SamMichaels writes "Zophar's Domain had news of a press release from Twin Galaxies, the people who've tracked the high scores in games since 1981 (got famous in 82). They're looking for the top gamers to be published in a special commemorative edition of Twin Galaxies' "Official Video Game & Pinball Book Of World Records", which is the industry's official record book. The search is for gamers of "every game, every genre and every platform, whether old or new"."

geoff lane asks: "Netscape, Mozilla and IE are all large programs capable of many functions which are mostly unused (Mozilla does attempt to shrink its runtime size by using DLLs.) Lynx, Chimera and a number of other browsers are smaller but with significantly fewer functions. A modern browser needs to support Javascript, Java and SSL. It doesn't need to support News, Gopher, FTP or e-mail - all of which have perfectly good applications available already (though there should be a way for the Web browser to sub-contract work to these applications). On occasion I've wondered if I could build a halfway decent Web browser from a few specialist program components (for the display and parsing of HTML mostly) and wget, tied together with shell script or Perl and using external programs for most of the necessary support functions. How small can a usable Web browser get? (assuming we define usable as meaning capable of displaying a Slashdot page reasonably correctly *grin!*)"

The webmaster responsible for putting Red Hat Linux in service for the Royal Family steps down, The A in ALS stands this year for "oAkland," DSS hackers can rejoice for the moment, and visions of Perl will soon adorn at least two continents. For more on these completely explicable statements, read on in tonight's episode of Slashback.

Kelly McNeill writes: "A recent editorial appearing on osOpinion.com (and linked to here on Slashdot last Thursday) dealt with comments made by Mac creator Jef Raskin and his opinion of Apple's upcoming next generation operating system OS X. The somewhat controversial editorial generated a ton of mixed response both here as well as on the publishing site. As it seems, Mr. Raskin's thoughts on OS X (and Unix) were very misunderstood and he has since stepped up to the plate to clear the air and responded to the technology community at large."

David Korn answers! You asked the questions a little while ago, and now David Korn has kindly responded with answers (some lengthy, some pithy, all appreciated) to queries about the eponymous shell, the famous Microsoft/Korn story (in short -- yep, it's like you've heard), and proper Unix behavior. He even made his son Adam write one of the answers.

drfalken writes "Interesting piece here about OS X from Jef Raskin's point-of-view (he was one of the wizards behind the original Mac GUI). He thinks that even the concept of an OS is a hold over from an older era, and that work should be done to get the user closer to the app. I dunno if I agree. "

We've been at LinuxWorld for the last couple days, and some interesting stuff has been going on: The SAMBA folks won the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds award, and SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro using XFS ^[?] . In other news, our BOF went well with many questions about Slashcode - and the Perl Monks booth has been doing great in donations. Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT : The highlight for me so far was judging the "Coveted" Golden Penguin Awards w/ Don. Actually, I seriously did covet the award, beautiful hand blown glass penguin made me wish I was a contestant. We judged that Linus got the definition of BogoMIPS wrong. Fortunately his still won, but it was truly joyous seeing the surprise on his face.

Sowbug writes: "Perl programmers rejoice! Mason 1.0 was released today, though prerelease versions have been in operation for years at websites like TechWeb, Salon.com, and AvantGo. Congratulations, Jonathan Swartz (principal author of Mason)!" I don't know much about Mason, but it seems like another cool addition to the Cold Fusion/PHP world of embeddable code in Web pages.

David Korn is the author of the famous Korn shell, ksh, which deserves consideration next to the ubiquitous bash. Quote (regarding the AT&T research group he's part of): "We don't write anything in Perl anymore, because [ksh93] has all the functionality built in." He's also an AT&T fellow, and heads up the UWIN project, which "provides a mechanism for building and running UNIX applications on Windows NT, Windows 98, and Windows 95 with few, if any, changes necessary." This is the software that allowed some crazy folks to run GNOME on Windows several weeks back as well. (And is available for no-cost personal use.) This is the same David Korn you may remember from this picture. I met him at a recent NYLUG meeting when he spoke about the Advanced Software Technologies collection of tools, now Open Source, and he graciously agreed to field questions in the usual Slashdot interview style. So please leave your questions in the space below --1 question per comment, please -- and Korn will get back to you with answers in the near future.

dlc writes: "Linux Weekly News interviews Larry Wall. 'Until now, the process of the design of Perl has been evolutionary. It's been done by prototype and modification over time. I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.'"

kchayer asks: "I'm looking for an open-sourced system we can use to track workorders for help and problem requests on campus where I work. It seems that all products with similar functionality are designed more for bug tracking and correcting in the software development process: dcl, bugzilla, request tracker (not exactly what I want, or fully-featured enough), to name a few. While those are nice programs, and can be fudged to do what I want, I am interested in something specifically designed to track requests for help solving computer problems among students and our various staff/faculty departments on campus."

Eric Priepke writes: "I have 2 "Pinball 2000" machines, both of which I've added ethernet to. Via that ethernet, it's possible to telnet in to the pinball machine and get to a shell. I'm using that shell to dump out a bunch of statistic information on the games, and then build a web page with a backend perl script. Any time my games are on, the local FreeBSD box notices and updates the web pages every 1/2 hour." The link is to a mirror. Really impressive hack. Revenge from Mars is among my favorite pinball tables. Since Williams is giving up on Pinball 2000, it would be sweet to see if we couldn't make new games out of the old hardware.

tf23 writes "ApacheToday's got an article about mod_perl and shared memory. The article is part IV of the improving mod_perl series. For any perl/apache coders (or anyone coding with Slash or Bender) this is a good read.
Quick links to the other parts:
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part III: Code Profiling and Memory Measurement Techniques
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part II: Benchmarking Applications
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part I: Choosing Operating System and Hardware"
This is in part one of our holy grails, caching all of the comments for current stories. It would make those near 2000 comment stories a lot easier to stomach for the Web servers.

antis0c writes: "I am in the process of starting up an ISP, and I've been trying to find some really good Open Source Billing Software. I've looked around quite a bit, and the only truly Open Source solution I found was Freeside. It seems to offer a lot of what I need; Real-time credit card processing, MySQL database backend, Radius and Apache support, and all the general account management things you expect, but the user interface really leaves much to be desired. It doesn't feel very secure at all as it uses a lot of suid scripts and suEXEC in Apache and it also requires a lot of 3rd party Perl Modules (21 to be exact) which getting them all to work properly in conjunction with Freeside seems like a harder task than jumping through hoops of fire. My question is, what kinds of Billing Software have you guys used, and [what are] your good/bad experiences with it?"

A number of people have been wondering what's going to happen to TPJ ^[?] in light of Earthweb's (the owner of TPJ) sale of most of its properties to Internet.com. Many rumours have been flying around and Jon Orwant has decided to clear things. I've put his status update below.

I've been collecting parts to convert an old broken arcade cabinet into a home for Mame/Snes9x/DGen. I've got buttons and joysticks and a machine, and even wrote a really nice GTK Perl menu system to select games, but now I have to decide if I want to replace the (small very burned out) arcade monitor. I could throw in a 19" SVGA monitor, or I could try to get an arcade monitor and figure out a way to make it run nicely under X. I'm leaning towards the SVGA monitor simply so that I have more resolution options, but there's a part of me that would love to use either the existing arcade screen (despite the burn in) or replace it with a different one. Does anyone have advice for making such a monitor work under XFree?

sachachua asks: "I'm a sophomore taking up computer science, and since I'll be graduating pretty soon - March 2003 - I'm trying to figure out what to do in order to better prepare myself for the future. I'm really into programming, and I'm considering going for a practicum or an internship in some software company that can really help me develop my potential. I do a lot of web work with PHP, Java and Perl, and I pick up new languages easily. =) However, it's a bit difficult because I'm way over in the Philippines, which is a Third World country. Since it's so far away, my campus doesn't get visited by all those companies that court other graduates. And even if they do manage to find me, there are all sorts of visas to arrange. But the international exposure will be really great, and I want to meet other geeks. =)"

ChetPan asks: "I'm doing some development for a couple of student-run sites at NC State University. We want to make dynamic portal-like customizable pages, but aren't really sure what to use to output the actual HTML, since the main concern here is performance. We have most of our code in Perl modules and we're wondering about the main (heavy traffic) pages. I don't know much about embperl or eperl and how they compare to regular mod_perl under Apache. Are there other embedded Perl solutions? Would we get a performance boost by using PHP? Unfortunately I haven't seen much neutral comparison of the different embedded types on the Web. I would especially appreciate seeing some benchmarks and/or statistics on the topic."

Reader Whizziwig writes: "My CD player worked fine, but I was carrying around at least 36 CDs in my bookbag all the time, and breaking some. I also looked at all the mp3-cd players, I didn't see any that looked great, skip-protection & display-wise, plus it still meant carrying around a case of CDs." To deal with this, he bought a honkin' 6-gig MP3 player; read below for the review he contributed.

arkman writes: "In this morning's e-mail ActiveState has announced the availability of the beta release of the Komodo Integrated Development environment on Windows and the technology preview of Komodo for Linux. The relevant information can be viewed at their Web site. Komodo is ActiveState's cross-platform IDE, and it supports Perl, Python and Java Script." Looks very promising; I hope it doesn't suffer from the problems that certain other Mozilla-based products do.