Kourino writes: "Marcelo announced the release of 2.4.18 a couple hours ago after 4 release candidates, but the tree marked 2.4.18 on kernel.org is missing the -rc4 patch that finally made the kernel releasable. Basically, what's marked as 2.4.18 is really -rc3, and what's marked as -rc4 is what should have become 2.4.18. According to Marcelo on #kernelnewbies, most users won't be affected, but people on SPARC systems should definitely grab 2.4.18-rc4. Your best bet is probably just to get 2.4.17 and patch to 2.4.18-rc4. Seems 2.4 is destined to be an "interesting" release branch ^_^; For the new release, head over to your favorite kernel.org mirror. (Marcelo will set things straight in 2.4.19-pre1.)"

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting interview with David Faure, the french KDE developer who works for Mandrake Software. His code can be found on Konqueror, KFM, KWord and he is also the main bug hunter for KDE. David talks about KDE 3's enhancements and speed improvements, the future of KWord, the debugging tools under Linux, and even Gnome2, .NET, MacOSX and Mozilla."

PokeBlor writes: "Arena.net has an article by Patrick Wyatt, a Blizzard ex, that goes into depth about the creation of multiplayer games, ranging from replayability to lag. He uses good examples from Starcraft and Warcraft 2, two games that Wyatt was a designer on."

primal39 writes: "The Mozilla Project is hosting a developer days on March 1 and 2 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Registration Here." Only $50 registration, but dress warm.

LiquidPC writes: "OpenBSD's Louis Bertrand has put his MUSESS 2002 presentation online, entitled Fix the Bugs, Secure the System. Does an overview of OpenBSD, then explains Format String Ugliness, Buffer Overflows, The Wrong Way to Fix Overflows, along with numerous other things."

Isle writes: "GCC 3.0.4 has finally been released. As those who has tried the prereleases will know this version finally compiles a working version of aRts and thus compiles the entire KDE-suite. With the Linux kernel compiling already with the 3.0.3 version, gcc 3.0 now compiles all major projects I know of. Is it finally time to dump that good old 2.95?"

wrinkledshirt writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an article here about coding with KParts, KDE's component architecture. It's a little thin, but given that no single component technology has claimed victory yet for Linux, just thought this might be an interesting read for some. It also might lead to some good discussion comparing people's experiences with KParts, ORBit ^? , Bonobo ^? , or Kylix ^? 's CLX..."

Pzykotic writes: "Apple today announced a new category to their yearly Apple Design Awards: 'Best Mac OS X Open Source Port' for individuals or collaborations. The winners will be announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, during the week of this May 6-10. Winners receive an 'Ultimate' (Dual 1 GHz/GeForce4 TI/DVD-R/etc) Power Mac G4 system with an Apple Cinema Display."

moominpapa writes "We are about to set up a project web site that will involve static and dynamically-generated XML pages serialized into HTML, PDF etc. and user interaction with a database (either native XML or MySQL). Previously we've dealt with SGML content and used DynaText/DynaWeb along with PHP and MySQL. Now we want to move to XML content and all-open-source tools. The two main choices seem to be a Java-based Apache/Tomcat/Cocoon 2 framework or a Python-based Zope (+ some XML tools) framework. Cocoon 2 looks powerful but installation on Solaris and Mac OS X has been rather buggy and the performance slow. However, our programmers know Java well and the XML tools are all there. Zope looks promising, although it would mean picking up Python and Zope doesn't seem to have the XML stuff well-integrated yet. Has anyone extensively used both? What would you say were the strong and weak points of each? Is there another possible framework you think we should consider?"

zscgeek writes "The W3C just released the first working draft of CCXML a new XML based language designed to allow people to write advanced phone control applications. The announcement is here and the specification is here. The cool thing about CCXML is that it provides advanced call control features that were missing from VoiceXML so it allows lots of new applications that just were not possible before with VoiceXML. It also integrates with VoiceXML so you can reuse all your VoiceXML code. Voxeo has also announced an open beta of an implementation of it that you can access at http://community.voxeo.com so you can try this stuff out."

Jari Komppa writes "After getting tired of tons of newbies starting MMORPG projects as their first programming project and calling for help on flipcode message boards, I decided to write a little rant in attempt to give these people some idea of the magnitude of the project they're starting. There seems to be hundreds of these projects out there.."

Matthaeus asks: "I'm a 3rd-year CS student who will most likely be writing end-user applications after graduation. Naturally, I would like my apps to sell well, so I want to minimize user annoyance as much as possible. In an effort to improve my coding skills, what are Slashdot readers' biggest pet peeves when it comes to software? For example, my largest pet peeve is when a program steals the focus from another program while I'm typing. Maybe other software developers could take notice of this discussion also."

Olivier DECKMYN writes: "Zopera team, representing the community of french speaking Zope users have made a community Interview of Jim Fulton, the brain behind Zope. Jim explains origins and future of Zope, business of Zope Corp., and delivers informations about the fantastic upcoming Zope 3... Zope is a revolutionnary Open-Source internet application server, written in Python."

clever writes: "Since open standards are good for pretty much everyone except closed source, multi billion, software companies that try to lock their customers into their proprietary technology I thought that the Slashdot readers might welcome a chance to help shape the next SQL-standard. The Mimer SQL Validator lets you validate any given SQL-statement against SQL-92, SQL-99 and, get this, SQL-200x (Draft spec, 2002-01-11). It stores your statement, if you'll allow it, and it will be used by the ISO SQL-200x standards committee to make statistics on commonly used features and errors to be used in the standards work. So, don't ask what SQL can do for you. Ask what you can do for SQL. In the process you will find out the proprietary features that you are already using."

tal197 writes: "More than two years since the ROX desktop (a desktop based around the filesystem) was last mentioned on slashdot, the second stable branch of the central ROX-Filer component has just been released. It's still pretty light and fast, despite all the changes, and integrates well with other desktops too."

Iptable writes: "Underlinux.com.br has an interview with Harald Welte, member of netfilter/iptables core team. Harald told about the future of iptables2 with new kernel family (2.5.x/2.6.x) and other things like libiptables that will be a common interface to deal with iptables firewall rules. To read the complete interview visit UnderLinux.Com.Br."

Colour Blind asks: "I am working for a not-for-profit organization developing a website for kids. I am attempting to develop a method for testing if two colours (as defined by R, G, and B values [0-255]) are adequately different to be visible on top of each other. So far I have tried many things but this is the one that, by all accounts, should work: I have converted from RGB to (CIE)XYZ using a 3x3 matrix transformation. From here I have used three more equations to convert to CIELAB colour. I have then calculated the distance between the two colours in question in CIELAB colour space. The results are not correct: there are pairs of colours that are quite far from visible that yield the same difference as colours that are plainly acceptable for visibility. Any suggestions?"

Ramses Smeyers writes "The FOSDEM event finished some hours ago and was a very great succes. People from all over the world, came to talk about Open Source software and Free Software. If you wan't to see some pictures of it, go and visit the site." (If you're not up on your 6-letter acronyms, that stands for Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting.) A glance at FOSDEM organizer Raphael Bauduin gives an idea of what the conference was like. (This is also where Guido's recent FSF Award was announced.)

bkuhn writes: "The FSF today bestowed its fourth annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software upon Guido van Rossum . The two other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch and Andrew Tridgell." Developing Python seems like a good reason :)

Jim Hall writes: "Newsforge [ed. note: Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN] is running an article about the FreeDOS Project. If you don't know: FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system, and is released under the GNU General Public License. It's a good read. From the article: 'But, in the true spirit of Open Source, FreeDOS is not content to be an imitation of the existing technology. ... Open Source talks about freedom to use, but it also means freedom to choose. FreeDOS gives people another choice. If you don't want DOS, try something else. But if DOS might be the key for that special device you are building, check out FreeDOS. It is definitely worth a look.'" We did an interview with Hall two years ago - looks like the project has come a long way since then.