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honestpuck writes with his review of Getting Started with Lego Trains from No Starch Press. "I have a confession to make. There is one small part of my childhood that is constantly returning; every few years it breaks out and I find my apartment covered in small pieces of brightly coloured plastic: Yes, the Lego addiction strikes. One of those recent episodes involved a train set (perhaps I indulged in a few pieces of track and an extra car or two - but that's all, I swear) so I was pleased to see this book." Read on for the rest of his review. Note that the Bricks on the Brain site is down at the moment; you might want to try the google cache instead. Getting Started with Lego Trains author Jacob H. McKee pages 101 publisher No Starch Press rating 7 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 1593270062 summary Good book on building Lego trains. Not terribly large.

Getting Started with Lego Trains is a fairly good guide to designing and building Lego trains. The writing is a clear, simple style that should be understood by anyone, the layout is clear.

Jacob McKee, the author, is webmaster at Bricks On The Brain, a good site which acts as a portal to build instructions. He also has a section devoted to the book which has three example pages and some links to other sites useful to Lego train builders. Both the book and the site itself promise at least a couple of articles by McKee but these are still "to come." I hope they come soon as McKee promises (in the book and on the site) an article on using decals and I'd like to know his sources and methods.

The book starts with two chapters that are absolutely basic; most of the information here is included in the Lego documentation you get with the train kits, such as how to hook up the electrical power and the different train and carriage sets available. There are still some useful nuggets such as the 'Studs Not On Top' technique for getting bricks pointing away from the vertical and interesting trivia such as a short history of Lego trains. McKee also adds some details that may be hard to glean from the Lego manuals such as how an active passing line can cause a short circuit in your track.

The third chapter is only two pages, which once again detail some fairly obvious information such as the various parts of the train couplings and bogies. From that point on, the book gets interesting. The real core of the book consists of the three chapters that McKee has devoted to three different train models. Instead of just giving you the plans to build the locomotive and two carriages, McKee has shared the design process itself and gives some useful design and building tips before showing you the instructions.

The first model is a glorious model of a GP-38 locomotive (if you want to see the finished models then you can get decent-sized pictures on McKee's site). It might have been better to have had this model last of the three, as it is the most complex and I found it the hardest to make with my Lego collection - there are more specialized parts in this model and I to change the design in a couple of spots. Given the great look of the finished model, this isn't too much of a complaint.

The second example is a refrigerated car (or "reefer car" in train yard slang). I found that I couldn't build this car in the all-green of the book design but had the parts to build it in red. Since, as McKee points out, these sorts of cars are to be found in dozens of different paint jobs I don't feel this was a problem. There are considerably fewer specialized parts in this model.

The third example is a container car (with containers), which is the easiest to build and uses few specialized pieces you are unlikely to have if you own a train set already. Once again my only real problem was one of having exactly the same colour as the book -- one of my containers has red doors instead of white, for example.

I hope from my descriptions of the chapter you can see why I think the model order is wrong -- I'd completely reverse the order of these three chapters.

For an early teen (or older) reader, the strength of this book is the tips and encouragement McKee gives in these three chapters for designing your own locomotives and carriages. There are dozens of little tips and tricks on creating a visually pleasing and playable model design. Younger readers may not appreciate McKee's excellent advice on creating your own designs as much as older readers, but they will enjoy building the models all the same.

There is a final chapter on building track layouts, including some useful tips on building track inclines, and finally two short appendices, one on where to buy Lego and a glossary (McKee labels it "terminology").

Originally (before publication, that is), this book was advertised at $24.95. The actual cover price is $19.95, though, and No Starch have dropped the price again. At the new price of $14.95, it becomes much more attractive and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in designing and building their own Lego train locomotives and carriages. The readable, simple style and clear build instructions make it enjoyable for quite young readers and older, more dedicated builders will appreciate the design tips. Lego have train sets that they advise are for 8 years old or older, and I believe the average seven-year-old would have no problem understanding the build instructions in this book.

You can purchase Getting Started with Lego Trains from bn.com. (They're asking the full cover price for now, but that may change.) Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting abstruse information on Ultima creator Richard Garriott's mysterious new MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, as referenced in a recent Slashdot Games post dealing with Korean MMO behemoth NCSoft, who purchased the nascent game for "$33.4 million in stock and cash" back in 2001. An online chat transcript from early 2003 noted that "many people that worked on [cancelled MMO Ultima Online 2] are now with NCsoft working on Tabula Rasa", and more recently, a Richard Garriott lecture at the Austin Game Conference mentioned that the game "will most likely utilize a massively multiplayer metaworld for player matching and instantiated spaces for smaller groups of matched players", but almost nothing about the game has yet been revealed. The clearest indication yet comes from several recently-posted pieces of concept art, as noted earlier this week, showing an alien planet called Eera as the main setting, and mentioning such oddities as "Eeran Wastelanders [which] will beguile you with psychic hallucinations."

The Importance of writes "As noted previously, a couple of weeks ago BMG released a new CD by Anthony Hamilton that included DRM. Slashdot readers speculated that the system wouldn't work. Now there is a report proving it doesn't work by Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton's computer science department and the author of an earlier, definitive report (PDF, HTML version) on first generation CD copy protection. Famed computer scientist Ed Felten asks: "Is this the end of the road for CD copy protection?" His answer? "It ought to be.""

Thanks to IGN PC for their article indicating that LucasArts have cancelled Full Throttle:Hell On Wheels, the partially completed PC sequel to the classic point 'n click adventure. Simon Jeffery, president of LucasArts said: "We do not want to disappoint the many fans of Full Throttle and hope everyone can understand how committed we are to delivering the best quality gaming experience that we possibly can." The official Full Throttle sequel homepage has been removed, although its Google cache is still available.

garyebickford writes "IMHO the Open Source community (whatever that is) needs a Red Team project. This would be an open source project, but its output would be a process rather than a piece of software. If such a group exists, I'm not aware of it. This document and this page [from the Google cache] are from a commercial company (picked at random from a Google search) that provides similar services. The OS Red Team would provide 3rd party security testing, code review and evaluation for open source projects prior to release, providing a 'report card' stating what has been reviewed and tested, and recommending fixes. When a package is released, the Team's 'weather report' stating the probabilities that a package would survive different kinds of attack would be a valuable piece of information for prospective users." Do you think the Open Source Community would benefit from such an effort?

"The Team could also provide a set of recommended processes and tools for O.S. projects to follow prior to submission to the Red Team test queue. This by itself would be a valuable tool.

Such teams are sometimes used by companies to test the security of their networks and software. The O.S. community have done an excellent job so far, but as open source is used more and more by the mainstream computer users, vetting by a 3rd party would help make many organizations more likely to accept a piece of O.S. software.

The Team would, like any open source project, be comprised of both experts and newbies. The newbies would have the opportunity of doing real testing under the guidance of folks who know more, thereby becoming more expert themselves. The experts would provide a centralized open-source-oriented set of recommendations and specialized review as needed.

Either the Red Team or its members could also provide paid services for commercial software, and could participate with university CS departments in training students, providing the opportunity for valuable cross-training between schools. It might even be possible to arrange course credit for work on the Team.

Many Open Source projects could benefit from such a 3rd party group to recommend development procedures, code styles, and actual testing to teach and motivate better security practices in code design. The plain fact is that many (most?) of us developers are not completely 'up' on the issue of security - it's a very dynamic area of specialization. This initiative could be another resource that will be useful in establishing OS in the mainstream."