Moosbert writes: "The latest and greatest PostgreSQL has been released. Major new features include write-ahead logging for better performance and reliability, outer joins, unlimited row size, and more complex queries (subselects in FROM, views with aggregates, etc.). Get yours from a mirror."

Jeremy Allison wrote in to tell us that Samba 2.2.0 has been released. Of course, I'm sure everyone reading this knows what that means already, so I've attached the press release. Mostly this looks like its stuff for compatibility with Windows "We just changed enough to break everyone else" 2000's implementation of the protocol. Congrats to everyone involved with what is unquesitonably among the most important server apps on Linux.

This week's interview is with Guido van Rossum, a man who, as they say, needs no introduction. (Not around here, at least.) To learn a bit more about him, check his personal page. You might want to ask him about Python 2.1, which was released today. One question per person, please. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated ones to Guido about 24 hours after this post went up, and will run his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

mborland asks: "As I am contemplating doing contracting for a living, I have set my rates, and am allowing hiring organizations the option of a discount if certain portions of my work are released into the public domain under GPL. This at least benefits me, as I can feel free to easily reuse code for other projects; it arguably helps the organization, especially if the code is any good to begin with, and gets improved over time. If I do work for an organization which requires, for various reasons, that the code be propriety, then they pay full price--and they are happy to do so. But most places who just want something to work well and do not care about code ownership are happy to consider a price reduction. Any experiences with this? Thoughts?" This is an interesting way to professionally advocate the use of Open Source. What do you think about this practice, especially those of you working in the industry as contractors?

Wordman asks: "The Slashdot article on making software suck less got me wondering about how open source projects make use of the (by far) best tool for reducing software suckage: peer code reviews. Normally, a project team is assigned a fellow programmer's code to look over and critique; however, with open source projects, the 'team' is not as cohesive and usually scattered geographically. Additionally, most open source projects do not have a 'project manager' the way a company would. So, what experiences have you had with code reviews in an open source project? What was the process? Did it work? If it didn't, what went wrong? How would you go about starting a code review process in an open source project?"

Dr. Love asks: "C++ contains a mountain of features. I am searching for a good C++ coding practice - what language features to avoid, what language features to make extensive use of, etc. In my survey of C++ coding practices, there seems to be a plethora of philosophies ranging from the stingy to the highly abstracted and elaborate. By stingy, I'm referring to those that use few of C++'s advanced features, such as Mozilla. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are elaborate practices that make extensive use of the STL, exceptions, RTTI, templates, etc. Those who prefer the simple implementations tend to argue that elaborate practices result in inefficient, unclear, and unportable code. Those who prefer the elaborate implementations tend to argue that simple implementations are missing out on a Nirvana of reuse and clean design. Are these arguments unfounded? What has been your experience with C++ coding guidelines? What does the industry expect?" Just like the choice of the language itself, the choice of the features you use in your language should lend itself to the task you are developing. Some projects don't need to use every single feature of C++ to get the job done, however use of those ignored features in other projects might make your life (and your code) much easier to handle.

Mike Hall asks: "It has come up at work again. We are about to start a new design on our product and the spaces vs. tabs discussion is back. When you indent c/c++ code should all spaces, or tabs be used? Almost everyone agrees that a mix of the two is a bad idea. Currently most of the programmers here want to use tabs set to 4. I am a space junkie. I prefer all my code to look the same if I am looking at it on vi, emacs, less, or on a paper after a lpr command. What does the slashdot community feel is the pros and cons of spaces and tabs in code?" I'm kind of torn on the issue. I believe that properly indented code is important in improving readability, but I'm also a firm believer in the fact that to edit code, you shouldn't need to spend hours and hours on formatting. Tabs are the fastest way to align your data, but they have their drawbacks and formatting code with spaces takes for ever. What works best for some of you, out there?

horos1 asks: "I was wondering how people out there deal with 'Heisenbugs': bugs that have no logical, programmatic cause (mostly from C and C++ programs and especially threaded C/C++ programs), that may change or disappear if you modify the state of the program. For example: we have a multi-threaded C++ app which cores in about 5 places, at a different memory address each time, and which disappear if we turn threading off. They seem to be caused because of a memory overrun error, but this too is exceedingly hard to fix with tools like purify, because they tend to give several 'false positives' on memory errors, as well as core when we link with certain libraries. Anyways, this is getting very annoying... Any help with this, as well as pointers on how to deal with bugs like this would be greatly appreciated."

pudge writes: "The Perl Journal is back in the hands of Jon Orwant, after a sorrowful chapter in the hands of EarthWeb. No details available yet, just the good news. He is now accepting article proposals for future issues, and Issue #20 will be printed and mailed soon." It's cool to see something decent being revived in a month when it seems like many companies are either failing or scaling back.

Sean asks: "Are there any blind programmers out there? I'm interested to hear how prevalent they are, what sort of work or projects they do (and the size of the projects), and whether we have any blind contributors to open source projects. In fact, it would be interesting to widen the question to ask how many blind IT professionals are out there. How do blind programmers work and what development environments are they likely to work in?" I know that there are ways for the blind to use a computer, however I don't know if the tools that they use are robust enough for programming. However, as computer technology and interfaces improve. I'm sure that more and more people with disabilities will be using them.

Pudge tells me that perl 5.6.1 is released. Tell your boss you won't get any work done today, you have to, er, upgrade your personal knowledgebase of evolving regularly expressional technology. Then test every one of the bugfixes, like ""a\nxb\n" =~ /(?!\A)x/m". Pick your favorite new feature or bugfix from the announcement and tell us about it.

frekio asks: "I'm a 4th year undergrad at UCSD and am taking part of an ambitious cognitive science course that moves us, as groups, to redesign an interface with cognitive processes, usability and efficiency in mind. My idea was to contribute to Open Source with this project by assisting in a GUI design/redesign. We need to work with something that has an active user community which could provide feedback about changes we made or propose, and therefore must have a decently large userbase. What are some projects out there that provide software which people use day-to-day and could use more time and effort put into the User Interface?"

janpod66 writes: "Tim Berners-Lee is putting his weight behind a new programming language designed by David Kranz intended to replace existing client-side programming languages like Java and JavaScript, as well as HTML. You can find more information at InteractiveWeek. Dertouzos, head of MIT's Lab for Computer Science is also involved. You can also find more information at the startup company's web site. They have programming manauls on their web site. It looks vaguely like a mix of Tcl, Lisp and C (lots of low-level type declarations possible). They also provide a brief rationale. Now, I'm the first to admit that HTML, XML, DOM, JavaScript, Java, and style sheets have become rather complex. Actually, Curl looks pretty nice and clean. But does it stand a chance? And is going with something new, untried like this better than going with mature, widely understood technology?"

It's been coming in through the proverbial grapevine that SourceXChange has been closed by its' parent Collab.net. In the closed doors page they've got, Collab notes that they are focusing on a code development environment they've been working on - it's a lot like what SourceXChange was doing, but installing for people looking for collabrative development tools.

rotifer asks: "A while ago I saw Kent Beck talk at the Java user's group meeting here in Seattle. Someone asked him about UML. He made a derisive noise and sneered that he had come up with a better version called GML, Galactic Modeling Language. He said (and I am paraphrasing here) that GML had three components "Boxes, Arrows and Arrows Pointing to Boxes". I thought this was right on. That seemed to be all the object modeling a person would need, especially when compared to the 808 pages of obtuse documentation that make up UML. But am I missing something here. Do people find UML useful. Or is it just overblown hype? Do you need this fully featured language to design an O-O system? Or are you better off with just boxes and arrows? Also, if you were to teach programming to beginning Java and C++ developers, is it a good idea to start with a course in UML so that new programmers can become familiar with O-O methodology before they start to cut code?"

raelity writes "Larry Wall provides some insight into the design of Perl 6 on www.perl.com. "People get scared when they hear the word Apocalypse, but here I mean it in the good sense: a Revealing. An Apocalypse is supposed to reveal good news to good people. (And if it also happens to reveal bad news to bad people, so be it. Just don't be bad.) What I will be revealing in these columns will be the design of Perl 6. Or more accurately, the beginnings of that design, since the design process will certainly continue after I've had my initial say in the matter." " This is a really interesting article and worth reading if you're at all into Perl. Full of Wallisms, entertaining and insightful.

iomud writes "Cnet has an article about "Extreme Programming" the idea being that to code quickly with less errors and minimal integration issues it should be done in pairs. From the opinions in the article it sounds like it works providing a constant state of QA and keeping coders on their toes. Are two heads really better than one?" Its a sorta cheesy article, but some of the concepts are true. Of course, distributed hackers have been doing this for years on open source projects. Its not quite as real-time as they're talking about here, but its fundamentally similiar.

sparty asks: "Does anyone have any tips for a Computer Science student looking for a summer job? I've tried a few of the larger job sites (such as monster.com), along with some "summer job" sites. The former seem not to have many summer jobs, and the latter seem not to have many comp sci-type jobs--they seem to have a lot more 'work at camp' or work-at-the-amusement-park-type jobs. I've put up a page with my resume, and I've tried submitting it to a few sites. I am willing to travel for the summer, but I don't know what might be available in other areas. Is there another avenue I should be exploring?"

However skeptical the ads make you, it's hard to deny that what used to be considered supercomputing power keeps showing up in consumer-priced boxes, and the threshold of what really is extreme has crept steadily upward. If you're planning a project of more than average size, though, the review that chromatic contributed below of Planning Extreme Programming could be a valuable read, and the ideas in the book itself could save you a lot of money and time. Even if you have no plans to desire to install a beowulf in your broomcloset, it's interesting to consider what sort of thought must go into any large-scale programming project.

Morbaal writes "I am working on a project where we have to have a minimal ammount of load on the db server. So my question is should I submit hex data for the server to compute or int data or does it matter at all?" Clearly this depends on which version of SQL Server you're using.