Handling exceptions may not be exciting, but it's a crucial part of writing your application. Instead of putting it off until the "fun stuff" is done, Jeff Langr advises a head-on approach: Drive exceptions through tests, like any other production code.

This week, one of the most-commented stories on OSNews was the story about how 'Maxxus' cracked/hacked (take your pick) the Intel version of Apple's OSX once again. This sparked a lively debate over whether we should encourage Maxxus, or condemn his actions. I made myself clear from the get-go: I condemn his actions. Note: This is the Sunday Eve Column of the week.

"Many people in the industry assumed that Itanium had a low - and poor - profile among end users. That was what the folks at IDC assumed until recently, when they surveyed 500 members of their Enterprise Server Customer Panel. The results were somewhat surprising, they said. Not only was there a high level of awareness among the users - more than 80 percent knew of the platform - but that their intent to buy an Itanium system was fairly strong. About 24 percent of those polled said they had bought at least one Itanium system, though only 13 percent of non-HP users had done so. However, more than a third of all participants said they were highly likely to buy an Itanium system within the next 12 to 18 months."

"John Mashey is known in computing circles for a whole raft of things, among them are his work on the design of the original MIPS architecture, his work at SGI, and a long history of in-depth posts in the newsgroup comp.arch. David Kanter of Realworldtech has taken one of Mashey's posts and, with the author's permission, fleshed it out with more data and graphs for posting as a multipart series. Part I of the series is now available, with Part II on the way. One of the things that really struck me in reading the retrospective was just how prominent a role completely non-architectural factors play in the stories of the successes and failures of various processors."

The Ubuntu team has released Dapper Drake Flight CD4, the 4th alpha release on the way to the final release of Dapper Drake (which is now in upstream version freeze). Besides many cosmetic changes to the boot sequence, GDM, and GNOME in general, this release features Espresso (a live-CD installer), GNOME 2.14 Beta 2, and much more. The team has also included a 'very special and early gift' - Novell's Xgl and Compiz. Downloads for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu are in the release announcement.

"You manage a heterogeneous network and want to provide different Quality of Service agreements and network restrictions based on the client operating system. With pf and altq, you can now limit the amount of bandwidth available to users of different operating systems, or force outbound web traffic through a transparent filtering proxy. This article describes how to install pf, altq, and Squid on your FreeBSD router and web proxy to achieve these goals."

Haiku's Micheal Phipps has posted 20 reasons as to why he thinks Haiku is relevant. "Build all of the libraries that developers need into the OS and update them with an ultra-high quality build every year or two. No one likes to reload their OS and no one likes .dll or .so misery." Read on for the whole list.

The Linux kernel has booted on top of the sun4v hypervisor on Sun's new Niagara CPU (just the kernel, there was no root filesystem). Sun has been very active in trying to get Linux support for their Niagara.

"A quiet revolution is taking place on a young mailing list, one that overturns years of false enmity and makes perfect sense to most free software users. Having competed for the free desktop crown since 1997, collaborating on code but never on promotion, KDE and GNOME have launched an initiative to market and promote the free desktop together."

"I use Fedora core daily and I've used every final release of Fedora since Yarrow (Fedora Core Release 1). When I get time, I also look at some of the test releases to see how Fedora is changing, and if there's one thing certain about Fedora, it's change. I decided to write this article to hopefully give people a chance to learn a little bit more about Fedora since the first release came to life back in November 2003, how the distro has matured and what to expect for Fedora Core release 5 in mid-March 2006."

Early in 2006 mobile operators around the world will begin offering a new enhancement for use with Microsoft Windows Mobile devices (such as the O2 Xda Exec or Xda Mini S), called Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP). Of course, if push e-mail on mobile is not your thing, you might be wondering what the fuss is about. More at GeekZone.

Solaris Express 2/2006 (derived from Nevada Build 31) was posted yesterday, providing a host of useful improvements. Wifi, RealPlayer 10, and Gnome-Pilot support were introduced. Roughly 1150 bugs were fixed. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

"Microsoft still is expected to deliver the next Windows Vista milestone, the February Community Technology Preview release, next week - most likely on Feb. 21, according to testers briefed last month by Microsoft." In addition, "the company has begun testing a Quality of Service feature, which will be in both Vista and Longhorn Server. QoS technology helps cut down network congestion while optimizing traffic to the available bandwidth. QoS becomes useful when customers have multimedia applications or Voice over IP."

Developers on the projects expected to make up the next major version of the K Desktop Environment want KDE 4 to offer features and software interaction beyond what is available now, and better, easier access for users to their files and information. Among the ideas are universally available personal information and a desktop that is tailored for and responds to the things users do most. Ian Geiser, a KDE developer and official US representative for the KDE project, says KDE 4 will most likely be released in late 2006, though internal debate could push the release back to early 2007.