derek_farn writes, "Google now has a page that supports source code searching. I hope they extend it to be more programming-language aware (e.g., search for identifiers and functions) like the specialist code search sites (Krugle, Koders, and Codease), who probably now have very worried investors. I don't see any option to search for Cobol. I guess there is not a lot of Cobol source available on the Internet, even although there is supposed to be more Cobol source in existence than any other language (perhaps that statement is not true in the noughties)." From the Cnet.com article: "Google engineers, many of whom participate in open-source projects, already use these code searching capabilities internally. Since it is a Google Labs project, the company is not yet seeking to monetize searches through ads."

rm69990 writes "Google, becoming more and more concerned about the growing use of the word google as a verb, has fired off warning letters to numerous media organizations warning them against using its name as a verb. This follows google (with a lowercase g) being added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in June. According to a Google spokesperson: "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues.""

Read on for some of the most interesting comments from yesterday's stories on NASA's lost moon-walk tapes, the reported foiling of a large-scale terror attack planned against the U.S. to have been staged from the U.K., and the Department of Homeland Security's sudden warning to patch Windows with the latest security updates, in today's Backslash summary of those conversations.

Simon P. Chappell writes "Regular expressions (regex to their friends) are an incredibly powerful addition to most programmer's personal toolkit of techniques. Programming using a language that doesn't support them can be frustrating if you need to do any amount of non-trivial string handling. Java was just such a language until the release of the 1.4.x series. Sure, there were libraries like ORO that would provide regex support, but it wasn't built in and not many companies allow the use of 3rd party libraries. With version 1.4.x, the corporate Java developer in the trench, received the power of regular expression pattern matching." Read the rest of Simon's review.

Aeonite writes "The Information Revolution subtitled, The Not-For-Dummies Guide to the History, Technology and Use of the World Wide Web, is the second in a trilogy by J.R. Okin. The first book, The Internet Revolution, covering the Internet in general and the third, The Technology Revolution being a guide to The Impact, Perils and Promise of the Internet. I have not read either of those two books, but I believe that each can be read independently, and this review should be viewed in that light." Read the rest of Aeonite's review.

Ravi writes "I recently got hold of a very nice book on Ubuntu called Ubuntu Hacks co-authored by three authors - Kyle Rankin, Jonathan Oxer and Bill Childers. This is the latest of the hack series of books published by O'Reilly. They have made available a rough cut version of the book online ahead of schedule which was how I got hold of the book but as of now you can also buy the book in print. Put in a nutshell, this book is a collection of around 100 tips and tricks which the authors choose to call hacks, which explain how to accomplish various tasks in Ubuntu Linux. The so called hacks range from down right ordinary to the other end of the spectrum of doing specialised things." Read on for the rest of Ravi's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Flickr and Second Life fans seem to have collided head-on over a little known policy on Flickr that 'delists' an account from public areas, including search, when more than half of your content is non-photographic in nature. Flickr stated that most people searching the site are looking for photographic content so the restriction is in place merely to keep the site focused on its original intent. From the article: 'As a result, many screenshots on Flickr are AWOL — at least as far as the general public is concerned. That's angering and confusing some of the people who carefully stage scenes in the popular virtual world and religiously post the results online.'"

Ben writes "According to a Spyware Quiz conducted by McAfee SiteAdvisor , a staggering 97% of Internet users are just one click away from infecting their PCs with spyware. One interesting conclusion from this study showed that even users with a high "Spyware IQ" have a nearly 100% chance of visiting a dangerous site during 30 days of typical online searching and browsing activity."

Interrobang asks: "I'm a longtime Slashdot reader, who isn't a programmer. I'm one of programmers' symbiotic (parasitic?) life-forms -- a freelance technical writer. I'd like to know from the programmers, IT managers, and similar others in the crowd: If you were searching the Internet for a technical writer, what kinds of search terms would you use? What sites would you check? Where and how would you start looking?"

norburym writes "Peter Morville is an information architect, an advocate of expanding the boundaries of librarianship in an Internet age and the voice of ambient findability. In this new book from O'Reilly, Morville expands on a theme he's been discussing for several years: we live in an age where computers and the Internet are changing how we access information. Digital networks are available everywhere. As users, we have computers, PDAs, GPS units, smartphones, software and other network technologies that enable constant and mobile connectivity. As Morville writes, ambient findability is "a realm in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime" and his book is a thought provoking chronicle of the advent of that goal." Read the rest of Mary's review.

George Meyson writes "Google has launched a new service known as Google Music that will allow a person to search fast links to song lyrics, musical artists and CD titles on the main search results page. The user can type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar special, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes. Items that can be purchased will have links to merchants for online ordering or downloading. Initial merchant partners include Apple Computer's iTunes service, RealNetworks Rhapsody, eMusic and Amazon.com." From the Google Blog: "A few of us decided to try to make the information you get for these searches even better, so we created a music search feature. Now you can search for a popular artist name, like the Beatles or the Pixies, and often Google will show some information about that artist, like cover art, reviews, and links to stores where you can download the track or buy a CD via a link at the top of your web search results page."

Slim Devices recently sent us the latest version of their Squeezebox MP3 player. It was snatched up and reviewed by Patrick Schoonveld (the poor guy responsible for making ads work on Slashdot and other OSTG sites). His review of the thing follows.

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "A group led by the Internet Archive is planning a massive, ambitious effort to scan millions of old books and make them available for Web searching early next year. Behind that effort are about a dozen scanners, employees making about $10 an hour to manually scan volumes -- some more than a century old -- one page at a time, on special contraptions. The Wall Street Journal Online visits a University of Toronto library to watch one of the scanners in action: 25-year-old Liz Ridolfo."

Eurogamer is reporting on a little humor that Rockstar is having at Jack Thompson's expense. From the article: "Rockstar has just launched a new website for forthcoming PSP game GTA: Liberty City Stories, which features a spoof email from 'JT@CitizensUnitedNegatingTechnology'. 'The Internet is an unambiguous evil,' the email reads. 'The only things worse than the Internet are computer games and liberals ... Only last week, I was using the Internet to look up some information for my 15 year old niece, who is a keen water skier and state wide sailor ... Trust me when I say this - searching under the subject matter "Teenage girls water sports" is not for the faint hearted.'" The article goes on to describe some frantic arm waving from the parody's target.

Very few things surprise me about videogames anymore. I won't claim to be all-knowing by any means, but there are very few genuine surprises these days. Release dates are known well in advance, endless features and interviews are conducted with developers during the course of a game's creation, and what few elements that publishers try to keep under wraps get leaked to the media by individuals wanting their moment in the sun. Even the big gaming news stories of this past year (Hot Coffee, the PS3 PreRendered Movie Debate) were more frustrating than surprising. Happily, Nintendo managed to pull a rabbit out of their hat. Today's announcement of exactly what the revolution behind the Revolution will be is nothing short of a showstopper. Read on for my reaction to Nintendo's new bid for the brass ring.

stern writes "Pamela Paul’s Pornified surveys the effects of pornography in America. On the basis of the book jacket, this might seem more appropriate material for iVillage than Slashdot, except for one thing: pornography pervades the Internet and drives the adoption of new technologies. You can’t fairly tell the story of one without the other." Read on for the rest of Stern's review.

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

guaigean writes "Internet News is running a story on a new Yahoo! service titled Yahoo! Audio Search and it is currently in beta. The tool allows the searching of audio files and Yahoo! claims to have 50 million music, voice, and other files cataloged in the search. It searches across multiple mainstream music sites, as well as plenty of independent pages. Now if only it was tied in with some sort of lyric search."

Bazooka Joel asks: "My father has been a long time user of AOL. He subscribed to AOL's dialup service about 5 years ago and created his first email account with their services. We now have cable internet from a local company, but he still pays $15 a month just to access his email. I have tried to get him to switch to Gmail, but he is stubborn. He finally relented and said that if I could forward all of his old mail (thousands of messages) and import his contact list into Gmail, he would cancel his AOL subscription. After searching the 'net, I found a way to import his contacts. However, I cannot find a program that will forward all of his old mail. Can anybody lend me a hand?"

dexter riley asks: "Hello, all. My mother, a librarian, historian and genealogist for over twenty years, died about a year ago. She left a huge amount of genealogy information, culled from books, magazines, and the internet, mostly in the form of typewritten, photocopied, and printed pages. My main goals are: Preservation - converting the documents into a compact format that can be easily copied and transferred to others; and Indexing - making it possible for someone else to easily find the documents referring to a particular person, family, place, or document type (like land, marriage, military, birth or death records). To this end, I would like to convert her work into a format that can be stored digitally and scanned for keywords, to make it easier for others to use this information for their genealogy projects later on. What tools do you recommend for handling a project of this size?"