douthitb asks: "I have recently started work as a contractor with a company developing/improving an application for exchanging large amounts of data. The current solution exchanges data via XML, but the data itself is stored in a SQL Server database. There is a concern about the overhead involved with wrapping and unwrapping the XML to get the data in and out of a relational database. The proposed solution is to use Tamino, an XML-based database. Neither I nor any of the other developers have any experience with Tamino, but the desired result is to remove the bottleneck of converting the XML back and forth. Does anyone have experience using Tamino (or any other XML-based database)? What benefits and/or difficulties did you have in using an XML database, as opposed to its relational counterpart? How large of a learning curve should be expected with a product like this? Do XML databases really live up to the hype? A similar topic was discussed on Slashdot way back when, so I was hoping to get some more up-to-date feedback on the subject."

zentogo wonders: "As I stroll through the local recycle shops in my little Japanese City, I see boxes of used KEITAI-- Japanese Cell Phones. Most of them only a two or three years old, with more technology and features than any affordable phone in the USA, and they actually work! See, Japanese people cycle to new technology, especially phones, very quickly, and it is almost impossible for them not to. Take my own personal example: after one year with the telecom KDDI, I was given a free phone. It had more features than my previous one, and was much lighter, so when I was offered the deal I changed on the spot! So I wonder, what can be done with all these old phones? Can they be recycled for parts or even software? Can they be adapted to another type of technology? It would seem to be a big waste of decent hardware if something interesting couldn't be done with them."

Node and Edge asks: "Many interesting problem domains involve some form of graph-based or graph-like information: network activity visualizations; social software; workflow management; P2P software development; and version control with branching, just to name a few. It is notoriously difficult for people to visualize a graph structure - unless it happens to be a strictly hierarchical tree-like structure, such as what we know from file-system explorers. Now, with all of that said, what graph libraries can you recommend? The following criteria apply, though they're not absolute: Java or Java bindings; simple to use for simple applications; and polished, extensible UI components. I'm familiar with JGraph, JUNG, Prefuse, OpenJGraph, Tigris GEF, Eclipse GEF, Graphviz, but have not had a chance to evaluate them all. Have you used any of these extensively? If so, can you provide any constructive advice? If not, can you recommend something else, ?"

Pieroxy asks: "As an administrator of various websites, I am always eager to know about my audience. Without going through the hassle of setting up polls and other information gathering systems, the http headers (and connection) are the primary obvious source of information available. However, getting meaningful information out of a User-Agent string or out of an IP address can be trickier than it looks. There are some websites out there that seems to provide some of this information (User-Agent detection, User-Agent explanation, IP localization, or even an IP-to-country mapping), but none seems to be either free, in a usable form or even complete. Would anyone have pointers for free code/service that can help match a User-Agent String with an OS and a browser? A service/code that would match an IP address with a geographic region? Anything else that one can use to try and have a clearer view of its audience?"

malcomvetter asks: "I need a command line FTP client that supports 'Implicit SSL', sports some kind of scripting interface, and runs on Win32. Any suggestions? So far, I have only found GUI versions such as FileZilla." I remember once needing a scripting FTP client long ago. It took me a long time, but I finally found one that had a workable but unintuitive interface. Have scripting FTP clients become more prevalent or is your best bet using something flexible with network bindings (like Python or Perl) to get the job done?

Beans asks: "I have a couple classical music CD's which I listen to at work, and use for putting the baby to sleep. I can never find the correct volume, I can't hear soft spots, so I turn it up, only to have a rising crescendo rouse the baby, or at work, have co-workers glace over. What is a good way to normalize them (read on for what I mean by normalize)? All of the normalizing software I have seen uses the entire song for the window of normalzing. Basically makes determines a static value required to get the average volume of the song to the user defined level, then applies that value to the entire song. What I need is something that normalizes over a sliding window, or say 5 seconds, or whatever. In effect making soft spots louder, and crescendo's quieter. Not the way the music was intended to be heard, but perfect for music-at-work, or putting kids to sleep. Does anyone know of any software that does this? On a side note, I work for a Seismic processing company, and we do stuff like this all the time on Seismic waves, not sound waves. If I can't find any canned software to do this, I may modify some of our code to work with WAV files, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel."

Deviant asks: "I just bought a new Dell Axim X30 with 802.11b and Bluetooth. It was a bit of an impulse buy and now I find myself trying to find out what I can do with it and what software is 'must have' for the platform. I work in IT for a bank where I have wireless available in the office and I am also a part-time education student. I got it primarily for basic PDA things like a calendar, a To-do list, e-mail/IM, taking notes, and am looking forward to getting a few good games for it. I guess my question is to Slashdot readers with MS Windows Mobile based PDAs: What software do you use daily that makes your PDA worth while for you? What uses are there for this that I may not have thought of?"

Whatistehmatrix asks: "About 5 years ago, when I first found out about KaZaA, it was somewhat 'underground' and had less than 1 million people. I soon discovered there was an unbelievable amount of music open to me. Instead of getting the music I always heard on the radio, I always sought out the music that was previously unavailable to me [Japanese pop & rock, overseas techno, etc]. Well, fast forward to today, and I actively buy CDs from groups I fell in love with from the songs I found on P2P. I was wondering, if any of the Slashdot community used to/still uses P2P programs to try out music that isn't heard on the radio, to expand your tastes in music from different countries & cultures?"

Meostro asks: "I'm looking for the best format to use to distribute arbitrary datasets. Tarballs compressed with gzip seem to be the most common thing out there, with zip coming in a close second. What advanced compression packages are the most widely recognized or available on the widest array of systems? Cross-platform compatibility is my most important goal, followed by compression ratio, decompression time, compression time and extra features (solid archives, support for multiple files, etc.). I'm starting up a free data site to provide test data for anything you can imagine: images for compression and format interpretation, text and audio for language processing, programming language examples to test parsing, and more. I hope this will grow to be a significant (read: multi-gigabyte) archive, so I want to start off right with my distribution format. Right now the plan is data.tar.bz2, but i'm open to anything that will give me better compression as long as it's available for Linux, Windows and Mac."