Indicating this ZDnet article, an Anonymous Coward writes: "Something I haven't seen mentioned before; XP will apparently drop Java support, not only for Java apps, but in the browser as well. XP users can still download and install Java seperately, but of course, how many will choose to do so?"

Denis Lackovic writes: "we tested kernel 2.4.5 with six filesystems: ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, vfat, and xfs. You can find out the results here." The tests cover a number of situations, on decent but reasonable hardware.

jeffy124 writes "ZDnet has an interesting article on how OpenOffice, Sun's Open-Source version of StarOffice, needs some serious help in being ported to the Macintosh OS-X. With Microsoft about to release Office 2001 for OS-X and demo it at next week's MacWorld Expo, support in getting a Mac OS-X port out for OpenOffice is critical to keeping a Microsoft dominance of yet another operating system's office suite to a minimum. The project is need of someone to step up to the plate as a project lead."

Per Wigren writes: "This is a REALLY good article on PHP security! It's scary how easy it is to leave security holes in code that looks secure at the first glance. Every PHP coder should read this! Seconds after reading this I stopped my webservers for an audit and I found and closed several potential holes in my code..."

Craig Maloney contributed this review of the Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0, which he calls "the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there." Like others in the same series, this package from O'Reilly assembles several related titles onto a single, searchable disk to save endless page-thumbing, but not without a few glitches.

Newsforge (part of the sinister OSDN keiretsu ^[?] ) has a nice story about getting starting developing for the GNU/Linux desktop. I'm not totally sure this is the best way to start (any guide that starts off "First, learn C++" is not optimal in my book...) but there are some good tips in there.

josephfeller writes: "Making Sense of the Bazaar: 1st Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering was held on May 15, 2001 as part of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2001). The full text of the 18 position papers and slides from the four presentations are available at http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2001/."

budcub writes "IT Recruitermag has a informative column, on How to deal with Prima Donna programmers from a management point of view." Put on the asebestos -- but I will say that a number of people that I've worked with, or talked to, have complained about working with people like this before.

quakeaddict writes: "The SOAP 1.2 spec is out in draft. Get it while it's hot!"

flounder_p queries: "I have recently started playing with the Ruby programming language and think it's really great. I was just wondering why you guys think Ruby has not caught on more in the open source community than it has? How many of you guys are using it? Will it ever catch on or will it always be looked at as yet another scripting language? Don't get me wrong scripting languages are great (and I live by Perl) but I still hope to see Ruby catch on more. I would like to hear opinions on things on why Ruby is good or bad not on why OOP is good or bad. We have already had that discussion here." On a side note, a little birdy tells me that BlackAdder has plans for Ruby support in its next beta.

Zenithal asks: "I've been slowly and silently developing an online game for quite some time now, and I'd like very much for it to be free. The problem is that the game will require several servers and lots of bandwidth if it is at all successful. For now my workplace is willing to sponser my needs, but if things ever picked up it would start costing serious money to run. What I'm wondering is, how can I make any money to maintain the game universe and possibly maybe even get cash for a few beer? I know the potential is there to sell box versions and manuals, but that just doesn't seem realistic. Any ideas Slashdot?" If you aren't willing to sell the game, then maybe you can sell things about the game to fund its further development. Of course, it goes without saying that the game will have to be good, so one of the first things one should do is get a good core group out there to test it. Also, if any game like this is to succeed, it should not ignore whatever community that happens to develop around it. I know something like this is unlikely, but if it were to happen, what would you do to get it started?

pudge (Slashcode wrangler, MacPerl maintainer, and use.perl editor) wrote in to tell us that The Perl Journal has been bought by CMP. This of course ends the ongoing struggles with Earthweb that has resulted in many subscribers (including me) going without what is one of the best technical journals being published today. CMP of course publishes several other good journals including Dr. Dobbs. Besides Jon Orwant (who will continue as Senior Contributing Editor) nobody is happier to see TPJ return then me!

gdon writes: "So you are the best and fastest coder in town? Take a chance to exhibit your skills and maybe win a prize at the 4th ICFP programming contest at the International Conference on Functional Programming. The programming challenge task will be published on July 26, 2001 at 15:00 UTC and program submission ends 72 hours later." Check out the previous contests: 1998, 1999, or 2000.

Mr. Obvious writes: "It must have already been submitted, since the article is over a day old (gasp!) but there's a good round-up on the state of the art in supercomputing, as it applies to modeling the weather --- that is to say, modeling the planet --- over at the NYTimes. They go into lots of interesting things concerning how hard it is, what progress has been made lately, why the US researchers feel themselves to be hamstringed in comparison to those in Europe or Japan, and even into some things you probably didn't know (I didn't, at least) about the weather."

kato writes: "Doug Bagley has posted results from benchmarking of 29 different language implementations solving 25 different problems (he's written ~600 of the 725 programs so far). The languages include C/C++, Perl, Python, Eiffel, BASH, Tcl, and OCaml. The problems range in complexity from "Hello, World!" to the Sieve of Eratosthenes and Matrix Multiplication. The results can be sorted by speed, memory usage, or lines of code. You can also give one particular program more weight than another (if you are doing more client/server code than "Hello, World!") and find the faster/smallest/shortest language implementation. I can see many of my programs being written in OCaml from now on." Update: 07/04 12:42 PM by CT : The site is apparently now redirecting people back here. I guess technically thats an error message, just not a helpful one. Update: 07/05 8:40 PM by M : Please don't email. The link is broken. We know. The guy is running a server at home on a metered connection, and doesn't want any more traffic.

dante101vr2 asks: "While working in the programming field I have heard a lot of mention to doing code reviews, however I have yet to see one occur. Along with my job, I have also talked to a number of others throughout the IT community who laugh when they hear mention of a code review, claiming that there is not enough time in the day. My question to you is, do code reviews exist, and are they a good tool or are they just time consuming?" For those of you who do have normal code reviews, what small things do you do to make the whole process go along as painlessly as possible?

ender-iii asks: "The company I work for is ready for a ground up revamp of our application. The old version relies heavily on environment variables (so much so, that if they aren't set, the app core dumps!). The old programmer wants to do the same thing and put all configuration in the environment. I am arguing for a config file. My question is this: why would anyone use environment variables for a standalone application?" I can think of lots of reasons where an environment variable for certain settings is better than having to edit a configuration file (user overrides of that setting, for example...and many time users aren't going to have write perms to config files!) however, they have the strongest value when used appropriately. If you are setting 10-20 variables in the environment, then you really should be thinking about a config file of some sort...not every admin/user will be happy cluttering their environment with unnecessary variables. What do you all consider appropriate use of ENV variables, and when is it acceptable to use it to store lots of config information?

Exomorph writes: " C Styled Scripting (CSS) has just been released for Linux! (Already available for Windows, and OS/2) You can use CSS like an interpreter (Like Perl) or as a scripting engine within your own applications. It follows the C syntax very closely and has now been released under the GNU General Public License." Is anyone using this?

An anonymous reader sent in this tidbit - Loki Software has recently released Programming Linux Games, a book about Linux game development. It covers SDL, several audio APIs, and the Linux framebuffer console. The publisher has more info. (If someone wants to review this, email Hemos.)

Markus Kuhn writes: "Linux and other Unices are well on the way of making UTF-8 their single main character encoding. Replacing ASCII with UTF-8 is now one of the hottest Linux developer topics. Soon gone will be the annoying restrictions that Latin-1 imposes currently on even English language Linux users (no en/em dashes, no smart quotes, no math symbols, etc.). Counted are the days of the bewildering number of different regional ASCII extensions such as ISO 8859-1/2/3/5/7/9/13/15, KOI8-R/U, GBK, CP1251, VISCII, TIS-620, EUC-JP/KR, SJIS. Pioneered by the fathers of Unix in Plan 9 a decade ago, the ASCII-compatible UTF-8 encoding of Unicode / ISO 10646 (UCS) has emerged as the final way-to-go out of the current character-set chaos. With glibc 2.2.x and XFree86 4.x, the basic infrastructure for UTF-8 support is now well in place. To get started, read the UTF-8 FAQ and look at some of the UTF-8 example files listed there with xterm, emacs, vim, etc. Then think about whether running in a UTF-8 locale and using UTF-8 files, filenames, terminals and stdin/stdout has any consequences for software that you use or maintain. Join the linux-utf8 mailing list if you need advice. In two years from now, it should be possible to recommend every Linux user to switch over to UTF-8 permanently."