"In order to be an effective programmer, you need to possess a combination of traits that allow your skill, experience, and knowledge to produce working code. There are some technically skilled developers who will never be effective because they lack the other traits needed. Here are seven traits that are necessary to become a great programmer."

That rare event where tried and true Debian releases a new version. "This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for 'Wheezy', will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically."

"After reading all the reviews, and talking to people who actually wore Glass, I just see a product plagued by bugs, and of questionable use, that's generating a lot of buzz because people want so desperately to have some new gadget to latch onto, and fear being wrong about the next major technology trend." Nobody wants a computer in their home. Nobody wants a cell phone and always be connected. Nobody wants an iPhone. The current version of this line? Nobody wants Glass. "I haven't worn Glass." Oh right.

"Internet giant Google has changed the tagline on the homepage of its Palestinian edition from 'Palestinian Territories' to 'Palestine'. The change, introduced on 1 May, means google.ps now displays 'Palestine' in Arabic and English under Google's logo. Using the word Palestine is controversial for some. Israeli policy is that the borders of a Palestinian state are yet to be agreed." Good but daring move.

"Do intellectual property rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public effort. Across a range of empirical specifications, I find evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain." Research by Heidi L. Williams, of the Department of Economics at MIT. Forget what companies and their advocates (i.e., politicians) say, and trust science.

"Microsoft's phone chief hates to call the new Nokia Lumia 521 cheap, but the lower-priced smartphone launching in the United States is the company's boldest move yet to win mass market share from leaders Apple and Samsung. The world's largest software company has so far focused on putting its Windows Phone software into expensive, high-end devices - chiefly from Nokia and HTC. But the new model will go on sale at Walmart later this month at an unsubsidized price under $150, relatively cheap for a new phone running up-to-date software without a long-term contract." Windows Phone is racing to the bottom just as fast as Android - with the difference being that expensive Android devices do not fail to sell.

"In the past few weeks, I've managed to find a bit more free time to work on Haiku. As per usual, the lion's share of this time was spent on improving our integrated debugger. As such, I thought I'd give a brief overview of what's been added, and how it can be useful."

"BlackBerry 10 is completely different from previous BlackBerry operating systems—with good reason. Its core assets come from a company named QNX, which Research In Motion acquired in 2010. Blackberry 10 features include 'live tiles' that dynamically refresh with new information, as well as a revamped keyboard and security upgrades. But what really makes or breaks a phone is the quality (and quantity) of its third-party apps. So what we'll do here is look at the programming API. That will give us a good grip on what app developers can do with the platform."

OpenBSD 5.3 has been released. It's got improvements all over the place, and includes OpenSMTPD 53, the first version considered stable enough for production use. Y'all know where the downloads are.

CEO of Blackberry Thorsten Heins said yesterday that he doesn't believe the tablet computer market is long for this world. "In five years I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore," he tells Bloomberg News, "Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model." If the dream of one device wirelessly interacting with all sorts of displays and peripherals comes to fruition, he may actually have a point.

Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.

The Verge reviews the BlackBerry Q10: "Maybe you're here for the keyboard. As superb as the Q10's physical keyboard is, I keep thinking about the six-year evolution of the soft keyboard since the introduction of the original iPhone. They've gotten so good on every platform - iOS, Windows Phone, Android, even BlackBerry's own Z10. The argument used to be that physical keyboards were for serious users who needed to burn through email, and I just don't think that holds water anymore. Yes, this is the best of a dying breed, but for the life of me, I don't know why someone who's accustomed to a full-touch phone would come back to this." I disagree. Touchscreen keyboards have not improved considerably at all - in fact, I find them just as terrible and unpleasant to use as when they were first introduced on Palm OS and Windows Mobile. A properly designed hardware keyboard - preferably landscape (like on the E7), but portrait will do too - will always run circles around those frustrating software keyboards. Major respect to BlackBerry for sticking to their guns. To anyone making a quality phone with a landscape hardware keyboard (rebadge an E7 for all I care) running Android or Windows Phone: please, take my money. Please.

After ten weeks of development Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.9. The latest version of the kernel now has a device mapper target which allows a user to setup an SSD as a cache for hard disks to boost disk performance under load. There's also kernel support for multiple processes waiting for requests on the same port, a feature which will allow it to distribute server work better across multiple CPU cores. KVM virtualisation is now available on ARM processors and RAID 5 and 6 support has been added to Btrfs's existing RAID 0 and 1 handling. Linux 3.9 also has a number of new and improved drivers which means the kernel now supports the graphics cores in AMD's next generation of APUs and also works with the high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips which will likely appear in Intel's next mobile platform. Read more about new features in What's new in Linux 3.9.

"As computer games became more and more complex in the late 1980s, the days of the individual developer seemed to be waning. For a young teenager sitting alone in his room, the dream of creating the next great game by himself was getting out of reach. Yet out of this dilemma these same kids invented a unique method of self-expression, something that would end up enduring longer than Commodore itself. In fact, it still exists today. This was the demo scene."