DanPeng asks: "I'm an inexperienced programmer who has been following the Open Source movement for a few years now, and recently I've been looking for opportunities to write some code and contribute to an Open Source project. As a a senior in high school, I've taught myself C, C++, Perl, and a few other languages. I have a basic understanding of algorithms from AP Computer Science, and I've toyed with GNOME/GTK+ and *NIX programming. I lack, however, any 'real' programming experience writing code for projects of any great size or importance. How should a new developer contribute to Open Source?"

Sure, you know that Netcraft tests have for a while provided empirical evidence of Apache's usefulness and ubiquity. But if you're called upon to use Apache in your workplace (or if you care to serve pages for fun off your home box), you might need more to go on. Chromatic took some busy time out of his life to write this review of Administering Apache, which he says takes a "calculated, strategic approach" to what has become one of the world's most important pieces of software.

Chronic reviewer chromatic writes again, this time with a review of the newest iteration of what is probably the emblematic Perl book, the O'Reilly camel book. Read on to see how it stacks up to earlier versions of that work, and whether your Perl skills would benefit from reading through it.

Let's start this off with SanLouBlues's submission about a video made by splicing old 8bit video games (I don't think it'll work on Linux, but it's worth finding a box to watch this). And now, the senseless destruction portion of the show: stevenma sent an ISP's excuse letter, including a photo of the bullet damage from the wire! friedo knows how to make a hard drive squeal, but on purpose. If that's not enough destruction for you, knisa sent in a story about a meteor destroying a 1980 Ford. Slightly less-destructive violence was submitted by Steve Stag, who notes that Nerf has discovered that their weapons appeal to adults too. (well duh!) An anonymous reader noted that Liam Neeson's lightsaber from Phantom Menace is being auctioned off for charity. WhyPanic sent us a site that talks about Vintage Unix. An anonymous reader noted that in Finland, you pay traffic violations based on your income, and this dot-com millionaire was fined $70,000 for 20 miles/hour over the speed limit! Speaking of dot-coms, warland wonders if todays dot-coms would get funding if they tried to pitch their ideas today? And now for the truly strange stuff: conraduno sent in a palindromic C program. NinjaPablo sent in a link about a guy breaking a centipede 14-year-old record by scoring 7,111,111 points (and I thought breaking 200,000 on joust made me cool ;) head_the_mongoose sent us "Call Me Darth", a Darth Vader site that simply needs to be seen.

In addition to all the other books he has insightfully reviewed, chromatic has written this review of CGI Programming With Perl. This books sounds like a great resource for the builder of dynamic Web sites with a Perl background. And isn't it nice to see a book with "an unapologetic Unix flavor"?

Anonymous Coward writes "There is now a site dshield.org which collects firewall log excerpts to summarize and organize them in a database. The point is to single out script kiddies that scan large IP segments. It could all end up saving ISPs a lot of time running after / responding to gazillions of reports from users. Interesting: Right now, IPs used by @Home and RoadRunner to scan their users top the list. The site is only up for a couple of days. but already quite a bid of data has been collected. There is a little perl script that will automatically send Linux kernel log excerpts (ipchains style) to the sytem. ZoneAlarm logs can be processed as well."

Alfred Bacon writes "There will be an interview with Larry Wall on The Paula Gordon Show available on Saturday at 3:00 pm EST. It is an hour long in RealAudo format broken up into 10 minute segments. Mr. Wall will be discussing Perl, Free Software and the Open Source movement. It should be worth listening to."

Paul K Egell-Johnsen writes "At zez.org Bård Farstad has written an article on how to embed java in php.

I saw a sample of mixing Perl and Java at the O'Reilly Open Souce conference a couple of years ago. It was some of the ugliest code I have ever seen.

strredwolf points out that we have winners of the Fifth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest, noting, "Unfortunately, my virtual machine didn't win." (Insert loser-condolences here.) BTW, I noticed problems with the code as printed: the winner of category 2 lacks a terminal quote, and I couldn't get the category 3 winner to compile even after fiddling with whitespace. Put up a webpage with code I can copy-paste-and-run, email me, and I'll update this story with your link.

Last week I came out in favor of electronic voting. Over the weekend, it turned out that its opponents' worst fears came true. Not only was some computer software buggy, but it actually threw a state election the wrong way. And though not very likely, it's even possible that this state will determine our next president! Have I changed my mind about electronic voting?

Seumas asks: "Like a lot of other people (especially at Slashdot), I run a Web site which is growing fairly popular. Sure, it's no Slashdot or MP3.com, but, it is growing so large that I can barely afford to continue paying for it out of my own pocket. In my instance, I have a specialized auction site with over 6,000 members and page-views in the millions-per-month (the site has only been around for a little over a year). What was started as an excuse to learn Perl has turned into a project that eats up my money, time and patience. So how does one make such a project pay off...or at least, pay for itself?" I realize we may have covered such issues in other past Ask Slashdots, but the fact is, many of you who run Web sites may find yourself in this position, and the more answers and testimonials I can get from those of you who have already gone thru this, the better things will be for those who follow.

maraist writes: "Larry Wall's Altanta Linux Showcase Talk on Perl 6 is now available. Highlights: Perl will be interpreted by Perl (syntax can look like any language), variables will be more localized and OO, more support of both low level and high level constructs, and the core will be streamlined."

Blond_buzzkill writes "Twin Galaxies has this article introducing the IES and comparing it to the other consoles. Most informative, however, is a chart comparing the Indrema's hardware to the Xbox and the Playstation 2. The article also says the IES will go on sale in Spring 2001, a bit ahead of either Gamecube or Xbox." I'm still pretty excited to see what comes of Indrema. I'm still waiting for the converged media box, and they've got as good of a shot as anyone.

Use Perl is reporting that Damian Conway has been sponsored by several companies and individuals (most impressively Black Star who donated half of the needed $55k). Now Damian can continue working on amazing perl projects like Quantum::Superpositions and Lingua::Romana::Perligata for the next year! Malicose noted that Damian sponsor page explains a bit more too.

tjansen asks: "While looking into the GTK library, I notice that there are a large number of GTK bindings for scripting languages: Perl, Python, JavaScript, Guile...almost every language has its own GTK binding with its own syntax that all have to be maintained (and documented) separately. The same problem exists for all C or C++ based libraries, writing wrappers for scripting languages is just a lot of work. On Windows systems COM is used to make libraries and components accessible to scripting languages. Even if the COM interface does not fit very well to a particular language, for example because they don't use the language's naming convention, they give even obscure languages a great amount of libraries with almost no work other than writing ActiveScripting bindings for the language. Why maintain separate bindings when the community could use something like CORBA for the same thing? I think the idea is too obvious and something like this should be very useful for language interoperability in general. Is anyone working on such a project?"

Tseuq asks: "The company I work for has recently rolled out their first 'official' Intranet. Like most companies, we use a combination of Novell, NT and Unix for our file/print/application duties. We want to allow all users in the company access to certain sites on the Internet (health benefits, 401k plans etc., regardless of whether they have been officially blessed with Internet access. However, we currently use a Novell based proxy/fireall which works well for those with NDS (Novell Directory Services) ID, but there are several people in the company for whom it is not feasable to have such an ID, making authentication into the Novell proxy quite difficult (read: impossible)."

jbc writes: "As discussed over at use Perl, the Perl community is attempting to raise US$55K in donations to support Perl überhacker Damian Conway for a year so he can devote himself to worthwhile pursuits related to Perl development. Thanks to a large donation from an as-yet-unnamed corporate donor, they're apparently already more than halfway there." Update: 10/15 11:31 PM by H : To actually give, go to the YAPC site.

Well, I join slashdot (aka the "sinister Andover keiretsu") full-time today. It seems worthy of a story, although I'll limit it to the YRO section since those have been my traditional stomping grounds. There's no real news below, just some rambling and question-asking, but I hope it will be interesting nonetheless.

So last night a couple of guys (Nohican && {}) cracked into Slashdot. As they say, the weakest link in any security system is human: on one of our test boxes, we had a "clean" copy of Slashcode installed, with default data... including the temp admin password (God/Pete). It didn't take much after that to get into Slashdot itself. Hit the link below to read a bit more on the subject (but if you don't want to bother reading it, you should at least change your password).

Auckerman writes: "Mark Summerfield, of Perl Press , has written an excellent article over at OsOpinion. It's written as a letter from his future self on what life will be like in 20 years. Kinda scary and certainly worst case scenerio, but his point gets across."