Module development and code questions

The title is pretty self explanatory.
What I want is to be able to link to something external to drupal site within the menu with menu() function called in a link hook.
I strongly think it has to be done with a custom module because I need permission mecanism ( that I cannot have with the menus.module from Jim Riggs )

But the menu fonction needs a "callback" : the name of a function to execute, not a link ! How can I workaround ? Create this very callback function but putting what in it for automatic external redirection ?

Anybody can help ? thanks.

OK.
book.module allows to show the whole book in a single page by recursively reading the content of all the pages and subpages.
pdfview.module allows to create a pdf of the content of a page (I experiment some issues with letters like àòèéù but that does not matter now).

I wonder what's the best way to combine both, to create pdf books - with or without comments, and with or without glossary, and with an index which links the automatically generated page numbers.

A friend asked me to pass this question along.

With many of the image (other file) handling issues now done at the core, sometimes it is a bit confusing for some to know exactly which image handling issue is currently performed by which module. For instance, which module for Drupal 4.5 is responsible for image/photo galleries that were setup with the old image.module? What other image related tasks have now been transferred to which other modules? Can some of the developers chime in and walk the rest of us through about image handling in Drupal 4.5?

Thanks.

I noticed that the poll pages display incorrectly on a site when the poster is using an avatar.

I have fixed this and generally cleaned up the formatting with a few minor modifications. (poll.module)

What do i do with this? I think it might be something moderatley useful...

I would like to implement a Drupal site based on flexinode module.
I would like to ask to someone else with the same experience how they implemented search on such a scenario.
What I understand is that flexinode lets you search on a specific flexinode type (/flexinode/search/xx), but not across all the types (like standard Drupal search).
I would need some suggestions by you. My need would be to have the possibility to search by taxonomy and by string.
The modules like taxonomy_browser do not work correctly with flexinode.

I've been trying to use the i18n module from CVS with a 4.4.2 system. I had some problems, then patched it with a patch provided by chx. Unfortunately, everything seems fixed except for the "Language" block, which gives multiple language prefixes in the url, eg. "http://yoursite.com/fr/fr/destination/url". I've looked into the code and posted what I found here.