An Anonymous Coward writes: "KernelTrap has posted an interview with kernel hacker William Lee Irwin III (aka "wli"). He is one of the developers helping to implement a reverse mapping feature into the Linux kernel. (Rik van Riel, the lead of this effort, was interviewed by KernelTrap earlier.) From the interview: 'For regular kernel hacking, rewrites aren't going to get anywhere, those who wrote the originals will scream bloody murder and those who have to call the stuff are terrified they'll have to deal with new bugs in unfamiliar code. But as a crutch for getting around not quite being able to read things it's fine. Maybe someone will come after me for saying so as there are bound to be frivolous rewrites of all kinds of things after any kind of public statement like this, but if people get off their butts and stop duplicating everyone else's merges of $VM + O(1) + misc garbage to write some actual new code, it's worth the flames.'"

Mark Hood writes: "I've been asked to provide a simple trouble-shooting guide for new engineers to follow when presented with an unfamiliar fault or bug report. Mainly this can be done with static web pages and a series of 'yes/no' questions... (Is it plugged in? Is it switched on? etc) but a nice facility would be to allow engineers to update it with what they did to fix faults / gather information. The question is: does anything simple like this already exist? Web searches turn up loads of 'Expert System Shells' or 'Programming Systems', but I was hoping for something that wouldn't require months of dedicated time (this is not my job, I'm just helping out :). Anyone done this at their workplace? Any hints? Or should I knuckle down and write a few CGI scripts for adding data to a web page?"

pudge (apple.slashdot.org editor and MacPerl Maintainer) writes "MacPerl 5.6.1r1 is the first release of MacPerl in four years. It is now based on perl 5.6.1 -- actually on the latest unreleased 5.6 sources, so MacPerl is the most advanced release of perl ever -- and support for MacPerl is now in the perl core, for both 5.6 and 5.8. MacPerl can also be built entirely with freely available software. And, like its predecessor, it runs on Mac OS X under the Classic environment. Read the announcement, and see macperldelta for details on what's changed."

JeanBaptiste writes: "I work for a small company that refuses to spend the money on visual studio. I need this (or some other language) to do my job (which isn't programming), and for about a year now I have had to use borland C++ 3.0 for dos to do the things that need doing. I know C/pascal/basic from years ago, but have not had to write any programs for work until recently. My question: Are there any cheap/free programming languages that will make a stable winNT/2000 app?" Well, there's ActiveState, which has perl, python, and assorted other packages and tools.

An anonymous submitter sent in a link to a recent email from the kde-devel list, criticizing the release process. Hopefully the KDE guys can work out any problems and keep up the good work that we've seen in the past. Update: 03/10 14:20 GMT by M : One of the comments below points out that another KDE developer has made an extensive response to the original criticisms.

An anonymous reader sent in: "As Embedded Linux becomes established as a solid alternative to many proprietary OSes and RTOSes, demands on embedded Linux developers and providers are increasing. This detailed technical article by Nicholas McGuire sketches the top requirements for Embedded Linux systems including considerations of user interface, network capabilities, security issues, resource optimization, performance requirements and issues, and compatibility and standards issues."

Oink.NET writes "The O'Reilly Network reports on an unannounced BOF session at BSDCon 2002 regarding Rotor, a shared souce implementation of Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure that currently runs on Windows and FreeBSD. It relies on a Platform Adaptation Layer, similar to Apache's Portable Runtime, that simplifies porting to other OS's. As to the licensing terms, the Rotor FAQ says "Microsoft intends to provide very liberal non-commercial licensing terms and is interested in gathering community input on the design of the license." Wonder if that includes Slashdot community input..."

jhiv writes: "The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) reports that 'Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories have completed the first full-system three-dimensional simulations of a nuclear weapon's explosion'. The simulations are two of the largest computer simulations ever attempted, each taking weeks to complete on the ASCI White supercomputer. The Los Alamos team used the ASCI Blue Mountain supercomputer to visualize the results. Additional coverage can be found in this story in the Albuquerque Journal."

Jacob Marner writes: "A large independent university report has just been published that examines whether Java is useful for professional game development."

chongo writes: "The winners of the 16th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) have been selected. The judges are in the process of notifying the winners by EMail. We expect to release the source code around mid April 2002 after the winners have had a chance to review our writeup of their entries."

Tomas Hämälä writes: "Developed as an in-house tool for spatial audio at VRlab, OpenAL++ is now released to the public. As the name suggests, the API is object oriented and built on the portable audio library OpenAL. The libraries CommonC++ and PortAudio are also used. OpenAL++ is released under the LGPL. Features of OpenAL++ include: Object oriented interface, easy thread handling, automatic initialization/shutdown and more. For more information, visit the OpenAL++ homepage. VRlab is a research center for virtual reality and visualization. It is closely connected to the Departement of Computing Science at Umeå University and High Performance Computing Centre North."

maelstrom writes: "Looks like someone's found a local root exploit for OpenSSH versions between 2.0 and 3.0.2. Seems as though its a one-off error, there is no public exploit, but there is sure to be one shortly. They aren't ruling out remote exploit. Recommending patching and upgrading ASAP."

bsd writes: "Rubi Con is invading Detroit, MI again. This year it is April 5-7th. Rubi Con is a yearly technology conference with a focus on data and network security. This is Rubi Con's 4th year in existance. With over 60 speakers it will be 72 hours of fun. Maybe we will see some of the Slashdot Mob there? More information at Rubi Con's Website."

jimmi writes: "A couple of months ago cgisecurity.com released a paper called 'Fingerprinting Port80 Attacks.' Today they released Part 2, which is even bigger then the first. Part two can be found here. This paper deals with web application attacks and how to detect them, along with figuring out what the data means."

AustinSaltLick writes: "Open Source projects can now compile their code on the first compiler farm in the open source community that runs on an IBM eServer zSeries server. The zSeries is the world's first dedicated Linux mainframe server. This article explains how project administrators can request access for their team."

jeek writes "Perl 5.7.3 is out. This should be the last development version before 5.8.0 comes out in April or May." You can download it from CPAN or get a copy of it from SourceForge.net. If you have some free time try downloading it and testing it. According to the included perldelta.pod file, the highlights are: better Unicode support, new thread implementation, many new modules, better numeric accuracy, safe signals, and a completely overhauled and improved regression test suite.

osworks writes: "There is an review of the Sorcerer Linux distribution over at linuxworld.com that is worth a read. I've been running SGL on my Inspiron for a month now, and have the same impression as the author. It took a really long time to install, but was educational and rather fun. Some discouraging news near the bottom about how the maintainer needs some development help, or it will be the end of Sorcerer. This is one of the most exciting new distros to come along in a long time, and that would be a shame."

Craig Maloney submitted this review of Addison-Wesley's entry in the tough field of books on C (book title: C), and pulls no punches in comparing it to others. He says it's slightly above average, but that "experienced programmers will likely pass on this book." Read the complete review below for his reasoning.

bergie writes: "The new IDE for Midgard and PHP developers is entirely written in PHP using the PHP-GTK toolkit. PHPmole aims to provide the free software world with a web development environment comparable to DreamWeaver and MS Visual Studio, with additional content management functionalities. PHP is not only for web developers any more ..."

Marsee writes: "Mike Beam looks at two Aqua enhancements -- one seemingly frivolous and the other not: animated window resizing and drawers." O'Reilly's really invested in Mac OS X, and they often have nice articles for developers on a wide range of subjects in their Mac DevCenter.