chromatic has reviewed O'Reilly's DocBook. Written by Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner the book is: "A hefty reference of DocBook Elements and Entities, with an emphasis on customization and configuration -- if you know what that means, you'll find this book useful."

Chad asks: "I am looking into doing so molecular modeling on Linux platforms because they are cost effective. After running some tests, I find errors, albeit small, in the results as compared to similar tests on SGIs or SUNs. I have heard about this in the past when talking to some professors but I never thought much about it until now. Knowing that errors propagate and grow (especially after weeks of computation), I want to know what I can do to avoid problems with the math library. Is it a problem? Can it be fixed? Am I over reacting?" Can anyone offer up some information on this? Has anyone actually stressed tested libm.a?

Bobe asks: " I had already install GD in my php3+apache, and it work fine. Today, someone want use php-ldap in my server, so I install php-ldap-3.0.14-3.i386.rpm. That rpm install ldap.so in my linux server /etc/httpd/modules and add line in php3.ini file: /*/extension=ldap.so/*/ Then I think "Can I build php-gd.*.*.rpm like Php-ldap-3.0.14-3.i386.rpm?", so if other peple not build GD in php3, they can download my php-gd.*.*.rpm and install it. Sorry my English so poor."

A reader writes "Sun will be releasing the source of their Forte for Java IDE (formerly Netbeans) under the Mozilla license. I believe this would be the first time Sun has released a major product under an approved open source license. "

The Open Source movement has produced some of the world's finest software through the cooperation of developers worldwide. While it may be the most effective way of writing software the planet has ever seen, it creates its own communication challenges, as well. The days of private, closed-door meetings in pretty offices are over; disputes of all kinds are dealt with publically.

Jean-loup is the kind of person I love to see us interview here. He's important in the sense that work he's done (positively) affects almost every Linux or Unix user, but the chance of Jean-loup ever getting any "mainstream" media attention is zero. Or possibly less. Without people like Jean-loup there would be no Open Source movement, and I consider the chance to present him as a Slashdot interview guest a *huge* honor. The readers who asked the excellent questions, and the moderators who helped select them, also deserve major kudos. So thanks to all of you for an excellent Q&A session!

thing12 wrote to us to say that the fine folks of Perl have a 5.6.0 release candidate announced.

Earl Shannon writes, "With the new release of Sendmail I was looking over Sendmail.net and came across this essay called It's the User, Stupid. Author Mike Kuniavsky states a very important question if Linux wants to make inroads on the desktop as an open source solution. How can the open source development model obtain the necessary user feedback to development interfaces that the user will intuitively able to use?"

Josuah asks: "I just started my CS164 Compilers class at the University of California, Berkeley and the book we are using is called Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman, published by Addison-Wesley. Our professor told us today that the book kinda sucks because it is old (1988) but was unable to suggest a better book. Does anyone know of a good book on modern compiler programming? "

Bryan asks: "What do you use to develop, debug and test java servlets on Linux? I am especially interested in debugging tools and techniques, especially those that use Apache+mod_jserv." I've just started using mod_jserv recently and am very happy with it. Something like this could sure help my development activities and I'm sure others are looking for something like this as well.

We've all heard of "garbage collection" in reference to cleaning up after yourself after a memory allocation. Two graduate students at the Illinois Institute of Technology are proposing a new method of garbage collection and memory allocation called DMM. What they are trying to do is "map basic software algorithms such as malloc(), free(), and realloc() into hardware." Sounds as if it has some promise, but can it ever be as flexible as some of the memory managers used today?

The PHP Group announced the release of PHP 3.0.15, which fixes some bugs and addresses some safe mode security concerns. Also available is a short patch file for PHP 4.0 Beta 4 which fixes a problem with "magic quotes" not working properly.

cybermalandro sent us an interesting interview with Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP fame. The interview talks with him about the origins of the project. Also heard are Stig Bakken, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski about working on PHP and where it's going. You can grab the MP3 from the site, as well as a QuickTime version.

Monday we had over 550 assorted questions and comments for and about Bjarne Stroustrup. Excellent moderation (Thanks, Monday Moderators!) helped cull this mass down to 10 extremely high-quality questions Bjarne has kindly answered in amazing depth, for which he deserves a loud round of applause. Update: 02/28 02:12 by R : Bjarne later took the time to dig through all the comments and reply to some of them. The additional material is appended to the end of the original Q&A session.

aarestad writes, "Just saw this on perl.com: the new beta leading to perl 5.6. Read the announcement." It's mostly bugfixes. Pumpking Sarathy says we're on track for a 5.6 final release candidate by Feb.28.

You can learn more about Bjarne Stroutrup here. Even though Bjarne isn't on your nightly news a lot (like never) he deserves (and gets) heavy respect from fellow programmers. If you have a question for Bjarne that he hasn't already answered on his FAQ page, please post it below. If you're a moderator, please moderate others' questions up or down, as deserved, which is just as important as actually asking questions. Tuesday afternoon (U.S. EST) we'll forward 10 selected questions to Bjarne. His answers are scheduled to appear Friday.

BlueBlade writes, "Inprise, formerly known as Borland (and now merging with Corel) has released their latest compiler for free. They said the move was to show support for the open source community. You can find the full article here. " It's Free Beer though. No source code, although such a release would really show their support for the Open Source Community.

Jayakrishnan, who recently reviewed Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, has returned with a review of Li Gong's Inside Java 2 Platform Security, Architecture, API Design and Implementation. With the increasing use of Java in many different situations, books like this will only increase in importance - so learn more about now, versus later.

burner writes, "After quite a wait, JDK1.2.2 is released for Linux. You can grab the final release from Sun's site. Sun has also put up bios for the Blackdown guys. Sun's been acting pretty flippy lately, but this is great news. I've been using Blackdown's latest release candidates lately, and they're excellent, but now there's a final release. Nice work guys! "

davemabe writes "Every programmer has a favorite scripting language. Here is a well written article by Jon Udell from byte.com detailing the differences between Perl and Python, their cultures, OOP, database access, philosophies, and which one will gain the most converts in the future. Very interesting reading on an almost religious debate. "