tf23 writes "ApacheToday's got an article about mod_perl and shared memory. The article is part IV of the improving mod_perl series. For any perl/apache coders (or anyone coding with Slash or Bender) this is a good read.
Quick links to the other parts:
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part III: Code Profiling and Memory Measurement Techniques
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part II: Benchmarking Applications
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part I: Choosing Operating System and Hardware"
This is in part one of our holy grails, caching all of the comments for current stories. It would make those near 2000 comment stories a lot easier to stomach for the Web servers.

bedel231 sent us a fairly lengthy and detailed article discussing the hype surrounding Object Oriented Programming and tries to claim that a lot of things taken for granted are mythical. Personally, I've never been a huge fan of OOP, so I tend to agree on a lot of these points. Regardless of your stance on the issue, it's worth a read.

hhg writes: "Central Command discovers First Virus to Use PHP Scripting Language. 'This virus is not dangerous in any kind, but it can be modified to have a very destructive payload and marks a new step towards a new virus generation,' said Steven Sundermeier, Product Manager at Central Command, Inc." In its current form, the virus apparently only infects Windows machines -- by infecting all .php, .hm, .html or .htt files in the C:\Windows directory, but I guess we will see more dangerous variants out there very soon." The Register also has a nice article about it here. Anyone who has been following PHP probably already knows about this, but I thought it would be interesting to folks who don't follow PHP that closely. Calling it a virus though, is somewhat suspect. Plus we get to show off the new PHP topic icon :)

zburke asks: "I need to make the first release of an application but I have no idea how to tag it -- version 1, version 1.0, version 1.0.0? Is it worth trying to encode major version/minor version/bug fix into an a.b.c scheme? Microsoft's "NT 4.00 Service Pack 6a" sucks, but so does Oracle's "8.1.5.4.0". Apache has the simplest versioning I've seen, but the only thing I know about 1.3.14 is that it came after 1.3.12. Any ideas or references?" The most popular version numbering scheme stems from the <major>.<minor>.<patchlevel> scheme, and that works well enough, but what other versioning schemes can you all come up with that are different enough, but not a pain in the butt to decode?

quoll asks: "I work for a software development company which is entirely Linux based, and tries to release all of its code as Open Source. It's a great place to work, and I've just been asked to help make it better. After going from 12 people to 19 we suddenly don't have enough coffee making capacity, and I've been asked to research a coffee machine which can keep up with the expected increase in demand. Unfortunately I'm only familiar with feeding coffee to small groups, using drip-filters and the like. I suspect that we could use an espresso machine, but I'm concerned about the need to spend 10 minutes to make a single serving. How do other companies provide large quantities of nice (ie. non-instant) coffee? What sort of machines do people recommend?" Yes, I know that this is under the "Java" topic, but it gets so underused these days that it was getting lonely, and the icon is rather appropriate, yes?

Pierre Phaneuf asks: "The XPLC project, an open source, portable component system focused on high performance, is looking at leveraging the open source community to do a peer-review of its design. An article on Advogato describes the design of XPLC. What do you see there that you like? What do you think is wrong? Any ideas or suggestions?"

abh asks: "I can't be the only one out there who has a background programming under Windows, primarily using Microsoft's Visual Studio. I'm a Linux enthusiast who is looking for information (books? Web sites?) on developing using the GNU tools. Since most of my experience is with a visual design environment, are there similar environments available Linux?"

A number of people have been wondering what's going to happen to TPJ ^[?] in light of Earthweb's (the owner of TPJ) sale of most of its properties to Internet.com. Many rumours have been flying around and Jon Orwant has decided to clear things. I've put his status update below.

albert_tam asks: "I don't appprove of 'management methodologies' and I feel that things like ISO, TQC, Kepnor-Tregoe, CMM, 6 Sigma, etc., aren't worth the time it takes to learn them. There are also those self-proclaiming-MBA-bearing IT experts, who spout off about these everyday in our office and earn big paychecks. The result? It's not important. By the time everybody in the office is forced to get started with these management methodologies, those 'so-called' Quality assuring IT consultants are already gone. The thing is, do you buy those management methodologies? How do you draw a line between IT & management concepts without hindering your daily work? Let's hear what you have to say."

lmsig asks: "I've recently run into a dilemma. I own a Palm IIIxe and my wife was given a Palm m100 for a Christmas gift. Unfortunately they have different shapes and use different cradles and cables to HotSync. I didn't think this would be a big deal; just throw one into each COM port; low and behold I have to reconfigure the software each time since it can only support one device. Palm has told me that they do not support the use of multiple cradles on a single desktop. Does anyone have any creative ideas to conveniently access both devices?" Considering the fact that high-tech households will have more than one Pilot, I think Palm has dropped the ball on this one. Why is it that the Hotsync software can only be operated on one port? Does the Unix software have this limitation?

antiher0 writes "The first beta of Perl::Flash is done! You can now use Perl to generate flash animations, etc. I've been waiting for something like this to come along :) BTW, be sure to check out the demo page. You can also check out the project breakdown here."

Icephreak asks: " I've been studying a foreign language for quite some time now and have been recently researching the more effective ways to approach learning the nuances of it in both spoken and written form. Not so surprisingly the same advice comes up again and again. More still, I remember being given the same dead ringer advice by a few programmer friends about learning programming languages. I find this lends a good hand to the observation presented in the famous Thomas Scoville article, "The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature," about a surprising number of linguistically capable people gravitating to text-based operating environments and programming careers. What are your thoughts about a possible parallel between human and computer-based linguistics? Does a good command of one's spoken language loan leverage to becoming an effective programmer or computer operator in general? "

Per Wigren writes: "I just found out about Athena OS which got me really amazed. It's a 100% OO, kernel-independent GUI OS with an XML-based scriptinglanguage called DML that allows the user to edit the OS itself, as well as creating simple applications and extensive GUI interfaces! It's extremely fast! It started an Amiga Workbench-clone desktop with draggable screens in less than 2 seconds... Download is less than 1M ... I honestly think Athena has potential to obsolete both Gnome and KDE ..." Take note of these words from the FAQ regarding Athena's terms: "[O]pen source may be something of a misnomer from a purist's point of view. Linux users should note that Pandora has nothing to do with the GPL or any other public licensing scheme."

MrKhuel writes: "Professor Lee Hollaar of the University of Utah School of Computing has filed a neutral friend of the court brief, which has been posted with other electronically submitted documents in the Microsoft anti-trust appeal, discussing problems with some arguments for combining programs and how to test for the legality of program combination in anti-trust cases." Beyond the Microsoft case, this has some interesting applications.

ChetPan asks: "I'm doing some development for a couple of student-run sites at NC State University. We want to make dynamic portal-like customizable pages, but aren't really sure what to use to output the actual HTML, since the main concern here is performance. We have most of our code in Perl modules and we're wondering about the main (heavy traffic) pages. I don't know much about embperl or eperl and how they compare to regular mod_perl under Apache. Are there other embedded Perl solutions? Would we get a performance boost by using PHP? Unfortunately I haven't seen much neutral comparison of the different embedded types on the Web. I would especially appreciate seeing some benchmarks and/or statistics on the topic."

While it might be nice to have a blindingly fast, universally available language shared by every computer on the planet, for now, there's Java. Jayakrishnan contributed this review of Core Servlets and Java Server Pages, in which he finds that "the basics are covered" well along with some reservations. Read on to discover whether it might fit your needs.

QwkHyenA asks: "I'm a new programmer who has been working for a DOD government contracting company for 2 years now. We started off with 2 programmers in house and will move up to 6-8 within the next 3 months. What books/resources can help me with setting up a real programming shop (i.e. language references, CVS, Do's & Don'ts...)"

D. C. Sessions asks: "I'm on the Software Task Group of a standards body (JEDEC) which is, among other things, responsible for the DDR memory standard. You may have heard of it. Currently standards drafts must be submitted in an editable word processing format, which right now is interpreted as FrameMaker or MS Word. I find not only offensive, but dangerous that these standards -should- outlive the current MS software that can manipulate them. I've gotten some sympathy on 'bit rot' from the rest of the committee based on showing what current flavors of Word do to documents saved with older versions, but the problem is this: What do I propose as a replacement?" Two that come to mind right off of the top of my head are LaTeX and, of course, HTML. Any other formats that can work just as well as .DOC in most situations and are cross-platform to boot?

arkman writes: "In this morning's e-mail ActiveState has announced the availability of the beta release of the Komodo Integrated Development environment on Windows and the technology preview of Komodo for Linux. The relevant information can be viewed at their Web site. Komodo is ActiveState's cross-platform IDE, and it supports Perl, Python and Java Script." Looks very promising; I hope it doesn't suffer from the problems that certain other Mozilla-based products do.

Kaufmann writes "Good old Perl guru Nathan Torkington has an article on O'Reilly's perl.com about "What every Perl programmer needs to know about .NET". It's quite short and, unsurprisingly, favourable to .NET (although not to Microsoft). Points to the SOAP module on CPAN and a bunch of other stuff. It contains a nasty error, though: claims that Java is the only language that compiles to the JVM. Check it out anyway."