funnymalloc asks: "A quick search for 'leak' on FreshMeat yields a whole slew of projects/products which claim to help one find and kill memory bugs of various types when using C/C++. ccmalloc, debauch, dmalloc, LeakTracer, libyama, MCheck, MemProf, memwatch and mpr show up on the first page alone. Ideally a product would detect all of the common problems: array over/under runs, write to unallocated memory, write to 'freed' memory, unfreed memory (a leak) etc. And would work with both new/delete and (m)(c)(re)alloc/free. My question is which of these projects/products do people use and like? (and no, Java is not an answer)"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Graduate CS program for non-CS undergrads? I have a social sciences degree from a respected university, with a moderate amount of math. I have realized that much of the most exciting/important thinking and research these days is in CS, and I am trying to get the foundations and understanding I need to think about these problems well. I have never taken a CS class, so I am looking for a grad school or program that will take such a student, crash-course the prereqs, etc. Any thoughts on how to accomplish this? I have seen what Ars Digita is doing but hesitate to go with an unaccredited program."

woggo asks: "I need to benchmark two different JDBC drivers for a research project and would like to use a standard benchmark. I was able to find this implementation of TPC-W, but that is too much of a test of the Web server to be useful for my purposes. Does anyone know of a freely-available Java implementation of TPC-C? It needs to be reasonably conformant and I need to be able to cite the results in a paper without violating a license agreement, which would seem to exclude evaluation versions of products."

QuantumG asks: "I recently got into an argument with an open source project leader over wether or not releasing precompiled binaries is a good thing or not. He was adament that if potential programmers had to download the pre-alpha source code they would be more likely to take up an active part in programming than if they could just grab a binary. I thought it was important to make it as easy as possible to show the current state of the project to new recruits so they could see what has been done, what needs to be done and what could use work. I feel the same way about screenshots. What does Slashdot think?" Binaries are definitely important. Remember, programmers aren't the only ones who would like to look at your code and see what you are doing, and it's not right to expect them to compile code that may not be easy to compile. Of course, there is a (debatable) point in the software lifecycle where the software is deemed "mature" enough for binaries. What do you all think about this issue?

Julius C asks: "What coding resource should one use? There are so many out there. Should I go to the big jungle, Internet.com? Or what about Planet-Source-Code.com? There is even this promising new site DeskCode.com. All have their pluses, but what is the best for me? I am a serious die-hard programmer like many out there. My only thirst is the thirst for new unheard of knowledge. Internet.com seems to provide to those who like reading through articles written by a group of know it alls. That's good for some, but I like code, I like reading up-to-the-minute stuff contributed by my peers. Where do I go for that?"

ScrotalDwarf writes: " OneEighty software has released the world's first 8-bit Java VM. A fully functional Java VM, kilobytes rather than megabytes, in size! It's aimed at the mobile markets, but being smaller it's a whole lot faster - a fast Solaris JVM implementation!? If that wasn't enough, it's actually based on an implementation of a Turing machine. "

pdowner asks: "I've just finished and handed in my latest Operating Systems Inmternals assignment for my degree in Computer Studies. It involved writing/modifying a timer module for a Microkernel implemented in modula 2, which is written by one of my lectures and is available from here. I am interested in finding out what microkernels other universities use to teach their students the insides of Operating Systems."

Chris Worth asks: "Something Slashdotters could help with here. We all know that asking a hacker for 'business' stuff like accurate deadlines and costings can be next to impossible. Trouble is, you can't run a business without this stuff... forcing us marketroids to guess it. So plans are laid, budgets are forecast, and schedules set without reference to the techies. Generally, this all ends in tears. What's a reasonable way to estimate the size and cost of a 'normal' (for example, a database-driven customer service app, with no fundamentally new technology needed) Web development project? Is there some equation - perhaps linking together number of program variables, length of spec document etc. - that'd lead to a decent guess as to how long a given number of people could reasonably be expected to deliver the project in? In other words, how can I be fair to my programmers?" It's nice to see someone in marketing trying to go that extra mile to make sure their programmers have enough time to do the job, but reality being what it is, this luxury happens infrequently enough. What would you techies want from marketing and what do you folks who work in marketing want from your IT staff? Is there a way to work things out that would make most camps happy?

grovertime asks: "As a screenwriter-cum-Web developer, I have a pet project to create a Slashdot for the entertainment industry. I have been playing around with the Venezuelan version of Slashcode, namely PHP-Nuke. As it is PHP-based rather than Perl-based, it cannot support frames within my Dreamweaver-built site. I would like to merge the two so as to extend the capability of the site to containing streaming audio and video, etc. Has anyone wrapped PHP (particularly Nuke - or even Slashcode) with a Dreamweaver constructed multi-media site?"

slamdaddy asks: "At my previous place of employment we used CVS's tagging features to move files from the repository to the staging and production environments. I had assumed that they just attached a script to a certain tag (i.e. the tag "ALPHA" sent it to the common dev environment, the tag "BETA" sent it to the QA environment and the tag "LIVE" sent it to the production/staging environment) and the script just ran whenever you tagged a file with the appropriate tag. I've been looking through the CVS documentation at www.cvshome.org and have not found any facility for this. To answer this, I did a search on Google and came up with Nik Clayton's excellent series titled Managing websites with Unix" on DaemonNews. It looks like part five was going to cover everything I need BUT... it was slated to come out in May and never appeared on the site! Are there any other resources that explain how I can use CVS tags to copy the HTML pages to the proper locations?"

Chromatic, indefatigueable, has come up with another review. This time through the door he's gathered his reactions to Perl for System Administrators, one of the growing list of titles to help bridge the gap between SysAdmin and programmer.

hardcorebit asks: "Interactive Software Engineering has announced that a version of the Eiffel programming language, called Eiffel# is available for Microsoft's .NET initiative. The .NET framework provides a common type system and inheritance mechanism for different languages. The claim is that Eiffel# programmers can use this to seamlessly integrate code from other programming languages, across networks, and so on. The only thing is that .NET doesn't support multiple implementation inheritance, so Eiffel# currently lacks this feature. There are one or two other differences as well. I'm not an Eiffel expert, so I'd like to know whether the missing features matter and if so, how much." First C# and now Eiffel#...is Microsoft trying to wrap some of the more popular languages in it's .NET initiative? If so, how effective can it be if Microsoft is leaving out features like multiple inheritance and the ability to redefine features in descendant classes?

Manuka writes "I have just returned from LISA 2000 in New Orleans (it was a blast), where Michael Gilfix of Tufts University presented a best-of-LISA paper on his creation, called Peep. This has got to be one of the coolest networking tools I've seen - it generates sound events based on network traffic. Really neat stuff like a bird chirping when mail comes in, or an owl hooting when your web server dishes up a page (you can actually use any sound for any event). Neat little way to generate background noise, and you can see (hear) what the network is up to and if it's doing anything weird - if the owl sounds like it's on speed, you're being slashdotted, or if the birds sound a little too hitchcockian, you're being spammed. " But what is the sound of one cracker scanning?

I got a piece of email today from Sascha Schumann about the issue of installing mod_perl and PHP together. In his own words: "The problem was caused by mixing object code with and without Large File Support (LFS) in one process. APXS provides a lot of unnecessary information. PHP applied a strict filter to get only useful things. That filter missed settings for LFS, so that PHP was always compiled without LFS." If you are having issues with this, you can check out the latest snapshot here, which is patched to solve this problem. The fix will also be a part of version 4.0.4 when it is released.

tsetem asks: "My company is a DoD contractor. As such, most of the code we have written in the past, and are currently writing/porting is in Ada. In the past, we have used IDE's ranging from Rational Apex (Not available for Linux yet) to Vi. What I'm wondering is is there a nice & powerful IDE for Linux? So I turn to the Slashdot Community to see who has worked with Ada, and what they feel the best development environment is under Linux. Ada may not be the most popular language, but I'm sure someone has written tools to make working with it that much easier."

Chronic reviewer chromatic writes again, this time with a review of the newest iteration of what is probably the emblematic Perl book, the O'Reilly camel book. Read on to see how it stacks up to earlier versions of that work, and whether your Perl skills would benefit from reading through it.

Logic Bomb writes: "Salon has an article about the famous Berkely eXperimental Computing Club, from whence came GTK, the GIMP, early web browsers, and many other goodies. The article has a nice overview of the club's history, as well as questions about its continued existence. Apparently the rise of collaboration over the Internet has made it much harder to find recruits."

BrightIce writes: "The Java Developer Journal has an interesting article about Java in the Linux world. It tries to explain why the Linux folks dislike Java, what the future might bring regarding M$, C# and Java, about Sun and Microsoft, and Java and Embedded Linux." I know why I hate it: it takes too.long.to.get.to.my.method(half, of, the, time); and then there's the fact that when Java was new and exciting I wrote a video game in it, only to have Sun cease-and-desist me for calling it "Java Invaders." (oh, and have you ever noticed that our logo isn't the sun logo? They cease-and-desisted us for using their logo here too, even tho that is definitely fair use). Other than that, my only problem with Java is that the VM in Netscape is crap. Oh, and their licensing. And the fact that it's bloated. And the fact that I don't have enough time to type in all the reasons it irritated me *grin*

Crazy Corrigan asks: "I just got a new pager, bought and paid for by my office. I'm looking and the thing and lo and behold, it has an IR port on the bottom. I got all excited and figured there must be someone out there who has a program for the Palm Pilot to interact with this thing. However, upon further research, Motorola says it's only for factory programming. Anyone want a challenge? This would probably be a great project for any Palm programmer! These things are really cheap and could be a great way to extend the usability of your Palm! Check out the LS350 User Guides on Motorola's site"

alexhmit01 asks: "One of my classes requires us to write a system that will deal with accessing huge amounts of random data. The catch? The project must be done in scheme. Storing the data in a Database would make indexing and searching the data MUCH easier than manually creating hash tables and other ugliness for which scheme is AMAZINGLY inefficient at. Does anyone know of ODBC, Postgres or MySQL bindings for Scheme (preferably MIT Scheme, but we could use a different Scheme if need be)?" While perusing around, I found this page which which contains some information about Scheme and Databases. Are there any other bindings for Scheme that will allow you to connect to various database backends?