slashdot-me asks: "The International Obfuscated C Code Contest that we all know and love seems to be stalled. The judging phase of the contest began six months ago in April. Since then all the judges except Leonid Broukis have abandoned the project. Has this 16-year-old programming tradition died?"

Gone Jackal asks: "I've run into a ludicrous situation. I'm a classicist at the University of Chicago, finishing off my undergraduate career with a bachelor's thesis. As part of this, I'm working on poetry and meter in Vergil. Imagine my joy when I found in the library catalogue a 20 volume set of books on just this topic, published between 1973 and 1985. Now imagine my horror when I open up the first volume and see that the entire work is on punch cards. What the heck do I do with punch cards? The CS department has laughed at me, and mainframe computing says they're not allowed to help since I'm not an administrator. Any suggestions on where to go, what to do to read these, or even find out what's on them? (The series title, in case you wanted to know, is 'Metrische Analysen zu Vergil', by Wilhelm Ott. It's in German)." Oh man...punch cards. I can understand Gone Jackal's frustration, however I'm more surprised that such works weren't converted to better media a long time ago.

mnalsky asks: "I need an automated system for Java applications testing. I'd like the system to be able to record user session of Swing application and dump it to a file. Then one can play back this file and the application will repeat all of the steps. I've searched through the Web for it and have found nothing. Sun had its tool JavaStar, but in November, 1999 they stopped developing it. Now it's not possible to download JavaStar from their Web site, and I can't find it anywhere else on the Web. Are there any other tools like this? Is JavaStar available somewhere that I might have missed?"

Rayooz asks: "With all the hype around the J2EE specification, I'm wondering if it truly lives up to its promise of "server independence" in the real world. Has anyone had experience developing/deploying a J2EE application on one application server and then moving it to another server without any modification?"

Asmodeus asks: "Does anyone know of a commerical or commerically supported C++ cross compiler which is not GCC and which will target the complete gaumet of Enterprise platforms (including Win 32 DLLs). It must be hosted on Solaris and Windows NT/2K. GCC won't cut the mustard due to buggy sparc-64 bit support (incomplete target floating point implementation on host side) and the recent stability problems with 2.95+ have gotten people here a little nervous. I am currently not interested in compiling for embedded systems, only Enterprise grade platforms (and Win 32). The compiler must support shared library compilation for all target platforms, and ideally have a good debugger for all platforms. I've looked around at a lot of the compilers out there and it looks as if this is an area not many companies are interested in. [Note to GCC manics - I use it and I think it's great, but we have reached the limits of its capabilities..] Any suggestions greatfully received!"

crazney writes "Linux.com has an article up by Ryan Gorden of Loki on porting from Windows to Linux, in particular the troubles faced with Microsofts MFC API and the extensions implemented by Microsofts Visual C++ on the C++ language." Talks about porting, the gaming industry, and gives suggestions for portability from someone who should know.

A reader writes "The QNX development platform is now available. It's available in three versions: the Windows-based self-extracting installer, the ISO image and the QNX4 install archive" You can also get it from QNX's site itself.

RobotmanipulaTor asks: "I have a large CD collection I want to convert to MP3 and so do my friends. The last thing we want to do is to manually insert the CD into a drive and convert it. We want to get an extremely basic automated CD duplicator like this and use it to feed CDs to the drive. We could then write some simple software to automate the process, let it run, and presto... MP3's for all. It seems there is a standard control set for the robotic arms, but I can't find any documentation on this. Has anyone done a similar project, or written autoloader software that could be modified?"

A reader wrote to us with a presentation made regarding Inprise's Kylix. More information goooddd.

Mirk asks: "After 10 years of a software career built on the rock-solid foundation of doing technical work only, I can feel the hot breath of encroaching middle age on the back of my neck, bringing with it the inevitable slide into management. I'm about to do something I used to think I'd never do, and move from a purely technical job into one with a management component. I'll be responsible for leading a team of about four techies, giving perhaps 20% of my time to the management side of things. The problem is, having strenuously resisted all moves in a management direction up until now, I'm going to have to plough straight in without the benefit of any accumulated experience." So what happens when the spectre of management rears its head and you are up to the challenge as opposed to resisting it?

Midh Mulpuri asks: "These days licenses like GPL, MPL and QPL make it easy for developers to release software as open source without the hassle of having to write up "TERMS and CONDITIONS" for each project. While the software is released as open source, it is mostly released with no warranty whatsoever. That is reasonable considering the software is often 'free'. Major projects often find service providers offering fee-based support. But for most part, the burden of providing service falls on the community and the developers. Further, there is no quality assurance other than the reputation of the project (and the developers). While for many this is enough assurance, the lack of warranty and quality assurance might still leave some people uncomfortable. To make 'free' software more appealing we would need a better way to assure quality. The greatest quality assurance for software is the developer. A framework should be developed to make it easier for the developer to assure users of quality." Does Open Source really need a framework for Quality Assurance?

Hackers is probably the first book I read that made me think of computers as the substrate of a social world rather than just boxes with lights. The book came out in 1984, though, and a lot's changed since then. Read on, as topeka lets you know how well Levy's techno opus has aged.

cconnell writes: "One of the most tantalizing statements about open source development is that these projects manage themselves. Gone are layers of do-nothing managers with bloated bureaucracies and interminable development schedules. In their place is a new paradigm of self-organizing software developers with no overhead and high efficiency. There is just one problem with this assertion -- it is not true. This article shows that open source projects are about as far as you can get from self-organizing. In fact, these projects use strong central control, which is crucial to their success. As evidence, I examine Raymond's fetchmail project and Linus Torvalds's work with Linux."

RevAaron asks: "With Java, and now C#, we're seeing the same (then revolutionary) concepts and features that Smalltalk had over twenty years ago. With open source versions like Squeak and GNU Smalltalk, not to mention numerous other versions, most of which have an free (as in beer) version available, why hasn't the open source world adopted it to a larger extent? It boggles the mind that the open source community hasn't picked it up, even with almost all of the source of the entire Smalltalk system available to developers, even with the commercial implementations. Is it simply a case of 'once a C coder, always a C coder,' with languages like C++ and Java being used by virtue of their Algol-derived syntax?" The choice of language of most developers is a queer thing indeed. I'm still surprised that COBOL has lasted for as long as it has. So if anyone has any insight as to why Smalltalk use isn't more widespread, please share.

mholve wrote to us about an interview with Larry Wall ^[?] regarding Perl 6. Wall is, always, interesting to read. Warning - the text bit is short, most of it is video.

myrkul asks: "I'm working on an application that takes vector graphics, text, and bitmapped pictures as well as layout info from a database, and converts it to postscript (PDF would work too) for printing. I've been looking for (preferably free) Postscript libraries for either C++ or Java which would allow me to lay out these elements, and haven't had much luck. Any suggestions?"

chrizzzz wrote to us about the opencodex.com contest to write a Open MPEG-4 Codec. They've got an industrial sponser now, so the first team/person to do it wins 50,000$US. The contest page has speifics about the project.

Biedermann asks: "I have been looking for web based messageboard for ages. The Problem is: the users should be able to log in, get the new messages, log out and read/write offline. Not everybody has low-cost-always-on-broadband access to the net. All the programs I could find were either not keeping promises or fell unmaintained years ago in beta. Is there any such beast? Or would it be possible to do such a thing with Slashcode or Squishdot? (I'm not a coder, so I don't know what it takes)" I've been thinking about writing something like this for Slashcode but haven't yet had the time. Do you all think this would be a worthwhile application?

mmmmbeer asks: "I have a question for anyone who has outsourced programming jobs to overseas companies. My company is considering doing this, which in theory will allow us to dump off a bunch of (supposed) 'grunt work' and free up our programmers to do other work. One of our management's reasons why they think this is good is because the contracting company can 'throw a bunch of coders on it' and therefore get it done quickly. To me this seems to violate Brooks's Law. We (the in-house programmers) are also worried that the learning curve will in fact be great enough that, even if the extra manpower works to their (and our) advantage, it could still be done faster and better in-house. My question is, has anyone had any experience with this, good or bad, and do you have any warnings or suggestions for us?"

Fross asks: "I am Technical Architect at a reasonably large e-commerce firm, which naturally has a very large and active Website, with tens of thousands of registered users, and millions of page hits a month. The time has come to reimplement the old architecture from the ground up, and I'm looking for other (preferably Open Source, or Open Source-friendly) solutions that will give a faster, more scalable, more reliable, easily maintainable solution than the current implementation (which is running under ASP, on IIS of course). I have a fair amount of experience with Perl, some with PHP, but have never used them for something of this size. Does anyone have experience of deploying something this large with these technologies, and can give some valued information on how these solutions cope?"