Bob Smith writes: "Miguel just commited the last patch nessisary to get Mono's C# compiler to compile itself. After 7 odd months, MCS is now self hosting." jbarn adds: "Mono-list email is here."

fxn points to this "article from Dr. Dobbs's Jounal on the recent Lightweight Languages Workshop, held at MIT's AI Lab." This is a nice followup to Simon Cozen's report on the conference, posted here in November.

Able writes "This is a good article that will teach you how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, and panel applets. It also provides you with the understanding to compile a few sample GTK+ 2 programs that will give you a good understanding of GTK+ 2's many improvements over GTK+ 1."

ThChalm asks: "I am the first one to admit that my programming experience is somewhat limited. The majority of it has been obtained writing FORTRAN code to solve problems in mechanical engineering. I have written some smaller (you might say toy) codes using C. I have read a lot of books on C++ (and OOP), but always get frustrated with the following question: Why can't anyone show me an engineering application that is solved with an object oriented program?"

Jeremy writes: "KernelTrap has interviewed Matthew Dillon, a well-known FreeBSD kernel hacker. He has recently been in the spotlight due to many impressive NFS related bug fixes, as well as fixes to the TCP stack. In this interview he talks about these bug fixes as well as his history with computers, programming and FreeBSD. He also discusses Linux, open source, embedded systems, the Amiga (and his DICE C compiler), and much more."

davidsmind writes "Former KDE hacker and creator of the much acclaimed Liquid theme, Mosfet(AKA Daniel M. Duley ) is back in the spotlight. The Dot was the first one with the story. 'Many in the KDE community are aware of some rocky history between KDE hacker Mosfet and other KDE developers. Fortunately, it looks like things have taken a great turn for the better: Mosfet wrote in to tell us that "I've decided to donate 20 effects I ported to KDE/Qt for PixiePlus to KDE3." Waldo Bastian promptly added them to CVS.'" The list of effects is long, impressive, and under a BSD-style license. Mosfet has done a lot of the work that makes my desktop pretty, so I'm very happy to hear about this.

unixbob writes: "Microsofts developer site MSDN is running an interview with lead GNOME developer Miguel de Icaza entitled Using the ECMA Standards: An Interview with Miguel de Icaza ."

BorrisYeltsin writes: "A couple of updates for Parrot are in a recent This Week on Perl 6, most imporantly Parrot 0.03 is out! Get it here , the release notes are here. Also Adam Turoff has got together the Parrot FAQ version 0.2 which addresses some of the more common questions about Parrot and Perl 6."

Ursus Maximus writes "Python City, formerly known as the Python Liberation Front, is an attempt to further Guido van Rossum's dream of making computer programming accessible to any intelligent person. Featuring more than 20 detailed reviews of programming books,presented from a newbie's point of view, as well as links to 14 tutorials for learning Python, the site is a good starting point for folks interested in scripting. In addition, you will find an online interactive script for Choosing Your Own Programming Language, based on one's own preferences, expectations, and priorities, While the script is written in JavaScript, there are no apologies for any perceived bias towards Python ;-)))). You will also find several interesting and fun GPL'ed scripts such as askMerlin, an online, artificially intellgent Oracle; DecisionAnalysis, to help you make up your mind; and myGale, a webcrawler to routinely collect all online articles about Python. Add in a dash of Monty Python humor and newbies will find learning Python to be not only painless but indeed, fun!"

skunkeh asks: "I was recently discussing innovative uses for IRC bots with a friend and we came up with the idea of using bots for theatrical performances, with different bots taking on different roles and outputting a pre-defined script to a moderated IRC channel. The obvious solution for inputing scripts to the bots would be using XML - is anyone aware of an XML standard for play scripts or would we need to create our own?" Bots doing Shakesspeare? Hrmm....OK, after that image, this is the last time I post Slashdot articles while drinking Bawls.

haplo21112 writes "I am working on coding a web front end to choose music from the collections stored on my web servers hard drive, and then stream this music to machine connected to my stereo. Like many people I would think, my music collection is mixed between .ogg/.mp3 formats since I started ripping before .ogg(which I now use) was available. The problem I have run up against is I can find no utility for streaming, that supports both formats, specifically both in a mixed playlist. Mod_MP3 came close, but it turns out that it can handle only one at a time either all .mp3's or all .oggs, the playlist can't be mixed. I looked into the Icecast streaming utilities, but they seem to be mp3 bound at least till the icecast 2.0 release. Has anyone run into this same problem of mixed media, did you come up with a solution that didn't require redoing half your collection in the other format." Ah, if only the problem was that simple...

Dylbert asks: "Putting aside my gripes about using Microsoft products in the workplace (or anywhere, for that matter), I was wondering if any Slashdot users have found ways to overcome the forced use of ActiveX when creating DLLs in Visual Basic. Because my work uses a few seperate programming languages to write code in, the use of ActiveX would mean we will have to convert all our existing code to the same ActiveX architecture which I believe is unnecessary. Any suggestions?"

Steve Baum asks: "I'm thinking of replacing a current tangle of NFS cross-mounted disks with the am-utils system, which maintains a cache of mounted filesystems that are demand-mounted when first referenced and unmounted after a period of inactivity. I was wondering if anyone had used this system in a moderately large (40-50 disks on 10-15 machines) environment and, if so, how efficient and stable they'd found it to be."

RichMeraz writes "Bruce Eckel has posted his first incarnation of Thinking in Patterns with Python on his website. What a wonderful Christmas present." Make sure to check the list of mirrors before downloading. As Eckel says, "This should whet your appetite to read Design Patterns " (or reread it)... classic book, I figure it can't hurt to refresh my memory once a year, and holidays seem like a good time to think in the abstract...

An Anonymous Coward's idle musings inspires this query: "Web-based applications are a hot topic, right now, but sometimes HTML is too simple for your applications. Using a cross-plataform, more powerful and efficient UI like Mozilla's XUL would be great." XUL is more an interface description language rather than an application language, as it still uses Javascript to handle application processing. It would be interesting to see if future browsers (or future versions of existing browsers) would add XUL bindings for other languages like PHP, Perl, or even Visual Basic if such a thing interests you.

Bryan Andersen asks: "What is there available in open source code analysis software? I'm about to embark on a project that will make use of lots of open source software. I need to make sure that the software used is as bullet proof as possible with a limited staff. I'd like to make sure there aren't surprises like buffer overflows, race conditions, etc. in the code that we write."

soundsop writes: "The first tool resulting from the winners of a design competition by the Software Carpentry project has been released. The QMTest tool is a testing tool to replace software such as XUnit, Expect and DejaGnu. An issue tracking tool, called QMTrack (a la Bugzilla) is forthcoming. It looks like the winning design proposals for a config tool (autoconf replacement) and a build tool (make replacement) are not being implemented."

Gerard J. Pinzone queries: "My company is looking to implement C/C++ and Java coding standards. However, I can't seem to find a definitive list. I'm more familiar with Java and have suggested that we use 'Elements of Java Style' and Sun's documentation. BTW, beware of 'Netscape's Software Coding Standards Guide for Java.' It's woefully out-of-date! Any suggestions?"

augros writes: "Keith Packard, responsible for the X RENDER extension, is still working diligently on the X component that may one day make X a rival to other bleeding edge windowing systems (...ahem, *Quartz*). It's thanks to RENDER that 'xterm -fa arial' gives you a sleek anti-aliased terminal and k-jofol can offer you those funky-shaped skins. But how long will it be before X wields true-translucent windows? The cheap hacks (eterm) have lasted way too long. Read Packard's article; he goes over the details of what will need to be done. If you're interested in the current level of development check out Packard's screenshot. I tried his code myself and had to do tweak it a bit before the window even mapped. He claims it worked as true-transparency on his box, albeit painfully slow, however all I got was alpha-blended rectangles on an unrefreshing background." And watch this space for an XFree86-related interview, too :)

742Evergreen writes: "Another Christmas present for the developers: Python 2.2 has been released! A 'What's new' can be found here. Python 2.2 can be found here. Documentation is here."