Discussion2 has been in beta for a few months now on Slashdot. Initially available only to subscribers, it now should be available to anyone willing to login and click the checkbox at the head of every discussion. It is far from complete: IE doesn't work (patches welcome, but since only a quarter of you use it, it's not a huge priority) and performance is lacking (you want a fast computer for larger discussions) but it's already an improvement for most users. Read on for some notes on what we have planned.

Simon P. Chappell writes "Classics are funny things, especially in the world of books. There are books that people say "should' be classics (I'll refrain from mentioning names to protect the pretentious) and then there are books that people are too busy actually using to get around to listing as classics. Mastering Regular Expressions, now in it's third edition, is in the second group. It's one of those books that you see on desks in computer departments the world over. This is a real "doers" book." Read the rest of Simon's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "Just as PHP and other Web scripting languages have made it possible to create dynamic Web pages, online mapping services are making it possible to create dynamic maps that can be customized by a Web site owner, or made customizable by a site visitor. In the case of Google Maps, this is done using the built-in application programming interface (API), which is described in a new book, Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax: From Novice to Professional." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

neoflexycurrent writes "A court in Texas has thrown the book at a defendant accused by the RIAA of file sharing. The court determined that she had intentionally wiped her hard drive clean, so it entered the most severe sanction possible — default judgment against her. The record companies now just have to ask the court how much they want in damages."

Simon P. Chappell writes "Regular expressions (regex to their friends) are an incredibly powerful addition to most programmer's personal toolkit of techniques. Programming using a language that doesn't support them can be frustrating if you need to do any amount of non-trivial string handling. Java was just such a language until the release of the 1.4.x series. Sure, there were libraries like ORO that would provide regex support, but it wasn't built in and not many companies allow the use of 3rd party libraries. With version 1.4.x, the corporate Java developer in the trench, received the power of regular expression pattern matching." Read the rest of Simon's review.

briandon writes "It's not a step-by-step guide (and doesn't claim to be one), but Building Scalable Web Sites is the closest thing available to a nuts-and-bolts look at managing the technical aspects of doing a Web-based startup. There's lots of code inside, but the book isn't built around a single, extremely contrived, case study like an online wine store. Instead, most of the chapters follow a general pattern: a topic (like bottlenecks in your application and platform, scaling, or monitoring) is addressed and some rules of thumb that describe the way that the author feels things should be done are set forth and explained, with lots of very specific hints and factoids mixed in along the way. Tools for other languages (in most cases, Perl) are mentioned in passing, nearly all of the code snippets are in PHP. MySQL 4.1 is the basis for most of the database-centered material." Read the rest of Brian's review.

Ravi writes "Any one who has had the opportunity to manipulate images would be aware of Adobe's Photoshop - considered to be the market leader in image manipulation software. But with its high price tag, buying Photoshop is akin to putting strain on your bank balance. What is interesting is that there is a very popular free alternative to Photoshop in GIMP. For those in the dark, GIMP is a state of the art image manipulation software which runs on multiple architectures and OSes and which is released under the GNU free License (GPL). I have been using GIMP exclusively for touching up images for many years now and it has met all my graphics manipulation needs." Read the rest of Ravi's review

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the popular programming languages now in use, Perl is perhaps the best suited for writing utilities — for several reasons, such as its text-processing capabilities, ease of addressing system resources, and minimal language overhead for input, output, list processing. It was designed to blend the rapid solution development of shell scripting with the powerful control constructs of third-generation languages. Consequently, Perl quickly became a favorite language for developing programs ranging from system administration utilities to CGI scripts that power Web sites. In fact, Perl has been called the glue that holds the Internet together. The tremendous flexibility and power of Perl is seen in Steve Oualline's book Wicked Cool Perl Scripts: Useful Perl Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems." Read the rest of Michael's review

gbulmash asks: "Recently, I began working on a graphics project and wanted to use ImageMagick. As a PHP coder, I figured I'd use MagickWand for PHP. But after some investigation, I decided that an alpha at 0.1.8 with sparse documentation just wasn't going to be good enough for production use. I decided that PerlMagick would be a much better API, but I didn't want to code the whole project in Perl. In the end, I found a cool package for embedding Perl code in PHP scripts (with an article on its use) and it went to a 1.0.0 release, earlier this year. I think I've found my answer, but before I make a final decision and go ahead with it, I thought I'd ask the knowledgeable Slashdot crowd: Is there a better way of interfacing Perl with PHP so you can get the best of both worlds?" So you've got Perl in your PHP, is there a way to do PHP in your Perl?

AriaStar asks: "It's overwhelming to start trying to learn all the different technologies needed to go into programming. It seems that every type of technology assumes knowledge of a different one, which in turn requires knowledge of another, until it's gone full circle. I am interested in everything from Unix to AJAX to Perl. Things like HTML, Javascript, and SQL are like English, but then again, they're basic. Where is the best place to start? What is a good path for someone who learns quickly and easily, but who is simply too overwhelmed, to take?"

An anonymous reader writes "More worrying news from the UK. This time, a bill meant to fight cybercrime may make it illegal to use or make available network security tools available, just because they could be used by hackers." From the article: "Clayton cited the Perl scripting language, created by Larry Wall in 1987, as an example of a useful technology that could fall foul of the law. 'Perl is almost universally used on a daily basis to permit the Internet to function,' said Clayton. 'I doubt if there is a sysadmin on the planet who hasn't written a Perl program at some time or another. Equally, almost every hacker who commits an offense under section 1 or section 3 of the CMA will use Perl as part of their toolkit. Unless Larry is especially stupid, and there is very little evidence for that, he will form the opinion that hackers are likely to use his Perl system. Locking Larry up is surely not desirable.'" A note that this is equally confusing but separate from yesterday's story about the UK government wanting private encryption keys.

markmcb asks: "I help design a LAMP web site and I'm constantly plagued by trying to decide on what level should I separate functional code and markup. Depending on what you read, some say embedding HTML in your PHP scripts [or Perl, or Java, or Ruby, or Python, etc] is bad while others say it's no big deal. However, seldom are any practical applications of such code cited. How is your site built? Do you mix HTML with your code? If not, how do you overcome the simple and easy method of doing so? Lastly, what performance gains/losses have you noticed by doing so?"

cahiha writes "In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. His timeline is something like that in 1992, the industry was focused on 'Chicago' (Windows 95), while McNealy bravely went his own way-- 'the network is the computer.' He goes on to claim that 'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy]. [...] I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions.' I have trouble following his argument: client/server computing and distributed computing were already widely available and widely used in the early 1990s. The defining applications of the emerging Internet were, not Java, but Apache, Netscape, and Perl. Sun's biggest response to Chicago was to attempt to establish Java as the predominant desktop application delivery platform, something they have not succeeded at so far. So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating 'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?"

rst+ack writes "Microsoft has released RC1 version of PowerShell the .NET-based shell with perl-like syntax previously known as Monad or MSH. PowerShell (PS) has been covered a few times on Slashdot. Contrary to cmd.exe and Unix/Linux shells it operates on objects, not text when passing data between scripts and executables. Easy access to .NET classes allows users to create quite advanced solutions in short time. PS won't be shipped with Vista or Windows Server 2007 but it will debut with Exchange 12."

diverman asks: "It is very common for web applications (be them Java, Perl, PHP, .NET, or shell script) to need knowledge about credentials to access another resource. Perhaps it's a relational database login, an FTP account for transferring files, or maybe a authentication credentials to another web service. Whatever it is, most developers have likely had to write a program that needs to keep a password for later use. The big issue now is: where do you put them?"

Robert wrote to mention a Computer Business Review Online article about SCO's newest marketing tactic. They're offering their OS as part of a 'SCAMP' stack, ala the more familiar LAMP setup. From the article: "The Lindon, Utah-based Unix vendor has included the open source Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP and Perl programming languages with its SCO OpenServer operating system since the launch of OpenServer 6 in June 2005. It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp."

Michael J. Ross writes "To modify a digital image, most computer users turn to a GUI-based image processing application, such as Photoshop. However, while Photoshop and many other similar programs can process multiple images in batch mode, they still require manual usage, and thus typically are unable to process images via a command line or within a second application. Those capabilities call for a programmatic digital image manipulation tool such as ImageMagick, which is explored in a relatively new book, The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick." Read the rest of Michael's review.

Kevin Young wrote to mention a ZDNet article which goes into some detail on new results from a Department of Homeland security initiative. It's called the 'Open Source Hardening Project', and (funded to the tune of $1.24 Million) the goals of the initiative are to use a commercial tool for source code analysis to buck up the security base of many OSS projects. LAMP (the conglomeration of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python) was a 'winner' in the eyes of the project. From the article: "In the analysis, more than 17.5 million lines of code from 32 open-source projects were scanned. On average, 0.434 bugs per 1,000 lines of code were found, Coverity said. The LAMP stack, however, 'showed significantly better software quality," with an average of 0.29 defects per 1,000 lines of code, the technology company said.'"

DMBeiler asks: "I'm a first year computer-science student, with a lot of computing background. I learned C++ in the curriculum here, but am also familiar with Perl, PHP, and know my way around Linux. I consider myself adept enough to pick up a working knowledge of a language fairly quickly. As an underclassman, with little formal training, do any jobs/internships exist for me, say, over the summer? What do I need to bring to the table to be considered for even a menial position, these days?"

segphault writes "Andy Bakun has written an excellent 20 page guide to game development with SDL_Perl for Ars Technica. The tutorial, which includes extensive code examples and plenty of screenshots, walks readers through the process of building a clone of the original Atari Kaboom! game." From the article: "One of the biggest benefits of using SDL is that it allows portable media applications to be written without having to be concerned with specific implementations of media libraries for each target platform. Bringing Perl into the picture takes the portability one step further, allowing media-rich applications to be written in a high-level language that can be targeted to a number of platforms. While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working."