John Smart provides a quick intro to Lucene, a powerful and elegant library for full-text indexing and searching in Java, with which you can add rich full-text search functionality to your Java web application.

Right in between a car crash and Easter, I knew I had to write a Sunday Eve Column. So here I am, digesting vast quantities of chocolate eggs (and I don't even like chocolate), craving for coffee (for me about as special as breathing), with the goal of explaining to you my, well, obsession with microkernels. Why do I like them? Why do I think the microkernel paradigm is superior to the monolithic one? Read on.

SilentPCReview tries to answer an important question: what is the best power efficiency achievable with currently available AMD and Intel processors that can be used on a desktop PC? The answer: "Our focus on thermals, power and energy efficiency led to mostly predictable results: mobile processors are best, followed by AMD desktop processor in general, and then Intel desktop processors. The power efficiency of AMD Athlon 64 single and dual core processors is excellent, even for their highest performance models. The Intel desktop processors suffer from inefficiency, even on the 65nm die. The Core Duo is a delightful exception in Intel's camp, with probably the highest performance-per-watt ratio of all the processors in our survey."

The second issue of the quarterly OS2eCS eZine was published on April 1, 2006. Articles include: 'Developing for Fun with OS/2 and OpenWatcom', 'Surfing in the Colorful Chinese World with OS/2 and eComStation', 'USB Thumb Drives and Flash Wristbands with eComStation', and more.

One of the components of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is GCJ, the GNU Compiler for the Java programming language. GCJ is a compiler that can generate both native code and bytecode from Java source files. GCJ includes a runtime library (libgcj) that provides all runtime support, the core class libraries, a garbage collector, and a bytecode interpreter. Programs created by gcj can dynamically load and interpret class files or native shared libraries resulting in pure, or mixed native/interpreted apps.

AnandTech has published a very, very in-depth (17 pages) review of Apple's MacBook Pro. "With the MacBook Pro the desire to upgrade is even tougher to resist because Apple switched to a significantly faster processor than what was in the outgoing PowerBook G4. Honestly, as tempting as this new model may be to upgrade to for existing PowerBook owners, I would recommend waiting for a Merom version if you can. By the time Merom is introduced later this year there will be even more Universal Binaries available for the platform and hopefully by then all of the issues with the current MacBook Pros will have been worked out." In the review, Parallels's virtualization tool is compared to Apple's Boot Camp, and AnandTech concludes that it is already amazingly close to running Windows 'natively'.

"In this article a simple usage of regular expressions is described. Its intention is to bring users to try the most powerful search and replace paradigm available and hopefully start using it. This however can not replace good tutorials available on the sites that are also mentioned in this article. The article is written reproducing actual steps I took to complete my task, to show the specifics and possible problems."

"Try KDE is a new resource listing ways that you can try out KDE without commiting to a full GNU/Linux or BSD install. It includes links to live cds, VMware player images and Klik bundles as well as links to KDE desktops available over NX, with explanations of these technologies. It is linked to from the KDE frontpage and will be updated regularly as more resources are discovered. You the community can help us out, by sending your comments and suggestions to the email address listed at the foot of the Try KDE page."

Microsoft estimates it lost about $14 billion last year to software piracy - and those may prove to be the most lucrative sales never made. Although the world's largest software maker spends millions of dollars annually to combat illegal copying and distribution of its products, critics allege - and Microsoft acknowledges - that piracy sometimes helps the company establish itself in emerging markets and fend off threats from free open-source programs.

"Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure. Well, these images make the point very well. Both images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. The same page and picture. A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications."

A new report out by market research firm Forrester suggests that Apple could double its market share through defections from the Windows platform alone. The firm said that much of this has to do with customers' deep distrust of Microsoft. Apple, along with TiVo, was the only company whose brand trust increased in the last two years. Consumers trust technology brands like Bose, Dell, Sony, Panasonic, and Hewlett-Packard the most, while Toshiba, Hitachi, Gateway, and LG joined Microsoft at the bottom.

Mozilla has released a new version of the Firefox Web browser with what is described as 'significant security and stability improvements'. Details on the security vulnerabilities being patched were not available April 13 when Firefox 1.5.0.2 was shipped as a high-priority update. However, a source told eWEEK that the most serious flaw could allow 'remote code execution' attacks. A Mozilla spokesperson said information on the security patches will be publicly released soon.

The latest FreeBSD status report has been released. "The highlights of this quarters report certainly include the availability of native Java binaries thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, as well as progress has been made with Xen support and Sun's Ultrasparc T1. Futhermore we are looking forward to FreeBSD 6.1 and TrustedBSD audit support has been imported into FreeBSD 7-CURRENT. All in all, a very exiting start to 2006." And on a related note, FreeBSD now boots on the Intel Macs.

Community contributor Jürgen Keil and Sun engineer Jan Setje-Eilers have been working together to get OpenSolaris based operating systems to work under Apple's BootCamp. Today Jan announced that he had successfully installed and booted build 36 of Solaris Nevada (plus some hacks). A series of bugfixes to make OpenSolaris distributions "just work" have been identified.