Peter Wayner writes: "In a world where Ali had to meet Frazier and Luke had to meet his father, it was only a matter of time before buzzwords like Java and eXtreme Programming found themselves together on the same marquee. A pair of new books examines some open source Java development tools and outlines how they can be put to use by those trying to master their workload by adopting the techniques of eXtreme programming." Read on for his latest review, which is really two reviews in one.

Brian Donovan contributes this review of Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, the most recent of several books geared toward helping people use the common Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP combination to produce database-backed websites. Read on for the review.

chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."

Steve Streeting writes "Version 0.99b of OGRE (Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) has been released! OGRE is a well designed, flexible and easy to use 3D engine released under the GNU Public License. This version adds highly customisable, scriptable particle systems, generic billboard support, compatibility with VC.Net, performance improvements and various bug fixes."

AlainRoy writes "A new article was just published in First Monday, which suggests that most open source projects have rather few developers." He excerpts from the study, done by Sandeep Krishnamurthy: "Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge...most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1."

Moshe Bar is (pick one) 1. A Linux kernel developer; 2. A motorcycle enthusiast; 3. The primary openMosix maintainer; 4. A respected Linux device driver writer; 5. Author of several books and many articles about Linux; 6. Newly married. 7. A Talmudic scholar; 8. All of the above. The correct answer is 8, and since in addition to (or perhaps because of) all this Moshe is a popular guy, this interview is here by reader request. (Yes, we take interview requests; send them to robin@roblimo.com.) Ask Moshe whatever you wish, one question per post. We'll send him 10 of the highest moderated questions and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

plluke writes "I'm a Teaching Assistant for a course named CS148: Building Intelligent Robots offered by the CS Department at Brown University. Our robots were made/programmed/run on Lego MindStorms (with LegOS). Tres funky results include probabilistic sonar mappers, a bipedal walker, and a bartender. The final exhibition page is here and contains the aforementioned funky results."

benh57 writes "KDE has finally been ported to Mac OS X, by the Fink team. Source packages and pre-built binaries are now available. Read the announcement and instructions for installing. Woohoo!"

dr_skipper writes: "In the preface of Core Lego Mindstorms Programming, the author compares the Robotics Invention System to the first mass production automobile, the Ford Model-T. This put millions of cars into the hands of ordinary people, and kick-started an industry. Whether this kit will turn out to be the equivalent of the model-T of robots remains to be seen. We already know millions of these kits have already been sold, so at least it has the potential to capture a huge number of people into robotics that never would have ventured into it in the first place. Maybe someday we'll hear stories from robot engineers telling how they got their start with the Lego Mindstorms kit. Before Mindstorms there were lots of do-it-yourself robot kits that were usually a little sketchy. The promises often outweighed what was delivered, and it was never guaranteed that once all the transistors and capacitors were assembled that it would even work. Mindstorms has overcome this and caught on in a big way, as evidenced by the staggering robotics creations that are popping up on websites all over the Internet." The rest of John's review is below.

josephfeller writes: "'Meeting Challenges and Surviving Success: The 2nd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering' was held last week at the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2002), in Orlando, FL. The 15 workshop position papers and the workshop introduction are available for free download."

Slashback with a load of updates for you tonight on modchips for Xbox, Nigerian spam-scams, missing Mozilla hackers, Guillaume Laurent on Murray on Guillaume Laurent, and more. Read on for the details.

fdsa writes "After a heated debate, and under some pressure by TransGaming, an 'intent to package' WineX from sourceforge CVS for (non-free) Debian has been withdrawn. The message provides a good summary of the recent Wine chaos, and notes how WineX is effectively under a different license than stated. Here's a mail from their CEO Gavriel State on the issue."

We've all heard plenty about IBM's investment in Linux, but we don't hear much from -- or about -- the actual Linux developers at IBM. This interview is not with one person, but with a number of IBM Linux people spearheaded by Dave Hansen, who volunteered to help us with this interview. Of the group responding to your questions, Dave says, "There are more people, but the majority of the group's skills are represented. No surprise that we'll have our responses reviewed before we send them back to you, but we'll try to expedite that.

jimmcq writes: "After two years of active development the long awaited stable release of FreeCraft is available. FreeCraft is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It is possible to play against human opponents over LAN, internet, or against the computer. The engine can be used to build C&C, WC2, SC and AOE-like real-time strategy (RTS) games. It successfully runs under Linux, BSD, BeOS, MacOS/X, MacOS/Darwin and MS Windows. Souce code and binaries are available from SourceForge."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Palm Info Center reports that POSE (the Palm Os Emulator) has been ported to the Sharp Zaurus using the QTopia palmtop environment. See the QPOSE homepage for more information." This could make a Zaurus a much more attractive device to those of us with lots of important info on Palm Os devices, but according to other readers' submissions it does require a Palm ROM image to function.

Last week, you posted your questions to SomaFM's General Manger, Rusty, and today he delivers. In this interview: answers about CARP (which was wisely rejected by the Library of Congress, this week), the RIAA, the workings of an internet radio station, and of course, Big URL.

This set of interview responses from Linux hacker Alan Cox is overtly political, in line with the questions we asked him on May 6th. Alan doesn't just talk about problems here but proposes sensible solutions for them. Very nice. Thanks, Alan.

babbage writes "There has been some talk recently on various mailing lists about getting a Mac OS X version of Ximian Connector extension to Evolution, which allows Evolution to interact with Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers much as Microsoft Outlook can. It is already possible to build and run Gnome and Evolution on Mac OS X, thanks largely to projects such as Fink. Ximian is aware of this interest, and has indicated that if enough users expressed a serious interest in buying the product -- the target number was 500 paying users -- they would be willing to produce a Mac OS X port of Connector. To that end, I've set up an petition to help gauge user interest."

The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance. " Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.

axehind writes "In this Byte.com article, Dr Moshe Bar explains some of the differences between IA32 and IA64. He also explains some things to watch out for when porting applications to the IA64 architecture."