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Announcing Ubuntu 4.10

The warm-hearted Warthogs of the Warty Team are proud to present the very first release of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support. Update: A selection of screenshots from the final version.

An Ocean and Synth look at JDK 5.0

Now that Tiger is an official release, it's time to explore even more exciting differences between the 1.4 version of the Java 2 Standard Edition platform and 5.0 of the Java 2 Development Kit. In this installment of Taming Tiger, UI expert John Zukowski explores the newly available Ocean and Synth look and feels. Now, even non-programmers can develop custom look and feels without writing code or having the benefit of a good eye!

Cross-platform packaging facility OpenPKG 2.2 released

The OpenPKG project released version 2.2 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 2.2 consists of 528 selected (from a pool of 800) packages, all carefully packaged for easy deployment on 18 different Unix platforms. Focusing on portability and isolation, OpenPKG 2.2 places greater emphasis on reducing underlying Unix system requirements.

Increase stability and responsiveness by short-circuiting code

Keep your Web applications running when tasks lock up. High volume Web sites often require asynchronous or threaded operations to achieve target performance criteria. While threads in Web containers are considered bad practice, the alternative is for developers to make blocking calls to code they cannot control. It becomes important that dependencies of this nature fail-fast. This developerWorks article covers a homegrown short-circuit pattern that ensures threaded execution and completion of a process in a fixed window of time.