The Jakarta group had raised some concerns over the proposed Java Specification Participation Agreement. After some hemming and hawing, it appears that the Java Community Process chair (Sun) has agreed with the ASF's concerns - but IANAL ^? . If you have more info, paste it below.

Marcus Vollmer writes "I am looking for packet generation tools, or suggestions on how to go about writing one. I need to be able to generate ip packets with specific characteristics and send them to a network appliance, in order to simulate possible scenarios. For example, one appliance we want to test performs layer 7 operations, we want to be able to test splitting requests and responses up across multiple frames, force retransmits, and send different responses back. (eg. if the first request was split over 3 frames, we might want to send a reset and have the client retransmit using only 2 frames). I doubt there are any existing tools to do this, but we were thinking of writing a series of tools using netfilter, and placing a linux box between the client and the appliance running these filters to alter the packets. If there are existing tools to do this thats great, if not, any pointers and resources would be great. There is a good article in the Linux Journal (Feb and March issues), along with the information at netfilter.org, but we would be interested in hearing any ideas and suggestions from the slashdot community."

LiquidPC writes: "In this whitepaper on Linux Scheduler Latency, Clark Williams of Red Hat compares the performance of two popular ways to improve kernel Linux preemption latency -- the preemption patch pioneered by MontaVista and the low-latency patch pioneered by Ingo Molnar -- and discovers that the best approach might be a combination of both."

HPAVC writes: "Jabber today announced that Oracle has selected the Jabber as one of the primary interfaces for Oracle9i Application Server, enabling Jabber to deliver an industry-leading wireless Instant Messaging/IM system for Oracle App Server. The drivers will be downloadable via the Oracle Technology Network. Seems like its coming around well like previously mentioned here."

demultiplexer writes: "JavaRanch, a not for profit, volunteer-driven site dedicated to Java and probably the world's most popular Java website outside Sun, received a "cease and desist" letter from Sun's lawyers earlier this year for alleged trademark violations. It is being asked to rename to something like "The Java(tm) Technology Ranch" or "The Ranch, a friendly place for Java(tm) technology greenhorns." Quite a mouthful. Negotiations with Sun have failed so far and the ranch now considers renaming to GeekRanch and broadening its scope. Read the full story in all its gory detail."

rsd writes: "Have you ever thought that sed is too limited and only useful to Regular Expression scripts? Well, verde666, who works for Conectiva, proved that it can be used for games too. He wrote a sokoban game named sedsokoban with sed. There is even a screenshot."

elfdump writes "Tilly, one of the Perl Monks, has been threatened with lawsuits from his employer for performing open-source development. His company claims ownership on all of the GPL'd work he has performed since he was hired, including rights to portions of the Carp and Exporter modules. In addition to his code being pulled, Tilly's revolutionary ideas on regular expression engines (1, 2) may now never be fulfilled. In this statement, Tilly warns open-source developers of the dangers of the "work for hire" provision in contracts, which entitles a company to all of its employee's intellectual products, regardless of their applicability to the company or whether or not the ideas were developed on work time. Definitely something to consider if you perform OSS development." One thing to clarify: your employer does not own everything you do by law - only by the contract you may have signed. Brief rant below.

mirthe_v writes "Hi, I'm working for a small webcompany (about 20 people), with ColdFusion programmers and designing staff. We all work on a bunch of projects (Internet, intranet, cd-roms, etc.) on the same time, with different people and different or no methodologies. There is an ever growing need for documentation, but we have no idea where to start."

Joris van der Hoeven writes "It is a common belief that structured texts are best conceived using ASCII-based text editors like Emacs or VI. It is true that word processors like MS-Word have done a bad job on this issue. But does this mean that wysiwyg structured text editing would be impossible? We firmly believe the contrary and argue that such editors are both technically conceivable and desirable. Judge for yourself by taking a look at the GNU TeXmacs program, whose version 1.0 has just been released."

Amy Rich writes: "If you're are, or want to be, a professional sysadmin, buy this book! I've been doing UNIX system administration for nearly ten years now, and I've never seen another book like this on the market. Limoncelli and Hogan do a fantastic job of describing the 'whys' behind many of the best practices in the systems and network administrator world. I wish this book had been around when I started out; it would have saved so many headaches as I 'learned the hard way.' Read on (below) for the reasons Amy is so enthusiastic about this book, and to see if it might fit your situation.

tanveer1979 writes: "An article in The Times of India reports that Sun and Miscrosoft have released a joint bulletin about a security hole in the JVM code."

dfelznic writes: "The mp3 archives of CodeCon are now availble, which is news in itself. But what makes this real interesting is that they are being distributed by BitTorrent. BitTorrent allows users to download a file from multiple different people. Instead of everyone nailing one server, users get the file from other users. Furthurnet uses a similar technology to distribute legal bootlegs of concerts. The archive is available at the BitTorrent demo downloads page. As soon as I started downloading (cable modem) at around 300k I got a request for the file and began uploading at 40k. This could be the answer to the slashdot effect;) Now, who is going to be the first to complain about the use of mp3s instead of oggs?"

bkuhn writes: "The Free Software Foundation and Affero announced today the Affero General Public License (AGPL), a modified version of the GNU GPL. The AGPL includes a provision that protects a feature giving download access to the source code of a web service application. Public comment on the license should be sent to <agpl@fsf.org>."

President Chimp Toe writes "The landmark 1.0 release of bioperl has just been announced. Bioperl is an open-source collection of perl modules designed for the life-sciences community, offering a comprehensive range of modules for DNA and protein sequence manipulation and analysis. More broadly speaking, bioperl is a beautiful example of the virtues of open-source programming and code re-use. Assembled over the last few years by a diverse group of individuals from academia and the private sector, bioperl has made life easier for countless bioinformatics and computational biologists. It allows us to cut out the crappy part of programming (dealing with biological data formats, for instance), and concentrate on the fun part - answering biological questions. Thanks all those involved - keep up the good work!"

erlando writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution is running an interview with Joel Spolsky (from JoelOnSoftware) in which he responds to this earlier thread here on Slashdot. In short: He defends his position and makes some interesting remarks on Linux and the desktop."

drfickle writes: "Although there has not yet been a formal announcement, David Merrill has stepped down as the Linux Documentation Project Collection Editor & Review Coordinator and appointed Joy Yokley Goodreau as his replacement. Joy has been very active in the LDP community for well over a year and has represented the LDP at many Linux conferences. She is an employee of the IBM Linux Technology Center on the LDoc team."

N. Megill writes: "Computer scientist and obfuscated code aficionado John Tromp has devised what may be the world's most compact Universal Machine (Postscript research paper) to date. Written in the 'S-K combinatory logic' language, which has only 2 commands (S and K), his UM can be encoded with only 272 bits (34 bytes), compared to 5495 bits for the Universal Turing Machine given in Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind ."

Suhani writes "The dream of using your remote control to interact with television broadcast shows has finally become a reality, thanks to interactive television (iTV). Here, John Papageorge explores the opportunities and challenges of creating applications for the set-top box platforms (such as OpenTV, AOLTV, and Worldgate) that allow for interactive television."

replicant_deckard writes "In this short but insightful essay Shawn Gordon, the founder of theKompany, explains why GPL doesn't work for software companies producing graphical and end-user friendly stuff. This reminds us that GPL has so far been useful just for infrastructure-level hacker stuff like operating systems, databases etc. " Of course, it's been used for end user - OpenOffice, GAIM, and other projects.

Niels Provos writes: "Even though I should be working on my disseration proposal right now, I got side tracked with a little project. Markus and I have been working on a 'Privilege Separated OpenSSH.' The basic idea is that OpenSSH starts two processes, one privileged and one unprivileged. The unprivileged process deals with all the network data processing, while the privileged process monitors and decides if authentication was successful. This reduces the impact that bugs in for example third party libraries can have on OpenSSH. We hope that any privilege escalation will not be possible any more in the future." This privilege separation should show up in future versions of OpenSSH, including the portable version.