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?"

acomj writes "Developer resource site CodeZoo launched today. An archive of Java code pieces, which plans to do for Java what cpan did for Perl, according to an announcement from O'Reilly." From the announcement: "We're not focused on hosting developer projects, like SourceForge, nor on comprehensively listing all open source Java code. Instead, we've hand-selected a list of the components we think will be the easiest and best to use in your development projects -- whether you are an open source or commercial developer."

nazarijo (Jose Nazario) writes "As a biochemist by training, Jeff Augen's Bioinformatics in the Post-Genomic Era was very interesting to me. Though I left the field some years ago, I was using the bioinformatics tools that are covered in the book daily and still look in from time to time. Naturally I was curious to see a larger perspective, as well as any progressions, that have occurred in the past few years. Augen's book gave me part of the larger picture, but it could have done more." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review.

Enjoi writes "GeNToo is a version of the Gentoo meta distribution based on the NT kernel, (virtually) completely free of any Win32 code. It provides a complete text-mode Gentoo environment, with all GNU tools, Perl, Python and the other usual suspects. In addition, it comes with with full NT hardware driver support." Aptly named GeNToo, is it a step towards bringing Windows closer to open source? "

r3lody writes "If you spend time working writing applications that have to do pattern matches and/or replacements, you know about some of the intricacies of regular expressions. For many people they can be an arcane hodgepodge of odd characters that somehow manage to do wonderful things, but they don't have enough time (or interest) to really understand how to code them. Nathan A. Good has written Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach for those people. In its relatively slim 289 pages, he offers 100 regular expressions in a cookbook format, tailored to solve problems in one of six broad categories (Words and Text, URLs and Paths, CSV and Tab-Delimited Files, Formatting and Validating, HTML and XML, and Coding and Using Commands)." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

autrijus writes "I am delighted to announce that Pugs 6.0.11 is released, with experimental pugscc support to turn Perl 6 programs into stand-alone executables, as well as many new features. Pugs is an implementation of Perl 6, written in Haskell. For more information, see Pugs Apocryphon 1 and this perl.com interview."

jcr13 writes "OCaml is nearly as fast (or sometimes even faster) than C, right? At least according to the Computer Language Shootout [alternate] (OCaml supporters often point to these shootout results). My results on a real-world programming problem (optimizing a garden layout using dynamic programming) disagree. On one particular problem instance (a garden of size 7x3), my C++ implementation finished in 1 second, while the OCaml implementation was still running after 16 minutes. Bear in mind that my OCaml implementation was dramatically faster than my equivalent Haskell code. It seems that if you program using a functional style in OCaml (which I did, using map, filter, and other recursive structures in place of loops), it is quite slow. However, most of the shootout OCaml programs rely heavily on OCaml's imperative features (unlike Haskell, OCaml doesn't force you to be a functional purist). If you write OCaml code that is isomorphic to C code, it will be fast---what about if you use OCaml the way it was meant to be used?"

malcomvetter asks: "I need a command line FTP client that supports 'Implicit SSL', sports some kind of scripting interface, and runs on Win32. Any suggestions? So far, I have only found GUI versions such as FileZilla." I remember once needing a scripting FTP client long ago. It took me a long time, but I finally found one that had a workable but unintuitive interface. Have scripting FTP clients become more prevalent or is your best bet using something flexible with network bindings (like Python or Perl) to get the job done?

r3lody (Raymond Lodato) writes "Anyone who has been working on the *nix platform has had a brush with Perl, the scripting language whose acronym (depending on who you ask) could mean Practical Extraction and Report Language, or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. In either case, there is a distinct difference between learning to use Perl, and learning to use it well. In my opinion, the best way to learn any language well is to see how others have used it to solve problems. One of the foremost experts in the use of Perl, Randal L. Schwartz, has been writing columns since March of 1995 on the use of Perl in the real world, and has provided us with 6 books and over 200 columns with many examples on how Perl is used." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

loser in front of a computer writes "ZDNet Australia reports that 'Australia's CSIRO research organisation has developed a Firefox plugin named Annodex that allows browsing through time-continuous media such as audio and video in the same way that HTML allows browsing through text.' I've just checked Annodex out and it's very cool. The sample video from the Perl conference is way funny too." The catch is, the media to be searched has to be prepped first.

CowboyRobot writes "Developer of Smalltalk Alan Kay has an interview on ACM Queue where he describes the history of computing and his approach to designing languages. Kay has an impressive resume (PARC, ARPAnet, Atari, Apple, Alan Turing Award winner) and has an endless supply of memorable quotes: 'Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term,' 'Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you're always going to get a pop culture,' 'most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training,' 'All creativity is an extended form of a joke,' and 'nobody really knows how to design a good language.'"

innerweb asks: "I am looking for help and advice on using and parsing the OFX (Open Financial Exchange) file spec using C/C++ and/or Perl. I have read the standards, downloaded the DTD (ofx version 2), and tried to parse several files from different banks. They have all failed in my normal parsers (commercial and OSS), yet they load fine in Microsoft Money. It is not so complicated that I can not hand roll my own, and I have much of it working that way as a proof, but I would rather stick with something that is standards based, as this is a standard that in my opinion ought to work with standards based tools. Am I missing something here, or is this truly a file format that is broken as a feature?"

Michael Clark writes "Seen those funky remote scripting techniques employed by Orkut, Gmail and Google Suggests that avoid that oh so 80's page reloading (think IBM 3270 only slower). A fledgling standard is developing to allow this new breed of fast and highly dynamic web applications to flourish. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and others. It is derived from JavaScript and it has similar expresive capabilities to XML. Perfect for the web as doesn't suffer from XML's bloat and is custom made for our defacto browser language. JSON-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC although it uses the lightweight JSON format instead of XML (so it is much faster). The XMLHttpRequest object (or MSXML ActiveX in the case of Internet Explorer) is used in the browser to call remote methods on the server without the need for reloading the page. JSON-RPC-Java is a Java implementation of the JSON-RPC protocol. JSON-RPC-Java combines these all together to create an amazingly and simple way of developing these highly interactive type of enterprise java applications with JavaScript DHTML web front-ends. " Click below to read more about it.

Newly released TextWrangler 2.0 is now free (as in beer). TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor. TextWrangler has switched identities since 1.0, from being a text editor with an indeterminant purpose to a subset of BBEdit, a BBEdit Lite on steroids. It handles syntax coloring, scripting tools (perl, python, shell), and some Xcode integration. It does not include some of BBEdit's more advanced features like source control, CodeWarrior integration, glossaries, and creating text factories (though it can run existing saved factories). BBEdit remains $200, and TextWrangler still qualifies for BBEdit's $130 cross-upgrade price. Previous purchasers of TextWrangler qualify for a store credit (they will be notified via e-mail).

the-dark-kangaroo writes "The BBC have provided the entire internet with a look inside their amazing network. It shows everyone the almighty web power they are with over 40 webservers and 12 firewalls and their 8Gbps intersite connections. All this seems to running some form of *NIX with perl underlying their powerful website delivery. Take a look at those load graphs!"

ericdfields asks: "One of my lifetime career goals is to establish myself on some decent level or another as a well-rounded, (mostly) standards-based web designer with some backroom web development knowhow. The problem is I have no clue where to begin. HTML, CSS, JavaScript are an obvious start, but what about other web-driven languages? PHP, XML, SQL, Perl... the list goes on. Should I be looking to grab hold of some Flash and Director skills? What abilities will be needed on the horizon that I can get an early start on learning today?"

stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."

nile_list writes "Edward Felten of the very fine Freedom to Tinker has written a 15 line P2P program in Python. From the post on Freedom to Tinker, "I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless." Matthew Scala, a reader of Freedom to Tinker, has responded with the 9 line MoleSter, written in Perl."

mallumax writes "OSnews is running a story on XliveCD which runs an X server (from X.org) from the CD using Cygwin. Also included are awk, sed, perl, vim, bash, grep, other text utilities, and most importantly an OpenSSH client. XliveCD is being developed by University Technology Services of Indiana University. Now you can carry Cygwin with you! I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Torrent link."

Jonathan Edwards writes "The Lightweight Languages Workshop (LL4) will be webcast live from MIT tomorrow. Previous years have seen lively discussions between the proponents of languages like Perl, Python, and Scheme. Check out the program at the website."