A reader writes " Looking for an xmms-kde RPM, I've stumbled across rhcontrib.bero.org - looks like Red Hat is building up a new contribution area. Looks quite interesting, but sloow."

xtermz asks: "I recently began working for a mid-large scale print house. We do everything from printing of sales fliers to invoices for some fortune 500 companies. For doing these invoices, we use something called JetLetter which is basically a mail merge program on crack. It lets your create a template, pull from a database and send a PCL stream to your desired printer type. The problem with this program is that it is designed only to pull from flat text files, or antiquated .dbf files. It can't support SQL Server, XML, or anything made after say...1992 (even though they have a 'JetLetter 2000' version, which is basically the same DOS based app with a 'Windows' interface). If you try doing a search for 'mail merge', your likely to get back a couple thousand hits for MS Word. Talking to my co-workers, JetLetter seems to be the only solution which suits our needs." Many people seem to think that to do "mail-merges" you need a word-processor. Not so. A mail-merge is simply applying a subset of data over a text template. Looking at the problem this way, can any of you offer suggestions to a solution that xtermz might be able to use to replace (or supplement) JetLetter?

drachen writes: "Trolltech has announced that Qt/Windows will now be available under a non-commercial license. To sum it up: 'Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt for evaluation purposes; and Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt on a personal basis to create free programs, and the source code must be made available.'" There's also talk of this at dot.kde.org.

Uche writes "IBM developerWorks recently published my article series on how to develop XPCOM components using Python. PyXPCOM gives, say Mozilla hackers, a nice option for development, since, of course, Python is the crown prince of all languages. See part 1, part 2 and part 3."

Scotch Game writes: "The LA Times is running a story about the soon-to-be-even-more-famous Cyc knowledge base that has been created by Cycorp under the leadership of Douglas B. Lenat (bio here). It's a pop piece with little technical information, but it does have some enticing bits such as the suggestion that the Cyc system is developing a sense of itself. If you're not familiar with Cycorp and its goals then take a look. Of course, you should realize that this is, in fact, the system that will one day send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time in order to kill a young pretty lass by the name of Sarah Connor. But for now the system is pre-sentient and pretty cool ..." See also OpenCyc.

lhdentra writes "Linux Journal is carrying an article by Brandon Wiley of the Everything Over Freenet project explaining how you can create your very own turn-based game, running over Freenet. He claims it's faster than playing chess by post."

seebs writes: "I wrote an article about Unix as a component architecture for the components 'zone' at IBM's developerWorks. They ran it. Here's an article (part four of a series) looking at how Unix has delivered on the promises of the object modules and component architectures that are so popular these days." This reminds me a lot of the book The Unix Philosophy.

stereoroid writes "LinuxGram is reporting that Compaq has nearly completed the Solaris Threading Library (STL), a set of tools that help Solaris developers port their applications to Linux (White Paper here). I suppose that when it's ready, it'll appear on opensource.compaq.com alongside the Linux PPTP drivers and the "Single System Image" Linux Clustering system they've been working on.

gergi writes: "Running at the kernel level, Redhat's Tux 2.0 blew away Apache and IIS in webserving content according to this benchmark! Given the never-ending security flaws found in other webservers, has a major turning point in web server design come about?"

David Cornelson writes: "If you like playing Interactive Fiction or Text Adventures, then maybe you'll like writing them too. One of the premiere development tools for creating these programs is called Inform. The resulting programs are compiled to the Z-Machine specification created by Infocom, one of the original commercial developers of text adventures. The Z-Machine is a virtual machine that has interpreters for many platforms. I recently started taking pre-orders for a layflat perfect bound copy of the Inform Designer's Manual: 4th Edition for the hardcore Interactive Fiction community that resides mostly at the usenet groups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, but if anyone else is interested, feel free to pre-order a copy of the DM4. This is a non-profit project. The author is Graham Nelson, a mathematics professor from Cambridge and has licensed both Inform and the DM4 for public use. The PDF version of the DM4 is currently available, but with so many current users of the Inform language, many people were seeking a printing solution. I volunteered to handle the logistics and Graham is currently finalizing a printed version with the cover art. The printer should receive the final cut in a week or so and begin printing shortly thereafter. Anyway, if you've ever played Zork, Adventure, or Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, you might want to try writing something of your own. This manual would not only help you get started, but there is a great deal of background information into the genre as well. David Cornelson, dcornelson@placet.com."

GnuCash is probably the best-known Linux accounting program for home and small business users. GnuCash development is now sponsored by The Linux Developers Group, Inc., a company formed this May by the core GnuCash developers, including Robert Merkel, who originally got involved with GnuCash because, he says, "I was sick of my father nagging me about the dud accounting program he used." Please feel free to ask Robert about GnuCash, guile, shared libraries or almost anything else, even cricket. (He's Australian and a major cricket fan.) We'll send Robert 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

Phil Edwards, GCC Developer wrote in to say: "The first major release of the GNU Compiler Collection in nine years, GCC 3.0, is finished. There is a long list of new features, including a new x86 back-end, a new C++ library, and a new C++ ABI, to pick my three favorites. Note that the GCC project does not distribute binary packages, only source. And right now the server is heavily loaded, so if you intend to get the source tarball, please /. one of the many ftp mirror sites instead. Plans for 2.95.4 (bugfix release), 3.0.1 (bugfix release), and 3.1 (more user-visible features) are all in progress." MartinG points to this mailing list message announcing the upload.

[cx] writes "There is one here at a U-Virginia college site. "

cgu queries: "For those who are familiar with it, log4j is one of the most widely used Java libraries today. Sun Microsystems intends to ship an obviously inferior package with JDK 1.4. Is the Java Community Process just a fig leaf allowing Sun to ignore existing development efforts? What has been the experience of other Java developers with the JCP?" There's a bit of history here, so you'll probably want to check out the log4j pages linked to, above. This is a large concern for any language which has developed a community around it, who hopes to assist in its further development. So is Sun paying attention to the community that has rallied around Java or is the Java Community Process just paying lipservice to the intended ideal?

Pointy Haired Programmer queries: "I work for a Fortune 100 company that is currently using a mixture of *NIX web servers and MS web servers. This company is very slow to adopt any new technology that isn't MS. So, we are serving most of our pages either through ASP or some type of CGI. Right now, we are investigating the possible use of PHP on our network due its cross platform abilities. I really want to see this happen for us, as I am an avid supporter of both PHP and Apache. I was wondering what the Slashdot Community had to say about the situation and maybe some of the advantages and the disadvantages of PHP being deployed in such a manner." Not having used PHP before, I'm not quite sure how well the code adapts to changes in its environment. Are there any "gotcha's!" that one needs to worry about when taking PHP code from Unix to Windows and vice-versa? How well does PHP work on Microsoft Servers?

An Anonymous Coward sent in this: "An article over at SysAdmin magazine seeks the truth while comparing network application performance under RH Linux, Solaris x86, FreeBSD 4.2, and Windows 2000. I'm a little suspicious of the writer's results, but you be the judge."

Bob Moore writes "SystemLogic has got a very thorough article on multithreading. Deals with Amdalh's Law, Latencies and Bandwidth, On-Chip Multiprocessing, Course-Grained Multithreading, Fine-Grained Multithreading, Simultaneous Multithreading, and Applications Of Multithreading. This is definately a good one."

Shane Hathaway writes: "I'm sure the slashdot readership will be happy to learn that Python is now compatible with the GPL. It's a bugfix for Python 2.0 but a similar release is planned for Python 2.1."

Daniel Ashton asks: "AltaVista Discovery was a wonderful tool for indexing files on one's own hard drive. I have most of O'Reilly's CD Bookshelves copied to my hard drive, along with other documentation in HTML or PDF format, and AltaVista Discovery indexes it all. Finding information on Perl syntax or Unix utilities or Java APIs is as easy as entering the keywords in Discovery's search toolbar. A web browser opens with a list of hits and summaries. Unfortunately, Discovery was both 1) single-platform and 2) discontinued. As I anticipate installing a new OS on my machine, I dread loosing this functionality. What alternatives exist? Are such tools available for Linux? For Win2K? Is there a file-format-reading toolkit that could be used to write a new indexer?"

Faux_Pseudo writes: "The NY Times (free reg) has a nostalgic article on the birth of the language that made computers usable by people without an IQ over 300. You might also note the lack of focus groups looking over their shoulders telling them what it should be, bureaucrats telling them when it must be released and bean counters about how much they could spend doing it."