Interchange, though not as well-known as other open source projects like Linux and Apache, nevertheless forms the backbone for many companies' technology efforts, large and small. After being absorbed by Red Hat, then cut loose as that company narrowed its focus, its development community has continued to expand the project, and released version 5.0 yesterday. Read the announcement and the release notes. If you need to build a customized, database-driven web application, check it out.

"By now, Windows and Unix are functionally more similar than different. They both support the same major programming metaphors, from command lines to GUIs to web servers; they are organized around virtually the same panoply of system resources, from nearly identical file systems to memory to sockets and processes and threads. There's not much about the core set of services provided by each operating system to limit the kinds of applications you can create. What's left is cultural differences." Read the article by JoelOnSoftware.

The UPS man rang my buzzer. I sat in my chair sweating bullets. Do I even dare? Despite better judgment, I buzzed him in. "Did anyone see you?" I asked in a nervous voice. "Uh, just sign here." He gave me an annoyed look and after getting my John Hancock, he handed me the package. I hurriedly closed my blinds, fearful someone might see the contents as I opened it. The package sat on my coffee table for about an hour while we (that is to say, me and the package) stared each other down. A scene from the cult classic Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits came to mind: "Mum! Dad! Don't touch it! It's pure evil!"

IsComputerOn reports that Axel Dörfler, OpenTracker's maintainer, would like everyone's opinion on a new feature he is working on: If, let's say, you have folder A and folder B, both showing (their contents) in Tracker windows. You want to create a link (or move, or copy) folder A to folder B, you right-click and drag the little icon (screenshot) into folder B, no need to go to the parent folder of A and then drag it.

The latest Sun Microsystems Java 1.4.2 release update is out, version 1.4.2_03. The only change in this release deals with a CA certificates update in cacerts file.

Microsoft plans to reorganize its Windows unit, creating a new division more tightly focused on the development of the core operating system, CNET News.com has learned. Also, Microsoft posted a review of their technology for 2003 and a preview for 2004.

The latest beta of KDE's 3.2, beta 2, was released a few days ago. I installed the provided Fedora RPMs and had a look in this early pre-release version of the popular X11 desktop environment. Six screenshots are included. We look at both the strengths and the weaknesses of the DE.

Slashdot reports that Intel has released version 8.0 of their C/C++ compiler for both Windows and Linux. This release has been rumored for a long time to contain better GCC source and binary compatibility.

The OpenBeOS folks published a new newsletter and includes some interesting readings like the "The "virtualdrive" driver" and the "System Logging". For more BeOS reading, read the Technoids magazine, issue 4 (german only).

Slashdot reports that TICalc.org announced yesterday that Patrick Pelisier has released a new beta OS, called PedroM, for the TI-89 and TI-92+ under the GPL.

Fundamentally, a XAML page describes the classes that the runtime should create, the property values and event handlers for the instances of the classes, and an object model hierarchy—that is, which instance is the parent of another instance. Read the development article here.

GNUstep is a set of general-purpose Objective-C libraries based on the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT (now Apple) Inc. Changes include in NSWindow, DnD now works on the whole window, and events are propogated up to the first DnD aware view. Absolute paths and DnD work in OpenPanels.

The Dot reports that while Qt/Mac has been GPLed since Apple's World Wide Developer Conference 2003, which let everybody think that KOffice and the whole KDE stuff would quickly become native Aqua applications. However, the KDE on Darwin project is not really active and needs more developers.

While it's no Indigo Espresso or a VAX Bar (though, of course, there is NetBSD/sgimips and NetBSD/vax), at least you can log in on a Mr. Coffee. And while the JavaStation has been running NetBSD for a while, full support is now completely in-tree: