Patches are small, sometimes temporary "quick fixes" that address often critical software flaws. Patches are usually made available by software vendors in between service packs or version upgrades upon confirmation that a software flaw affects a large number of users with usually serious consequences.

Like it or not, but sooner or later you realize that you'll have to write shell-scripts to administer UNIX. And among these scripts there certainly will be those to cooperate with interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, su, password, ssh. But it means the end of the admin's quiet life because while dealing with interactive programs one often come across numerous hidden traps which doesn't usually happen with ordinary sh-scripts. Though fortunately or may be not, but most of these problems generally turn up within first five minutes of the work under the script. The symptoms typically look like that author can't pass the authentication from the script. At first you feel confused because usual pipe constructions such as:

IBM DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Server Edition is designed to meet the relational database server needs of mid- to large-size businesses. It can be deployed on Linux, UNIX, or Windows servers of any size, from one CPU to hundreds of CPUs.

Close on the heels of the popular Fedora Core 4 release is the budding preliminary plans for next release of Fedora Core 5.

The Open Source software project OpenPKG has established the OpenPKG Foundation, a nonprofit organization providing the ideational, financial, material and manned support of OpenPKG. OpenPKG is an "instrument for deployment and maintenance of Open Source Unix software when administration crosses platform boundaries."

Extended attributes are name/value pairs that can be assigned to any file and directory. They allow for more infomation to be embedded in the filesystem when file and directory names aren't enough, like ID3 tags on mp3s. Most Linux distributions and filesystems support it, and you just need to turn it on. Linux.com has more.

Updates to come in the company's next version of the Java, code-named Mustang, include language-processing, security and networking feature.

After a long wait the new major version 0.7 update to Portable.NET has finally been released. The new version features numerous performance improvements, fixes for WinForms and Xml, and many other changes - read the full list of changes. The new release also brings a new runtime package (at this stage for Windows systems only) - at just under 2MB. More details.

Michael Robertson has given up day-to-day control of Linspire and is leaving the company in the hands of new CEO Kevin Carmony.

Mandriva, with the recent purchase of Lycoris, a U.S. Linux desktop distributor, is expanding rapidly, but analysts ask whether it's growing fast enough to compete with the major Linux vendors: Red Hat and Novell/SuSE.

Recursion is a tool not often used by imperative language developers, because it is thought to be slow and to waste space, but as the author demonstrates, there are several techniques that can be used to minimize or eliminate these problems. He introduces the concept of recursion and tackle recursive programming patterns, examining how they can be used to write provably correct programs.

RISC OS users have crowed for years about the intuitiveness of their operating system's GUI. But that vaunted usability is of little utility in this modern world without a modern web browser to go with it. So you'll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today.

Badly designed software is costing businesses millions of dollars annually because it's difficult to use, requires extensive training and support, and is so frustrating that many end users underutilize applications, say IT officials at companies such as The Boeing Co. and Fidelity Investments. Despite those problems, most CIOs remain unaware of a 3-year-old standard designed to help IT managers compare the usability of software products.

Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.