Richard Emberson asks: "Once again into the breech...or at least the ground floor in a new startup. This time around, I would like to have all of the Engineering documentation internally online: a unified, internal, CVS-ed, web-based, development organization document tree covering the engineering process, methodology, coding standards, nightly build/test reports, FAQs, new hire information and help pages and the documentation for each project. Recently I've written documentation (on Linux of course) using the Apache XML-stylebook tags, stylesheets, and Ant-base publishing - and I like it. So my questions are: Has anyone done this and, if so, how were the links between documents managed?" Does your workplace use XML in its internal documentation? If so, how well does your system work, and what advice would you pass on to anyone else attempting something similar?

CosmicDreams writes: "Last April fools, I was indeed fooled by a slashdot article that claimed that Python and Perl developers were going to join forces and merge their current development trees into a new computer language called Parrot. It seems as though my foolishness was well placed. Today I came across this story In the article, it talks about the ongoing progress of the language and what plans the developers have for the near future. Now I'm so confused I don't really know if this is for real or not. Does someone know if this is the same Parrot programming language. I don't want to place my foolishness foolheartedly."

Phil Bewig writes: "Results of the 2001 ICFP Programming Contest (previously mentioned at SlashDot here and here) have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in Dylan, and the judges' prize is to a program in Erlang. The judges also named third place (ocaml) and fourth place (C) entries that were not awarded prizes. ICFP Programming Contest pages for prior years are available: 2000, 1999, and 1998."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "This story by LinuxDevices.com founder Rick Lehrbaum provides in-depth coverage of today's important joint announcment by Red Hat and FSMLabs of Red Hat's adoption of RTLinux as its real-time Linux technology of choice. The article is based primarily on interviews with Michael Tiemann and Victor Yodaiken, has a comment from Alan Cox, and includes numerous links to further details and background information. Guess it's time for another round in the never-ending debate over real-time Linux architectures!"

Bob_Juanita writes: "The W3C has finally made the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format an official recommendation." I'm looking forward to this - SVG looks to have a lot of potential for web development. Easy, dynamic, scalable graphics from database data - nice.

Eugenia Loli-Queru writes: "OSNews is hosting an interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the creator of the Menuet Operating System. Menuet is a new, 32-bit OS under the GPL and it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16.7 million colors (except with 3Dfx Voodoo cards), sound at 44.1 khz stereo etc. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code!"

cconnell writes: "Most software design is lousy. Most software is so bad, in fact, that if it were a bridge, no one in his or her right mind would walk across it. If it were a house, we would be afraid to enter. The only reason we (software engineers) get away with this scam is the general public cannot see inside of software systems. If software design were as visible as a bridge or house, we would be hiding our heads in shame. This article is a challenge to engineers, managers, executives and software users (which is everyone) to raise our standards about software. We should expect the same level of quality and performance in software we demand in physical construction. Instead of trying to create software that works in a minimal sense, we should be creating software that has internal beauty." We had a good discussion on a related topic half a year ago.

Remote writes: "Borland has a paper [.pdf] by William Roetzheim comparing development and maintenance costs of software development using Kylix and gcc. Bottom line is that applications written with gcc are twice as expensive (timewise) both to write and to maintain, and about 50% more expensive to document. The comparison was done using parametric modeling techniques but the author claims that his tool has 7% accuracy. While I don't do Pascal myself, I wonder if the same would apply after they port C++ Builder to Linux and compare it to something like KDevelop + gcc."

lkcl writes: "DCE/RPC - the basis for DCOM, Windows NT Domains, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, a large chunk of Microsoft's MSDN APIs, has a new home. In combination with Samba TNG (not to be confused with Samba), dcerpc.net is the developer forum for Windows NT compatible DCE/RPC middleware. For more information on what DCE/RPC can do, see http://dcerpc.net/dcerpc.xvl and http://dcerpc.net/url. Sign up for an account, help end Microsoft's domination. None of this time-wasting browser stuff by the U.S. DoJ and none of this time-wasting multimedia stuff by the European Commission. Go for the *real* stuff - and help kick ass."

Packetknife writes: "It would seem SGI has dropped support for their Pro64 compiler suite. Many people are aware that SGI has some of the best compiler people in the business. Their contributions would be most excellent and I'm hoping they continue heavy support for GCC. Either way, they are asking for feedback. Please send email to IA64devtools@oss.sgi.com to let them know you want this project to continue and contribute to GCC as well. Any work SGI does on the compilers will help all platforms and the whole community."

xynopsis writes: "Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc. (ICS), a leading Motif supplier, announced it has produced a version of Open Motif targeted at embedded and handheld devices with limited displays, memory, and processing power. Finally a Motif version that claims to have a small footprint! It also seems to be Open Group's answer to QT Embedded. What do you think?"

Erik Tjernlund writes: "Oh, where art thou my lovely new programming language? Stop fiddling around with those perl magnets and use a real poetic computer language: The Shakespeare Programming Language. Not a compiler, but it converts to C. Cool 100+ line Hello World example. Amazing what CompSci-students can create when they really should do real work."

Nooks writes: "The linux.conf.au 2002 call for papers has been issued; paper abstracts should be sent to the call for papers list. See the lca2002 website for more information."

Little Sheep writes: "An interesting round-up interview regarding modern Linux filesystems is published by OSNews, featuring the developers behind IBM's JFS, ReiserFS and SGI's XFS filesystems."

securitas writes: "ZDNet has posted a comparative review of 5 Windows-on-Linux emulators from VMware (2), NeTraverse, WinToNet and Wine." The results encountered varied quite a bit -- none of the products are perfect, but it looks like they hit a particularly disappointing time with Wine.

smugskii writes: "Oracle is releasing JDeveloper 9i on Linux - its Java/XML/JSP authoring tool. The Oracle database is nothing new on Linux, but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that Oracle is supporting development tools running on a non-Windows OS. Oracle are well known for the RDBMS, but somehow get overlooked for their other tools and technologies. If only they'd port Oracle Designer (good modelling tool) I'd be able finally remove the dual boot from my workstation.
Check out the Beta release at Oracle Technet , though may need to register for a free account before downloading."

Chuck Moore is, among other things, a chip designer. His latest design, the 25x, is based on a 5x5 array of X18 microprocessor cores, and could provide 60,000 MIPS with a production cost of about one dollar. And Moore has the chops to back that up: he's been designing tiny, efficient processors for many years. He's also the inventor of the programming language Forth, which has evolved from a miniscule but radically fast language "difficult for a human to read" (according to The Secret Guide) to the even more radical colorForth. How radical? Try "includes own operating system; has own 27-key Dvorak keyboard layout; meaningful color syntax." How's that for starters? Ask below your questions for Chuck about processors and programming (ask all you'd like, but one per post, please) We'll pass the best ones on to him, answers soon to follow.

An unnamed reader writes: " Bioinformatics.org has a story outlining recent activity in open source software development within the discipline of bioinformatics. The report covers a recent meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark called the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, and describes a large number of projects and groups important to bioinformatics open source development. Most interesting was the appendix describing important online biological data sources. A student at Stanford University wrote the full report."

ryarger writes "Woo Hoo! After a seeming eternity of wait, there is finally an implementation of stored procedures for MySQL. It uses Perl as the stored proc language, too!" Also note that this piece of work was done by OSDNs own Krow. Very cool work I must say.

emc3 writes: "This article at InternetNews says that OASIS, the XML interoperability consortium, has announced the formation of a committee to develop Human Markup Language, 'to promote a specification for conveying human characteristics through XML.' The idea is to codify psychological, emotive, cultural, and physical characteristics in a standardized way. They say that the most obvious application would be for describing phsyical characteristics and actions in virtual reality environments. Other real-world uses could include describing a patient's psychological state for medical records. The OASIS press release is here. No more :-/ for me. From now on, it's <smirk>!"