O'Reilly has put up an interesting interview with Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, the guys behind the llama book (Learning Perl). In addition to all the perl stuff, Randal gives his take on Smalltalk, Ruby, and Python. And (not surprisingly) they plug the newest edition of the book.

Björn Schotte writes: "All sessions including abstracts were published today on php-conference.de. Also, online registration is now possible on the signup page. There are more than 60 sessions plus power workshops on the pre-conference day, plus an extra so-called Open Source room where Open Source PHP projects can present themselves for free. Also, a Q&A panel with nearly all members of the PHP Core Group will be organized where you can ask them about things like "What about the future of PHP?" / "Will there be an engine for PHP/Perl/Python together?" etc."

G3ck0G33k writes: "Is there any free software version/clone of Rational's programs PureCoverage and/or Purify? I have worked with both of them on fairly large projects (>150,000 lines of code) and they were great to work with. When the first runs of Purify found nearly fifty instances of minor memory leaks, I was deeply frustrated/impressed. A free (perhaps GPLd) clone would be so interesting; Rational's licensing is killing my current budget. Of course, the more kinds of leaks it may detect, the better. GeckoGeek" We had a similar question last year but there's no harm in seeing what the current answers are.

mdlm writes: "SOAP guru Satish Thatte has published the XLANG spec, a business process messaging specification. This extends Microsoft's SOAP/.NET standardization efforts."

jluxe writes: "CNN reports that a new language, Curl, was presented at the Software Development Forum in Palo Alto. This language works via a plug-in to browsers, and attempts to merge the gap between HTML, javascript, java, and even C++. It also supports the Macromedia Flash plug-in. Interesting to note that Tim Berners-Lee is listed as a financial backer of this venture, as well as an adviser." Here's the Curl Corporation's official website as well.

znu writes: "Trolltech has announced the release of Qt/Mac Open Beta 1. The final release is expected in October. It's good to see that OS X users will soon be able to run quite a lot of graphical *nix apps without installing X11. Screenshots are here(1), here(2) and here(3)." ClaytonianG cites this MacCentral article as well, which links to a blurb on the Trolltech site about the program from which those screenshots are taken.

JigSaw writes: "SDL, the open source answer to DirectX, is a well-known cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. Sam Lantiga, the maintainer and SDL project leader, announced today on the SDL mailing list, that he ported the library to Playstation2 and it will allow to write and run SDL games (open source or commercial, as SDL is LGPL) on the Linux port for the PS2. Great to see Linux to become the source for a whole bunch of free SDL games (some of them with commercial-level quality), easily recompiled for the PS2 and run them without having to spend $49 USD for each game. This release will be even more significant in the near future, as SONY is planning to release the broadband adapter add-on, which will enable small developers (and even companies) to release free or shareware games, downloadable in binary or source format (most SDL games are known to have small sizes) from the web, and hop, to your TV!"

rabalde writes: "You can order now and free of charge the CD-ROM "SAP DB 7.3, SAP's Open Source Database" from the SAP Shop. It contains the content of the SAP DB web site, all SAP DB software for all platforms supported by SAP DB (a lot of platforms), all SAP DB sources and the development environment and all SAP DB documentation. I've already ordered mine, so now all of you can go there and /. them. There's also some SAP DB Logos available for download."

JigSaw writes "AtheOS 0.3.5 has just been released. Lots of changes to the core of the OS, but the most important upgrade is the port of the Konqueror web browser (the author had to wrap around X/KDE/QT calls in order to port it). AtheOS is a modern OS, written from scratch using OOP and C++, it features a 64-bit journaled/attributed filesystem and (surprise) it doesn't use X, but rather its native GUI system (screenshots). Changelog is here, while you can download it here (only around 23 MB for the basic installation). There is already a number of posix software ports and third party native software available."

tim finin writes: "WEP is the security protocol used in the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN's. "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4" by Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir describes new results on RC4 with a practical attack against WEP -- an extremely powerful attack which can be applied even when WEP's RC4 stream cipher uses a 2048 bit secret key (its maximal size) and 128 bit IV modifiers (as proposed in WEP2). The attacker can be a completely passive eavesdropper (i.e., he does not have to inject packets, monitor responses, or use accomplices) and thus his existence is essentially undetectable. After scanning several hundred thousand packets, the attacker can completely recover the secret key and thus decrypt all the ciphertexts. The running time of the attack grows linearly instead of exponentially with the key size, and thus it is negligible even for 2048 bit keys." The brave can jump straight to the paper in pure, clean, postscript or PDF format.

David Mentré writes: "The ICFP 2001 programming contest TASK is now available. The objective is to write an optimizer (aka compressor) for an HTML-like language. It must work for arbitrarily big inputs and in a limited wall-clock time. Can you guess what will be the winning language? ;)" We already announced the contest, but now that the task is available, it might be fun to look at. So what will the contestants come up with? Anyone think perl might be the language of choice? :)

Anonymous Coward writes "I'm sure I'm not the first to report this, but Perl.com put up a synopsis of Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl. "

Rosco P. Coltrane writes: "I don't know if this is old news, but I've just noticed that the "Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition" book by Alessandro Rubini & Jonathan Corbet has been published under the GNU Free Documentation License v1.1 by O'Reilly." Making the entire book available is a nice gesture by O'Reilly. And anything that helps get more device drivers written is a plus in my book... We reviewed the first edition, but obviously there have been one or two tiny changes since then.

TwP writes "There is a rather long but very interesting paper posted on First Monday that describes a software completion bond market. The bond market would be used by programmers to generate revenue for software projects, open source or otherwise. It would also help to identify potential users of the software package - those who invest in the bonds would most likely be those to use the developed software."

StrawberryFrog writes: "Borland Kylix for x86 Linux is now free-as-in-beer for writing free-as-in-GPL'd apps. You can read all about it and download it from the Borland site."

pdiaz writes: "Here is a report made by Sun Microsystems people about GNOME usability. They collected a bunch of professionals (lawyers, engineers, Graphic Designers, etc..) and put them in front of a Gnome desktop. They were asked to perform some tasks and tell what some icons, menus, etc., do. Some quotes are really funny, like when they asked what does the terminal emulator icon launch." Very interesting stuff, and this approach is necessary because once you've gotten accustomed to the system it's no longer possible for you to evaluate how it appears to an inexperienced user.

There's a great Dan Gillmor article, from his blog ^[?] regarding the challenge issued by Tim O'Reilly and Clay Shirky to the computer OEMs, asking them to include the latest Java JRE. As Microsoft has said they won't be including Java in WinXP, but are cool with "letting" OEMs put in other programs, let's see the manufacturers strike a blow for competition, and compatibility, and including a non-"extended and embraced" JRE.

Craig Maloney writes the review below of Linux Game Programming. From the sound of it, there may be a considerable market need for more books on programming the fun stuff for GNU/Linux. This one may even suit your needs, but earns some harsh words from Craig.

webword writes: "Joel Spolsky is running an editorial where he claims that writing really good software takes ten years. (Yes, TEN years.) He explains several mistakes that are made by companies that don't understand his ten year principle. The mistakes are backed up with some interesting industry examples, so it isn't just vapor. Unfortunately, he doesn't mention any OSS/FS examples, but I'm sure we can handle that. I am mostly skeptical of his idea because I'm not sure how he thinks a young software company could possibly survive without building really good software in much less time. Spolsky mentions that new companies need to strictly control their cost structures, and that will save them, but that doesn't seem like enough to me."

Caleb Clark writes "This open source bot was so much fun I had to write a tutorial: Getting Started with the A.L.I.C.E. bot and Mac OSX. A beginning tutorial on using OSX to install, modify, and serve an award winning open source chat bot made with XML and Java. ALICE bot won the 2000 Loebner Prize (Turning Test) for most human bot. She's made in an XML language called Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and uses Java to run. This is a great environment for newbies to work with basic A.I. by Variable Hacking existing XML code to make their own bot."