An article at Advogato explains Ximian’s not-yet-released Mono project. “The goal of the Mono project, briefly, is to create an independent, free software implementation of the various
languages, protocols, and interfaces making up the .NET platform. Much to Microsoft’s credit, they seem to be
taking the open standards process quite seriously.”

Network World Fusion follow up on an earlier press release. The story says storage management vendor Sistina Software has released file system
software that “gives Linux server users better
performance and updated volume
management tools.”

ZDNet reports that a Japanese cracker has posted a program on the Internet giving remote
attackers complete control of vulnerable servers running Microsoft’s Web server
software.

John Gowin writes, “First in a series of many, Linux Orbit is featuring a new HOWTO for Samba aimed at the first-time user. Using a step by step approach, the HOWTO includes steps for configuring a simple drive share, enabling encrypted passwords and sharing a Windows printer with a GNU/Linux system over a network.”

joabj writes, “I can’t tell you how happy this makes the geek in me!! Spectrum, the IEEE trade magazine for electrical engineers is, IMHO, the best general technology magazine being published, far more accurate, in-depth, and hype-free than Wired or even M.I.T. Technology Review. (for proof, check out this feature on digital radio.) The trouble is you had to be an IEEE member to recieve it, which involved getting an engineering degree, passing a test to get into the association, and THEN paying $170 a year for dues just to get the damn thing. Either that or read it at the library (like I did), or pick over whatever few free articles are posted on the IEEE site. But now (or sometime in the past few weeks, anyway), IEEE has opened Spectrum up for anyone who coughs up $39.95 for the annual subscription fee. Great news for us self-learners.”

The announcement’s at KDE.News (aka The Dot). From the release coordinator: “With
support for IMAP, the totally new printing framework and improved proxy support,
KDE 2.2 will be an excellent foundation for the desktop needs of many businesses.”

From CNet: “Napster entered a fourth day of a self-imposed blackout Thursday, continuing to bar
file trading on its service while engineers worked to fix problems in a database intended to
stop swaps of copyrighted songs.”

CNet reports that IBM execs are talking back to Microsoft’s recent Open Source/Free Software bashing, saying the attacks are arrogant, futile and counterproductive.

From LinuxPR: Command Prompt, Inc. is pleased to
announce the release of DocParse 0.2.6. DocParse is an invaluable tool for
professional technical authors who maintain a large amount of HTML based
documentation. DocParse will take any HTML document and convert it into a
valid DocBook XML/SGML document.

DocParse will correctly convert multiple documents, lists, and tables and entities.
DocParse currently runs on x86 Linux only. We will release for YellowDog Linux
(PPC) and MacOS X shortly.

Posted at LWN.net. Among the items: “Armin Rigo announced his “Python specializing compiler”, psyco: It works on the principle that you can compile a faster version of a
function if you know stuff about the arguments it’s likely to be
called with. This is one of the more asthetically pleasing of the
possible ways to speed Python up (it’s similar to some tactics used
by the seemingly defunct self compiler), but it’s still a very large
amount of work away from being useful …”