Slashdot Mirror

William Tanksley writes "For all those not yet tired of Java: Aromasoft has announced a Java-based OS for handheld devices, Teapot. It's allegedly Personal Java 3.0 compliant, and cleanroom engineered (which probably means no Sun code, although I'm not certain)." Is it just me, or is everyone working on a really cool Java project, and dismissing Sun at the same time.

Brian Koehler asks: "With all the news about Napster lately, I'm wondering if the Street Performer Protocol would really work in practice. Does anyone know if this has been studied before? If not, here's a questionaire and here are the results." There weren't many votes when I checked a week ago. You all might want to stop by and let your views be known. We've talked about this before, but this was before Napster was popular, and the highly-visible court case. Have your opinions changed since then?

Brazilian Geek writes: "This is interesting ... Here's a link to the Caffeine Vault. Everything you wanted to know about every geek's favorite drug. BTW, did you know that caffeine can kill? Here's a handy table with the caffeine content of some popular soft drinks and different brews of coffee."

I'm here at Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I took the Quickies to the crowd and let them pick some of today's Quickies. Hope you like them. CitizenC told us to check out The Kama Sutra of Winnie the Pooh. Scary. alpha264 wrote in about a pegboard computer." Darkness Productions told us that Spaz Labs was back." Phrogman shared a huge collection of Space Images now available on Spaceref.com. kbolton told us to look at streaming anime for free. scampbell said that Yamaha Paper Craft has updated their rare-animal paper sculpture collection to include the Yellow-eyed Penguin. _endgame mentioned that voting has begun for the Freenet Logo." An anonymous coward wrote in about the Men of Sieg Hall calendar. I included that one for Telsa. cdlu wrote (from about ten feet away) about this thing that creates much annoyance from the console. MURL said that Christopher Lee has been cast in the role of a charismatic separatist in Episode II. And finally, I just wanted to mention that Dave Taylor from that company stopped by just to make sure that he wasn't mentioned in the Quickies. Teehee.

toph42 asks: "I am impressed by the technology of the IEEE 1394 interface, but I am disappointed at the performance of the hard drives I have seen. I need to find a hard drive that leaves out the IDE bottleneck and attaches to Firewire natively, without an IDE bridge. Does such a thing exist?"

Chicken can run writes: "Kaydara announced Thursday in a press release the port of FilmBox to Red Hat Linux V6.2. FilmBox is a real-time character animation and motion capture system and was the software behind the groovy slow-motion camera fx in The Matrix. What is interesting is that it is the first such system to be available on Red Hat Linux, opening further the door to major 3D production oportunities on the OS."

DanPeng asks: "It looks like Autodesk has been pulling the same kind of proprietary file-format monopoly tactics with AutoCAD that Microsoft has been pulling with Office. The difference between Office and AutoCAD, however, is that an organization, the OpenDWG Alliance has been formed by competing companies to reverse-engineer the AutoCAD DWG format. With the amount of funding that it gets, it is actually quite functional and successful, with millions of users. Even when Autodesk revised the format for AutoCAD 2000, the OpenDWG Alliance fully reverse-engineered it within eight weeks. Now, why can't Corel, Lotus, Sun, etc. band together and reverse-engineer Microsoft's file formats properly?"

Good question.

I wonder if it has something to do with the mentality of the players involved. I don't think Sun, Corel or Lotus ever thought that they might be able to get together so that they could compete on the Office market, I think they all looked to carve out pieces of the market with their own suites, making such collaboration impossible. Despite popular misperception, Applix does not convert DOC, it converts RTF (which may be close enough for some people). Star Office is striving toward this holy grail, but they aren't quite there yet. So maybe it's not too late for folks to pool resources and finally get the job done. In fact, with the eyes of the court on Microsoft, now might be the perfect time.

On the other hand, we have DWG, which is a fairly rich format that deals with the description of 3D objects. Could decoding a file format that deals with text and its presentation really be that much more difficult to reverse engineer? I'd guess this depends more on the design behind said file format. If one of the main goals of the .DOC format is obfuscation, this could be difficult indeed, but I wouldn't say that it's impossible ... not for three big corporations, nor for thousands of loosely organized coders. It's one thing to have control of a file format, but it's another to be put into the position of having to change the format constantly in order to stay in the game. If Microsoft is placed in this situation, the onus would be on them to either concede the format until the next major release is made, or shorten the upgrade cycle on Office. How many businesses would stick with an office suite which forced users to upgrade every eight weeks just to remain compatible? If something like this were to happen, we might finally be able to put a dent in the everpresent Office monopoly.

So why hasn't .DOC been reverse engineered? I would think that if this can happen to the DWG format then it can happen to any proprietary format. Have we tried, or has Microsoft's reputation, both professionally and legally, kept people from really thinking about it?

HoserHead writes: "For those who are really worried about the Unisys patent on LZW compression in GIF files, the answer may soon be at hand: MNG is on the way. PNG has a brother in MNG, which is the free alternative to animated GIFs. Tim Rowley has recently sent Mozilla hackers a checkin of preliminary MNG support, as can be read here (Necko/Imglib section). Now, all that's needed is MNG export support for the GIMP!"

Booker noted that cryptome has the DeCSS deposition now online for folks to read it. Hopefully someone can post a translation: I'm reading it and just seeing a lot of objecting and refusing to answer questions.

Chris Benard asks: "I frequently have problems with X just taking control of my keyboard, but not my mouse. My mouse still moves, but it isn't able to interact with X (not unlike a windows freeze). However, I would like to know if there is a program to listen on a serial port for commands and execute them as root. I have an HP48G calculator, and I would like to make a few short commands to execute from it to my serial port, such as killall -9 X and killall -9 netscape-communicator. Please let me know of any programs existing and any SDKs that I might use to produce my own program. " Has anyone managed to come up with a hack that might work for this situation?

kaphka writes "Sony will be freely licensing its Playstation 2 platform, as well as opening its architecture, according to this TechWeb article. I guess that's one way to deal with the emulators."

CokeBear writes "Join the protest against the DMCA at Stanford University, May 18, noon - 2:00pm. Details at http://zgp.org/~dmarti/dmca/."

relyt writes "If you get spam, check out Spam Recycle. Forward them your spam, and they will prosecute the spammers for you, giving you time to do other things. It is also is supported by CAUCE! Send them your spam, and their trained monkeys will poke it, prod it, and kill it. " Somehow I'm skeptical, but hey, I get spammed every 48 hours to buy toner and I don't even own a printer. Sure would be nice if it would stop ;)

Booker asks: "Are there any public domain repositories for sounds? Sort of like Propaganda for your speakers? Audio cues can really enhance a desktop design, but most of what is currently out there consists of a small number of bleeps, bloops, and buzzes. Of the window managers / desktops which do ship some default sounds (E, gnome, KDE...), where did those come from? If someone were to start such a repository, what should the file format be?"

King Monkey asks: "Over the past year or so I have see several mentions on the Interet about connecting computrs together in order to pool processing power and resources. I have not yet however seen anywhere that exlains the differences between the various implementations. What is the difference (if any) between clustering, Beowulf and Parametric processing. These are just the ones I have heard about. I am sure there are more I have not heard about. I would also like to learn about these."

Krendle writes: "A company named ISky is claiming that they will deliver high speed (2mbps down, 1/2mbps up) 2-way satellite Internet access by the end of 2001. One issue I've seen raised in newsgroups (in reference to satellite internet in general) is that of lag. With Internet applications like telephony and online gaming, etc., gaining popularity this is an important issue. 2Mbps from the sky still sounds cool to me, especially where we can't even get cable TV. What do you guys think -- will latency be a problem?" I'd be happy to "settle" for always-on wireless access faster than dial-up and cheap as DSL, but the iSKY Q&A page is short on price details. But it does say "iSKY is planning on being able to support all platforms including Macintosh, Linux, Solaris and Windows."

DarkenWood writes "I just got an email from Microsoft about the x-box. They have officially unveiled it." 600mhz, NVIDIA Video, 4x DVD Player.

Booker asks: "Microsoft has been the driving force behind the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), a system by which education-related applications can communicate with each other via XML messages. Although Microsoft is the coordinator, the spec seems extremely open, and something that Linux applications could easily work with. Many vendors have signed on to the SIF, and it looks like it will become a standard, at least in North America. What do you think? Could Linux stake a claim as a server for this new standard? What would it take to port this code?" This would be cool. Anyone interested in tackling this one?

"One of the things Microsoft has done to support this standard is to release a Zone Integration Server which manages the queuing and authentication between the various client applications attached to it. The interesting thing, though, is that the source code is available, and the license is quite liberal - liberal enough, I think, that a Linux port would be possible.

to'c wrote: "17-year-old Viviana Risca wins US$100,000 from Intel for her work in 'DNA-based Steganography.' Talk about combining hot technologies! With a bit of gene-splicing, that next pigeon you clone wouldn't need to carry a message. It would be the message! Full story here." Interesting test message she chose, too.

Hasdi Hashim writes, "NEC Corporation is using the first generation National Semiconductor chipset in the world's first Bluetooth interoperable notebook PCs with a built-in antenna, displayed at CeBit 2000."

mowa sent us a link to the one of the latest interviews on sendmail.net. This time around they're talking with Bruce Perens, concerned primarily with the issue of patents. The interview uses Amazon as its example of patents gone awry - nothing much new here, but yet another perspective on the whole issue.

Update: 02/16 11:40 by michael : A while back, we received a submission that never made it into a story of its own, but will fit nicely here. Bryce wrote: "Several of the WorldForge developers, impressed at the quality of comments on the patent story posted a few days ago and wanting to see those comments preserved in a useful form, edited all of the replies into a useful, readable set of documents. The article is most definitely, "Written by Slashdot, For Slashdot". Many of our team members put in a few hours each sorting and summarizing, in the hopes it'd get some good press for WorldForge."

karrde writes "Yahoo Biz has a story here about CoSource.com being bought out by Applix. Seems the president of CoSource will still control it, along w/ controling the Linux division of Applix. "

Edouard asks: "Right now I'm sitting in the instrument room of a 60 meter seismic exploration boat, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. We need to have a 24/7 link with our main office, both phone and Network, so we can also read our mail, surf the web and of course read Slashdot. We're using a fast satellite link for that. When thinking about it, it's quite a weird place to read Slashdot - or just surf the web for that matter. What about other readers? Where's the strangest place where you ever read your favorite web site or accessed the Internet? In a cave? Bottom of the Sea? Maybe from the space shuttle?" Interesting question, and one that's bound to get more interesting as the Internet grows.

Grey writes "The Age has a report that a Houston entrepreneur sold the name "business.com" for US$7.5 million. " Sheesh - I thought the Altavista domain name sale was really high. I think it's time for to start auctioning off such great names as Cowboyneal.net, CmdrTaco, and, of course, hemos.net. Do I hear 1 billion? *grin*

terrified writes "A Norwegian company called Screen Media is advertising a new product, called the Freepad, on their website. Apparently it is a Linux-based portable device with wireless technology, letting you roam about 300m from its "base station." This thing looks quite promising, but unfortunately there's next to nothing in the way of information on their website. " Its a tablet style machine does look pretty excellent, but its tough to make out much more.

Rudolf writes "Newsweek has an article this week, available here, about NASA calculating that space probes, such as Pioneer 10, 11, and Ulysses, are slowing down more than they should. A team of astronomers and physicists couldn't figure it out, so they published their findings in Physical Review Letters to generate discussion. Several possible causes of the slowing have been discussed, but nothing that completely solves the puzzle. Anyone care to rethink gravity and time?" Update: 09/29 09:00 by H :Thanks to Mark for his link to the original citation.

terrified writes "This little blurb on Yahoo news this morning says that Linus is hinting at an announcement from Transmeta at the November Comdex in Las Vegas. " We need to set up some pools: When the secret will be revealed, and maybe some sort of pools for what the secret is. Transmeta employees who leak data to me will be given a cut if I win ;)

terrified writes "According to the Debian Weekly News, Debian evangelist Bruce Perens has talked to Corel and they said it would be fixed. Here's the relevant text: "Corel has started a closed beta test of their Corel Linux distribution. Unfortunatly, they did so under a very restrictive license, that violates the GPL in several respects. The good news is that Bruce Perens has already contected Corel and we're promised that this will be fixed." I'm not sure about how they plan to "fix" it - isn't that a relatively easy thing to do, in light of the GPL nature of the code? The Debian Weekly News is available here. The text of the message Bruce sent to the Debian-User group is here. "

terrified gave us the hook-up to a recent ZD-Net column about Sun's recent moves in relation to Linux. The author's contention is that Sun is using Linux as a pawn in their holy war against Microsoft. A ell-argued piece.

terrified wrote to to us with the official word that Visio has been purchased by Microsoft. Visio makes some incredible network diagramming and technical drawing software and is used extensively worldwide. The deal was a 1.3$US billion dollar stock swap between the two companies.

MrSpock writes "John Walker, founder of AutoCAD's holding companay Autodesk, has written a 200 page weight loss guide called The Hacker's Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition that takes a very hacker-friendly perspective on weight loss (and god knows many of us hackers need to lose weight). If your Geek Code includes "s:+>:", then you might want to look into the book. It's not a dry read, and seems to be pretty well-reasoned. " I especially liked Walker's "Eat Watch" concept. It's funny, yes, but it also makes good sense. I heartily recommend this online book to any Slashdot reader who is starting to think about entering Michelin Tire Man lookalike contests.

Joe Drew wrote in to give us his perspective on a debate that is quite the rage these days: the BSD License vs the GPL. He has written up a summary of why he prefers the GPL, and I think it might be worth a read- especially if you have been wondering about this stuff (and according to my INBOX, many of you are).

The following was written by Slashdot reader Joe Drew

The GPL vs the BSD License: A GPL advocate's perspective

Recently, there has been a lot of anti-GPL sentiment in the BSD camps. A cynic would say that they are simply jealous over the GPL's (and Linux') success; however, with a careful examination of reality one notices that the BSD license is no less, perhaps more successful than the GPL, and the BSD variants are thriving in their own niches. So why the anti-GPL sentiment? Personally, I believe it's two things.

1. BSD advocates are maybe just a little, tiny bit bitter over the fact that Linux is perceived to be more successful than BSD. Everyone with his head screwed on straight knows that neither of these two factions are going away, but nonetheless, there may be some resentment there. By creating awareness of their OSen, they can draw attention to it.
2. Some BSD advocates mistake the anti-proprietary slant to the GPL as pro-communist or anti-capitalist, both of which are blatantly foolish and incorrect.

The GPL exists because Richard Stallman, rms, wanted to ensure the freedom of software forever. Free Software, of all its types, thrived then and thrives now; however, the GPL is one of the only licenses which guarantees that Free Software cannot become non-Free. This doesn't mean that money can't exchange hands over Free Software, only that it can't become proprietary.

When using the BSD license, your software is just as Free as when you use the GPL. However, a company can take your code, incorporate it into its own proprietary product, and (depending on the type of BSD license, with or without advertising clause) you can receive no compensation for your work, perhaps not even credit. If that's exactly what you want, then the BSD license is for you. However, it seems just a little bit dangerous for a lot of Free Software authors.

This isn't possible with the GPL. It's always there, blatantly in your face, telling you ``You may not use this code in proprietary ventures.'' If a company takes your work, repackages it and sells the repackaging and service for it, your code is still available. It isn't legally permissible for them to take your code, incorporate it into another product and sell that product.

The BSD license is a fine license. It does exactly what it's meant to do, which is get the software out there. For a lot of Free Software authors, that's exactly what they want. However, for some people, that's not good enough -- they want to give everyone the freedom to do with the code what they will, but they don't want to give people the right to make the code proprietary.

The GPL is very popular, and very effective, because it protects people's Free Software, while still allowing them the freedom to do with it essentially whatever they want. Many people make a living selling and creating Free Software; this number will only increase as its benefits become more publicised and well-known.

The bottom line is, the GPL is not anti-commercial or anti- capitalistic; it is only anti-proprietary. The BSD license, on the other hand, is very unrestrictive, and allows proprietary knockoffs. Which you choose depends on what you need and what you value. There's nothing more to it than that.

Joe Drew wrote in to give us his perspective on a debate that is quite the rage these days: the BSD License vs the GPL. He has written up a summary of why he prefers the GPL, and I think it might be worth a read- especially if you have been wondering about this stuff (and according to my INBOX, many of you are).

The following was written by Slashdot reader Joe Drew

The GPL vs the BSD License: A GPL advocate's perspective

Recently, there has been a lot of anti-GPL sentiment in the BSD camps. A cynic would say that they are simply jealous over the GPL's (and Linux') success; however, with a careful examination of reality one notices that the BSD license is no less, perhaps more successful than the GPL, and the BSD variants are thriving in their own niches. So why the anti-GPL sentiment? Personally, I believe it's two things.

1. BSD advocates are maybe just a little, tiny bit bitter over the fact that Linux is perceived to be more successful than BSD. Everyone with his head screwed on straight knows that neither of these two factions are going away, but nonetheless, there may be some resentment there. By creating awareness of their OSen, they can draw attention to it.
2. Some BSD advocates mistake the anti-proprietary slant to the GPL as pro-communist or anti-capitalist, both of which are blatantly foolish and incorrect.

The GPL exists because Richard Stallman, rms, wanted to ensure the freedom of software forever. Free Software, of all its types, thrived then and thrives now; however, the GPL is one of the only licenses which guarantees that Free Software cannot become non-Free. This doesn't mean that money can't exchange hands over Free Software, only that it can't become proprietary.

When using the BSD license, your software is just as Free as when you use the GPL. However, a company can take your code, incorporate it into its own proprietary product, and (depending on the type of BSD license, with or without advertising clause) you can receive no compensation for your work, perhaps not even credit. If that's exactly what you want, then the BSD license is for you. However, it seems just a little bit dangerous for a lot of Free Software authors.

This isn't possible with the GPL. It's always there, blatantly in your face, telling you ``You may not use this code in proprietary ventures.'' If a company takes your work, repackages it and sells the repackaging and service for it, your code is still available. It isn't legally permissible for them to take your code, incorporate it into another product and sell that product.

The BSD license is a fine license. It does exactly what it's meant to do, which is get the software out there. For a lot of Free Software authors, that's exactly what they want. However, for some people, that's not good enough -- they want to give everyone the freedom to do with the code what they will, but they don't want to give people the right to make the code proprietary.

The GPL is very popular, and very effective, because it protects people's Free Software, while still allowing them the freedom to do with it essentially whatever they want. Many people make a living selling and creating Free Software; this number will only increase as its benefits become more publicised and well-known.

The bottom line is, the GPL is not anti-commercial or anti- capitalistic; it is only anti-proprietary. The BSD license, on the other hand, is very unrestrictive, and allows proprietary knockoffs. Which you choose depends on what you need and what you value. There's nothing more to it than that.

Hasdi R Hashim wrote in to tell us that Intel has released theInstruction Set for the merced. You'll enjoy it if you're the sort that gets off on this stuff anyway.. "

Rudolf writes "Here in Sacramento, CA, a court has ruled that an ex-employee of Intel does NOT have the right to send mass-mail to current Intel employees. The judge ruled that "The mere connection of Intel's e-mail system with the Internet does not convert it into a public forum." The court finds that Hamidi's e-mails are not protected speech." The Sacramento Bee has the story here. " I'm torn on this one-I'd hate to get the mail from this guy, but the EFF (quoted in the article) has a good point as well.

gopher writes " IMBDEV has just started shipping a customizable MP3 decoder board that can use either your computers serial or parallel port. It also comes with complete source code and prototyping space so that it can be customized." I'm not quite sure what to make of this.

jsparkes asks: "I haven't been able to find definitive information on mounting FAT32 filesystems in linux. It seems like it was implemented by Gordon Chaffee, who has this Fat32 homepage. It seems that it was added in 2.0.34 and should also be in 2.2.X. Does it work? Is just like an ext2 fs, or are there limitations? I'd like to dual boot linux and win98, but if I can't use my large FAT32 partitions, it would be pointless. (I have a 10G win98 drive, and will use a 1.2G for linux..)"

AMK writes "You'll probably all remember the late February announcement that the upcoming season of "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" will be its last. Some recent news: this Wired article talks about the mounting fan campaigns to save MST3K from cancellation. Time to use the /. effect for good instead of evil, so write some polite letters of support, and increase the ratings by recruiting more people to watch the show. " I wish MediaOne wasn't the crappiest cable company on the planet earth. I don't get SciFi, Comedy Central, or the Cartoon Network. I don't even get a preview channel. But I do get several religion channels, shopping channels, and news channels that I never watch. I gotta get a dish. Maybe I'll Ask Slashdot about that *grin*. God I loved MST3k.

Eric Harlow, author of Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK has written a book well worth reading. A good first round of things, click below to find out how to write more of applications/widgets/whatever. Thanks to A.M. Kuchling for the review. Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK author Eric Harlow pages publisher New Riders rating 6 reviewer A.M. Kuchling ISBN summary A reasonably good first book on GTK+, though it's not likely to become the definitive one unless the second edition makes some minor improvements. REVIEW: Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK Eric Harlow New Riders

Nutshell
Review: A reasonably good first book on GTK+, though it's not likely to become the definitive one unless the second edition makes some minor improvements.
Rating: 6/10 A.M. Kuchling The Scenario-->

The GTK+ GUI toolkit was developed for the GIMP, and was subsequently adopted by both the current Mozilla codebase and the GNOME project. I believe this is the first formally published documentation for the GTK+ toolkit. (It is not a generic guide to application development under Linux, even though the spine of the book reads only "Developing Linux Applications".)

The book provides good coverage of the fundamentals that you need to know: the basic data structures provided by GLIB; the overviews of buttons, menus, dialog boxes, and all the other major widgets; and four sample applications -- a calculator, text editor, Minesweeper game, molecule viewer, and a simple Defender game. Harlow's development of each topic is understandable and helpful, making the book a vast improvement over struggling through the toolkit's source code, and well worth purchasing if you want to program with GTK+.

My one major problem with the book is, surprisingly, wishing there were more screenshots in it. The opposite is true of most computer books, because a screenshot and a paragraph of text can be made to fill a whole page, and helps immensely in padding out a book to make it look bulky and comprehensive. This book goes to the opposite extreme; there's no screenshot of the calculator application at all, and only one or two screenshots for each of the other sample programs.

Another flaw is that the book seems to contain every single line of code for the sample applications. As a general rule, in any given C program, 90% of the code is uninteresting; only 10% contains the heart of the program, and the rest is all scaffolding. I would have preferred to see a dissection of the central portions of each program in pseudocode and small chunks of C code, relying on the Web to get the complete distribution, instead of having to flip past page after monospaced page of program listings. So What's In It For Me?-->

This book rates 6 out of 10 points, because it covers GTK+ quite well, and provides you with the basic information you'll need to hack with it. It would get 7 out of 10 points if there were fewer pages of code and more illustrative screenshots.

Purchase this book over at Computer Literacy.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to GTK+
2. GLIB
3. Developing GUI Applications
4. Basic Widgets
5. Menus, Toolbars, and Tooltips
6. More Widgets: Frames, Text, Dialog Boxes, File Selection Dialog Box, Progress Bar
7. Writing a Calculator Application
8. Developing a Simple Word Processor
9. Minesweeper
10. Graphics Drawing Kit
11. Styles, Colors, Fonts, Cursors, and Referencing
12. Molecule Viewer Using GDK
13. Sprites and Animation
14. Trees, Clists, and Tabs
15. Creating Your Own Widgets

dtor writes "P3 Id? Worry about the P2 Id. According to this MSNBC article, some P2s ship with a P3-like unique ID enabled. Apparently, this was an mistake at the factory." Intel apparently was testing the process, used in the PIIIs on some of their PII mobile lines, and someone forgot to turn that circuit off before they left the factory. Intel is saying that a BIOS update is out that will take care of the problem - anyone have a link to that?

HoserHead writes "Netscape has released a new JVM-JIT compiler called ElectricalFire. It originally started as an in-house commercial compiler project but is now purely Open Source: there are now no plans to turn it into a commercial product. ElectricalFire also contains none of Sun's code. Check it out at its homepage on mozilla.org." It's NPL'd and they are calling for developers.

Hasdi R Hashim writes "The searchable lyrics site has been shut down by local authorities today believe it or not. Once again, the big megalomaniac company goes after non-profit little fish." With over a million hits a day, one would think the music industry would know better than to irritate that many consumers.

HoserHead writes "The new Netcraft Web Server Survey is out, and on it Apache has bypassed the two million site mark. In fact, it was the only web server software which increased in percentage: Everything else decreased. Apache now controls 54% of the web. Another Open Source Software triumph! "

MagicFab writes "Apparently another ASP cross-platform implementation named I-ASP has been made ready for prime time by Halcyon Soft. It's a Java servlet so basically it can run on many Java platforms and server combinations (including Linux/Apache which are listed). You can even apply for a beta by filling their online form. "

ryutin wrote in to send us a link to a front page story in The Washington Post all about Eric S. Raymond. Lots of interesting quotes, but not a lot about Open Source, its still fairly entertaining.

Joshua Hinman writes "Iomega and Liquid Audio are working on a new audio format, similar to the old Liquid Audio format, with compression comparable to MP3, that will be bound to a particular Zip disk's serial number (every zip disk has a unique one) to prevent copying. I think it's a dumb idea (Unless they put a Zip drive in the Rio). It will probably be cracked soon enough, anyway. " remember when every video came had copy protection? I thought we were finally getting past that. Sheesh. Why torture your paying customers by restricting them like this?

The Alchemist wrote in to say that Lotus Notes 4.6a now runs on Wine-981109. Also, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote in to say "Great news! WINE Office 97! Both Winword and Excel work. Not perfect, but at least you can type :-) Older version supported Word 2.0 and 6.0, but at last the WINE team is "up to speed". And even before Corel is coming in..." I see bright shiny things in our future, like maybe I can get addicted to Diablo again...

HoserHead writes "Canada has agreed not to impose mandatory key escrow and seemingly kept strong crypto exports loose. I'm glad to see our government behaving intelligently - perhaps the United States could take a hint? "

HoserHead wrote in to let us in on the skinny on recent mozilla.org developments. Basically, it goes like this - binaries built nightly are available for download, and the Win32 ones can integrate with the IE/Win98 Active Desktop. Screenshots are here, but I think it's a personal workstation, so can we get a mirror or two (small shots)? I wonder if we're on track to beating them at their own game...

Jeremy Arnold has written an essay on what he calls LUTE- the Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation project. It could help make programs more usable by organizing volunteers to test software and clean things up. Far to often great programmers aren't the best at creating the ideal user interface. Perhaps this project could put people who understand the human factors in touch with the guys who write the killer code. Hit the link below to read it and throw in your 2 bits. The following was written by Slashdot reader Jeremy Arnold The LUTE Project Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation Last week on Slashdot an article was posted about an essay on user interface design. As a comment to that article I brought forth an idea for a group of people who would do usability testing for Open Source Linux projects. The response to the idea was generally positive, so I have now prepared this more formal proposal. If I can find a place to host web pages and a mailing list and Slashdot readers agree there is a need for this group and some are willing to volunteer their time to be part of it, the Lute project should be running shortly.

What is the Lute project? LUTE stands for "Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation". A bit redundant, but I like acronyms that form words. :) Usability testing is the process of testing the user interface for a piece of software to make sure that it makes sense to the user. "Makes sense" refers to the interface being intuitive and consistent, and generally that the user interface helps the user rather than frustrating them. Note that there is a difference between "usability testing" and just plain "testing". Lute does not exist to find bugs in software. The purpose is to find flaws in the user interface.

Most commercial software development includes a usability testing phase, and the most usable software generally includes usability testing throughout the development cycle. Large software development companies usually have a "usability testing lab" with lots of (somewhat) fancy equipment to aid them in this testing. This, of course, translates to money, which most open source projects do not have. Usability testing can be performed (though somewhat less effectively) with no special equipment, but it is an area which many open source developers are unfamiliar with, and most do not take the time to do it.

As Linux becomes more accepted in the commercial world and starts to be used by more "common users" rather than the traditional hacker types, software usability will become more and more important.

The Lute project is an attempt to address these issues by performing usability testing for open source projects. This testing will be performed for free by Lute volunteers. On the web, Lute will also serve as an information center for good user interface design as well as techniques for usability testing and evaluation.

Lute will not force developers to use certain toolkits (such as KDE/Qt or Gnome/GTK). In fact, when testing a program, Lute volunteers won't even be looking at the source code. In addition, Lute will not enforce strict standards (like forcing you to use 5 pixels between buttons and 10 point bold Helvetica font for menu text). Upon completing testing, the Lute volunteer wil l give an evaluation back to the developer about what aspects of the interface work well, and, more importantly, what aspects don't work well. The evaluator will also try to give the developer ideas on how to improve these aspects. It is up to the developer to choose whether or not to implement these changes, and how to do it.

How will Lute work? These details are subject to change, but this is how I envision Lute working. The developer will submit a request for an evaluation of his/her project. (Of course, most open source projects have multiple developers. In this case, one developer would act as the liaison to Lute.) This request will include a short description of the program, a list of features to be tested (sometimes this will be the whole program, other times just a few features may need to be tested), and a developer contact (email address).

Once a request has been submitted, it will probably be appended to a web page list of pending projects and sent out on a Lute mailing list. Lute evaluators can then choose to accept the project. The evaluator will write up a list of tasks to use for the test. These tasks are the things that the user will perform in order to give the evaluator a good feel for what works well and what doesn't. After preparing this task list, the evaluator will discuss it with the developer to make sure that the developer thinks it adequately covers the expected uses of the program. The evaluator would then find about 3 "average users" to test the program with, and report back to the developer with the findings.

Note that the definition of an "average user" could be a bit different for each project. For example, the average user of a programming IDE would be a programmer, while the average user of a web browser might be the evaluator's mother. Also note that the average users will generally be somebody the evaluator knows, and they must be able to meet in person to perform the evaluation. (If you disagree with this condition, go read some articles/books on usability testing and then post an informed comment here.)

This "formal testing" process could take a bit of time, and is probably overkill at times, especially when usability testing is performed regularly throughout the development cycle. In this case, a full formal test should certainly be performed from time to time, but at other times the developer might just need an "expert opinion" about how the usability of an application could be improved. For this, the developer might put in a request for an "expert opinion" (or perhaps this should be "somewhat informed opinion"), at which time a Lute evaluator could volunteer for the project and then look at the program and make recommendations based on their prior experience with and knowledge of user interface design and testing. Note that this is a supplement to the formal testing, and not a replacement. The formal testing can be much more effective; it just takes a bit more time and effort to do.

What roles are involved? Here is a description of the various roles which need to be fulfilled for this to work:

• Project Maintainer

  I am currently this person. I will be in charge of setting up the infrastructure for the project, including things like web pages and mailing lists. I will also be in charge of facilitating communication between Lute volunteers, and make the final decisions in policy matters. Most open source projects have some type of "benevolent dictator". Lute's "Project Maintainer" is the same type of thing.

  In case somebody cares, I am Jeremy Arnold (jeremy_a@bigfoot.com). Last spring I graduated from Utah State University with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and I now work as a Java Performance tester for IBM. I have little formal experience with user interface design, and my usability testing experience consists of about a week doing usability testing on a program I developed during a summer internship. I certainly don't claim to be an expert in this area, but it is something I find very interesting and in many ways it comes naturally to me. I have been a Linux user for about 4 years now, although I have never really (previously) taken a very active part in the Linux development community.

• Evaluator

  These are the people who will do most of the real work for Lute. They will then volunteer to evaluate the programs submitted by the developers, and report their findings back to the developer.

  While I don't expect the evaluators to have years of experience in usability testing, they will be required to have at least some knowledge in the area. At a minimum, this will probably mean they have to read some on-line information about it, and perhaps for their first project or two a more experienced evaluator will also evaluate the program and then give some feedback to the new evaluator about any areas they might be able to improve in. This is not meant to scare off people who would like to help; I just feel it is necessary in order to provide quality feedback to developers and not lose credibility for Lute. Anybody who has done some work with user interface design and knows the challenges involved could probably pick up the necessary knowledge to be an evaluator pretty quickly.

• Developer

  Developers are, of course, the people who are developing open source projects. More specifically, they are the ones developing open source projects with user interfaces. This does not necessarily mean graphical user interfaces, although most programs evaluated by Lute probably will have GUIs. Any program that interacts with the user has some kind of user interface, and can be evaluated by Lute.

  Lute will only evaluate programs at the request of a developer. The programs to be evaluated must be open source (as a matter of principle....I am not against closed source development for some projects, but Lute is really designed to help open source developers) and freely available (if the developers are charging users for their product, then they can afford to pay somebody for usability testing). I refuse to get into a debate about whether or not KDE is really free, but programs written using KDE/Qt fit the definition of free used in this paragraph, and are eligible for Lute evaluation.

  Lute will encourage (and perhaps require) the developer to read some general information on user interface design before we will evaluate their program. This is simply because it is a waste of time for us to evaluate a program that has no consideration for well-known design principles and then report on all the ways their program violates these principles. Any required reading will be as short as possible.

  Programs to be evaluated must have a reasonably functional interface. It is best to evaluate the user interface of a program before it is completed, so that the framework can be fixed before a lot of code is developed over it. However, even if the program is not complete, the user interface must be functional. If your program has a button labeled "Find a cure for cancer and generate world peace" (not necessarily a good name for a button), it doesn't have to actually find a cure for cancer and generate world peace, but if I press that button it should pop up a window that says that the cancer-curing peace-generating functionality is not implemented, rather than just sitting there or crashing the program or something.

• Average User

  The evaluator will test the program by observing average people use the program (performing the list of tasks given by the observer). These users are very important, as they can show the evaluator the types of difficulties that most people will have when using the program.

  Average users are not direct volunteers to Lute as the evaluators are. This is because evaluators need to be able to watch the users as they run the program, which means they must be geographically near the person. Because of this, evaluators will generally find average users among the people around them. Luckily, average computer users are pretty abundant in the world, so this shouldn't be a problem.

  Besides the need for geographical proximity, volunteers to be average users would not be desirable. If a person is an "average user" for 50 usability tests, they are no longer average. That person should consider becoming an evaluator.

• Web page/mailing list host

  As mentioned far above, the Lute project is also in need of somebody to host the needed web pages and mailing list(s). If the project becomes popular, I could afford to get a permanent connection to the Internet and use my machine as the host, but I would rather not spend that money until the project gets moving and looks like it is going to succeed. CGI (or perhaps Java servlets?) access on the web host would be really helpful, as I hope to get much of the process of submitting requests for evaluation and stuff automated. Even if the project does become quite popular, I wouldn't expect the mailing list to be extremely high volume or the web pages to need high bandwidth (except of course if the URL was posted on Slashdot).

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Post them here, and I will try to answer them. A lot of the details remain to be decided, most likely once there is a team of Lute evaluators. Note that all of the policy and procedure stuff in this article is not set in stone. It is just my thoughts on how things would work best. Like I said, I don't claim to be an expert, and it is quite possible (and even likely) that things could be done better.

"I want to help. What do I do?" I'm glad you would like to help. If you would like to be a Lute volunteer as an evaluator, web/mailing list host, send me email (jeremy_a@bigfoot.com) and let me know. Personal replies are unlikely for evaluators, but I will let you know once the mailing list is set up.