According to a new study from the consulting firm Software Productivity Research, software programmers spend 47 days a year developing or enhancing software applications. The rest of the time is spent testing, fixing bugs, and working on projects that will later be cancelled. This might be deemed poetic justice, given that users avoid using more that 10% of application's functionality for fear that something will break. On the other hand this could be seen as good news for newer projects: add fewer features but get them right. Eg: a light-weight word-processor that imports foreign formats correctly, but only has the features most people use. What do you think? Can anyone corroborate the article's statement that 90% of nonprofit organizations in the U.S. cannot afford to maintain more than 15 networked computers?

Muttley asks: "There are plenty of projects out there to provide Free Software replacements for products like like TiVo, ReplayTV or AudioRequest. However the one thing that these replacements don't have, AFAIK, is a TV-based interface which doesn't look anything like the standard GUIs we all are familiar with (see the screenshots). Are there any projects out there that would make it very simple to do this sort of interface? It wouldn't need to handle multiple windows open at the same time just some simple widgets for doing simple interfaces but it would have to look pretty with lots of eye candy (alpha blended text and so on). Talisman goes part of the way but it's for Windows. How does Tivo do it and are they going to release the technology as Free Software? Or is there some way of doing it with existing window managers and widget Sets?"

In addition to all the other books he has insightfully reviewed, chromatic has written this review of CGI Programming With Perl. This books sounds like a great resource for the builder of dynamic Web sites with a Perl background. And isn't it nice to see a book with "an unapologetic Unix flavor"?

Alfred Bacon writes "There will be an interview with Larry Wall on The Paula Gordon Show available on Saturday at 3:00 pm EST. It is an hour long in RealAudo format broken up into 10 minute segments. Mr. Wall will be discussing Perl, Free Software and the Open Source movement. It should be worth listening to."

Paul K Egell-Johnsen writes "At zez.org Bård Farstad has written an article on how to embed java in php.

I saw a sample of mixing Perl and Java at the O'Reilly Open Souce conference a couple of years ago. It was some of the ugliest code I have ever seen.

This has been submitted to slashcode a couple of times now. It has appeared on the Slash mailing lists and from talking to Bryan at ApacheToolbox he has noticed it too. When compiling mod_perl and PHP 4 together, you end up with a core file for an Apache process. Is there a solution for making the two of them play nicely together?

Graymalkin asks: "I'm in the process of learning COM for use with evil Windows apps and got to wondering what sort of competition for COM there is in the land of Open Source. I know about CORBA and its integration with both KDE and GNOME, but I want to know how far it extends? What's in the pipeline? Microsoft's .NET architecture ties together half a dozen technologies to make a pretty cool programming model. Is there anything comparable in Open Source land, not merely a object communication scheme (CORBA, COM) but a whole architecture based on distributed computing?"

mikej asks: "I've always had issues with the native threading of Sun's JDKs on Linux, but have been able to get around the problems by using green threads. I've come into a situation where I absolutely must use native threads, and the Blackdown-derived 1.3 [J/S]DK from Sun simply doesn't cut it (context switing time, which is a Linux issue, is part of the problem as well). Is there a reliable (and reasonably quick) native-threading JDK available for Linux? I much prefer a Free or Open Source version, but if I have to start using commercial software to get this functionality then I have no choice. In addition, are there different Linux threading libraries available?"

kill-9.ws asks: "I'm a PHP developer, and up until this point, I've been using either Pico or EMACS to write all of my code. A text editor is fine for writing PHP, but I'm starting to look for more. I'd like to have some nice things like an editor that can do syntax highlighting for PHP and perhaps a function reference. Throw in a built-in FTP client, and that would be perfect. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?"

krogoth asks: "I'm working on a project with another programmer from Germany, and I and the person who runs our CVS server are in North America. This means that in the last 1-2 months, the other programmer and the CVS server have been online once, and that's not good enough. Is there any way to access a CVS server while it's offline (or at least have a commit/update ready to go)? The easiest way I can think of to do this would be e-mail... but then I don't have the time or knowledge to find out how to modify the server. The CVS server is running on Windows." Now this is an interesting idea. How difficult would it be to change the CVS client and daemon so that it would be possible queue up commits thru e-mail when the server is unavailable? Would any of you find this useful?

strredwolf points out that we have winners of the Fifth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest, noting, "Unfortunately, my virtual machine didn't win." (Insert loser-condolences here.) BTW, I noticed problems with the code as printed: the winner of category 2 lacks a terminal quote, and I couldn't get the category 3 winner to compile even after fiddling with whitespace. Put up a webpage with code I can copy-paste-and-run, email me, and I'll update this story with your link.

pavlos asks: "In a few days, part of our development team is going to a remote site to integrate our product with the customer's hardware. We can't move the whole team over there, so during the integration phase both the remote team and the team staying at home will need to commit changes to the software. An encrypted connection to the remote site exists, but is slow and unreliable. The remote team will be taking a Linux CVS server with them as an autonomous solution." The problems occur when it comes time to merge the changes made at the remote site with changes at the central office. What are the best ways to merge changes from a single project from two different CVS repositories?

muggs asks: "After reading this article in Byte, I'd like to hear people's experiences and opinions about REBOL." The language's creator, Carl Sassenrath, describes REBOL (Relative Expression-Based Object Language) as "a highly dynamic, polymorphic, reflective, context-dependent, symbolic, functional language...a powerful tool that provides great productive leverage." How well does it live up to this description?

Frank writes: "What most programmers probably think of when they talk about 'Python' is the specific implementation sometimes called 'CPython' (because it is implemented in C). However, Python as a language specification has been implemented several times in parallel with the evolution of Guido van Rossum's reference implementation. This article consists of annotated interviews with the creators of two of the non-standard Pythons -- Stackless and Vyper." A pair of interviews to make your head spin with talk of Literate Programming and the odd but neat concept of "continuations."

nfreier asks: "I am a developer working on a research project at the University of Washington. The project is called UrbanSim. We are developing a metropolitan land use and transportation modeling system along with a package for data manipulation and visualization. The data required as input to this modeling system is of significant size and complexity, originating from multiple sources and in multiple formats. We are looking for a method to track data changes at a central repository, much akin to the notion of tracking changes in source code à la CVS. We thought of using CVS initially but quickly realized that it does not handle large files and binaries well, nor is it well suited to tabular data. Other options include hand-rolling our own data server or using a database. Obviously, the drawbacks to hand-rolling our own are time and effort. The drawback to a database system is that it generally restricts us to using basic relational data formats only. Another constraint is that our entire project is under the GNU GPL and anything that we rely upon should also be freely available."

pgatt asks: "I am running a very high load Web site, averaging 500,000 hits per day. Most pages on the site require a MySQL connection for some simple query. I have a separate Web server and MySQL server, each consisting of dual Pentium III 750s with a gig of RAM. Under peak hours, MySQL reports a "Lost Connection To Server During Query" error, even if I try to connect to the database locally from the MySQL server. This usually seems to happen when the number simultaneous threads get to be around 700-800, but there doesn't seem to be an exact number that it hits when it encounters a problem. I have contacted MySQL support but have not had much luck. My system has plenty of resources left, only running at about 0.40 load average with plenty of RAM. I see a lot of people experiencing the same problem as me in the mysql mailing list but they haven't found a solution. I am looking for recommendations about how to either tweak MySQL to run better or other database solutions. I would like to stick with something open source, but if I need to pay for something to get stability then I will. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated."

Cryofan writes "Very interesting story on managing programmers. Lays bare the dynamics behind what is happening to the software industry." I think Greenspun has it right about the distribution of talent in software engineering, but I'm not sure I agree with his concept that it is necessary to work 70-hour weeks (though for unreasonably long hours, they do pay unreasonably large salaries).

redmoss asks: "The company I work for has a server-based system that we use for a wide variety of tasks: checking in customers, maintaining customer information, etc. We have had the programmer of this system working with us many years to bring it to its current level. I have approached him about open-sourcing/GPL'ing his system; he agrees with the idea in principle, but is not convinced that it would benefit him. He asked me to provide examples where opening a proprietary system has benefitted the programmer/owner. Perhaps some of you know of such cases and can point me to examples?" It should be noted that benefits from moving a project into the open may not be measured entirely in monetary units. Sometimes increased reliability of a service is worth more than an extra $1000 in sales at the end of the quarter. So can anyone out there name projects that have benefitted by opening up their source?

Jason Bennett contributed this review of the depressingly named Death March : The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving " Mission Impossible" Projects. But if you're ever part of a software project which seems to be going nowhere fast, and over very rocky roads, perhaps the words he's written will point you to a source of solace. This book seems to have some decent strategies for dealing with impossible demands and even more impossible deadlines. And while no book will give you a better boss or timetable, at least you'll know you're not the only one.

David Symonds asks: "CVS is great if you can commit after each significant change; however, if you have limited access (e.g. a dialup connection), this tends to make things sloppy. Are there any "CVS proxies" that can cache CVS commits locally, then send them on to the CVS server when you next connect to the Net?"