eEye and @Stake for their advisories here(1) and here(2)."

Irish writes: "One of the biggest complaints about Web services is the security issues. IBM and Microsoft just released specifications describing Web Services Security (WS-Security), or enhancements to SOAP messaging to provide quality of protection through message confidentiality and authentication. There is an developerWorks overview document and a whitepaper describing this Web service security model."

fader writes: "On gnome.org is an article indicating that there are now GTK bindings for C#. Basically, when combined with MONO, this means that you should be able to write at least some rudimentary .NET applications for GNOME." Update: 04/12 00:30 GMT by T : Hetz points out that Qt already has this capability (also in Alpha): here's a link to the Qt-CSharp project, and a proof-of-concept screenshot as well.