x-blackout-x writes "Ian C. Blenke writes "The primary goal of the video keg was to build a reliable video box that was easy to transport with enough space to store 3 days worth of Anime fan-subs. The secondary goal of the video keg was to make a home PVR system for video playback and time-shifting, along with a video arcade and perhaps a web browser. The tertiary goal of the video keg was to find an affordable hardware platform so that we could buy 4 of them immmediately to service the primary goal's need for 4 separate video rooms. For a PVR, the machine neeed to be small, quiet, low-heat, and still fast enough to run the software video player and arcade games." You can read the full scoop on this project on his blog Ians Blog "

jsuda writes "Podcasting appears to be one of the more interesting developments in current culture and technology. It is one of the earliest nonbusiness representations of the value and power of XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML is subtly and quietly being used to link digital documents together, and more significantly, databases, much like the Internet itself linked individual computers into a global network." Read on for the rest of Jsuda's review.

Spencerian writes "The surge of Unix-derived operating systems such as Mac OS X, Linux, and the now-free Solaris is not slowing against the fortified but embattled breakwaters of the Microsoft operating system family. But new power users of other operating systems, including those just starting with Unix as well as the graphical interface of the operating system (such as the Mac OS Finder, or the navigators of KDE or Gnome), remain in need of a comprehensive primer for Unix that complements their previous knowledge. The fourth edition of Dave Taylor's "Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours" should remain on the top of the buy list for computer users in need of a strong Unix reference where they may find themselves managing or using the subtle variants of Unix flavors." Read the rest of Spencerians' review.

An anonymous reader asks: "Ok, so here is the scenario: my company has some software that is used internally and it is written in Perl. We now need to put this code on a server that has 'public' access (it's a university machine). We provide root access to the system for the purpose of learning, but we need to keep the code from being viewed or edited. Is there anything to do besides the 'perl2exe' and the ActiveState compiler? How effective are those really at protecting code?"

jsuda writes "The Definitive Guide to MYSQL 3rd Edition certainly deserves its title. It is a large, dense, complete guide to MySQL and updates its predecessor edition by covering new MySQL5 and new auxiliary software including database administration tools and interfaces. MySQL is the open-source database software which has become very popular for web-based database applications now being used by Yahoo, NASA, Slashdot, and other entities. Read on for the rest of Jsudas' review

Andy Lester writes to tell us that the Perl foundation has named a new president and steering committee members. Bill Odom landed the seat of president, replacing Allison Randal who has occupied the seat since 2002. From the article: "Founded in 2000, The Perl Foundation (TPF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Holland, Michigan, established to advance the use and development of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code."

chromatic writes "Geoff Broadwell has written an analysis of optimizing an open source project for fun, specifically the Pugs project. Broadwell argues that making development fun and easy leads to higher quality code and a faster velocity of development, even when implementing a frivolous project (a toy Perl 6 interpreter) in an uncommon language (Haskell). The Pugs leader, Autrijus Tang, will speak about both Pugs and Haskell at EuroOSCON."

dogma01 writes "Parrot the virtual machine for Perl6 and other dynamic languages has released version 0.3.0. If interested you can also help support Parrot development by donating to The Perl Foundation or by getting involved with development."

chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Larry Wall's Ninth Annual State of the Onion address from OSCON 2005. In previous talks, he's used screensavers, music, and Unicode to explore Perl and open source. This year, he introduced the cast of characters in the Perl community in terms of spy movies and metaphors."

After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn't quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. You can use our sourceforge project page to submit bugs and we'd really appreciate the feedback. Thanks to Tim Vroom for putting the HTML in place, Wes Moran for writing the HTML in the first place, and Pudge for writing the code to convert 900k users, 60k stories, and 13 million comments to comply. And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.

barryhawkins writes "It's safe to assume that people who are thinking of learning GNU Emacs or improving their Emacs skills are motivated. These people probably know their way around a command prompt, and likely know that Lisp is more than just a speech impediment. They need a book that offers expert advice without wasting time or insulting the intelligence of the reader: Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition is that book." Read on for the rest of Hawkins' review.

wicked coding asks: "I'm a professional software engineer and I'm planning on building my ultimate setup for longer hours coding and hacking, but I'm kinda stuck when it comes with what to choose. What hardware would you choose to use, if money was no object? Obviously there may be some constraints on space. Leave no stone unturned, I'm looking for suggestions on desks, seating, lighting, keyboard and pointing device, monitors and even the computer system itself. Ideally it needs to be as comfortable and ergonomic as possible. What software would you choose to use, if the intended targets were Java and OO PHP5? Currently I'm using Eclipse on Gentoo. Is there a more suitable IDE that works with most popular OSS (and not so OSS) languages including XML, SQL, CSS, PHP, Perl, Java, and C/C++?"

honestpuck (Tony Williams) writes "I have to admit that I can bristle at books that try to preach, so Perl Best Practices was on a hiding to nothing when I came to review it. I also have to admit to being torn about the author -- after all, he is one of those poor fools who insist on living in cold, unenlightened Melbourne, while I live in vastly superior Sydney. On the other hand, how can I dislike a man who manages to place a quote that involves my favourite character, Lady Bracknell. from my favourite comic play, 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' in the first few pages of his book?" Read on for Williams' review.

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

Joseph Brenner writes "Every now and then, a beginning programmer asks if there's any point in learning to program in Perl 5, when Perl 6 is going to change everything soon. There are a number of answers to that: one is to point out that Perl 6 is still years away, another is to point out that it is promised that Perl 5 code will run under Perl 6 without modification (a module that begins with the traditional "package" statement is Perl 5 code; if it begins with the new "class," then it's Perl 6)." Read on for the rest of Brenner's review of Scott Walters' Programming in Perl 6 style using Perl 5, a book which answers that question a whole different way.

andphi asks: "How has volunteer F/OSS experience helped or hindered Slashdot readers in finding paid programming jobs? I have been involved with a F/OSS game engine development project (Adonthell) for a few years now. I've become the primary story and plot developer for the project. I hardly even look at the code, though I do try to follow the traffic on the developer's list. I've learned C++, VB6, Perl, IA32 Assembler, and exposed myself to a great many other languages (JavaScript, HTML, XML, SQL, C, awk, sed, bash, etc.). But I wonder, what can I do to sell myself using my post-graduate project involvement?"

turnitover writes "And here I thought their revenue was all based on projected lawsuit returns. But no, The SCO Group actually has turned out something that does something -- or does it? In any case, looks like eWEEK has reviewed OpenServer 6. From the review: though the company 'seems like an unlikely outlet for open-source software, the company has extended OpenServer with updated versions of Samba, Perl, PHP and other key components.'"

Craig Maloney writes "Just about everyone out there who has ever typed #!/usr/bin/perl has encountered Learning Perl (otherwise known as "The Llama Book") in one form or another. You may have learned some of the intricacies of the language from this tome, or you've seen someone recommend this book to potential Perl programmers on-line. Learning Perl is generally in the top three recommended books for new Perl programmers, next to Programming Perl ("The Camel Book"). Now in its fourth edition, Learning Perl returns with updates covering the stable 5.8 series of Perl. The changes are subtle, but the improvements make for a clearer and more readable book." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

An anonymous reader asks: "This summer I have the opportunity to work in a bio research lab creating a web site for data about proteins. Part of my job is to do bioinformatic analysis of the proteins to determine what types of support their are for the preliminary gene predictions. I have been using DNA Stryder (a Mac program) for sequence alignments plus translations from DNA sequences to protein sequences, and I was wondering if any of the Slashdot crowd knew of similar programs for Linux? I have looked into Bioperl , Biopython, EMBOSS, and BioConductor, but they seem to be more oriented towards servers and less towards stand-alone applications. What programs would you suggest, especially those that might be geared more towards biologists rather than computer scientists?"

Chip Salzenberg writes "In April of this year, Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA, told police that they feared I was misappropriating trade secrets. That very afternoon, police raided my house with a search warrant to seize every computer in the house, paper files, CDs, and DVDs... even my wireless router and cable modem!" Chip was the pumpking for perl's 5.004 release. Keep reading for his description of his current legal troubles, and for a shortcut into what he says prompted his former company's actions, read his letter warning about abuse of open proxies.