For those inundated with data -- numbers, names, dates, temperatures, colors, seismographic sensor output, voting records(!), or anything else -- the paltry concerns of user interface may be less important than the assurance that they can make something useful from all that stuff. Data munger extraordinaire chromatic has again delivered his insightful dissection of a programming book aimed at people with Perl knowledge and a lot of data to wade through, and No, it's not from O'Reilly. Maybe it's for you.

Daniel Rall writes: "Project JXTA, originally a research project spearheaded by Bill Joy and Mike Clary, is now an open source effort, with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications. It addresses the need for an open, generalized protocol that interoperates with any peer on the network including PCs, servers and other connected devices." Seems to be a combination of Gnutella and Beowulf clustering - lots of potential.

RagingBull writes: "This new article walks through the latest release of the new 2.2 Samba. What a huge jump in improvement the 2.2 version was over the older 2.x version's; made my job a lot easier especially with its new support of ACL's."

swagr writes "Some new and interesting information on the Ruby website.
1: O'Reilly is apparently publishing a translation of "Ruby Pocket Reference" (although this news doesn't seem to be on O'Reilly's site
2: There is a Ruby Conference happening in October.
3: They need some help with a Ruby mascot (1337 gimpists: go nuts)."

Carnage4Life asks: "After continually being surprised by the evolution of various programming languages (the most recent occurances being the change in meaning of the protected keyword in Java, as well as the addition of the restricted keyword in C) I've decided that I wish to get involved in the standards process for a variety of languages. This has proven to be easier said than done. So how does one get involved in the standards process for a particular language, be it C#, Javascript, Perl, C++, Java, C, Python, or any other language? I know each of these languages probably has a different process so please feel free simply to point out how to get involved in the languages you have knowledge about." Interesting question, but I think the best advice to fall back on is: "ask around". Most compilers and interpreters at least have the author's email address or a mailing list where these can be directed. With that said, has anyone done this for a specific language? If so, please tell us of your experiences.

epiphani asks: "Over the past few years IRC has grown substantially. With this growth, many issues are arising with bandwidth usage. I've started rewriting the client-side protocol that has remained completely unchanged since the publication of RFC1459. During my conversations with various client authors and coders from the major networks, the suggestion has been made to remove the nickname as the unique namespace, replacing it with an ICQ-like UIN. This would mean the same nickname could appear more than once on a network. This would also apply to channel names, just as EFnet is planning to do in hybrid7, with Vchans. Does anyone have any suggestions to optimization of the current client-side protocol?"

lamefrog writes: "Bjarne Stroustrup and other members of the C++ community recently met to discuss new work on the language for the first time post-ISO standard (C++0x) in an effort to keep the language moving, avoid fossilization and avoid being overtaken by proprietary extensions. Suggested new features center around the standard library and include support for multi-threading and simple platform-independent systems abstractions (handles, TCP/IP, memory maps etc...)" (Read more.)

Matt Watson writes "Here is a link over to a story on wired that talks about the upcoming chess match in Spain between the world's top 4 computer chess programs. The winner will go on to play Vladimir Kramnik for the second round of human vs computer chess. I think that "deep fritz" sounds the coolest and my money is on that one. Read the article from Wired"

Ellen writes "Apache's Jakarta-Tomcat server is an open source, Java-based Web application container that was created to run Servlet and JavaServer Page (JSP) web applications. In O'Reilly Network's "Using Tomcat" series, author James Goodwill previously has explained how to install and configure Tomcat. His latest article provides in-depth information about how to deploy it. Read "Deploying Web Appliactions to Tomcat"

LetterJ writes "I've started a contest to get some clever PHP poetry and other T-shirt designs over at PHPGeek.com. Designs and entered code should be licensed under an OSI aproved license. Details are available at PHP Geek."

Sean writes "Take a look at this comparison of Server-side scripting languages. The article explains how PHP scripts, Perl CGIs, and Java servlets work. It can help you decide whether to use PHP scripts, Perl CGIs, or Java servlets for your next Web development project. It also covers the issues that separate the three languages and provides all the source to test their differences." Right tool, right situation. That's all I have to say.

Thangorodrim writes "First saw this at SecurityFocus, but it seems as if someone at COTDC finally got around to coding a nice SMB session hijacker for NT/2000. I've tested this on some machines...its pretty brutal. And just in time to coincide with the release of l0phtcrack 3.0... The story linked doesn't have a link to the actual utility, but you can grab it here." *cough* For testing purposes only, of course.

Here you go - answers to your questions for Guido van Rossum about Python, its future, licensing hassles with the Free Software Foundation, and other neat stuff. Thanks, Guido!

Steven sent over an interview Feedmag has got with the lead AI programmer for Black & White. He talks about some of the creature/villager routinues in the game, which is interesting for the game, but also interesting in terms of how much the world of AIs for games has changed in the last few years.

the special sauce writes: "Allaire and Macromedia have revamped WDDX as a true Open Source endeavor (though it was never really proprietary, just more or less perceived that way because of its origins). I'm glad to see WDDX repositioned this way as I've used WDDX enough on some large projects to appreciated its simplicity. Hopefully, support for WDDX will swell with this latest announcement."

avdi asks: "BeOpen.com was once one of the crop of promising free-software based dotcoms, basing their business on selling corporate support contracts for the open-source development tools they also maintained. They were even the center for Python development at one time. Now, however, Python has moved on; their web site is out of date; their supported software cannot be downloaded; and they are unreachable via email. So, has BeOpen.com silently gone the way of many other dotcoms in these hard economic times, and if so, what has/will become of the open-source software they once maintained?" I tried calling the contacts listed for BeOpen.Com, and the numbers for both the administrative and techical contacts were disconnected. Not good news for those interested in the site, but maybe the software projects they housed managed to find new homes. One can hope...

Sc00ter writes "According to this security advisory from Tempest Security Technologies there is a security flaw in the Linux 2.4 kernel when using IPTables." In a nutshell: if you're using a 2.4 system as a firewall, you need to read this.

John Squeaker writes: "Last week while the rest of the world was worrying about corporations warning, and dot coms failing, 300 smalltalkers got together in Chicago to plan for the future. Given the fact corporations like Dell have canceled their user conference this year we were very pleased with the attendence figures. The conference hosted a key note by Alan Kay, a *must* read, and the mood and general feeling of the show was captured in this excellent trip report. More information on the conference plus links to the papers/tutorials presented there can be found at the conference site. Do you want to know where OO languages like Java, Ruby, Squeak, and SmallScript come from? Then come visit us for the real story, and see what you can expect to hear in the next five years." The whole thing is interesting, but I particularly liked Tuesday. Smalltalkers seem to have a secret from everyone else sometimes ...

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.