Pankaj Kumar writes "Controversies aside, JBoss has emerged as a credible alternative to commercial J2EE App Servers for developing and deploying Java based server applications. Besides the usual advantages of open source and GPL licensing, what sets it apart is its JMX based microkernel, a light-weight framework to run independently developed Java programs within a single JVM. Together, these make it possible for one to pick and choose components and assemble a custom server anywhere between the two extremes (and beyond!) of a simple Servlet Container and a full-fledged J2EE Server. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook by Norman Richards, a JBoss developer at JBoss, Inc., and Sam Griffith, Jr., a software consultant and trainer, is a no-fluff How-To guide on doing stuff with JBoss in O'Reilly's new Developer Notebook format." Read on for Kumar's review of the book.

dhammala asks: "I am responsible for setting up and maintaining a mail server for small web-hosting type business. We currently host about 75 domains, around 100 mailboxes and due to the efforts of our sales team, we are wanting to get ready for some great increases in those numbers. I am worried about my current configuration and ease of administration. More importantly (well, at least to the customers) is email deliverability -- it seems that messages delivered to some big players are being marked as SPAM or disappearing altogether. I am asking the Slashdot community for it's insight and advise on 1) if my current choice of software/configuration is a good match for this situation and 2) if there any additional measures I might take to ensure email deliverability?"

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

ipapusha writes "TI Calculator enthusiasts rejoice. A few weeks ago, Dan Englender released a new flash application usb8x. Usb8x is a driver that interfaces with the On-the-Go USB port in the TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It is designed to be used by other programmers to create drivers for a variety of USB peripherals, including a keyboard and mouse. Already, ticalc.org's own Michael Vincent has interfaced his Lexar JumpDrive to play The Matrix's famous lobby scene. (mirror) ."

jakobgrimstveit asks: "At work I've been developing an intranet/extranet portal framework in PHP based on many other peoples work, including quite a few PEAR modules. I've always wanted to release the coding framework as GPL and publish it on SourceForge, and my boss has - impressively enough - not been too negative about this. This has been going around in the organization for quite a while now, and finally the reply from the company's president was (not surprisingly): 'Why should we do so?' I now have the task of writing a document listing the main reasons for GPLing the code, and this is where I turn to the highly competent Slashdot crowd: How do I convince my bosses to GPL the code I've written? I assume many other developers have the same problems trying to convince their bosses to open up their code."

Shalendra Chhabra writes "Jonathan Zdziarski has been fighting spam since before the first MIT spam conference in 2003, and has now released a full-on technical book, Ending Spam, on spam filtering. Ending Spam covers how the current and near-future crop of heuristic and statistical filters actually work under the hood, and how you can most effectively use such filters to protect your inbox." Read on for the rest of Chhabra's review.

loquacious d asks: "This has been a spectacular summer for open-source student internships. Google funded a huge variety of open-source projects through the Summer of Code, including GCC-CIL and other improvements to Mono, new features and fixes for Gaim, and even new packages for Common Lisp. Joel Spolsky at Fog Creek hired four interns to produce a highly modified version of VNC called Fog Creek Copilot, and Paul Graham's new venture capital firm Y Combinator helped students create their own tech companies. What internships did people enjoy this summer, and which ones didn't work out so well? Which ones would you recommend to next year's applicants, and which should they avoid?"

OSCON 2005 was held in a convention center this year, instead of a hotel, because it just got too big (2000+ people). Too big, in fact, for pudge and myself to cover more than a fraction of the talks and the ideas flitting around the hallways. But here's some of what I found cool last week. And if you attended or presented at OSCON and want to tell us about all the neat stuff we missed, please, share your thoughts in the comments, or submit a fact-rich writeup and we'll maybe do a followup story later.

linuxbeta writes "DesktopBSD is the latest easy to install BSD aimed squarely at the desktop. Installation screen shots. From their site: 'DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users. DesktopBSD combines the stability of FreeBSD, the usability and functionality of KDE and the simplicity of specially developed software to provide a system that's easy to use and install.' DesktopBSD joins the ranks of PC-BSD and FreeSBIE."

djpretzel writes "The Dark Side of Phobos is the latest in a series of site projects at OverClocked ReMix, which each provide unofficial, non-commercial fan arrangements of entire game soundtracks (Sonic 2, Kirby, Donkey Kong Country, and Super Metroid, to date). This latest addition covers id software's perennial classic, the original DooM, with 23 tracks by 19 artists. More information is available at doom.ocremix.org, or simply download the torrent with both mp3 and lossless FLAC, site unseen. Mars never sounded so good."

overshoot writes "IBM has just tossed a bucket of chum into the whole search showdown, which Microsoft thought was between them and Google. Apparently, IBM Research has developed a 'key facts' search technology (as distinct from 'key words') over the last several years. Now they're going public with it -- by putting it on SourceForge under an OSS license!" (According to the article, it's expected to show up on SourceForge by the end of this year, not immediately.)

Bill Hilf, Microsoft's Linux Lab Manager, got his answers to your questions back to us in time to publish them just before the San Francisco LinuxWorld, where he is speaking. Before you ask: Yes, Microsoft PR had a look at his answers before he sent them. So if you have any follow-up questions for Mr. Hilf, please post them below and I'll try to ask at least a few of them in person at LinuxWorld.

An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, and Johnny Long's talks at Blackhat/Defcon over the weekend, comes the "Google Hack" Honeypot, a honeypot designed to lure in malicious search engine activity. They had a second release of their tools on monday, according to their site."

Bruce Lawson submits the review below of Stuart Langridge's Excellent guide to creating dynamic web pages; scalable and sensible., writing "Don't be put off by the title: the DHTML here bears no resemblance to the stupid Web tricks of the late 90s that allowed animated unicorns to follow your cursor or silly Powerpoint-like transitions between Web pages." Read on for the rest.

bulia byak writes "After several months of frantic work by the evergrowing developer community, the aptly numbered Inkscape 0.42 is out. The amount of new features in this version is astounding. Quoting from the (gigantic!) Release Notes, "while some of the new features simply fill long-standing functionality gaps, others are truly revolutionary". Check out the screenshots and grab your package for Linux, Windows, or OSX." The screenshots are pretty mind-blowing; this isn't a 1.0 release, but I think you'll agree it's worth checking out.

martin-boundary writes "The typical Bayesian spam filters learn to distinguish ham from spam just by reading thousands of emails, but is this all they can do? This essay shows step by step how to teach a Bayesian filter to play chess against a human, on Linux, with XBoard."

tekiegreg asks: "I've been asked by the boss to evaluate Load Testing and QA solutions for use by our company. Google Searches have yielded TestComplete and Mercury's solutions. However prices are very steep. Has anything in the Open Source world even come close to this level of functionality in a testing suite? Searches of Sourceforge and Freshmeat reveal nil. Are there any other solutions that people have tried, out there?"

Espectr0 writes "TuxTops has a small review comparing the Pocket PC handhelds against the Palm ones (no pun intended), with advantages and disadvantages of each. The conclusion? If you are after gaming, multimedia, good WiFi+Bluetooth support, a lot of accessories and versatility, go with Pocket PC. If you are after small and stylish devices with good battery life, simple interface and simple PIM apps, go with PalmOS."

SQL31337 writes "Jecology is a life simulator created in the spirit of Conway's Game of Life. It touches on many topics such as cellular automata, ecological balance, and the food chain. There is only one type of creature in Conway's Game of Life(CGoL). They reproduce, but do not mutate or evolve. They do not have to find food, but instead simply die based on scarcity or overpopulation. Jecology encompasses these aspects of ecology with a more complex simulation, but retains much of the elegant simplicity found in CGoL. Jecology is not merely a life simulator, but an ecology simulator. It is also an example of a complex system arising from simple rules, as described in A New Kind of Science. Screenshots and info about Jecology here."

2600fan writes "Fred Quimby, a game developer for the Stella Atari 2600 emulator, has released a new BASIC compiler that can be used to create games to run on Stella and potentially on the 2600 itself. The compiler generates efficient assembly-language code in DASM syntax, then uses DASM to make a binary. A bitmapped playfield and easy-to-use scrolling routines are included, and programmers can also add inline assembly language and directly access TIA registers if they please."