Bob Uhl writes "I've just finished reading a review copy of O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux System Administration. It's a handy introduction for the beginner GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's bookshelf. The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing, high-availability environment; working with virtualization. None of the chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and headed in the right direction." Read below for the rest of Bob's review.

FishWithAHammer writes "As part of my Google Summer of Code project, I'm working with WinLibre to develop a Debian-like software download system for free/open source software on the Windows platform. My reasoning is that open source software suffers from poor presentation. Most computer laymen, even those aware of open source software, often don't have any idea how to go about looking for it, but would use it if it were easier to access. What I have proposed is both a Debian-style packaging mechanism (capable of using Windows Installer MSIs or not, as the user wishes) and a software 'catalog' that takes the best aspects of Synaptic and Linspire's Click-N-Run system. Seamless, simple installation and removal of programs in as straightforward a way as apt-get (there will be a command-line tool as well). I'm posting to Slashdot to get the ideas of you lot who, while you may not be the target audience, can certainly provide insights that can be of value." Read on for more of this reader's ideas and questions.

TBBScorpion asks: "Lately I have been investigating 3D game engines. I was mostly paying attention to open source engines like Ogre3d, Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and the like. Then I found out about cheap Indie licenses for commercial game engines like Torque Game Engine ($150), Torque Game Engine Advanced ($295) and the C4 Engine ($200 + free upgrades). I found a list of top commercial and open source game engines at devmaster.net in case anyone is interested (I didn't want to take the time to list all the engines, but there are more good ones that I did not list on this page). Now for my questions. Now, here's my dilemma. Which of the engines are worth investing in? Should I buy an indie license or hold out for open source? Or should I start with an indie engine and switch later if open source catches up?"

An anonymous reader writes "After nearly two years of development, Pidgin 2.0 has finally been released! Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is a powerful and robust open source instant messaging client that supports many protocols. Pidgin 2.0 features a completely redesigned interface with attractive new icons and and a new status management system that was designed for optimal usability. Pidgin 2.0 also adds support for universal buddy icon management and smooth-scroll functionality for conversation windows. A comprehensive review at Ars Technica explores the new features in Pidgin 2.0 and demonstrates how to use the new D-Bus bindings with Python to make Pidgin's status system send updates to Twitter."

TimHunter writes "Peter Cooper's Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional has two audiences, novices with no programming experience who want to learn Ruby as their first programming language, and veterans who want to add Ruby to their programming toolkit. Cooper's response to this challenge is a solid entry in the limited arena of Ruby tutorials. Even though the early chapters are marred by the occasional reference to an advanced topic, readers will appreciate the plentiful examples and thoughtful description of the Ruby language." Read below for the rest of Tim's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "MySQL may be the most popular open source relational database management system (RDBMS) in the world, but during the first decade of its existence, it lacked support for stored programs, i.e., store procedures, functions, and triggers. The major commercial RDBMS vendors — including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft — could point to this deficiency as reason enough to choose their proprietary systems over MySQL or any other open source system, such as PostgreSQL. But with the release of MySQL version 5.0, in October 2005, the "little database engine that could" dramatically improved its position against the competition. The most comprehensive discussion of these new capabilities is in the book MySQL Stored Procedure Programming." Read below for the rest of Michael's review

koreth writes "Facebook has released Thrift, a toolkit for making remote method calls. It generates interoperable network code in C++, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Its protocol is much more lightweight (and probably much higher-performance) than SOAP or CORBA. Facebook uses it internally for high-traffic services like search. The license is extremely permissive."

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spo0nman writes "The PythonOnPlanes release team has just published PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. 'the SuperSunday' release. For those in the know PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association DataMapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.'Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the *PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer* officially debuting on the x86 platform.'"

Last week at GDC I had the privilege of sitting down to speak with a representative from CCP, the folks who maintain EVE Online. The week before, we'd asked for questions to pass on. I had the chance to put them directly to Magnus Bergsson, CMO at CCP. He very directly tackles the recent scandal involving a CCP developer, the reason why EVE's hardcore gameplay is so appealing, the balance between casual and hardcore players, and some information on the future of the game. Read on for his answers to your questions in a transcript of the interview, as well as audio live from the GDC Expo floor.

Coryoth writes "Design by Contract, writing pre- and post-conditions on functions, seemed like straightforward common sense to me. Such conditions, in the form of executable code, not only provide more exacting API documentation, but also provide a test harness. Having easy to write unit tests, that are automatically integrated into the inheritance hierarchy in OO languages, 'just made sense'. However, despite being available (to varying degrees of completeness) for many languages other than Eiffel, including Java, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Ada, and even Haskell and Ocaml, the concept has never gained significant traction, particularly in comparison to unit testing frameworks (which DbC complements nicely), and hype like 'Extreme Programming'. So why did Design by Contract fail to take off?"

dws90 writes "The cloak worn by Sir Alec Guinness when he played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars original trilogy has been sold at a TV and Cinema auction. The cloak sold for £54,000, which is about $103,923 according to Google calculator. According to the article, the cloak was missing for nearly 30 years, during which it was rented out to a number of other films, including the Mummy. It was found two years ago, and has been part of a film memorabilia exhibition in London since then. The cloak sold for more than any of the other movie costumes the article listed, beating out Sean Connery's dinner jacket from Thunderball and a helmet worn by Terry Jones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the technical challenges faced by the typical experienced computer programmer, questions about syntax form a relatively small portion. This is especially true now that current coding editors and IDEs offer statement expansion and syntax checking. Rather, the most common type of technical challenge is understanding how to solve a specific data access or manipulation problem. Hence the growing popularity of programming "cookbooks," which are filled with "recipes," each comprising a concise statement of a focused problem, followed by a solution, with plenty of sample code to show how to implement it. For developers using the MySQL database system, the gold standard of such books is MySQL Cookbook, by Paul DuBois." Read below for the rest of Michael's review

Simon P. Chappell writes "I missed the partying in the 70's and so was not exposed to the full groovy experience that was available. You could say that I was a late developer (pun intended). Thankfully, I am now able to make up for lost time by learning the Groovy scripting language. For those of you not familiar with Groovy, it is a dynamic language designed to run on a Java Virtual Machine and be easy for Java programmers to work with; it looks very similar to Java and will freely inter-operate with Java objects and libraries. I've been tinkering with Groovy on and off for about two years now; learning Groovy in the old days, prior to this year, was a challenge with all of the design changes that were taking place. Groovy in Action (GinA) is the book that I'd wished was available back then. Dierk König, a committer for the Groovy project, has written this definitive guide to Groovy and after what has seemed an eternity to those of us on the Groovy mailing list, it is finally available." Read below for the rest of Simon's review.

Scott Walters writes "Many of the recipes in SQL Hacks will improve the SQL you write day to day, and many will give you the confidence to attempt much more involved tasks with SQL. Other recipes will rarely if ever be needed, but make for a entertaining and education reading in a similar way that "worse case survival scenario" books do — SQL is pitted against the most difficult analysis tasks just as survival scenario books pit humans against pavement and lions. SQL Hacks fits well in the Hacks series, which raises the bar on advanced books by offering large, eclectic sets of tricks for problems that an unambitious person (a non-hacker) wouldn't ever push technology hard enough to run into. Put another way, the questions answered in a good Hacks book are ones that would get a "good question" comment rather than a an "RTFM!" response. It does a good job continuing where O'Reilly's SQL Cookbook left off, which is always difficult with two books written at slightly different times by different authors. Still, it's harder to review a Hacks book than a Learning book as, with hacks, the sky is the limit, and the reader will always find herself wishing for more. To this end, I hope O'Reilly continues to publish newer editions of their various Hacks books, drawing in more and more content in each edition, and identifying recipes that might better serve in the Cookbook counterpart." Read the rest of Scott's review.

penguinblotter writes in a journal article: "Soon, Walter Bright is scheduled to release version 1.0 of the D Programming Language. D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. D has appeared on Slashdot a few times before, and Walter has continued to add more and more features. Most Slashdot community comments in these articles have been offered on feature X or spec Y without reading through the extensive D newsgroup archives. It has been here over the past seven years where extremely gifted and experienced programmers hashed out discussions and arrived at excellent implementations of all the ideas discussed." Read on for the rest of penguinblotter's writeup.

spiffyman asks: "In the next year, I'll begin advanced work in mathematics, and I'll also be upgrading my desktop box. In light of the advantages of Linux and FOSS in the area of science and mathematics, I want to convert from a Windows system to a dual-boot one with Linux. Primary tasks aside from math/logic activities will include learning intermediate programming, web maintenance, some computational linguistics (in Python), and LOTS of LaTeX work for my publishing activities. What do Slashdot readers recommend in terms of hardware, OS, software, and perhaps reading for a quasi-power Windows user (with no previous Linux experience) to convert to an all-Linux system?"

jg21 writes "Java Developer's Journal has published the results of its end-of-year poll of various Internet technology players, from its own internal editors to industry high-ups like the founder of Apress, Gary Cornell, and including too the thoughts of professor Tony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon West. Participants were asked to foretell what they saw happening in 2007. Among the predictions — Cornell: 'The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#'; Wasserman: 'The use of the GPL 2 for open-sourcing Java will inhibit the completion and acceptance of the GPL 3 proposal'; and Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson: 'The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.'"

Trebonius asks: "I have just received two job offers in the same day. The first was for a job coding in Perl on Linux/UNIX platforms, for a small but very cool company around 120 miles from where I live. They play Half-Life together in the off-hours and the people I've talked to there seem very happy with the job and work environment there. I'd be making smallish web systems, and I'd basically have total control over the projects on which I work. They offered me 20% more than I make now. The second offer I received is for a huge nationwide company opening an IT office a couple blocks from where I currently work. They're an all-Microsoft shop — VB, C#, .NET, SQL200*, etc. I'd be a very small cog in a very large machine. They offered me 66% more than I'm making now. Benefits are essentially identical between the companies, so that's not a big factor. I'll also give the Perl company a chance to make me another offer, but what should the threshold be? How do you folks balance the desire for a fun job with the need to pay off debt?"

Ravi writes "Python, the dynamic object oriented programming language created by Guido van Rossum is known to deliver both the power and general applicability of traditional compiled languages without the complexities accompanying them. Coupled with its ease of use, programs written in Python can be run on multiple Operating systems and system architectures which gives it the same portability of any interpreted language. My first brush with Python was when I tried out a beautiful game called PySol — which is more like a collection of over 200 card games and PySol is entirely coded using the Python language. Nowadays a variety of Python web frameworks have also cropped up which promise the same kind of rapid application development that is possible using other programming languages." Read the rest of Ravi's review

NathanBFH writes "Many of the questions that make it to the Ask Slashdot pages come from young and aspiring programmers wanting to know the role math and education play in the profession, or what makes certain programmers so much more productive than others, or what the future of the craft will look like. One young programmer by the name of Jarosaw "sztywny" Rzeszótko decided to ask these types of questions (and more) to the programmers he admired the most who also, it turns out, happen to be some of the most influential computer scientists and programmers of the last several decades. The result? Most of them happily responded. The results include the following: Linus Torvalds (Linux), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Tim Bray (XML, Atom), Guido Van Rossum (Python), Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails Framework), and Googlers Steve Yegge and Peter Norvig."