Charles Connell writes: "What makes a programmer highly productive? Is it lines of code per day? Lines of good code? In this article, I examine the concept of software productivity. I look at some of the standard definitions for productivity and show why they are wrong. I then propose a new definition that captures what programming really is about." Read on for Connell's stab at a better way of evaluating the worth of programmer time.

RHW22 writes "Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro looks at shareware, focusing on the question of whether or not this industry can survive if people never actually cough up $$ for the product. He mentions Ambrosia Software, 'a developer of Macintosh games and utilities in Rochester, N.Y., could stop guessing after it revised its payment system last year. The new system aims to stop people from using pirated registration codes in two ways.' Read his column here." We mentioned this several weeks ago, with a link to Ambrosia's description of their system and what led to its adoption.

LarryWest42 writes: "This article lists a number of sobering security problems with SOAP (not only the avoidable one of tunneling through HTTP). I found it thanks to Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram newsletter."

Dre writes: "Today marks a special coincidence. First, Adam Treat released the initial version of Qt bindings for C#, which consists of 476 Qt classes converted to C#. The bindings work with the Mono compiler, runtime environment and class libraries, enabling a fully Open Source implementation of C# for Qt. While not yet ready for a real application, Adam has managed to write and execute a Hello World! program (screenshot). KDE bindings are on the drawing board. Shortly thereafter, Phil Thompson, Jim Bublitz and theKompany.com released KDE 2 and KDE 3 bindings for Python. Together with the Java, Objective C and C bindings in the kdebindings module, as well as the Ruby bindings, KDE is providing developers a broad gamut of application development languages."

sunhou writes: "The AMS published a lecture by Donald Knuth called All Questions Answered (pdf), where Knuth simply responded to questions from the audience. Topics ranged from errors in software ('I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"') to how he gets distracted by fonts on restaurant menus, to software patents. There were some really good questions (and responses)."

djmcmath asks: "Does anyone have any experience with Open Source Software and/or GPL'd software in military applications? I'm only asking because I'm involved in work on the combat systems for a new submarine, and had considered an Open Source solution. (I apologize, I must be intentionally vague for obvious reasons.) So ignore the obvious questions (Is it really suitable? Are closed-source proprietary options better? Does MS have a good solution?) and skip to the good stuff. What about the fact that my code would be classified Secret under US Code Umptifratz? I cannot distribute my code (and it's changes) without being tried for treason. What happens to the rest of the combat system code when I submit my GPL'd module?" Open Source and the Military: it's a tricky combination of keeping what can be open, open and keeping your secrets...well, secrets! However, open source in the military need not be as high profile as weapons systems. One of the only major OS projects that I'm aware of that had any form of military involvement was GRASS, the open-source GIS system. I'm sure there may be a few others out there. Does anyone know of other OS projects with military association? If there are any projects out there that interface with classified bits, how did you deal with those issues?

nickbrown writes: "In this interview with the KOffice development team it is revealed that only about 4-6 people are working on the suite of applications. It would appear they lack the resources to keep up with the likes of openoffice. Worth a read as it highlights the troubles they are having trying to produce a truly productive office suite for KDE."

Gerv writes: "mozilla.org are in the last stages of the Mozilla relicensing project (from [MN]PL to a [MN]PL/LGPL/GPL tri-license), but are still looking for a number of Mozilla contributors to ask them for permission to relicense. They want the help of the community in tracking them down. Have you seen these hackers?"

webjam writes: "JXTA for JXME shows a practical use of Sun's JavaTM 2 Platform Micro Edition. "Project JXTA is short for Juxtapose. It is in recognition that peer to peer is juxtapose to client server or Web based computing." The purpose of project JXTA for J2ME is to provide JXTA functionality to java enabled cell-phones and handhelds. We will soon see applications released based on these projects and technologies. Those who understand and can efficiently develop applications using these tools will no doubt have a prosperous future. Even with a limited knowledge of programming, working applications can be created using the APIs provided. Check out the Software requirements and build instructions. Once running it will provide application developers with the emulation environment; documentation and examples needed to develop Java technology applications targeted at CLDC/MIDP compliant mobile phones and entry level PDAs. Also, check out some of the main JXTA projects and applications developed so far..... Oh, I almost forgot, for sending instant messaging from your mobile toys, I would suggest you go ahead and spring for that teeny external keyboard :-) Alphanumeric just doesn't cut it."

superfred queries: "I work for a Java-based software company, and have been tasked with researching Java on handhelds...I've managed to dig up information on which handhelds support Java (most of the major ones do), but what puzzles me, is if any company is actually *using* this for any reason (besides Java-based handhelds/phones). The Palm OS has apparently supported Java since the Palm V, but has anyone written any software to take advantage of it? Are there any major software developers working on Java applications for handhelds? It seems like a great deal of effort has been used in getting Java on these platforms, but nothing's really utilizing it."

jscribner writes "Data these days tends to an unstructured form, be it text (like the web, email, or books), spoken word, or even in DB's with unique organization (and thus a discrete language). There's a new article on Unstructured Data in Think Research; it's an overview of the challenges, progress, and potential rewards in this area. I'm leaving on your doorstep because, to me, it's a good launching point for discussion of several interesting possibilities: /. as a minable DB of ideas, email identified by interpretation rather than keywords, emotive XML, etc."

An Anonymous Coward queries: "I work on a fairly large-sized project with at least a dozen developers. Advanced tools like CVS and ClearCase allow concurrent development, and provide merging tools to merge in different changes to the same file. This can be a significant productivity gain, particularly with files that are unavoidably common to several developers (C header files, most notoriously). During crunch times, such as before delivery deadlines, we often find that we are checking in changes to the same file several times a day, often hourly. The problem does not seem to be with conflicting changes to the same lines of code, but rather with developers knowing the sequence in which concurrent changes will be checked in. It is not possible to always be aware of who is checking in what and when, so programmers submitting patches to the baseline often have to redo those patches multiple times in a day in order to have them applied. Have other programming projects developed solutions for dealing with this problem?" The submitter proposes another solution, below, how well would it work?

mouseman writes "Geodesic Systems, a maker of memory management/debugging software, has a live demo of their Linux product running on the Mozilla nightly builds. It's pretty damn slick -- it detects memory leaks and can show where in the code the leaked memory was allocated and actually recover (GC) the leaked memory. The Mozilla reports actually look pretty good, which jibes with my own impressions of how much it has improved -- see for yourself."

rossjudson writes: "There's a little war going on in your computer; it's a war that you might be aware of if you're an experienced computer user. If you're new to the game, there's very little chance you know about it, but it affects you, and it gets worse, not better. The battleground in this war is your CPU, your disk space, and your system's stability." He's got a particular beef with NEW.NET, but lays out (in the article below) what he thinks is a workable, generalized code of conduct for software installation.

Eugenia writes: "Many are the developers who prefer Perforce in favor of CVS. There is a new player in the field now though. It is called Vesta and it is a replacement for both CVS and 'make'. It handles source revision control and automated construction. It is the result of over 10 years of research and development at the Compaq/Digital Research Center. Just last August Compaq gave the 'ok' to GPL Vesta and since then the 4-member team worked hard to finish up the port to x86 Linux (prior to that, Vesta only worked on Alpha and Tru64 systems). Now, the first Free version is available for download. For a summary of some of the features that make Vesta interesting, see this page."

Allen Reitz writes: "Sixteen of the top collegiate programmers in the country are left to compete in the 2002 Sun Microsystems and TopCoder Collegiate Challenge. The semi-final and final rounds will take place at MIT on April 19-20, 2002 where all 16 contestants vie for the $100,000 prize. Four regional finalists and 12 'wild cards' make up the final 16 out of 512 that were selected to compete. The four regional finalists include: Ben Wilhelm, Oberlin College; Trayton Otto Georgia Institute of Technology; Tom Sirgedas, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; Dan Adkins, University of California-Berkeley. Other schools that are sending contestants include: Cal. Tech, Stanford, Univ. of Minn., Virginia Tech, MIT, Michigan Tech, Purdue and the University of Central Florida. If you live in the Boston area and are interested in viewing a programming competition, feel free to stop by the University Park Hotel at MIT on April 19th or view the finals on April 20."

Yogidabear writes: "According to the Apache group, Open Source has been officially locked out of the Java process with JSR 99 (Java Specification Participation Agreement). The article on the Jakarta site notes that IBM in particular voted against this JSR and many others noted that they were not happy with the stance Sun was taking against Open Source. What does this mean for the Open Source community as it relates to Java? And, better yet, what does this mean for Java?"

TrebleJunkie writes "I've spent some time recenting looking for open source projects dealing with Automated Text Summarization -- automatically generating detailed summaries from longer documents -- to no avail. I can find a lot of research papers and several commercial projects, but no open source code or projects? Does anyone out there know of any?"

satch89450 writes: "SecurityFocus had a column that I missed when it was first published a few days ago, titled 'Responsible Disclosure' Draft Could Have Legal Muscle, but I discovered it when researching an answer to a comment on the CYBERIA mailing list. In this article, Mark Rasch discusses how the Draft would set the rules for reporting security vunerabilities, and in particular define the boundaries of liability assumed by bug-disclosers. By adopting a "Best Practices" RFC, the IETF could help the reporters of security-related bugs do their job, and put the onus of fixing the bugs on the vendors who make the mistakes, where it belongs. (The RFC draft described in the article, 'Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure Process, is here at the ISI repository.) This is, of course, in direct opposition to the process that Microsoft's Scott Culp, Manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, would like to see. As Microsoft is more part of the problem than part of the solution, I believe that the path to a formal process would better serve the entire community - and that community includes Microsoft's customers. I'm taking this seriously because the mainstream press is talking about the issue, and what it's going to take to fix it. Here is an example from BusinessWeek that scares me silly. I'm glad I'm looking to change careers from software development to something safe, like law."

robstah writes: "Bart Bunting, a Debian developer has won two gold medals in the 2002 Paralympics games. This story at Debian Planet has more information. I think we should commend Bart for his excellent achievement and wish him luck for the future."