KDE 3.3 Release Cycle Starts with KDE 3.3 Alpha 1 "Kindergarten" The KDE 3.3 Alpha 1 has been released to the FTP servers this morning. There won't be any binary packages for this release, everyone using Kindergarten is asked to compile it with --enable-debug, so that we can get valuable feedback.

An application developer can choose any one of a number of strategies to read and use an XML document. In some very simple examples a script containing a number of regular expressions might do the job, but normally a more rigorous technique is required. The Simple API for XML (SAX) is one of the two key techniques for analysing and processing XML documents (the other is the more complicated Document Object Model (DOM)). Read the article here.

Bunker down for a spate of battles over software ownership and patents in the near future, said Usenix Association president Marshall Kirk McKusick.

The "intelligent connected device" will be the next hotbed of innovation and growth in the technology sector -- revolutionizing markets as they exist today, according to embedded operating system market leader Wind River. Chairman and CEO Ken Klein predicts a major shift in device software, and says that companies not actively building connectivity and intelligence into their products today will not survive past the next wave of technology innovation and growth.

Here's a review of MDK 10.0 Official Powerpack with screenshots.

A US company that creates software to link disparate applications and operating systems says business is brisk.

Cisco has made public the details on it's new super-high end router, the HFR. It is using a new OS, IOS XR, which is based on the QNX/Neutrino microkernel.

The new version of the Syllable Live CD includes updates to the ATA driver, i810 audio driver, DHCP client and VMware video driver. Best of all, you can now install the OS from the Live CD - see here. In other Syllable news, Chat 0.2.0 has been released (IM client) and Syllable has been featured in Linux User and Developer magazine (issue 39).

SuSE Linux 9.1 is the followup to an excellent desktop distribution. SuSE gave me the opportunity to use SuSE 9.1 Professional for a couple weeks. This is a review/personal thoughts on the distro.

Seen at Ximian's Federico Mena-Quintero blog: GTK+'s Owen Taylor posted an interesting study on how to render nice fonts on a resolution-independent screen. It seems that Red Hat is gearing up to compete with Longhorn's features. Elsewhere, Søren Sandmann posted a good list of interaction problems in GTK+ that individual hackers might enjoy fixing.

Software developers will soon have their chance to smoke what Sun Microsystems is rolling. At the JavaOne conference next month, Sun will release a developer kit for its Project Looking Glass 3-D software. This will be the first time Sun has let anyone outside of the company fiddle with that code, and the move confirms that Project Looking Glass is heading toward a general release on Linux and Solaris.

The LinuxFormat printed magazing reviewed SuSE Linux 9.1 Pro and rated it 9/10 (PDF scan here).

Open Source database vendor MySQL AB released its latest incremental release last week (version 4.0.20), but according to some in the community, it still doesn't address what some say serious licensing concerns. Its license changed from LGPL to GPL (in order to not allow commercial/closed applications to link with its free version, but to instead push to them buy a license). Unfortunately, this license change comes to conflict with other OSS licenses, like PHP's (and maybe Perl's too).

What do people do these days when they are bored? One of the latest additions to the list of answers seems to be Build a Linux Distribution. Have you checked on Distrowatch lately? They have upwards of 100 distributions listed there. I used to be happy that I had a lot of choices but now I am beginning to get intimidated by the sheer volume of choices. You could play charades with only Linux Distro Names.