Marko van Dooren writes: "Waldo Bastian wrote an interesting paper on the GNU ld.so linker and C++. It seems not only KDE is slow. At least now I know what the kdeinit process is for."

An Anonymous Coward with thoughts of rapid CGI deployment, asks: "My manager has asked me for something that would show the differences in development time between ASP/VBScript and CGI/Perl. He is trying to gauge time schedules for web projects, but I don't have a clue as to where such information would be documented. I am familiar with both architectures and know the differences, but I think he's hoping for white papers of comparisons. Can anyone tell me where to look?"

DonJ writes: "This is a good article that explains a lot about how Perl can play a big part in developing Web Services. It will show you a no-nonsense approach to using SOAP::Lite, Perl's window into SOAP Web services. The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is the basic messaging protocol for Web services, so this is a need to know."

Nym writes: "It seems that another component, SQL has been added to the many layers of Freenet. Check out FreeSQL Project, and start porting your SQL apps today." The possible implications of this sort of utility are amazing.

David writes "I took a look at the new developerWorks Wireless resources section and found this very cool article that shows you how to design a JavaBean that works with SAX, reads in XML data, and puts WBMP (Wireless BitMap) drawing on mobile devices. It uses JSP to generates WML cards that displays WBMP graphs on the screen of a WAP device."

JoeB writes "This article claims if you follow a few simple guidelines you can easily port your Lotus Domino apps that run on Windows to Linux and Solaris. Here is a more focused article about what you need to know about Domino on Linux."

Mosix is a scalable clustering system for Linux, released under the GPL. Version 1.0 for the 2.4 kernels is now available.

If you are not familiar with RSS, and you work with web content and publishing, you should be. Webreference has an article covering the details and history of RSS. This week's temporary loss of the DTD that Netscape was hosting has pushed RSS from a behind the scenes tool, and into the common pool of buzzwords. While RSS may appear new to some peple it has been around for a couple of years. If you are a user with an account and you personalize your Slashboxes, you are deciding which RSS feeds you would like to display (not all slashboxes are RSS, but most are).

J1 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has officially given its Stamp of Approval to the XML Schema specification. This makes it an official W3C Recommendation. The press release has the details."

CynicTheHedgehog asks: "I am a programmer for what used to be a small CLEC in the Southeast. Initially I was in charge of system administration and development of small PHP scripts under little supervision and absolutely no quality control. I now work with an entire team of developers under new management, and recently there has been a major push toward mature development practices, not least of which is project documentation. The problem I am experiencing is that up to this point each of us was in charge of his respective projects, more or less managing them from conception to completion. That being the case, the documentation solutions we have come up with have been something of a mix between technical specifications and your typical corporate red tape. Our processes are poorly defined at the moment and I'm trying to come up with a solid, standards-based documentation solution. An SRS is a bit heavy for what we're trying to do and doesn't provide the 'sign-off' points we need to cover our rears. What kind of documentation formats are in place at other companies? Are there any defacto standards in the open source community that are useful in a corporate context?"

Larry Wall has written the second article in his "Apocalypse" series about Perl6. If you missed the first article, you might want to read that one first, or see the previous discussion.

Craig Pfeifer wrote this review of Server-Based Java Programming, and in a world of books loaded with buzzwords, and sometimes volume at the expense of clarity, he claims that this volume suffers neither fault. (Even if you're sick of the word "Enterprise.")

1010011010 writes: "IBM has tested the syscall speed of Linux 2.2.16, 2.4.2 and Windows 2000. As it turns out, Linux is a little more than twice as fast. This may be interesting to people who have been reading the LKML recently, as a debate has been doing on about syscall speed. Also, a method ("magic page") for further improving syscall speed is being developed by the kernel developers. The rate at which all aspects of Linux is improving -- kernel, GUIs, etc. -- is phenominal. I think Linux is pretty cool now; I can't wait to see it in 18 months."

If you are interested in reading an informative article on attacks against TCP connection sequences, CERT has posted a nice alert about it. The article does a nice job of going into the history of such attacks. Normally I find CERT's pretty worthless and outdated compared to what you find on Bugtraq, but this one is pretty good.

Glowbead asks: "I'm trying to find a java applet that can be used instead of a textarea for use in a Content Management System I'm working on. I basically need something that will let someone who's in charge of managing content to do spot formating (bold, italic, underline, H1, etc) without the need to know any html tags. I've found one called edit-on Pro that looks like it will do the trick from Real Objects. It's a pretty slick little applet that seems to work well under Netscape 4.x, Mozilla, and IE. The only problems are that I've tried for close to a week to get in touch with the company, with no luck, and it's not Open Source. I've also seen a few that are Windows only (dll plugin based). I'd really like to find something like this that is cross platform (as edit-on is) and free (as in speech) so that I can modify it to my needs and so that the whole system could be released at some point in the future. Does anyone know of anything good for this purpose?"

kovi writes "Paul Graham, the guy who developed what finally became Yahoo!Stores (and made him $50 million richer) wrote an article that explains how he used Lisp (the infamous programming language) as a competitive advantage against the competition. As a bonus: thoughts on startup experience." Its in pdf, but its actually worth a read. Very nifty.

keithp writes: "XFree86, Gnome and KDE are sponsoring the first XFree86 Technical Conference to be held concurrently with ALS in Oakland this November. We're looking for people interested in presenting novel and exciting stuff they're doing with XFree86 at all levels -- from X server hacks to toolkits, applications, theming and 3d graphics. There's also space for tutorials, BOFs and working groups -- if you're involved in an X-related group interested in getting together for non-electronic communication, we've got just the place."

BillyBob writes: "I Came accross this cool article about Functional programming in Python that demonstrates several intermediate and advanced FP concepts. The author uses Bryn Keller's 'Xoltar Toolkit' which provide valuable assistance. Keller has collected many of the strengths of FP into a nice little module containing pure Python implementations of the techniques. This is definitely worth examining for a Python programmer seeking to continue the exploration of functional paradigms."

MythoBeast asks: "While attempting to determine just how far a (unnamed) company's software is from releasability, a group that I belong to discovered that they consider a piece of software releasable with numerous 'severity one' bugs. This seems outright heinous to us at first, but then the conversation devolved into an argument of what constituted a 'severity one' bug. Is there a standard for such things? Is there a standard for how many of these things are reasonable for 'releasable' software?"

A reader writes: "SAP has released full source of their sapdb sql database system under the GPL. It can be found at http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/sapdb/deve lop/dev_sources.htm It's probably the most complete free database system available right now, with much more features than interbase, mysql or postgresql. The codebase seems to be rather old and is written in a mix of Pascal and C. It contains interfaces to Perl and various languages."