This is a sore point of mine. DDJ used to be one of the best programming/software engineering journals in the business, but recently I'm afraid they're not so good about publishing the kind of interesting theoretical or applied practical stuff that you'd expect from them. They're still the best in the business, make no mistake, but business is not so good. Instead they're recently publishing the same garbage as everyone else; articles regarding active this, and microshaft viral that. Of course, it's done in a better, more comprehensive way than every other magazine does it. That's no excuse, though. I recently wrote them a response to an offer of a greatly discounted subscription rate, saying basically just that. If they'd given me a discounted subscription rate seven years or so ago, I'd have taken it in a minute. Today, though, I can't justify paying anything at all for the same crap that you can find in the microshaft developer network, which my company unfortunately receives anyway. Is it just me, or have the previously done a better job at covering concepts and ideas in a way that didn't tie their examples to a single platform? Maybe I'm just bitter. Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '