Daniel Holmes writes "In addition to using PHP to 'just get the job done' for years now, I've been running a humble user group here in the Midwest. As such, I have read numerous books on and around the subject, always looking for something great to inspire my colleagues, group members and myself alike. There are a metric ton of books out there that will walk you through PHP syntax -- this is not one of them. If you are looking for a book on rapidly developing prototype sites, or writing lots of HTML-embedded PHP, just keep looking. But if you have read even one of those books, or just felt like your programming style itself could use a little upgrade, then go get yourself a copy of PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra." Read on for the rest of Holmes's review.

Slashback tonight with more on the Microsoft start page project vis-a-vis Google's similar one, a wee $40 million slap on the wrist for Amazon over shopping-cart patent infrigement, new animals for the CodeZoo, and a strong denial that WikiPedia has announced a more stringent editorial policy. Details on these stories and more, below.

OSCON 2005 was held in a convention center this year, instead of a hotel, because it just got too big (2000+ people). Too big, in fact, for pudge and myself to cover more than a fraction of the talks and the ideas flitting around the hallways. But here's some of what I found cool last week. And if you attended or presented at OSCON and want to tell us about all the neat stuff we missed, please, share your thoughts in the comments, or submit a fact-rich writeup and we'll maybe do a followup story later.

ucahg writes "Simon Willison has a post on his blog introducing Django, a rapid web development framework he and his colleagues are releasing into the wild. Hailed as Python's own version of a Rails framework, Django looks very promising. I'll be keeping a close eye on it as it gets more and more support..."

Richard Jones writes "Python's software repository has finally got its own home at the Python Cheese Shop. The Cheese Shop includes the package index (PyPI) and package download repository."

anyon wonders: "PHP is the most popular language for the web. eBay uses ISAPI (C), Google uses C/C++ (search), Java (gmail), and Python. Microsoft uses ASP (what else?). For small web site, it really doesn't matter. What's your take on language choice for large-scale web applications? Maybe language choice is irrelevant, only good people (developers) matter? If you can get the same good quality people, then what language you would chose? Considering the following factors: performance, scalability, extendibility, cost of development (man-month), availability of libraries, cost of libraries, development tools? Has there been a comprehensive comparison done?"

ewhac writes "Tapwave, makers of the universally acclaimed Zodiac mobile gaming device/media player/PalmOS PDA formally announced on their Web site that, 'the Zodiac business was discontinued and service and support are no longer available as of July 25th 2005.' The Zodiac was a PalmOS 5.2 device with gaming and media features, including ATI graphics and Yamaha sound acceleration, proportional joystick, two SD slots, Bluetooth, 200MHz ARM CPU (Freescale i.MX1), and up to 128M of RAM. At the most recent Palm developer conference, Tapwave employees were showing Zodiacs running their own port of Linux 2.6.10, with ports of SDL, Python, PyGame, mpg123, and primitive power management. It is unknown what will become of this work."

dfrankow writes "Gamespy has a preview of the upcoming Civilization IV title, where they go into more details about the moddability of the game. From the article: 'Civilization IV promises to be the most moddable game in the franchise yet. It'll ship with an in-game worldbuilder that allows you to shift units around and redraw the map, similar to a scenario editor. More hardcore modders can jump into XML files and tweak all of the unit stats and variables in the game. Beyond that, users who know the Python scripting language can actually go in and set up scripts and triggers to make game events happen or alter the way the game plays, while a Game A.I. SDK that'll be available shortly after the game ships will allow players to completely change the way the A.I., combat system, or game rules work.'"

nazarijo writes "I think by now we're all familiar with viruses and worms. It may have been a term paper diskette chewed up by a virus back in college, a family member's computer infected with the latest worm, or your email inbox clogged with a mass mailer of the week. But how do AV researchers dissect such malware, especially when virus writers have devoted so much time to avoiding detection and perfecting their craft with self-decrypting viruses, polymorphic shellcode, and obfuscated loops. Haven't you wanted a peek into how that's done, and how you would analyze such a monster that landed in your computer? Well, Peter Szor's book The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense (TAOCVRD) has been gaining lots of critical acclaim lately for filling that gap, and rightfully so. (Before we begin, however, I should make one thing perfectly clear: I was a technical reviewer of this book. I enjoyed it when I read it originally, and I'm even more pleased with the final result. And now on to your regularly scheduled review.)" Read on for the rest.

Vern Ceder writes "I really expected to love Data Crunching. The Pragmatic Bookshelf has come up with some very good and, well, "pragmatic" texts in the past so I was looking for more of the same. Even better, the subject of the book was the routine data extraction, massaging and formatting that I (and a lot of other coders) spend so much time on. I was really looking forward to adding a couple more pragmatic tools to my coding toolbox. Unfortunately (as you may have guessed), I really can't say I love Data Crunching. It's a good book, but there are several minor points that keep if from being a truly great book." Read on for the rest of Ceder's review.

wanderingstan writes "Outfoxed is my masters thesis project about trust. (Nutshell overview) The extension uses a social network for personalized searching, phishing/spyware protection, file/process validation and more. It's related to del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and those Kevin Bacon things, but goes a lot further. Mathematically, it's based on the network behavior of small world networks (pdf). Built with Javascript, Python, SQL, and XSLT. 366 testers so far, but we need the network to grow!"

Ridgelift writes "Learning to develop web applications with Ruby on Rails has gained a huge amount of interest lately, but for people wanting to learn Rails there are no books on the subject. That's changed now with the pre-release of Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails , the latest book from Dave Thomas and the author of Ruby on Rails David Heinemeier Hansson. It's really 3 books in one: a full Rails tutorial, an in depth guide to the components that make up Rails, and an introduction to developing applications using the Agile development model. There's even a quick introduction to Ruby, the language Rails is built with." Read on for an early review of the beta book. Full disclosure: Reviewer Miles K. Forrest points out that he has read earlier versions of the book's manuscript and provided critiques to the authors.

Cory R writes "Neil Gershenfeld is an MIT professor and the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms where he teaches a course called "How to Make (almost) Anything." In his book FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, Gershenfeld describes the current state of personal fabrication tools and the surprising impact that these tools have when made available to everybody from MIT students to villagers in India in the form of Fab Labs. Lots of fabrication techniques and some technologies are discussed including those that are still only in development today. The pace of development seems to be accelerating and as the capabilities of the tools advance, Gershenfeld predicts one day he will be able to drop the word "almost" from the title of his course." Read on for the rest of Cory R's review.

acreman writes "Monty Python's SPAMalot, a musical lovingly ripped off from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, won 3 of the 14 Tony Awards it was nominated for. The 3 awards given out were for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical (Sara Ramirez), Best Direction of a Musical (Mike Nichols), and Best Musical. "

Ninwa writes "Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap. More information on the protocol is available in an FAQ. What's most interesting is that Google is licensing the idea under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. According to the Google Blog, this is being done '...so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).' They even offer an open source client in Python."

MrAndrews writes "I just read on the Blender home page that Ton Roosendaal is going to be creating an open movie project called "Orange", which should kick off development sometime in the fall: "The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint." Moreover: "... the resulting movie - including all the production files and software - will be published under an open public license." Open source entertainment is another step closer to reality!"

thesamet writes "The Python Challenge is a set of riddles that require a little bit of Python programming to be solved. The purpose of the riddles is to provide an entertaining way to explore the Python programming language. The challenge was started late in April this year and it is starting to gain popularity in the Python community. What people love most about the challenge is that it makes them poke in Python's module library and discover new things. It truly demonstrates the great power of Python's included 'batteries.' The riddles are designed to be solvable by Python beginners, but yet are challenging even to experienced Python programmers. The first few riddles are very easy, but it gradually becomes more and more challenging. Many people reported that playing the challenge is highly addictive and it is great fun. The site also features discussion forums where users can ask for hints. Additionally, after solving a riddle, its solution is available in a wiki form."

An anonymous reader writes "Horst Knorr released a new test version of Knoda. With this release Knoda is the first KDE database frontend reading MS Access databases natively and is getting closer to its goal to be a full replacement for MS Access. Knoda is a database-frontend for KDE. Besides tables and queries Knoda comprises forms and reports, which are scriptable via Python."

skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.

m1cajah asks: "I've been trying to find an 'all-in-one' package for creating (and migrating to) online manuals and am having some difficulty finding what I'm looking for. I'm hoping Slashdot can help. We have a large number of manuals (designed for paper-based presentation) that suddenly need to be provided online to our customer base. Yes, the PHBs have changed the landscape on us once again. This will, once configured, be managed totally by the documentation staff and analysts (none very tech-savvy). It needs to be really easy to use because I would like to say there's a huge budget for this (as well as for training), but there isn't. Lower cost is good. Free is better.Can any of you point me to some other options?"