flounder_p queries: "I have recently started playing with the Ruby programming language and think it's really great. I was just wondering why you guys think Ruby has not caught on more in the open source community than it has? How many of you guys are using it? Will it ever catch on or will it always be looked at as yet another scripting language? Don't get me wrong scripting languages are great (and I live by Perl) but I still hope to see Ruby catch on more. I would like to hear opinions on things on why Ruby is good or bad not on why OOP is good or bad. We have already had that discussion here." On a side note, a little birdy tells me that BlackAdder has plans for Ruby support in its next beta.

pudge (Slashcode wrangler, MacPerl maintainer, and use.perl editor) wrote in to tell us that The Perl Journal has been bought by CMP. This of course ends the ongoing struggles with Earthweb that has resulted in many subscribers (including me) going without what is one of the best technical journals being published today. CMP of course publishes several other good journals including Dr. Dobbs. Besides Jon Orwant (who will continue as Senior Contributing Editor) nobody is happier to see TPJ return then me!

These are Robert's answers to questions about GnuCash you posted on June 18th. He says, "Some of the answers to the questions here were the result of discussions with the other people at LDG, where others were more qualified to speak on various topics, so the readers are really getting the benefit of our collected wisdom (well, we hope it's wisdom :) )"

kato writes: "Doug Bagley has posted results from benchmarking of 29 different language implementations solving 25 different problems (he's written ~600 of the 725 programs so far). The languages include C/C++, Perl, Python, Eiffel, BASH, Tcl, and OCaml. The problems range in complexity from "Hello, World!" to the Sieve of Eratosthenes and Matrix Multiplication. The results can be sorted by speed, memory usage, or lines of code. You can also give one particular program more weight than another (if you are doing more client/server code than "Hello, World!") and find the faster/smallest/shortest language implementation. I can see many of my programs being written in OCaml from now on." Update: 07/04 12:42 PM by CT : The site is apparently now redirecting people back here. I guess technically thats an error message, just not a helpful one. Update: 07/05 8:40 PM by M : Please don't email. The link is broken. We know. The guy is running a server at home on a metered connection, and doesn't want any more traffic.

Exomorph writes: " C Styled Scripting (CSS) has just been released for Linux! (Already available for Windows, and OS/2) You can use CSS like an interpreter (Like Perl) or as a scripting engine within your own applications. It follows the C syntax very closely and has now been released under the GNU General Public License." Is anyone using this?

Microsoft's new crusade against licenses that enforce source-code sharing has reached the EULA of their Mobile Internet Toolkit. It even disallows the use of any "Publicly Available Software" tool in the production of software using this SDK. This seems to be a very wide ranging restriction applying to compilers (gcc), editors (vim, staroffice), filesystems (backup on linux server), web-browsers (mozilla logging into some online tool provider), Java (sun's virtual machine). The licenses covered include: the GPL and LGPL, the Artistic License (e.g., PERL), the Mozilla Public License, the Netscape Public License, the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), and the Sun Industry Standards License (SISL). Is this legal? Thanks to Jonathan for the link. Update: 06/26 05:42 PM by S : Here's a legal opinion on the matter.

Okay, here's a nice "behind the curtains" peek into the way tech industry analysts (who are not the same as stock analysts) get and interpret their data, courtesy of IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky, in the form of answers to the insightful questions you asked him last week.

gh0ul asks: "I've come across a large and seemingly unspoken problem when it comes to webhosting: a multi-user shell service in which any of the hundreds of users can view any file for my website, including my SQL passwords and PHP scripts. I've tried many times talking to the admins but have run out of luck trying to find a way to have my scripts run as they should without anyone being able to just view the source at will or view the passwords for my MySQL databases. Apache runs as nobody, therefore the files have to be readable by nobody, I've heard about wrappers, but the admins refuse to install them.. So how would a normal user go about securing his web files and passwords for this purpose on a heavily populated machine?" When dealing with adminstrators who aren't willing to handle even the basics of web security for their customers, consider moving somewhere else. In the meantime, for Perl users concerned about leaving passwords in scripts, consider using DBIx::Password. I would be interested in knowing of alternatives for DBIx::Password in other languages, as well. It's a useful idea especially if your scripts find themselves in hostile environments.

Chris Johnson writes: "Recently I've been doing some heavy analysis of actual RIAA sales data, from the entire history of Platinum-certified albums. I've worked out a methodology that compensates for the explosion in CD sales and highlights ability to drive sustained sales over years. There's a top 10 list of albums and a top 10 list of the most commercially important artists in history with definite surprises- and the full lists as well, downloadable as text files, with Perl-friendly index numbering, so the analysis can continue with the annoying work already done! Perl folk, go nuts! The actual analysis takes this data and attempts to extrapolate from it and explain the competitive situation the music industry is in relative to Internet music in general, and what they are missing in their assumptions and plans. Should be interesting to see what people make of the Evergreens project! -Chris Johnson" Nice analysis of the history and future of music promotion.

Daniel Ashton asks: "AltaVista Discovery was a wonderful tool for indexing files on one's own hard drive. I have most of O'Reilly's CD Bookshelves copied to my hard drive, along with other documentation in HTML or PDF format, and AltaVista Discovery indexes it all. Finding information on Perl syntax or Unix utilities or Java APIs is as easy as entering the keywords in Discovery's search toolbar. A web browser opens with a list of hits and summaries. Unfortunately, Discovery was both 1) single-platform and 2) discontinued. As I anticipate installing a new OS on my machine, I dread loosing this functionality. What alternatives exist? Are such tools available for Linux? For Win2K? Is there a file-format-reading toolkit that could be used to write a new indexer?"

zby queries: "I've been using the 'Perl Cookbook' extensively for 2 years already and have found the book to be really helpful. Recently I've been learning about Ruby and I really miss that kind of resource. That gave me the idea to build that kind of knowlege base as an free project. I believe it just fits ideally, and could be run on a Slash or Scoop based system without any modifications from the beginning." It sounds like a grand idea, however are there any other such resources on the web?

coffii writes "I have just spent the last two days learning perl thanks to devshed. They have a set of eight well-written tutorials here and an introduction to OOP in perl. Why not learn a new language today, its a bit more productive than trying to get fp on ./ ;). I think I'll be going back for a dose of python next week." Even if you're not planning to specialize, this series look like a good way to at least get an overview of a few different languages. Can anyone recommend other interesting online tutorials, especially ones for unusual languages that might never find shelf space at the local MegaBooks?

AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Napster. These four "web properties" account for 50 percent of the time people spend online. Check out the trend: at the 60-percent level, the number of companies shrank from 110, two years ago, to fourteen today. Hello, I'm with Mergers & Acquisitions, can I borrow your mouse please?

jdavidb writes: "Dr. John Conway (author of the famous "Game of Life") has a wonderful algorithm for finding the day of the week for any year in history that you can do in your head. It's so easy and elegant, in fact, that someone has decided to write a poem about it. Shades of DeCSS haikus! What a marvelous example of how mathematics is a form of (free and protected) speech. As if to further illustrate that computer code is just another form of speech, there is an implementation of this algorithm (in Perl of course)!"

An AC sent in this article at perl.com which discusses new perl mailing lists set up especially to answer beginners' questions. Hopefully they're not all being answered with "Go buy Learning Perl" or something like that.

willmurat writes: "I read about Rebol in an article in UnixInsider months ago. It seems to me a very interesting language, with new features and trying to bring new paradigms in programming. But (always there is a but ...), it isn't Open Source and no institution is responsible to maintain that language. The only responsible party is Rebol Technologies. I'm not saying this is the right way to failure; there are examples of success following this way (Visual Basic and Delphi, for example), but I think a business strategy like that isn't good anymore. See the current developing of Perl version 6 for a very good example of language discussion. Seems to me the owners of Rebol language are limitating the popularization of that language choosing that way of dealing in this issue ... Is there any future to popularize a language that way?"

jimiUK asks: "I've been working for a while on my streaming mp3 server, using Apache:MP3 running on FreeBSD to start with but now running on RedHat Linux. It all runs smoothky, but what I'm trying to do is automate the ripping process so I can just insert cd's and have them ripped and classified automatically. This box is a dedicated server without a keyboard or moniter connected so I'd rather have no user input whatsoever. I've solved all of the initial problems, and now have the box set to login automatically on boot up, but I still can't find the right script. The most useful has been autorip, and I've also tried ripit (although it requires user intervention). My main problem is that if autorip cant find the cd information, it just stalls. My Perl skills are non-existent really so i'm not sure how to alter the script to instruct it to rip away if it doesnt find track info, which I could add in later. Does anyone have any other suggestions for alternative script front ends, or can point me in the right direction on altering autorip to get it over this hurdle." For those of you running MP3 servers, this idea might be a huge timesaver. Has anyone implemented such a system?

sumengen writes: "Damian's writing a series of articles parallel to Larry's Apocalypses. These 'Exegesis' articles will show full perl6 programs, with commentary exlaining the new features. The first Exegesis (numbered 2, to keep in sync with Larry) shows a perl6 version of a binary tree program from the Perl Cookbook. Get excited to see things like:
my int ($pre, $in, $post) are constant = (0..2);"

The Llama King asks: "Our group has an interesting idea for being able to rate different items, then receiving preferences for similar items, a feature found at sites such as NetFlix and Amazon. Unfortunately, we have big ideas and a small budget. I've searched high and low for an open-source version of this kind of algorithm, with no success. Are there any out there worth compiling?" Update: 05/16 10:30PM EDT by C :As it turns out, Jamie has some words on the subject, click below for more.

tadghin pointed out this Newsweek article on bioinformatics, and also notes: "At O'Reilly, we just published our first bioinformatics book last week, Learning Bioinformatics Computer Skills, by Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck, and it immediately rocketed to the top of the Amazon Computer bestseller list. This definitely appears to be a new area for the computer industry that's just starting to hit people's radar big time. I've also made the point to VCs looking at distributed computation startups that what I see on sites like slashdot is a lot of movement by hackers towards new and interesting problems. And science looks a lot more interesting than some of the business computing that's been front and center the past couple of years. And the Biological Open Source Computing Conference I spoke at last year was definitely popping with ideas and excitement. Unfortunately, this year's conference is in Copenhagen, right before the O'Reilly open source convention, but I definitely urge slashdotters to check out this area. Demand for perl expertise is especially high."