Andreas Junghanns writes: "Check out the Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition for a completely different experience! If you think you know everything about Rock-Paper-Scissors -- here is your chance to prove it against some stiff international competition. At the Web site you can find rules, sample programs and a report of the first contest, complete with results and program descriptions." This looks pretty cool, and it might make a neat first project for someone, too.

Dragon218 writes "Recently, I have been chosen to be part of a team of computer savvy youths who have been tasked to build and maintain a computer lab. We are probably going to get around $100,000 in grant money. The idea is to have it be a public lab, the trick being the users would help in commercial Web design or other projects to raise money to keep it active. I'd like a reality check on this. Also, if any of you have ideas to help this thing along, I (don't like to use the pronoun 'we' without the group's consent_ would appreciate it. If you would like more information about the group sponsoring it, you can check out http://brycchouse.org." Assuming the people in question know what they are doing, I don't see a problem with this at all, do you? Good luck, Dragon218.

John asks: "I'm designing a system where 10,000 applet based clients can view prices for a bunch of products. A requirement is that when a price changes, the clients see the new price within a few seconds. Basically, I'd like to push content to them. But a lot of them are behind firewalls, so a socket-based solution won't always work. OTOH, if they poll the server every couple of seconds using HTTP, that's 5,000 requests per second, which will require a server farm and multiple T1 lines. Does anyone know a more elegant way? I considered using HTTP requests that block in the server until a response is ready, but then I need to support 10,000 blocked threads and concurrent connections - another server farm. There's got to be a better way..."

BlueCalx- writes: "dotcomma has created a new programming contest: this time, to determine whether or not someone can create a program that can automatically parse an RDF file and generate a haiku based on its headlines or stories. Slashdot users such as 575 have essentially been doing the same thing for months: now, it's time to see if a computer program can do the same thing *g*. After witnessing the success of the AI Bots challenge a few months ago, it'll be interesting to see if a program like this is possible." Anyone who can generate intelligible, germane haiku from headlines without human intervention has my respect -- it's a lot thornier than it sounds.

David Symonds asks: "We've all known our fair share of easter eggs, in the form of hidden screens or messages that are activated by a certain keystroke sequence, or clicking on a certain pixel, and so on. Easter Eggs have been around for ages, from the old "xyzzy" command for "Colossal Cave" (a text-based adventure), to that move in International Karate (for the C64) which would cause your opponents pants to drop, to the various "about:..." entries in Netscape. My question is, are Easter Eggs a dying breed, and has anyone found any good ones in open source software?" I've always thought that the best Easter Eggs in Free Software was found in the comments of the source-code. What was your favorite easter-egg? I remember the secret room from the Atari 2600 Adventure game, mainly because I had found that one all on my own.

Never content to rest on his laurels, chromatic has again supplied us with a no-nonsense, informative book review. This time it's of O'Reilly's Programming the Perl DBI, for those of you unwilling to let any TLA go unconquered. If you're building a Web site or learning MySQL (or any other database) and want to combine Perl skills with data storage, he's got a few words for you. [Updated 13 June 3:20GMT by timothy:] Heck, it's a double header! PotPieMan gives a different perspective on the same book, all below.

Bryan Brunton asks: "I am writing an open source game called Merchant Empires For now, it is almost completely based on a closed source game called Space Merchant. IMO, Space Merchant is slow, ugly, and bug-filled. I am getting Space Merchant users who log into my game, spew some profanity and claim that I will be sued. I have no access to Space Merchant source code. Can I be sued? If so, what do I need to do to make my game qualify as a clean room implementation?"

Over at LWN, there is a report from JavaOne writtern by Nelson Minar - things looks really promising with Linux and Java. Definately worth a read for both Linux users and *BSD users.

rrwood asks: "The company at which I work is about to overhaul an existing application. Strangely enough, we're primarily Macintosh-based, but are casting an eye towards cross-platform development (i.e. Windows, though I'm hopeful that an X/Linux-based version is also a possibility). Given that the app is to be a fairly rich GUI front end that talks to a database backend, I'd be interested in hearing any recommendations or advice anyone out there has to offer." Read on for more information on the toolkits currently under consideration (feel free to offer more suggestions), but we are talking toolkits here. The topic of cross-platform languages got a rather thourough treatment in a previous article.

Kaufmann writes: "In this interview with Joe Johnston (on O'Reilly's Perl.com), Larry Rosler (of HP, one of the people who helped put the 'ANSI' in 'ANSI C') shares his thoughts and advice on the value of standards, optimising Perl code, how Sun should handle Java, and programming in general. Will we ever see a Perl Language Subcommittee too?"

This member, from the voiciferous Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "I work for a fairly large company, and I'm trying to convice the senior management to open source a piece of internally developed software that we rely upon, but that we don't directly profit from. This software enables our business model, but the software itself doesn't offer any particular competitive advantage. (Actually, to be a little more accurate, we would like to develop a system that replaces a commercial off-the-shelf solution that we're less than happy with, and open source that, so if you have anecdotal evidence or other ammunition for that particular argument, I'd be glad to hear it)." And this is something that I think more businesses should look into doing. If you use a piece of software that your business doesn't depend on, commercially, why not free it? (Read more...)

We've covered the movement to get Java 1.2 ported to the BSDs for a while now. After Linux got in on the act a couple of months ago, keepper was the first to write in with a link to this BSDi press release announcing the availability of Java 2 for BSD. Looks like BSD/OS will get it first (they're beta-ing it now). Then FreeBSD gets it, at which point (I assume) it'll be open to the other BSDs to take as they want.

nici writes: "Borland and Troll Tech(Qt+KDE anyone?) have made some sort of licensing agreement to allow Borland's new brain child Kylix to be born. It's going to be a Delphi/C/C++ compiler for Linux... complete with a GUI interface. It's supposed to be completely compatible with windows. Here's a Press Release." Several other people noted that Dr. Bob (CT:Not Dr. Dobbs, my bad! Mustn'y post before coffee!) has some screenshots if you're interested in what the tool actually looks like (Hint: It looks pretty sweet).

duplex asks: "In the dark ages of DOS real programmers used BRIEF. This editor conceived at Borland (I think) had a very unique keymap which involved the Meta (Alt) key a lot. I got used to it and the mapping became my second nature. There are some great descendants of BRIEF on Windoze that do an excellent job at emulating the functionality (most notably Codewright and MultiEdit). Unfortunately there isn't a good one for Unix apart from CRiSP. I'm the breed that grew up using BRIEF in DOS so not having a BRIEF clone puts me off doing any serious Linux work. I wonder if there is perhaps a less known editor out there that supports the full set of BRIEF bindings. I can do away with syntax highlighting and whatnot but BRIEF bindings are a must. I'm not really into spending megabucks on CRiSP because the licensing of it is quite inflexible. There must be lots more developers who prefer BRIEF bindings over EPSILON/Emacs or VI. Is there a project aimed at bringing the power of BRIEF to the Open Source community?" Most of the Unix editors are configurable enough where even the keybindings can be changed. The submittor did mention that he did not like Emacs, but couldn't Emacs or its cousin X-Emacs be configured for the task? Couldn't VIM be scripted into BRIEF submission?

This one is for those of you who deal in fabrication...jabber asks: "I'm looking for some free and open software that would do 2D 'shape nesting'. If you needed to cut some shapes out of a flat plane of material, for example, how could you arrange the shapes on the material to get the most useful area (and the least amount of wasted material)? Shape Nesting is used for sheet and slab metal cutting, vinyl sign making, and can even be applied to quilting. There are other features to consider like grain direction (in the case of cutting shapes in wood), and variable sizing (since some applications can allow one side of the flat plane to vary), and minimum distance between shapes (since torch-cutting tends to destroy more material than a laser, for example). I'm sure that software like this exists, and I've seen expensive proprietary applications in CAD/CAM, but is there anything available freely? I prefer source-code, since I could then add any of the features that are missing. Any ideas?"

bilboyablan asks: "Ive stumbled upon the Roxen Web server , mostly implemented in the Pike programming language. I got curious about Roxen, but even more about Pike, and it seems to me like a quite solid scripting OO language, with a C-like syntax, and with a quite good documentation (user manual) to boot. So it seems intriguing to me why Pike hasnt gotten a wider acceptance. So, if some of you fellow Slashdotters have had any experience with Pike (outside of Roxen), could you maybe drop a few lines on it? "

slick_rick asks: "I'm a junior in the CS program at a very horrible university. I just completed my junior level "algorithms" class where the teacher covered linked lists and binary searches. I would really like to learn something before I graduate that I didn't already know...like how to structure a significant piece of C++ code. I have looked at a few books on software engineering, and poked around the Web a bit, but I was hoping for some guidance from the master coders in the Slashdot community on who to believe."

catseye_95051 writes "An independent programmer in the UK (he does not work for any of the Java VM makers) has done a series of direct C vs. Java speed comparisons. The Results are likely to surprise some of the Java skeptics out there. " Author Chris Rijk admits, "This article is not supposed to be an attempt to fully quantify the speed difference between Java and C - it's too simple and incomplete for that," but the results are nonetheless food for thought.

Fooknut asks: "I'm here, in the infant stages of development of a corporate website, and portal for my employer. I asked to build on JSP/servlets/EJB, so they setup a Win2k server with IIS 5 and JRun (allaire). Two weeks into the dev process they have a meeting with some managing "programmers" and the decision is made that JSP/Java was just a foolish thing to do, and that we should go with ASP. So here I am, chucking all of my hard work out of the window because someone "important" likes ASP better. Luckily I haven't written much code yet. These decisions are made by ASP lovers, people stuck in the MS rut, unwilling to try or hold a new skillset (I believe because they don't know how and don't want to know how to program anything else). Does it make business sense to put all your chips in the MS hat? Should a web dev co do one thing only, or should it embrace a variety of technology? So what are the advantages and disadvantages of JSP over ASP and vice-versa? Please don't post anti-MS comments, I really would like some serious comparisons."

Sun Microsystems today announced the members of their Executive Committee which will oversee the Java Community Process (JCP) program, the community-based process for developing Java technology specifications, reference implementations and associated compatibility test suites. These ECs will serve in full capacity in guiding the JCP program until the first general EC election. Of particular note is the inclusion of various Open Source leaders, including Caldera and The Apache Software Foundation.