Slashback -- another round of updates and errata for your reading pleasure follows. So read on for more information on spambots, Flash memory for your slightly-outdated Apple systems, Linux (not quite) running on the GP32, publicity (including a security problem) from Mozilla, and more.

forged writes "The Register already reported Alan Cox's involvement against the proposed European Union Copyright Directive before. Today, Alan Cox has issued a wake up call to the Linux community amid concerns that the pending EUCD could stymie open source development. "The directive, which was approved last year, extends European copyright legislation so that it is even more restrictive than America's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."" If you haven't joined the EFF (or the equivalent in your country) , now might be a good time.

Reader Cole Tucker writes with this review: "The Ruby Developer's Guide was written with the intent to provide an overview of Ruby tools used for developing real-world applications. The book touches on a variety of areas, from GUI development to neural networks, and discusses existing Ruby packages that developers can take advantage of. In the end, the book comes out as a Ruby version of the Perl Cookbook." To see what he means by that, read on below for the rest of Cole's assessment of this book.

linderdm queries: "I am a perl web programmer who has taken a new job that requires me to do web 'programming' using XML, XSL, and Oracle XSQL. My minor experience with XSL so far has been horrible! It is so hard to do things that were very easy in Perl (looping!?!) and just seems incredibly verbose. I am curious to find out what the Slashdot community's experience has been with web programming in procedural languages (Perl, Java, etc) then switching to tag based XML/XSL. Am I wrong to be trying to do procedural programming with XSL?"

Misha writes "There have been a number of weeks/months in anyone's life that called for a better organization of your Inbox. filtering and folders work, but it'd be nice to have an text-mining tool running in the background that categorized incoming messages by topic as they arrive. It's nice to see that besides NLP research, there are some great algorithmic advances being done, as seen in this paper. Perhaps even one of them Perl monkeys will quickly hack such a background tool." Note: it's a PostScript file.

Wee writes "While searching for some serial port programming information, I came across a result labeled How to Build a Computerized Android Robot Head for $600. That title demanded a read. This guy built a Java and Perl/Tk controlled android head out of R/C motors, bicycle parts, a mannequin head, two QuickCams and my favorite item: a brass plant holder. Turns out the entire site is chock full of android/hardware/PC-control know-how (including scenarios in which one might find a need for an android head)."

Nat Friedman often seems to live in the shadow of his famous coworker, Miguel de Icaza, but today it's his turn to shine. You asked Nat questions last week. This week he answers, in detail, with lots of links, touching on subjects ranging from Gnome's future directions to how Microsoft is dealing with Linux as a competitor to Windows.

Reader the_rev_matt writes with this review of Hungry Minds' Zope Bible. He finds both merit and shortcomings in this book, and suggests that "Bible" may be too grand a word for this decent-but-spotty work. Read on for his reasoning.

blankmange writes "NewsFactor reports that Quark's QuarkXPress is not quite up-to-snuff under Mac OS X." Sources in the article claim Mac OS X still isn't quite there in regard to printing, or predictability. That is, I suppose, you don't mind crashes as long as you know when they are going to happen and what is going to cause them.

cascadefx writes "It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, PerlBox, written in Perl and Tk. I found this posted in response to an article on Perl Monks asking if Perl was obsessed with CGI?. Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting." I wonder how fast it runs?

blankmange writes: "This headline caught my eye: 'The End of Computer Rebooting.' Seems that there has been some new developments in memory technology: The new thin-film technology that could give rebooting the boot is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic used in most PCs and other memory-enabled devices. It also is considerably faster than current memory systems and holds the promise of reducing the time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files. This is great news, but what am I going to do with the extra hour or so a day?"

1Eye writes "Wired is running this article on the iPod, about a hack to display XML news headlines." That's pretty nifty. I wrote a 40-line Perl script to download arbitrary RSS feeds and create MP3s with the headline as the title and the site name as the artist, but it doesn't do long titles (limited to 30 chars by ID3v1, D'oh!) and doesn't manage the MP3s with the iPod.

Slashback with more on handheld everything-boxes, a softer review of the new Sharp Zaurus, raising money for open technologies, Gateway's singing cow, and getting around with alternative root servers -- all below. Enjoy. Update: 04/12 06:41 GMT by T : There's an update below in the part on alternate root servers, too.

Reader cpfeifer contributes the review below of O'Reilly's Programming Jabber: if your job (or hobby) includes instant messaging in all its glory, Jabber is a free-beer, free-speech framework for setting up instant messaging systems not bound to a single server in the middle. As cpfeifer points out, instant messaging can mean a lot more than popping an on-screen note to your friend in Des Moines -- machines and programs can use a general purpose communication system like this, with no human middleman required.

The Apache Software Foundation's Apache HTTP Server, version 2.0.35, has now been released for General Availability. You can find the official announcement, and download the server, from their website. Be sure to try a mirror first. Congratulations to the HTTP Server Project for getting the final release out. If you are wondering about it being usable in a production environment, you should poke around Slashdot's servers and see if you are surprised (now if only mod_perl was finished we could move more of our servers over to using the new release).

BorrisYeltsin writes "perl.com has Exegesis 4 from the Damian, in repsonse to Larry's latest Apocalypse. This installment covers news of the new flow and block control changes, fully integrated exceptions and some other cool stuff!"

bLanark asks: "I've used a variety of programming languanges over the years, but recently started using Java commercially (as opposed to just playing at home). As soon as I was on that Java project, I became a rampant stallion, never left my wife alone, sexually. She even started sleeping in the spare room just to get some rest on some nights! Soon, I was back on C++ (due to a budget cut and re-org). I am no longer a stallion (I won't go into more details!). My theory is that java's so easy, so after conquering an API a day (JDOM, Swing,...) I just came home and carried on conquering. Now, I have to work for a living again, and it doesn't leave much energy. Do other slashdotters have similar experience? Is lisp tantric? Do assembler programmers favour wham-bam-that's-the-end-of-that-non-maskable-inter rupt-where's-the-remote-control-honey-can-you-get- me-a-beer? What's the best programming language for attracting sexual partners? What about Operating Systems? Does MS == S&M?" Does C/C++ dampen your love life? Does Perl please your partner? Can you jive with Java? Inquiring minds want to know.

bsartist writes "I've released the first version of a Cocoa/Perl bridge that I call CamelBones. It's alpha-quality but functional enough for the example application, a POD reader similar to MacPerl's Shuck, to be written entirely in Perl." There are other projects like this that have been started, though this is the first one I've seen (since the Rhapsody days, anyway) that has code available.

reflexreaction writes "This article on NewsFactor does a decent job of covering some of the issues facing Open Source Software (OSS). It points to Linux's growth area, non-mission critical projects in mid-sized companies, and its main weakness, the desktop. It also briefly discusses Linux's potential growth into mission critical applications if scalability issues are addressed. Quick easy read. My favorite quote from the article "Linux on the desktop is toast.""

techmaven writes "When Channel Islands National Park officials needed an estimated about 300 rats exterminated on the east side of environmentally sensitive Anacapa Island, Aspen Ag Helicopters got the call. The kill was necessary because the rodents, descendants of rats that reached the island by way of a shipwreck a century or more ago, were decimating the populations of two rare seabirds. And GPS helped the helicopter company do the job."