darthtuttle asks: "So I'm working on collecting some stats from the Solaris kernel via the kstat interface and a few others, and I'm going to advertise them via SNMP and graph them with MRTG, however...writing the MIB is going to take forever, not to mention handling three versions of Solaris and different information based on what class of machine. My questions is, does anyone know of a way to take a C structure, mix some additional info (like where in the MIB it goes) and output a MIB definition? I swear, writing the MIB definition is harder then writing the C code to compile in to net-snmp!"

An AC sent in this article at perl.com which discusses new perl mailing lists set up especially to answer beginners' questions. Hopefully they're not all being answered with "Go buy Learning Perl" or something like that.

basic70 asks: "There seems to be a strong preference for developing new systems all the time, instead of just refactoring and improving existing ones. Why is that? Modifications such as moving to a new operating system, modifying the business logic, adding a web interface, moving to Unicode etc, shouldn't affect more than perhaps 10-20% (to grab figures at random) of a decently built software system. I can think of two reasons myself. The first is that consulting firms make more money developing new systems, and the second that existing systems are so badly layered and modularized that any larger improvements are impossible. The second reason is scary, because that means that the modern way of building things with short lifespans is starting to make its way into the software business as well. I saw a system written in 1995 that couldn't handle the new millenium. Can't we do any better than that? The GNU suite says we can, so why is it so hard with commercial software?"

Trak writes "I am not a lawyer, nor can I afford one. I have a cool idea that I think could make some money, and I'd like to pitch this idea to a couple CEO/entrepreneur buddies of mine for a joint venture (they provide the money, I already have the technology). Yes, they are friends, but they are also businessmen and I wouldn't put it past them to take my idea and run with it. How can I protect myself and my idea, such as drafting an NDA and having them sign it before hearing my idea? What would I need to include in such a document?" I'm sure many of us have been in this position before and didn't know what to do. For those who have written one, if you would please share some information and insight on what you did and why?

justrob writes: "Looks like there was a massive security breach at Source Forge. I wonder if this what caused the 'unscheduled maintenance event' that has left the shell servers unavailable for a week. Here is part of an email I recieved:" (Read more below.)

surflorida writes: "ActiveState and Oreilly are co-sponsoring a project called the Python Cookbook that is currently being developed publicly and collaboratively at the ActiveState Web site. Individuals, members of the Python user community, are contributing the scripts. All the scripts are and will be available for free download from ActiveState's site. O'Reilly will publish the best ones in a book, and some of the proceeds will benefit the Python Software Foundation."

tom writes "It seems that the BSD community will have to face, presently and in the future, some copyright problems. In fact, the IPFilter code is copyrighted by Darren Reed who recently added the following to his license : "...Yes, this means that derivative or modified works are not permitted without the author's prior consent. " This little add radically changes the status of the software which can not be considered >as open source anymore. Shall this modification influence the future of projects such as the OpenBSD, who actually uses a modified version of IPFilter? This originally came from Linux Weekly News." It's down towards the bottom of the page, now.

Reader Brian Donovan contributed the review below of O'Reilly & Associates' ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, which he says is a "must have" for anyone working on Web animation with Flash. Offered under the condition that you please not make your site utterly dependent on Flash, of course;)

joestump98 writes: "JWZ (of Netscape and Mozilla fame) has put up an extremely interesting article about using ThinkNic diskless workstations as internet kiosks at his new club, DNA Lounge. Very cool stuff!"

gabbarsingh sent this in via punchcard: "What's happening at Sun on the MAJC front? They haven't released anything new on that. The first samples were promised in first half of 2000." MAJC (pronounced "magic"), stands for Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing, and according to EDTN is the only hardware java implementation that combines both multithreading and multiprocessing. It seems that "Java on a Chip" solutions are more commonplace now, than they were when Rockwell released the first, back in 1997. Might the promise of code that you can "Write Once, Run Anywhere" soon become reality, now that there is an actual platform on which it can run (rather than piggybacking on other platforms via JVMs)?

rschroeder writes: "Apple has opened their Common Data Security Architecture framework, which "contains an expandable set of cryptographic algorithms to perform code signing and encryption operations while maintaining the security of the cryptographic keys." Lots of good info in addition to the code."

Wilto writes: "Emmanuel, of 2600 fame, has announced yet another H.O.P.E conference. The following is an excerpt from the official H2K mailing list. 'H2K2 will be held Friday, July 12 to Sunday, July 14, 2002 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. We will have close to 50,000 square feet to work with as opposed to the last conference which had closer to 12,000 square feet. This is an enormous space and we need to start planning on the best way to use it.' For more info, see www.h2k2.net and, naturally 2600.org." Subscribe to the h2k2 mailing list by sending "subscribe h2k2" to majordomo@2600.com.

Frank writes: "Here's an article about encryption with Stunnel, which is a program that allows both programmers and system administrators to easily add encryption to arbitrary TCP sessions. You can SSL-enable clients and servers with ease -- and you can do so without interfering with program source."

Guillem Cantallops Ramis writes: "In Bulma (Balearic Islands LUG) we've done real benchmarks this time: Mongo benchmarks (designed by Hans Reiser and used to test ReiserFS, slightly modified by me to support XFS and JFS), kernel compilation benchmarks, and a small "database simulation" benchmark. You'll find everything in english this time, with benchmark results and interesting comments by Dr. Ricardo Galli (Universitat de les Illes Balears, UIB). Have fun... and switch to a journaled filesystem now!" The previous article was here.

Steven Haryanto writes: "This one's from Indonesia. InfoLinux did an email interview with Hans Reiser, in which he explained about the ReiserFS project plan and the new Namesys business model. Mr. Reiser told me that Namesys recently received $600K funding from DARPA to include encryption in ReiserFS v4.0." Dig this quote: "We are going to add plugins in our next major version, and we hope that plugins will do for filesystems what they did for Photoshop." Mmmm -- encrypted, compressed, journaling, extensible filesystems. Reiser also touches on issues of international software development and how programmers can achieve fame.

willmurat writes: "I read about Rebol in an article in UnixInsider months ago. It seems to me a very interesting language, with new features and trying to bring new paradigms in programming. But (always there is a but ...), it isn't Open Source and no institution is responsible to maintain that language. The only responsible party is Rebol Technologies. I'm not saying this is the right way to failure; there are examples of success following this way (Visual Basic and Delphi, for example), but I think a business strategy like that isn't good anymore. See the current developing of Perl version 6 for a very good example of language discussion. Seems to me the owners of Rebol language are limitating the popularization of that language choosing that way of dealing in this issue ... Is there any future to popularize a language that way?"

JigSaw writes: "Is the world ready for yet another Operating System? Travis Geiselbrecht, an ex-BeOS kernel engineer, seems to think so. (He is actually the one who wrote the Linux ext2 filesystem add-on for BeOS). He recently put up on his web site his personal Operating System, NewOS, with full source code. The OS was written from scratch and it is very modern and powerful as you can see from its feature set. It currently runs on x86 and... Sega Dreamcast but he is planning ports for Alpha, SGI and Sun Blade machines in the near future."

Janon writes: "There's a rather interesting interview with Antony Fountain, a Motif developer and reference manual author at O'Reilly. He makes some rather well-founded (or at least it seems so to me) claims that Motif has some rather important advantages over the likes of GTK+ and Qt, such as an open and superior component model." It's a great illustration of the split between open and closed development, too -- fans of the Bazaar may see only waste in Fountains assertion that "Millions of lines of Motif get written and not one word about it leaves the company doors."

infiniti99 writes: "Looks like Trolltech made a port of their popular cross-platform GUI toolkit, Qt, (not to be confused with the QuickTime movie player) for the Mac. Here is a link to the announcement. There are a couple of screenshots and a demo application is available. Good stuff! Will this further solidify Qt's position as the de facto way to develop cross-platform applications?"

darthtuttle asks: "Hardware has a concept of meantime between failure, so how about applying a similar concept for software. Here's how it works. Cracks can be described by the level of access gained, some examples are: remote root, remote user (root if run by user root), remote group, local root, local user, local group, and so forth. Applications or services have their own measurements and descriptions as well. Most all types of cracks can be listed in an order and a higher level crack is equal to each of the lesser level cracks. For example: a remote root is also a remote user and remote group crack. Now measure the mean time between incidences! Do people find ways to break in to your system every day? Every week? Every month? Every year?"