Lisa Mann of O'Reilly sent us this story about anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse. This is something which has applications in communicating both extraterrestrially and on Earth.

etrnl asks: "I'm designing several websites with databases, and even designing a message board that supports multiple RDBMSes. What I'm looking for is a tool under Unix that I can use to diagram the relationships of different databases. Right now I'm using myODBC, myAccess, and Access 2k but there's got to be something better in the Open Source community (outside of using dia by hand...). I'm looking for support for mySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle if possible."

An Anonymous Coward gave us the excuse for the above headline with this note: "Endeavors Technology has "successfully developed a highly optimized, open source port of Python to the Palm OS platform" It's called Pippy. The press release is also there. Nice!" Here's a story about the situation.

SRS Webby writes "Eric Raymond has updated his The Art of Unix Programming page with two new chapters - Chapter 3: Unix's Zoo of Languages and Chapter 4: A Developer-Friendly Operating System." This is actually fairly old, but its a nice slow friday. Personally I'm resolving this by re-reading every Penny Arcade.

Years after the virtues of XML were first extolled (and plenty of uses both front-and-center and behind-the-scenes later), XML still isn't the do-all, be-all wonder we were led to believe. Book reviewing genius chromatic here dissects a book that sounds aimed at intermediate or advanced programmers (of other languages) who want extend their grasp with a greater understanding of the flexibility inherent to XML. How well it succeeds? Well, see what he's got to say about that.

rmpotter asks: "I'd like to provide WYSIWYG HTML editing within a number of HTML forms. I've looked at a number of free and commercial Java applets that purport to do this. Almost all of them were buggy/slow/less-functional. Frankly, the closest thing I've found is an IE-only solution at SiteExperts.com. It loads quickly, seems very stable and editing features can be added or removed as needed. Seems to me you need this functionality to build usable net/intranet apps. Are there any Mozilla examples worth looking at yet? Or a better Java applet that supports version 4 browsers? Anyone out there found a solution?"

An unnamed assailant writes: "I want to do a real nerdy project: My VCR has a plug in the back for a LAN-C/Control-L cable which connects to a serial port on a computer as well as a LAN-C connection on a camcorder. The VCR also came with some simple software to control a VCR and a camera through the cable. This was obviously before nonlinear editing was as common as it is now. Anyway, I want to see if there's any way to figure out what the codes are that the protocol uses so I can talk to the VCR using perl. Any suggestions?" Now this would be a great project, even (or especially?) without the whiz-bang eyecandy of B2K. There are a lot of middle- and high-schools with LAN-C equipped VCRs (most of which probably never get used that way), and it would be nice to be able to control them this way.

yamla asks: "I am interested in learning about distributed, fault-tolerant databases. That is, a database (not necessarily SQL) where the data is spread out (not replicated) amongst a large number of computers and furthermore, any reasonable number of those computers could disconnect or reconnect at any time without making it impossible to retrieve the stored data. I think this is a far more interesting problem than peer-to-peer because, provided such a solution scales, it would seem to solve the decentralised peer-to-peer problems. It would also seem to open up all kinds of new applications which we have hardly begun to think about yet. So I'm interested in good places to go to read up on (potential) solutions."

Jon_S asks: "I've been happily hacking on Linux for five years now, and actually started playing with computers back as a 7th grader in 1972 on a PDP-8. Somehow I didn't get into a directly computer-related field, but I soon will be. I'm going back for a masters in GIS and I will need to have some solid programming background. I've coded FORTRAN programs back in college, read lots of programming books, and have written my share of shell scripts. The one thing I haven't tackled is C or C++ programming." Put simply, the submittor is hoping to find some quality C/C++ courses on line. Any hints?

It's the scientific achievment of our generation; what can you say about the mapping of the human genome? But here's a story behind the story. parvati turned us on to this NYT article about James Kent, who wrote the gene assembly program GigAssembler last June. It turns out that, thanks to his code, the public Human Genome Project had actually finished its work three days before the private effort by Celera Genomics -- a feather in their cap and a boon to public science. The head of Celera was "astonished" to learn of this grad student's genius -- ten thousand lines of C in a month, and why? -- "because of his concern that the genome would be locked up by commercial patents if an assembled sequence was not made publicly available for all scientists to work on." (The debate over public vs. private science continues to rage; see this Seattle P-I article, which discusses among other things the ethics of NDA'ing scientific data produced for profit.)

David N. Welton writes " The Apache Software Foundation today announced the launch of the Apache Tcl project, with the goal of promoting the integration of the Apache Web server with the Tcl scripting language.
Tcl (tool command language, pronounced "tickle") is an open-source, cross-platform scripting language Tcl has a strong history of use for the Web, with products such as AOLserver, and the widely used StoryServer. Combined with Apache, the world's most popular web server, Tcl will make an excellent companion for back-end scripting tasks.
tcl.apache.org will serve as a point of reference for Apache-Tcl efforts, initially hosting the mod_dtcl project, a fast and light implementation of Tcl for Apache."

jw3 revives an old question: "Unix wouldn't have 10% of its functionality without pipes, which allow gluing together smaller utilities and that way accomplish more complicated tasks. Fancy GUI's, however, while being nice and user-friendly and all are a totally different philosophy (see interview with David Korn, answer to question 6, which I rather fancied). Now I have found an ingenious project, called Piper, which tries to create a pipelike mechanism for a GUI interface. Interestingly enough, it is being written by biologists, who just lack the flexibility of the Unix piping mechanism, but, on the other hand, need lots of GUI for their work. What do you think about this project, fellow Slashdotters?" Based on the last conversation we've had on this topic, do you think the Piper project is a step in the right direction?

TheTraveller asks: "I'm a European system/software engineer, with 25 springs behind me. Recently, I've got a bit fed up with staying tens of hours in a row in front of a screen, so I've decided to quit my job and tour this small planet. I'll obviously have to work to live, and I'll probably pick fruit as well; but I can't deny being a nerd. Have any of you Slashdotters had any experience on traveling the world and hack to survive? Are there companies willing to hire you for just one or two months? Can you be a part-time hacker? Any juicy info or link welcome." Sounds like a cool idea, but what are the realities for technical companies (on a nation-by-nation basis) hiring temporary workers like this on short notice?

Lightborn writes: "From the Web site: "Eidola is a representation-independent, object-oriented, visual programming language. Eidola is an experiment which takes a wild new approach to the structure and representation of programming languages. Traditional programming languages are heavily tied to their representation as textual source code, which is unfortunate -- text is a very poor notation system for the concepts of a high-level language. An Eidola program, however, exists independent of any representation; its "fundamental" form is as a set of carefully defined mathematical abstractions."" We're confused, yet intrigued.

geoff lane asks: "Netscape, Mozilla and IE are all large programs capable of many functions which are mostly unused (Mozilla does attempt to shrink its runtime size by using DLLs.) Lynx, Chimera and a number of other browsers are smaller but with significantly fewer functions. A modern browser needs to support Javascript, Java and SSL. It doesn't need to support News, Gopher, FTP or e-mail - all of which have perfectly good applications available already (though there should be a way for the Web browser to sub-contract work to these applications). On occasion I've wondered if I could build a halfway decent Web browser from a few specialist program components (for the display and parsing of HTML mostly) and wget, tied together with shell script or Perl and using external programs for most of the necessary support functions. How small can a usable Web browser get? (assuming we define usable as meaning capable of displaying a Slashdot page reasonably correctly *grin!*)"

irksome asks: "I am looking to write an application to replace a legacy system of having people choose their own schedules. The current system involves a large board, with all the available shifts in blocks, and sticky notes with people's names on them. After everyone puts their stickies on the board, some poor soul has to go through manually and type it all into a spreadsheet. I'm wondering if anyone has any sugesstions for replacing this system. The ideal system would have a Web-interface, and it should also be able to generate a printable spreadsheet. Any ideas on how to implement this?"

Sowbug writes: "Perl programmers rejoice! Mason 1.0 was released today, though prerelease versions have been in operation for years at websites like TechWeb, Salon.com, and AvantGo. Congratulations, Jonathan Swartz (principal author of Mason)!" I don't know much about Mason, but it seems like another cool addition to the Cold Fusion/PHP world of embeddable code in Web pages.

red_crayon writes: "Borland's kylix -- their port of Delphi (née Borland Pascal), and, coming later, Borland C++ Builder -- is out. See Borland's Kylix Web site for more details. This has been discussed on Slashdot in the past, but it is good to see that it is finally out. A kylix is an ancient Greek two-handled drinking cup. Hence, they keep the Greek theme started with Delphi. And the two handles are meant to be (???) some sort of symbolism WRT Win and Linux co-development." It's $999, and this round is actually "pre-order" rather than shipping -- but people have been waiting for this.

allinoneplace asks: "I would like to start working on an open-source project, starting from scratch since IMHO, is very difficult to jump into an already running project (reviewing the code would take months for some of them), and I've been speculating about some ideas on my own. However, I would like to know whether there is some place where proposals for open-source projects are posted, so that people might take and start them. The other way around: Is there any place where you can post projects you think are interesting but you won't be able to start?" What are your thoughts? Do you think the Open Source community really needs such a service?

Continuing with his campaign to rid the world of lousy software, chromatic is back with this review of Extreme Programming Installed. It sounds like what the authors are advocating is a truly programmer-centric environment; does anyone have experience in a workplace even close to this?