Reader cpfeifer contributes the review below of O'Reilly's Programming Jabber: if your job (or hobby) includes instant messaging in all its glory, Jabber is a free-beer, free-speech framework for setting up instant messaging systems not bound to a single server in the middle. As cpfeifer points out, instant messaging can mean a lot more than popping an on-screen note to your friend in Des Moines -- machines and programs can use a general purpose communication system like this, with no human middleman required.

eval writes "The papers accepted to SIGGRAPH 2002 have been announced, and are starting to appear online. You can find a list with links to preprints on this page put together by Tim Rowley at Brown (a great service to the community)."

ChunKing writes "The Computer History Simulation Project is a loose Internet-based collective of people interested in restoring historically significant computer hardware and software systems by simulation. The goal of the project is to create highly portable system simulators and to publish them as freeware on the Internet, with freely available copies of significant or representative software. I can't wait 'til someone fixes me an OS/390 emulator to remind me of the days when I used to be an Ops Analyst for a major bank..."

An Anonymous Coward writes "It appears that the latest version of Python has been released. "We are pleased to announce the release of Python 2.2.1, on April 10, 2002. This is a bug-fix release for Python 2.2 and supersedes the 2.2 release." As far as what's new, it says,"This being a bug-fix release, there have been no exciting new features implemented since 2.2 -- just heaps of fixes.""

Guylhem writes: "The Linux Documentation Project has a new domain name. You can now find the LDP on the web at www.tldp.org This name change came about due to some difficulties with the linuxdoc domain name (see linuxdocs.org, linuxdoc.com...) : in order to have clear rights to the domain name, the LDP had to relocate its primary services site. You can still reach access the LDP by pointing your browser to www.linuxdoc.org, but you will be redirected to www.tldp.org site." A few more details below.

Linuxdoc.org will be supported for compability reasons for the next 5 years. This move may come as a surprise for many LDP faithful, but the majority of the staff believed that the change was necessary to assure that the LDP would be available for the next wave of new Linux users.

The LDP will take care of this opportunity to improve internationalization - english (en.tldp.org), french (fr.tldp.org) and brasilian (br.tldp.org) content will be online soon. We intend to share as many resources (code, cvs, systems) as possible between the different localised versions. Within the next weeks, www.tldp.org will take you to the language your browser has been configured to accept as default. Feel like a closet writer? Whatever your mother tongue is, join us now!"

paradesign writes "O'Reilly is running a nice article on AltiVec in the G4 chip. The article includes examples, with code, showing its effectiveness. For everyone who is uneducated as to exactly what Altivec is, this is a must read."

windows bios world writes: "As this article states, 'There was little love from the leaders of the Java movement toward Microsoft's new framework for creating Web services, but there were signs of accommodation among some at the conference.' One of the most popular booth-trinkets was a button with a slash through it that said .NOT. A video shown at the first keynote depicted the Java Smart Car driving circles around a Bill Gates look-alike. The back of Bill's T-shirt, of course, was emblazoned with a J-flat logo instead of J-sharp."

PeterMAN writes: "If you want to learn how to share your systems on a heterogeneous local network and how to use it to compare and test applications on different operating systems and architectures, then take a look at these two articles that compare SSH, remote X, VNC, and other technologies as ways of remotely running applications." That link is to the second part of the series; here's the first installlment.

Uwe Hermann writes: "Pretty exactly two years ago I started to work on the Unmaintained Free Software site. The site has come a long way since then, so here's a small coverage of the new features, the projects which have been added, those which already have found a new maintainer, and some more or less interesting statistics." This is a great project, the kind of thing that's not glamorous, just useful, interesting and needed. Uwe's report is below. (And Oh Yes, there are plenty of unclaimed projects for interested maintainers to adopt.) This also seems a nice time to point out that you could be reading this story from the Developers section slashbox, which you can turn on by adjusting your preferences.

Max Hyre writes "Apropos (!= man -k :-) RIAA, web radio, and other such data-dispersal disagreements, here's a new way to do it your way: a fully software-driven radio receiver; just strap some off-the-shelf DAC hardware into a generic computer, and let the software do the rest. While I can just barely spell `sideband', this looks like it could be more fun than any set you ever had before, especially after those in the know build up some kewl apps for the great unwashed like me. They're also dreaming of GPS, cellular phones, &c.. My only gripe is that the web pages proper don't seem to have any cookbook recipes for the hardware; maybe that's in the docs with the source, or maybe this is strictly for the experienced, for now."

toadnine writes "Things you never imagined you could do with Python and a 2.4 kernel... check out SUBTERFUGUE. (Source: Need To Know)." A blue pill for applications.

dosten writes "ExtremeTech has a nice intro article on distributed and grid computing." Someday someone will successfully implement something like Progeny's NOW and all of these assorted hacks at building a distributed computing system will be superseded.

Oink.NET writes: "An interview with Roger Sessions discusses, among other things, his software fortress model for designing enterprise software systems, complete with guards, grunts, allies, and drawbridges. Enterprise systems are treated as mutually suspicious, marginally cooperating software fortresses, which he claims is perfect for the coexistence of J2EE and .NET systems."

BorrisYeltsin writes "perl.com has Exegesis 4 from the Damian, in repsonse to Larry's latest Apocalypse. This installment covers news of the new flow and block control changes, fully integrated exceptions and some other cool stuff!"

juan large moose writes: "According to this post on the Samba Technical mailing list, the Storage Network Industry Association will shortly release version 1.0 of their own SMB/CIFS technical reference. Version 0.9 has been available for some time. Last week, Microsoft released their own CIFS specification, but there was a catch. According to a statement in the document, readers were not permitted to implement software based on the Microsoft spec. unless they signed a license agreement. The SNIA document comes with no such restrictions. Several organizations, including IBM, HP, the jCIFS Team, Network Appliance, the Samba Team, etc. contributed to the SNIA document."

maloi writes: "A couple of years ago, I wrote some software to mimic the genetic image generation software Karl Sims describes in his paper Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics. After neglecting it for a long time, I finally got around to it again a few weeks ago, cleaned it up a bit, and released it under the GPL. You can now find it at Sourceforge. There's also a bit more info about it at Kaizolabs. I should mention that this is my first foray into open source development, so if there's anyone interested in both working on it and perhaps lending some guidance to me, it would be greatly appreciated!"

Pimpbot5000 queries: "I've searched high and low for a book/website/etc to get me up to speed on plugin architectures, but so far the pigeons aren't delivering. Where can a programmer go to learn about the different approaches, and their respective (dis)advantages? Most resources I've come across merely point you in the direction of creating plugins for existing projects, or quickly skip over the design phase and get straight to the 'and now you use dlopen()/dlsym() to...' part." I know quite a few plug-in architectures are language specific, but a resource that went over several schemes for each language would be a valuable thing for every coder's library.

cascadefx writes "Looks like CPAN has changed its focus to support Java now. A look at their page shows that is is now CJAN, the Comprehensive Java Archive Network where you will find all things Java." This should be a great boon to Java, a language renown for, well, sucking. But at the expense of the greatest of all languages? It's just too sad for me to express in words. I mean, who uses java anyway?

Erich writes "Debian Developer Simon Richter announced in this posting to debian-devel that he Intends to Package (ITP) a R00tk1t for Debian Linux. The rootkit will make use of debian mechanisms such as diversions to divert the original /bin/ls commands and replace them cleanly by the modified versions. Even reinstalling or upgrading the file-utils package (containing /bin/ls) will then not remove the modified /bin/ls and the rootkit will stay active, being probably the first upgrade-resistant rootkit! This rootkit will then be easy to install by doing "apt-get install rootkit" - a major useability aspect for our fellow wannabe-hackers, making Debian the premier choice for them."

bLanark asks: "I've used a variety of programming languanges over the years, but recently started using Java commercially (as opposed to just playing at home). As soon as I was on that Java project, I became a rampant stallion, never left my wife alone, sexually. She even started sleeping in the spare room just to get some rest on some nights! Soon, I was back on C++ (due to a budget cut and re-org). I am no longer a stallion (I won't go into more details!). My theory is that java's so easy, so after conquering an API a day (JDOM, Swing,...) I just came home and carried on conquering. Now, I have to work for a living again, and it doesn't leave much energy. Do other slashdotters have similar experience? Is lisp tantric? Do assembler programmers favour wham-bam-that's-the-end-of-that-non-maskable-inter rupt-where's-the-remote-control-honey-can-you-get- me-a-beer? What's the best programming language for attracting sexual partners? What about Operating Systems? Does MS == S&M?" Does C/C++ dampen your love life? Does Perl please your partner? Can you jive with Java? Inquiring minds want to know.