On-the-fly organization may suffice for keeping track of scripts /bin on your local machine, but larger projects have more at stake when it comes to coordinating the effort of programmers, especially when they're not even in the same timezone, never mind in the same room. CVS has become the lifeblood of many such projects. Reader Craig Pfeifer suggests CVS Pocket Reference as a good way to help keep that lifeblood flowing.

An AC submits: "We have recently had a lot of trouble trying to hire competent programmers for a research project. We are not programmers, so it is somewhat difficult to evaluate the competence of CS graduates. However, it seems that many of them are quite business oriented and that is not what we are looking for. On the other hand, the ones with adequate math skills etc. are often interested only in 'pure' CS. We would desperately need some kind of 'all-around lab hackers' capable of scientific problem solving, and confortable working with all sorts of software and hardware, but have not been able to find such persons. Does the Slashdot audience have any suggestions of how to attract the hackers having 'by programmers for scientists' - attitude?" [Update: 03/24 09:24 AM by michael : Note that although my email address is the only one on this submission, I'm not the one looking for programmers - I work for slashdot (although I used to program for a DOE laboratory, and that's why I found this question interesting and posted it). I've received a bunch of misdirected emails from people who thought this was interesting work, so if the submitter is reading this story, he/she might want to put contact information in a comment below.]

Decado writes "I found out from gamasutra that Michael Abrash and Dr.Dobbs Journal have made Abrash's now out of print "Graphics Programming Black Book" available for free download here. Written at about the time he was finished on Quake it was one of the most readable and informative books on graphics programming. Abrash begins each chapter with a real life anecdote to the problem he is solving and you can't help but think he is a cool guy. Though fairly dated now it is still a great read and his approach to optimisation still holds true today."

KellyM writes "'I've spent the last three days fixing compile-time bugs with xMach, and I'm currently testing using a copy of VMware running FreeBSD. The code compiled so cleanly that a stable release was inevitable, allowing me to finally start doing some of the new innovative work I dreamed up years ago, when my SPARC (since dead due to a battery issue) glowed with warmth onto me, and inspired me to create. Who knows -- we might make something useful out of xMach yet. It's certainly come a long way from seed to sprout; as its stalk strengthens, I hope to help it blossom into the full beauty of the great scheme hatched years ago. '"

Reader LetterJ preheated his brain, stirred in some acronyms, and sent in his review of The PHP Developer's Cookbook, which sounds like a more-than-usually-useful guide to solving specific programming problems. This "cookbook" approach is one I'd like to see in more books, too.

Curt Cox asks: "My company develops pure Java web applications, using Win32 and Linux, that are then deployed on Linux servers. One bell/whistle that many customers want is telephony integration. Our current solution is to handle calls through a dedicated Windows NT/TAPI box with an expensive telephony card. The thing I like least about this solution is that adding phone lines is such a pain. I would really like to use the net2phone or dialpad networks and avoid physical lines completely. Unfortunately, their client software is written to interface with speakers and microphones, and not programs. Are there any pure Java solutions for VoIP telephony?"

mikej asks: "I'm involved in an ongoing saga that attempts to get an application running a large number of Java threads (30-60 sustained, 300+ peak) reliably. My last large hurtle was the context switching delay on the 2.2 kernel, which the 2.4 series has _nicely_ fixed. Now I'm running into problems keeping the JVM alive under threadload. The Sun and IBM java mailing lists and newsgroups are full of complaints concerning threading problems on Linux, and I'm faced with the choice of moving the system to Solaris (something that I very much do not want to do). Has anyone seen a system like this in action, and is there an especially successful combination of SDK/glibc/kernel?"

An unnamed reader writes "Daily DaemonNews is running a story about Chili!Soft doing a port of Chili!Soft ASP to FreeBSD. It seems they're trying to gather enough interest to make a port worth while. A phone number and link is mentioned in the article."

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Our company is a small web development firm that focuses on dynamic and database-driven websites. We are thinking about creating a bonus/recognition program for our coders based on their performance. The question is, how exactly does one measure programmer performance? We don't want to use the number of lines of code per day (why encourage 10 lines when 5 will do?). We don't want to use the time it took to finish the project, since lack of bugs, speed, security, etc. is just as important as time. Has anyone had an experience with a measurement system that they thought was a fair and accurate measure of the quality and speed of coding?" While I'm sure some standard can be applied to answer this question, I don't see it being extremely accurate. Some things just can't be quantified. I'd be interested in knowing if you all think this is one of them.

vrmlguy asks: "While looking for something else, I found this discussion of SourceForge. As the authors point out, a great many Open Source projects have moved to SourceForge. I would like to compare this to another dependency that turned out badly. Deja.com provided a service that many, many people had depended on for years. (See this posting for a more jaundiced view of this dependency). Suddenly and without warning, they went out of business. This left quite a few people high and dry. My question is, what would happen if (heaven forbid!) something similar happened to SourceForge? I realize that 'everybody' affilated with a given project has their own copy of the piece that they are working on, but does any one person have a copy of everything any more? How hard would it be to put Humpdy Dumpdy back together? Are there any mirrors? Are they safe? Inquiring minds want to know!" If SourceForge were to close its open ports for the final time, tomorrow, I'm sure the community would find a way to continue. With that said, however, what are ways we can mitigate the damage if it happens?

deran9ed writes ""People can get quite emotional about Python, in a way they rarely get about software," says van Rossum, who is now director of Python Labs at Digital Creations. In this question and answer interview, he explains why Python deserves such loyalty, when it is better to use Python than Perl, and why increasing numbers of business applications developers will be using Python for years to come. THe full article is on SearchEnterpriseLinux"

TheCorporal asks: "Our company has come to the point in our development where we feel it is time for a recode. We are rewriting code for a large multiplayer, browser/text, turn based strategy game (Like Utopia), and would like to know the best language solution in terms of speed. A Rapid development platform would be nice, but most important is the speed of execution." There's more below, but the question is simple, which language is the swift hare of the net, and which one is the toiling tortoise, and where do the others fall, in between.

bethorphil asks: "I'm a web developer at a company that concentrates on Coldfusion and Javascript for our applications. I've managed to subvert my workstation to the point where I'm using Linux 80% of the time, yet I'm still stuck with windows for certain aspects of development which are too time consuming without a nice IDE. I need FTP and RDS support integrated into the editor, and it would be nice if javascript debugging were available too. I haven't had much luck running ColdFusion Studio or Dreamweaver through WINE, and VMWare is too expensive. Several of my coworkers have expressed an interest in this too, so I'm pretty sure that a week after I find the right setup, the whole development team will blow away their windows partitions and join the rebel forces... :-) Does anyone have any suggestions?"

Sommelier writes " Interesting article on the O'Reilly Python site about Walt Disney Feature Animation adopting Python to accomplish a lot of their work. "

Death of Rats asks: "What are the actual advantages of high-end Relational Database Management Systems (such as Oracle) over the free or low-priced solutions? Is it worth paying the 10 to 30 thousand dollars (or more) for Oracle, when you can do (as far as I know) everything it can by using ASP with Access/MSSQL for Windows, PHP/MySQL for Linux, JSP with JDBC connections for most platforms, or any number of other free or cheap systems? Is there a considerable speed increase, or is there enough more functionality to warrant the outrageous costs? Are some of the technologies more suited to different tasks? Any time I have needed to use databases, the open-source solutions have done fine, so I am skeptical."

darrint asks: "I'm about to write yet another application with parts on different boxes and OS's and languages. Some of my server apps need to be fault tolerant and/or support load balancing. I've worked so far with CORBA and have also looked at the features of XML-RPC and Ensemble. I see two different approaches: remote procedure calls and messaging. Can anyone enlighten me as to the less obvious consequences of choosing one approach over the other? I'm particularly interested in how the approaches support fault tolerance."

Roger Ramjet asks: "As an old schooler, I was somewhat hooked on VT100 terminals and coding with VI; however I never seem to be happy with fonts in DevStudio (amongst others). My question is, what fonts do you prefer to program with, and why?" As another "old schooler", I must say I do prefer monospaced fonts in a nice sans-serif for coding.

whyDNA? sends us this news bit: "I found this on the PHP page: The first release of PHP-GTK is now available. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension that provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ toolkit and enables you to write client-side cross-platform GUI applications. For more information, visit gtk.php.net."

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."