$Bob writes "The best and brightest of the Perl community are showing up to drive you insane. Test you strength in the 5th Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest!" Name your variables after the stooges! Write Spagetti! Its good!

MrProgrammer asks: "With hybrid languages like C# coming down the pike, what do you see as the next advances to be made in programming? We have languages from Assembly to Visual Basic, covering what would appear to be the entire spectrum. Is there anything else to be added? Is there anything beyond OOP?"

Jeve Stobs writes: "It seems that nowadays, there are three ways of distributing a program. In a tarball (be it a .gz or .bz2), in a Debian package, or in a RPM. These are all fine methods of packaging a piece of software, but they each have their places, and they aren't as comprehensive as I would like. I really think that, as we move into a broader user base with the variety we have so far (not to mention the variety we are likely to have in the near future) that a new method of software distribution is needed. osOpinion has an excellent editorial piece which details some solutions to this growing problem."

Baldrson and other folks as well write: "Dan Brumleve is at it again with Brown Orifice. In this episode, our fearless grey hat opens a security hole in the Web's foundation that makes Napster look positively tame by comparison. Be careful with this, kids. It turns your Netscape Web browser into a Web server that can serve up your entire file system to any other Web browser."

ghost. writes: "I'm sure it's been submitted already, but here's an O'Reilly interview with Anders Hejlsberg, Chief C# language architect for Microsoft (as well as the force behind Turbo Pascal and Delphi, in the past). While my interest in C# specifically is mild at best, I always seem to learn a lot when /. gets into a good discussion about programming and language design, and I'd enjoy reading everyone's insight based on what Hejlsberg had to say." It's a good read, too -- this interview brings to the fore some of the questions about openness that people raise about C#, and Hejlsberg has strong words about his new baby.

You want to code all day (or as long as you can stand), whether from home or in an office environment that suits you, with the right soda in the fridge, and friendly coworkers to ask questions when the going gets tough. You want a job in a field that will keep you interested for more than the first orientation meeting, and one that lets your skills be useful -- right down to your favorite programming language. Gavin Bong contributed this review of Programming Interview Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, a book designed to lead interviewees for programming positions into the jobs they want.

Tero Kukola asks: "In a past 'Ask Slashdot' article the subject was GUI toolkits. In one comment there was a link to page The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page. I'm very impressed about that effort. It contains only relevant and comprehensive information about GUI toolkits. I consider this kind of information very valuable to developers. Unfortunately, GUI toolkits are only one single area in software development. I think there is also a need to make similar pages about other tookits, too. Such are, for example: general toolkits (string, file, data structures, networking...), math & physics toolkits, and sound toolkits."

goingware asks: "What do you do if your productivity drops to two lines of code a day, and you just sit and stare at the code and feel like you don't know how to do it anymore? On the outside, it would seem my problem is that I've got some difficult architectural issues that I'm wrangling with. I'm not sure what the right way is to approach a certain feature I'm building into my program in C++. But what my real problem is that I just sit and stare at the computer all day long feeling scared and anxious. I'm afraid to try anything out at all for fear of making a mistake. I know I could just back up the code and write any old thing and throw it away if it's wrong, but for some reason knowing that doesn't help." What do you do when you are stuck in code and your focus leaves you? This isn't something as easy as getting up from the problem for a while (although that helps), this is sounds like something closer to burn-out. What can programmers do to combat this?

jcwren asks: "I was driving to work one morning, cursing the so-called 'traffic engineers' who configured our glorious network of traffic lights, when a few questions occurred to me. Do cities actually have a traffic management system that's either learning or adaptive (fuzzy logic, pseudo-AI, whatever)? I seem to remember that years ago that Phoenix had a far better traffic control system than Atlanta has ever had. What are peoples' thoughts (logically, not emotionally) on how traffic is managed in their cities?"

Jason Bennett took a look at the triply-authored Java Modeling in Color with UML. What he came away with ... well, that's for you to find out, but computer book writers everywhere ought to be grateful that Slashdot book reviewers are not granted the power of the emperor's thumb.

woggo writes "The Jakarta project quietly posted the release of ORO Matcher 2.0 this week; Dan Savarese has donated it to Apache under an open-source license. For those who don't know, ORO is a great regular expression package which supports Perl and awk-style pattern matching and substitution in Java -- something that servlet authors generally need. ORO alleged it would come out 'in early June,' but better late than never. This new version looks really cool, and requires Java 2. Download it here."

pole asks: "Are there common relational database patterns (schemas, stored procedures, triggers, etc.) which can be effectively reused? These could be "upsert" (update or insert) patterns, temporal database patterns (historical data such as human resources records or time-series data), referential integrity patterns or even code generation patterns (good programmers don't reuse code via cut-and-paste). Can you think of useful RDMBS patterns? Would be great if these were part of a repository with use-cases and examples that actually worked. Is there such a beast?"

RossyB asks: "Are there any tools to assist merging 2/3-way diffs? When I work on large changes to CVS sources I copy the tree and edit it separately, but then if the CVS source is heavily changed I need to manually update my changes. Merge conflicts from CVS suck, dirdiff helps a bit, gtkcvs is okay, but what I want is a tool to show me the differences between two or three trees, and allow me to edit/copy/delete files to merge the two. Hooking into XEmacs so I had syntax- and change- highlighted source code (in two windows) would be fantastic."

Dacta writes "At last, Interbase 6.0 is available (with source) for download. The announcement is here, with dowload mirrors in Chicago, Herndon and San Jose You may also be interested in the licence - basically it is MPL with "Interbase" substituted for Mozilla/Netscape."

Jeremy Pruitt asks: "I'm wondering if there is a way for me to do some perl scripting on a handheld device. I know there is no port for WindozeCE yet, but I also know there are a few BSD/Linux ports for handhelds. Can I run Perl on these ported versions of BSD/Linux? If so, does anybody recommend a handheld/OS combo that I can do some scripting on?"

eponymous poltroon writes "On SourceTalk, Simon makes a good case for the news about Perl 6 being a well-managed hoax. " That's his best case scenario: he outlines the major issues surrounding the recent structural changes announced to coincide with Perl 6's development.

Chris Nandor wrote in to tell us that Larry Wall has announced his vision for perl 6 as part of this keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. You can read an announcement at Perl.org or read Chris's summary of things (like information about the from-scratch rewrite being planned!)

realberen writes: "Visual Python 0.1 is released. Quoting the Web site: Visual Python, at its current stage of development, is a set of components aimed at GNOME and KDE application developers to enable them to easily add scripting capabilities to their applications. Ah, how I love Python! :)" Does this neatly counteract the argument that MS Office applications are necessary for complex, scripted integration (via Visual Basic)?

sdavies asks: "Functional languages like Scheme and Haskell are great! (here is a PS viewer) They give programmers new tools for elegance and abstraction. Unfortunately, to the legions of procedural programmers writing in languages like C/C++(/C#), Java, and VB, functional languages are considered obscure and impractical. What is your experience with functional languages, and what do you think is preventing them from being adopted into the mainstream?"

For those of you who think Ask Slashdot is lacking in the technical questions department, I hope this query from (yet another) Anonymous Coward will spark your interest: "I have written a forking server in Perl that is exibiting a phase change in its response characteristics around 10 simultaneous connections. As the number of simultaneous connections passes through 10 connections the connection time increases by two orders of magnitude and becomes very random. At the same point the transmission times drop slightly and continue to have small standard deviations. Although I posted this question to a variety of Perl and Unix usenet usegroups over a week ago, I never received a response. Since the most important part of the post is the performance plot, I placed it and relevant code snipits at: http://www.geocities.com/nawkboy The memory, io, and cpu usage never exceeded more than 80% at any time during the tests and were seldom above 50%. The test results were very similar between remote and local clients. The server is running on a Sun Enterprise 420R running Solaris 2.6. I do not understand the behavior and would appreciate any guidance in understanding it."