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An anonymous reader writes: Programmer Michael Fogleman recently built his own emulator for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. He's now put up a post sharing many technical insights he learned along the way. For example: "The NES used the MOS 6502 (at 1.79 MHz) as its CPU. The 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed in 1975. ... The 6502 had no multiply or divide instructions. And, of course, no floating point. There was a BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) mode but this was disabled in the NES version of the chip—possibly due to patent concerns. The 6502 had a 256-byte stack with no overflow detection. The 6502 had 151 opcodes (of a possible 256). The remaining 105 values are illegal / undocumented opcodes. Many of them crash the processor. But some of them perform possibly useful results by coincidence. As such, many of these have been given names based on what they do." It's an interesting look at how software and hardware interacted back then, and what it takes to emulate that in modern times. Fogleman released the source code on GitHub.

qubodup writes "Free Gamer, an open source gaming blog, has recently become the center of open source artists, developers and gamers. In its forums, the GPU-hungry Classical Java RPG and the Neverball-killer irrlamb have found their second home. So did sub-communities like extremist free gamers, who insist on games not only be free software but also to contain free content and want to build a knowledge base of existing free games. There are also free content artists, which address an old problem of open source games and want to supply graphics and sound for projects in need of game media."

AndyCater writes "If all goes according to plan, Debian should release both an update to Debian Sarge (3.1r6, henceforth to be oldstable) and a new stable release (Debian 4.0, which was codenamed Etch) — and announce the results of the election for Debian Project Leader — all within 12 hours. Sarge was updated late on April 7th UTC, Sam Hocevar was announced as DPL at about 00:30 UTC, and preparations for the release of Debian Etch are ongoing and look good for later on the 8th."

Amir Ansari asks: "There have been many comparisons between various archival media (hard drive, tape, magneto-optical, CD/DVD, and so on). Of course, the most important characteristics are permanence and portability, but what about the file systems involved? For instance, I routinely archive my data onto an external hard drive: easy to update and mirror, but which file system provides the best combination of reliability, future-proofing, data recovery, and availability across multiple platforms (Linux, OS X, BeOS/Zeta and Windows, in my case)? Open Source best guarantees the future availability of the standard and specification, but are file systems such as ext2 suitable for archival storage? Is journaling important?"

Grench writes "The BBC has an article on Microsoft's purchase of Lionhead Studios. They focus in particular on Peter Molyneux, and the kind of talents and expertise that he can bring to Microsoft's future gaming efforts. A sequel to Fable was mentioned as a probable endeavor." From the article: "Some of the giants of the games industry, such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, were reported to have been interested in acquiring Lionhead. But Microsoft has emerged as the victor, adding the studio to its roster of British gaming talent. In 2002, it acquired developers Rare in a $375m deal."

smallstepforman writes "In a classic example of "Do as I say, not as I do", Richard Grimes analyses the ratio of native to managed code in Microsoft's upcoming Vista Operating System. According to the analysis at Microsoft Vista and .NET, "Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework.""

In honor of Microsoft's 30th year, Epeeist writes "The BBC is running a Have Your Say article on Microsoft at 30." From that article: "Microsoft will always adapt and buy into other areas to keep themselves at the top. They're the company everyone loves to hate." While they're reflecting, most people are focusing on the now. teslatug writes "Brian Jones, a Microsoft PM on the Office team, has just confirmed that the new default XML format of Office 12 is not compatible with the GPL. Brian believes that LGPL may be compatible, but others have raised issues about the ability to redistribute." Relatedly, shades66 writes "Microsoft's Alan Yates tripped over his own words in responding to the Massachusetts Information Technology Division's late-August declaration for OpenDocument and other open software standards." For some more colourful commentary, smooth wombat writes "John Dvorak has written an article for MarketWatch in which he postulates that the reorganization by Microsoft is actually a prelude to its breakup into three separate entities."

neiljt writes "The BBC2 is to air an interview by Marc Lawson with Tim Berners-Lee this evening, where TBL offers his thoughts on the Read/Write web. A transcript of the interview is available from BBC News." From the article: "I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on [the web], finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don't like, are problems with humanity. This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it's communicating over so many other different media. I think it's a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it. "

Stanislav Blingstein writes "Cyberpunk just got a whole lot darker. The Escapist , by James Morris, takes the genre into a gloomy alley and gives it a good kicking. The main character, Bentley Dean, is more than just an anti-hero: he seems to enjoy being bad. His cast of accomplices aren't much better, either, and some are far worse. Most are pretty cartoon-like, too. But you still can't help liking Bentley Dean. He brings a certain charm to being a hacker with a cold-blooded killing streak." Read on for Blingstein's review. The Escapist author James Morris pages 167 publisher Ad Libbed Ltd rating 8 reviewer Stanislav Blingstein ISBN 1905290055 summary Cyberpunk with a darkly satirical edge

The Escapist is set in an indeterminate future. Space travel seems to exist, but most of the action takes place on Earth. And there's plenty of action, too. From page one, the book races along with scarcely a pause for breath, and by the time you've finished you've been around the world, met numerous bizarre competing factions, and uncovered the plot behind the mysterious Mind Invasions. The storyline takes in locations as far afield as Egypt, Malaysia, Israel, Las Vegas, New York, and London. It almost seems like a travelogue of all the places the author has been in his life, except seen through a warped lens of cyberpunk fiction.

In fact, the story seems almost arbitrary, like it was written as a stream of consciousness. Think Beat Generation, but penned by a Jack Kerouac who's fascinated by computers rather than drugs, jazz and driving. Bentley Dean is carried along by the increasingly frantic stream of events, each one hitting him sideways. All is revealed at the end, but you still get the feeling that many situations occur with no rhyme or reason -- a bit like real life, only with more explosions.

The ideas about future technology in The Escapist can vary from insightful to mundane. The central theme of cryogenic sabbaticals is rather amusing, though. These could be described as "holidays on ice." And though this is clearly a cyberpunk novel, not much of it actually takes place in cyberspace --that's more of a recurring theme in the background. Most of the action occurs in the flesh. This is maybe a good thing, as the novel's description of using virtual reality to explore the human mind is a bit 20th century, perhaps as a deliberate lampoon of how dated films like The Lawnmower Man seem today.

But that doesn't really matter. Most of the time, this is a very funny book. It's full of one-liners which take the present day and twist it to its logical extremes, so you can see just how ridiculous it is. The moon, with its low gravity, becomes a refuge for the overweight. Pandas are saved from extinction by being genetically re-engineered to like eating hamburgers. A strip club is named after Pee-Wee Herman. Bentley buys a fashionable suit made of paper, only to find it too noisy for creeping around at night.

Some of these ideas will have you laughing out loud, although a few of the gags are very much for the geeks in the audience, like the Windows Bar and Grill which takes three attempts to get your order right. There are also plenty of embedded cultural references for film buffs to spot, including HAL, Yoda and even James Bond quotations. You cant help feeling at times that the plot is just there to serve the jokes.

But the book also has a serious side. There's a deeper theme about artificial intelligence, and each chapter is headed by a quasi-philosophical statement. Some of these will really get you thinking, and some are deliberately silly, just to catch you out. If you're interested in the whole question of whether or not computers could ever think like us, and what that would mean, theres food for thought here, hidden among the humour. The Escapist is a book which just doesn't stop hitting you with idea after idea, some of them serious and some intended entirely for darkly comic relief.

The Escapist's main fault is just this -- it tries to do too much in too few pages. It's so fast that at times you have trouble keeping up, and sometimes you wish the characters would just slow down and admire the scenery. And if you need a truly sympathetic character to relate to in your novels, you might find Bentley Dean is just too mean. He's also too much like a cross between James Bond and Kevin Mitnick. But if you have a perverse streak, and a penchant for satire, you'll like The Escapist. You may even wish it was a bit longer.

As well as being available in printed form, The Escapist can also be bought as a PDF direct from the website. And since the novel is published under a Creative Commons license, once you've got hold of one of these PDFs, you can share it around and print it out as much as you like. The cover art is well worth seeing on a real book, though -- it has an evocative mystery all of its own.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

VernonNemitz writes "Over near San Francisco in California, USA, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is starting to reach the end of 15 years of development work on the National Ignition Facility. The goal is to use 192 high-powered laser beams to blast a pellet of frozen hydrogen isotopes, turning it into a tiny (and thus safe) hydrogen bomb. Currently 4 of the lasers have been commissioned for use in tests; the eventual goal is to get more energy out of the exploding pellet than is dumped into it. Personally I think they'd have an easier time of it if they combined different ideas, but what do I know?"

evilandi writes "The BBC are reporting that much of Manchester, England is without telephone service following a fire in a major underground tunnel system. The site in question is strongly suspected to be the 'Guardian' nuclear communications bunker system which is one of the main three UK subterranean communications backbone bunkers. The giveaway is this regional BBC news story which mentions Chapel Street, one of the very few entrance/exit points to the 'Guardian' system. If confirmed, Manchester could be without wired communications for some time. The MANAP Manchester Network Access Point regional Internet hub is officially reporting nothing, but a number of UK admins are seeing significant disruption."

David H. Rothman writes "'Winston Smith,' an unemployed American high school dropout self-named after 1984's hero, told my TeleRead.org site why he and buddies turned out Convert Lit to crack the Microsoft Reader e-book format. Winston makes clear he is pro-fair use and anti-piracy. Alas, new DMCAish legal restrictions in the United Kingdom will force the Dan Jackson Software site to shut off the Convert Lit downloading later this month. Just as in the States, free speech and fair use apparently matter less in the UK these days than they used to. According to Dan Jackson, Winston 'is indeed the real author of Convert LIT.' Meanwhile, if you're in a country without DMCAish thuggery and can host Dan at a new location, email him ASAP."

icke writes "Soon, the way you use your mouse could help prove who you are. According to a BBC News article, scientists have found a way for people to sign their name online using a mouse instead of a pen. The technology, based on the research from Queen Mary College, University of London by Peter McOwan, 'uses a neural network to pick out the unique features of the way that someone uses a mouse.'"

Ancipital was one of several who noted that a special patch is going into GCC. The file is README.SCO, and it is a short writeup about the SCO situation written by the FSF. It stops short of demanding that GCC developers strip SCO support from the compiler, and says more will be announced before the next compiler release.

Hulver writes "The BBC Domesday project, originally completed in 1986 and under threat (as reported in this old slashdot story) has had its data recovered. The contents of the laserdiscs have been put on DVD, and new programs written so that PCs can access the data. Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. Full details of the recovered data are at the Public Record Office website."

Dibyendu Majumdar writes "Dennis Ritchie has posted some court papers from the lawsuit by USL against BSDI about UNIX intellectual property. Some of the SCO claims, such as identical comments in the code, etc. also occur in the claims made by USL. Interesting read in the context of SCO vs IBM case."

visibleman asks: "Having recently damaged my right hand to the point where it is unusable for a month and only for light tasks after that I was wondering whether anyone in the community knows of any devices which replace the keyboard but require the use of only one hand. I remember a long time ago seeing in magazines something that had a single button per finger and relied on the user learning key combinations to make up letters but I have not seen this for ages, does anyone know what I am talking about?" Ask Slashdot covered this topic, twice: in this article from 1999 and a followup from 2001. For those readers who find themselves in this same situation, what solutions have you found and what were your experiences, good or bad? Are there any new devices in this vein that deserve mention or are the older solutions still the best?

neiljt writes "As a UK-based IT worker living about a 90-minute journey from London, I am interested in the idea of working from home, or teleworking. In the UK, however, the take-up of this practice has been less than frantic. My own immediate plan is to find work at home here in the UK, however my ultimate aim would be to find employment, which gives me the freedom to live where I choose. What barriers exist to working in the UK for a non-UK (e.g. US) employer. What about a UK citizen living outside the UK working for a UK or US employer? (Feel free to substitute your country of residence)"

"The arguments will probably be familiar to most here, but I will state them anyway, just to be sure you know how I'm thinking.

Advantages for me:

• Save journey time of 3 hours per day
• Save travel expenses
• Save travel frustration (delays, crowds, mobile phone idiocy, etc.)
• Be fresh and alert when I start work
• Feel better at the end of the working day
• Be at work promptly each day
• Work in a pleasant/relaxed environment
• Ready access to my (large) technical library

Advantages for my employer:

• Cost savings
• Office space savings
• Improved productivity
• Increased motivation

Advantages for society:

• Reduced traffic congestion
• Reduction in total travel and therefore pollution

There are a number of disadvantages and factors to consider, though none should be insurmountable. A couple might be:

• Employer needs to monitor quantity and quality of work performed
• Internet connectivity (mine currently limited to 56Kb)

The above illustrates that some take-up of the teleworking approach would be in the everybody's interests, but I am frustrated at the lack of good quality resources I have been able to find on the subject. There seems to be plenty available explaining the concept, but very little in the way of actual assignments or contacts. Of course I may have been looking in the wrong places, so if you know better (and I hope you do), please share.

It would be interesting to hear both from employers who support (or would support) this model, and from employees who have successfully negotiated employment at home.

In general, have your experiences been positive? If you have had problems, how have they been resolved? And now that the technology has been available for at least 10 years, will teleworking ever take off in the UK?"

spacemonkey asks: "I am a professional developer, but in my spare time I have been developing games for the Microsoft Smartphone platform. Included in this work is a port of gnuboy a GPL gameboy colour emulator. Where does the GPL stand on the question of codesigning applications where required? Basically gnuboy is available, with full source for smartphone, however there are a large number of users out there who are unable/unwilling to remove the certification requirements from their smartphone devices, so to allow for these users, I need to sign the code. To enter into the code signing program will cost me approximately £500. I am interested in signing the application to make it available to a wider audience, however since I am not running a charity I was wondering whether charging some nominal fee for the code signed version was compatible with the GPL or not. So users would have an option on a signed version for less than £5, or an unsigned version free, which will include the full source code. Am I allowed to charge for GPL software in this way, where the charge is to cover the packaging of the application into a signed form?"

Dr from the Source writes "Despite previous posts, tomorrow (April 25, 2003) is the real 50th anniversary of the publication of the famous paper by J. D. Watson and F. Crick in the Nature journal. Readers can download such paper, along with a few other classic ones from Nature's archive."

lotech writes "lik-sang has a review with full photos of the new Nintendo Ganeboy Advance SP. Not just supplying heaps of photos they have even beaten the pack on voiding the warranty and include heaps of internal photos. The handheld market is heating up with new releases from Nokia too and also the feature packed GP32. Oh and maybe then there maybe some Sony competition soon?"

neiljt writes "BBC News have a piece on NASA experiments to use IP for space missions. The article is a little low-tech, but more details available from NASA (OMNI). Is this the first Red Hat in space?" It's worth pointing out as well that Debian made the ride nearly six years ago. Still, great news.

Ancipital writes "Xiph.org (of Ogg Vorbis fame) have today announced that the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) project has joined the Xiph rebel alliance. The full story and press release can be found at the Xiph site. (FLAC is nice, because it gives you pristine lossless audio at roughtly 50% size reduction over uncompressed WAVs- you can store them on your hard drive/wherever and then transcode down to a lossy format when you need portability, yum!)"

Alien54 writes "Here's a guy who has done well taking digital photographs of the planets using not only a regular digital camera, but also using an old greyscale Quickcam. Lots of pics, of course, and some very nice shots of Mars and all the rest. He also has some higher end gear. See also these other related pages (link 1, link 2, link 3) Also worth looking at is the website of the QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group"

Warrior-GS writes "The final part of the Future of PC Gaming is up at GameSpy. This one deals with the future of user-created games and talks to developers and mod makers, as well as identifying tools that can assist them. There is also a Q&A with Warren Spector on where he thinks PC gaming is headed in the next several years." John Scabadone points to a "nice article featuring an update on the state of the handheld gaming industry along with a roundtable of some of the premier developers." Read on below for several more gaming updates, too.

pandrew writes "Square has openly admitted to doing something people have been asking for for many years now: a sequel! Though not what most people have asked for (i.e. Final Fantasy 7) this is still a very big step in the Final Fantasy line, since no game in the series has ever had a follow up with a connecting storyline."

k-hell writes "The Mother of All Games, Scorched Earth has been updated to allow for playing on Internet. Rendered in OpenGL, Scorched 3D now features a 3D island environment and LAN and Internet play. See screenshots here. You can download a Windows binary package and/or Windows source package here. At the same time, you should also grab the excellent server browser The All-Seeing Eye."

Lucifer writes "'Sega announced a list of new Sega AGES game titles for PlayStation 2, remakes of their classic Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn titles. Each game will retail for 2500 yen, and the first four titles are scheduled to release in Japan in summer 2003.' 15 years later and I'm going to start playing Phantasy Star again! ;-)"

Finally, bredroll writes "Attention fellow Geeks! Ever wanted to live 100ft underground in a ex British gov't nuclear bunker for three days and do nothing but geek at extreme levels and play LAN games? Well, we can help, This year's event includes food and bunks as well,

In-Bunker Events

• Battle Royale (Robot Wars-type event)
• Underground Noise Fest (see site)
• High-speed switched LAN
• Various LAN game tournaments
• NTK will be there
• + more ....

Users of all systems welcome, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac, anything, the more diverse the better. The bunker is located in Essex (UK) near the town of Brentwood. Details about booking places and prices are on our site."

PinchDuck writes "Check out this site to get a tour of London Underground stations that have been abandoned during the century+ history of the commuter system. You can apparently still get to some of them! (though not by taking the Tube, obviously). I wish I had found this site 2 weeks ago, when I went to London, but now my geeky explorations must wait until my next visit (having just flown back in to Detroit today)."

caveman writes "In this article at ElectronicNews.com, BAE systems have joined forces with Roke Manor Research (part of Siemens) to further develop a method of using mobile telephone base station signals as a form of radar, capable of detecting periscopes, boats, and aircraft up to several kilometers offshore, as well as detecting vehicles and people moving into and out of areas within range. The company doesn't say exactly how accurate the system will be, but they have a similar system which calculates height which is accurate to ten meters. The parts necessary to build a receiver cost about $3000, which is extremely cheap as radar systems go."

dazdaz asks: "I have spent the last 12 months applying for IT positions abroad (Europe and Asia) from the UK and out of it, have had 1 offer and 3 free trips! The offer I had unfortunately was not enough to live on and only came through because a friend had recommended me. For the other 3 positions, I had seriously under-estimated the cultural differences along with the tight competition I ended up as choice number 2 several times. Just briefly: my background is web/internet/unix/sysadmin with contract experience. I am looking at permanent work abroad for the stability and long term career path. I speak basic French, and realise that not 'speaking da lingo' does cut down my chances and will start learning a language when I reach my destination. My question is, do I continue to apply from remote, both directly to companies and through Agency's or should I take the big gamble and goto a country. This is a last resort due to the global economic situation and one that scares me in that it may not pay off and with limited financial resources the risk factor is higher."

"I've also noticed that to work in Asia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan etc you generally won't get a position from remote, you need to either transfer from an existing company or just go there. I've spent some time researching expatriation to each of these country's in preperation, however going there is the real research. There are various specialist expatriate websites that are quite interesting along with a handful of expatriate books to various country's around the world.

So in a roundabout way, I've decided to become a career traveller, start out in Europe (one of Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain) which has a higher chance of success of getting or even continuing my IT career and then then at a later date try the big leap of working in Asia.

I'd be interested in other people's thoughts and ideas, those who plan this, those who have done this. The tight IT market has become quite ugly, even for those qualified, do you give up pursuing a dream or stride on."

ZaPhY42 writes: "The Bitboys look like they've actually produced some working silicon of their mythical XBA Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture-based graphics card which they were previewing at Assembly 2002. Photos of the card can be found here(1) and here(2). What next? Duke Nukem Forever gets released by 3DRealms? ;)"

cybrpnk writes: "The QX3 Video Microscope may have been an obscure commercial failure as an educational toy, but it is widely available (for now, at least) as a fantastic tool/toy for any geek. The QX3 hooks up to a USB port and delivers live color 10X, 60X or 200X microphotos at 512x384 pixel resolution. Its kid-friendly software even makes time lapse videos a snap, like this one of TNT synthesis - a whole new way to blow up the lab, do not try this at home! Educators are doing amazing things with the QX3 in their classrooms. Sourceforge even has documentation on the software command structure used by the QX3, so it may be considered an open source microscope. Get yours today for under $50 at surplus closeout or EBay before they're all gone!" The Toys-R-Us nearest to me has one QX3+ left (now with my name on it) at $30, so I hope it really does work under Linux. And it's a lot less complicated than building a Scanning-Tunneling microscope.

flowerp writes "Any serious astronomer would declare you insane if you mounted your off-the-shelf CCD webcam to a telescope in order to watch the skies, but there is a group on the Internet who do just that! They call themselves QCUIAG (QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group). If you think those are just some crazy nerds, watch their astounding footage of planets and nebulae - and reconsider."

flowerp writes "Any serious astronomer would declare you insane if you mounted your off-the-shelf CCD webcam to a telescope in order to watch the skies, but there is a group on the Internet who do just that! They call themselves QCUIAG (QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group). If you think those are just some crazy nerds, watch their astounding footage of planets and nebulae - and reconsider."

flowerp writes "Any serious astronomer would declare you insane if you mounted your off-the-shelf CCD webcam to a telescope in order to watch the skies, but there is a group on the Internet who do just that! They call themselves QCUIAG (QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group). If you think those are just some crazy nerds, watch their astounding footage of planets and nebulae - and reconsider."

Cally writes: "Space.com reports that Mars Odyssey has completed aerobraking and is ready to begin its main science mission. As the spacecraft has already produced exciting results before the start of the science mission proper, interesting data on the quantities of water in the Martian crust may be expected soon - not to mention that Odyssey provides another datapoint in the study of Gamma Ray bursts."

jregel asks: "In the US, the Electronic Frontier Foundation works to protect digital rights on the Internet. I live in the UK, and would like to give money to a similar organization that will fight for my rights. Is there an EFF equivalent for those of us in the EU?"

Zocalo sent us a story running at FSF Europe talking about SourceForge's Drifting. Talks about the fact that they are releasing a closed-source version of the code commercially and various copyright related things. Obviously VA owns both SF and Slashdot so I'm skewed, but my personal opinion is that VA is doing what they need to do to make a buck while still providing the SourceForge.net website to the Open Source community. And I think their decision to sell a closed-source proprietary version of the code would be hypocritical, except that they aren't a 100% open-source company any more. And *that* is the part that makes me the most sad.

naylorjs writes: "This is an interesting article from the BBC about the technological future, in particular broadband and wireless. What makes it more interesting is the comments about nation states and such like. A certain amount of lateral thinking in use here, something that we don't see enough of in the technology field. IMHO."

Dre writes: "Richard Dale recently announced that he has committed C bindings for the KDE3/Qt3 libraries to KDE's CVS. According to him, "The bindings wrap about 800 classes [and] 13,000 methods, with 200k [lines of code] of C/C++ generated." The same tool used to generate these C bindings can also generate Objective C and Java bindings, and Richard hopes to be able to consolidate the generation of these various KDE bindings (Java/Objective C/C) with one tool. In addition, pending the resolution of a dynamic linking problem with the Objective C bindings, both C and Objective C bindings for KDE 2.2.x/Qt 2.3.x will also be available from KDE CVS."

Long-suffering Slashdot reader WrinkledShirt contributes this review of John Hall's Programming Linux Games, and lays out the good and the bad in a book that's one of the few of its kind. More games are always good -- hopefully books like this one will spark some inspiration.

Programming Linux Games author John Hall pages 415 publisher No Starch Press rating 7.5 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 1-886411-49-2 summary Well-written guide to a wide range of game-writing tools for Linux, but not a definitive reference work for any single task.

Introduction

The potential for linux gaming has really exploded in the last couple of years. In many cases, the potential has been realized -- Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3000, Tribes 2, Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and many other successful Windows titles, have all been brought to Linux, with Loki leading the charge. Judging by the bottom line, there's a definite shortage of true cash-cow success stories in this enigmatic part of the industry, and hence, a shortage of good reference material for naive people hoping to produce that next cash cow.

However, we've reached such a point of critical mass of knowledge and technology that books had to start appearing sometime. So, despite the fact that there's no overwhelming market demand for Linux games and a high ratio of hobbyists to dedicated game developers for the OS, here we have a book aiming at taking amateur Linux game development to the next level.

However, much of the technology out there for game programming in Linux is still heavily in development, with many of the APIs and libraries still a long way away from a 1.0 release. Allegro and Clanlib are a couple of exceptions to this trend -- both are popular APIs that sadly don't get much more than a passing mention in the book. Their sexier counterpart, Sam Lantinga's SDL, gets a fair amount of treatment (no surprise there, considering John Hall was the lead author for a team based within Loki) -- but even this fairly feature-complete library, which Loki uses to port its games over from Windows, isn't explored in its entirety.

Instead, there are also crash courses in BSD sockets, package management, TCL, the framebuffer and various sound APIs, and what we end up with here is the consummate cookbook, a jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none tome that introduces us to a wide variety of Linux gaming topics while stopping short of being a definitive reference for any of them. Such is John Hall's work, an interesting, wide-ranging introduction to game programming for an operating system that few believed was capable of it not too long ago.

John Hall, an experienced game developer, participated in Loki's Civilization, Call to Power game hack, and is currently working for Treyarch developing that company's Spider-Man title for the PS2.

The Good

As far as cookbooks go, this is a good one, and there isn't much concerning Linux game API programming that isn't touched on. There's an ongoing case study (Penguin Warrior) that is developed over the course of the book. Each chapter introduces a fairly deep concept, gives a decent function reference related to the concept, then incorporates the knowledge into proof-of-concept code, and then uses the new-found knowledge to enrich the case study. The tone is straightforward and the execution is solid. The final game works well enough to give confidence that the reader could take the knowledge in this book and apply it to his or her own project, either to add new features or re-think old ones.

The book is also well-written -- the sample code is extremely well-commented and good error-handling is in place. He makes no assumptions about the knowledge of the reader, dealing with such introductory topics in Linux programming as vi vs Emacs, the FSH and make, although he never gets annoying or patronizing. *cough cough* LaMothe *cough*

Individual chapters stand out as being great introductory resources for material that doesn't have much in the way of documentation. The important aspects of SDL get good treatment in one complete and comprehensive unit. There's also a thorough chapter on audio programming, comparing and contrasting OpenAL, OSS, ALSA, Ogg Vorbis, and ESD (among others), and all this after showing off SDL's sound capabilities one chapter earlier. Many of the pitfalls associated with each of the different technologies, as well as the pitfalls of sound programming in general, are covered here. It's a great jumping-off point for those who don't know much about the audio end of things.

There's even a really neat chapter on incorporating TCL script interpretation within a program written in C. For anyone who's had trouble throwing together their own text parser for initialization scripts, or who's fed up with the constant recompiles needed when tweaking for the most arbitrary of changes of the game's AI, the information in this chapter is a godsend. In the Penguin Warrior case study, it's almost spooky how effective TCL turns out to be in making the computer ship chase and evade the human player.

Finally, I want to reiterate the effective use of the case study, Penguin Warrior. Having seen the way other game programming texts handle using samples to illustrate game programming concepts -- which is often a mish-mash, to say the least -- the way this book approached the issue is refreshing: there's one major project, and each chapter brings us closer to that project's completion. The code works as intended and goes a long way to convince the reader that the libraries and techniques explored in this book are near-commercial-level quality. (Networked games turned out to be choppy on my machine, but that was the only real black mark I could find in the program's execution.) If nothing else, John Hall deserves a good deal of thanks for proving that game development on Linux is a realistic and rewarding endeavor.

The Not So Good

At times, the generalist nature of the book left me wondering if Hall couldn't have gone just a little bit further in some of the topics. There's a decent enough synopsis about deployment using Loki's install tool, as well as packaging in general, although nothing related to the Penguin Warrior game itself, so we don't get to see the theory in practice as much as it could have been. Also, he teases us by early on by starting with the compiler, moving to the make utility, talking a bit about package management, and then mentions automake, but he stops short of really explaining how to bring that into an existing project. Considering all the fun little dependencies needed for multimedia programming in Linux, this would have been a valuable bit of information for anyone not used to deploying on the platform.

Another instance of this so-close-yet-so-far approach occurs when he talks about incorporating Mesa into an SDL program. He tantalizes us with a code sample illustrating how to use the SDL as a replacement for glut, but that's all -- the material doesn't really get deep enough to convince readers that a 3D neophyte really can abandon glut for the SDL, particularly when many OpenGL reference materials out there rely heavily on glut as a teaching aid for windowing and other utility functions. Loki primarily used SDL to handle its 3D utility programming, so at least we know it's possible, but given the exploding popularity of 3D games it's too bad this wasn't covered more.

It's sometimes hard to tell exactly who the book is intended for. The introductory chapters include discussions on topics such as the different gaming genres out there, despite the fact that game programming hopefuls who don't know that Quake is a first-person shooter must make up a really narrow audience. Also, it's almost enough to give one whiplash to see how quickly he dives into using ioctl() when only a couple of chapters earlier he was explaining the basics of using gcc. Next up soon after that? Strap yourself in, we'll be writing straight to /dev/fb0! It's almost comical to think about how much dangerous knowledge a newbie's been given over the course of the book. Still, like I said earlier, he never talks down to the reader, who because of this might feel compelled against better judgement to be whisked along into subject matter that really needs other support material to be of any real use.

Hall's a humble enough guy, which is great insofar as writing style is concerned, but in one of the last chapters, he starts questioning some of the choices he made while coding Penguin Warrior throughout the book. Specifically, he says he probably should have used C++ instead of C, Scheme instead of TCL, and UDP instead of TCP for the networking, and this is cold comfort for people who would have hoped that the author would have picked the best plan of attack from the beginning. That said, C, TCL, and TCP are appropriate choices due to the simplicity of execution and the fact that they introduce useful techniques from a design point of view. Still, there's no point giving readers a sense of wistful "What if?" if you don't have to. It also highlights that this book is more a beginner's API reference than a game programming book per se.

To take that point further, there also really isn't much in the way of abstract game programming theory. This book could have really distinguished itself as special if some content related strictly to game development was here. There's a mention of Gamasutra here, a method of quick division there, the equation of a distance from a point to a line thrown into the mix, and that's pretty much all there is. Topics not really covered include optimization, pathfinding, and cracker-proofing your code, and what is talked about on the subjects of artificial intelligence design, collision detection, and physics is all rudimentary ... For coverage on these sorts of topics, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Finally, and this is really not the fault of the author or the book, but one wonders if the time was right for much of this material -- or, at the very least, its highly generalist approach. DRI is making its presence felt, the various audio APIs out there are improving all the time, and the LSB is coming along nicely, but until there's a proven and stable multimedia base to work from, no definitive guide can be written, and this sort of organized dogpile is really the best we can hope for with so much stuff to cover. The SDL is a top-notch library for graphics programming, and it's likely an entire book could have been spent strictly on graphics programming using it, and the depth that such a book could have attained far surpasses what we're given here. Plus, in a year from now, who knows where any of these sound APIs will be? Of course, these might prove to be just esoteric issues in the grand scheme of this book.

Conclusion

Despite the criticisms I have of this book, I really don't want the message that is conveyed here to be anything but positive. There's a lot working for this book -- the chapters on SDL, sound programming and incorporating TCL and C are excellent, and will be especially helpful for people who are novices in these areas. Considering the alternatives (hitting dryly-written online docs or constantly shaking your Google to see what falls out), this book is a very attractive option. Programming a fully-functional multiplayer game would probably require more effort than might be suggested by the brevity of the chapter on socket programming, but that chapter is a solid introduction as well. The book as a whole is well-written and succeeds for the most part in its endeavor to make the best of a chaotic situation. I'd recommend this book to anybody who appreciates the messy-kitchen style of learning, or to anyone with decent hacking skills who just needs to break the ice when it comes to the Linux game APIs. And even though it gets slightly schizophrenic in its attempt to be both an introductory text and a definitive reference, this is the sort of book that could kickstart a new movement in Linux game development.

Table of Contents (exploded version here)

1. The Anatomy of a Game
2. Linux Development Tools
3. Linux Gaming APIs
4. Mastering SDL
5. Linux Audio Programming
6. Game Scripting Under Linux
7. Networked Gaming with Linux
8. Gaming with the Linux Console
9. Finishing Penguin Warrior
10. To Every Man a Linux Distribution

• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography

Related Links

Sample Code
No Starch Press
Loki
SDL (List of SDL games)
OpenAL
DRI
Mesa
libsndfile
Gamasutra

You can purchase this book from Fatbrain.

MikeCamel writes: "The BBC announced today that Fred Hoyle, astronomer, science populariser and science fiction writer, died yesterday, aged 86. He is best known for having coined the phrase 'Big Bang,' though he was actually an opponent of the idea, and advocated the 'steady state' theory. He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were 'seeded' from outer space."

farrellj adds: "Hoyle was famous for a number of things, inventing the term 'Big Bang,' figuring out how stars create the heavier elements, and his most controversial, the idea that the seeds of life on earth came from space. He was also a noted Science Fiction writer, with many books, sometimes co-authored with his son, Geoffrey. We have lost one of the more original thinkers in the field of Astrophysics. You can read more at the NY Times site. (free reg. required, yadda yadda)"

David Cornelson writes: "If you like playing Interactive Fiction or Text Adventures, then maybe you'll like writing them too. One of the premiere development tools for creating these programs is called Inform. The resulting programs are compiled to the Z-Machine specification created by Infocom, one of the original commercial developers of text adventures. The Z-Machine is a virtual machine that has interpreters for many platforms. I recently started taking pre-orders for a layflat perfect bound copy of the Inform Designer's Manual: 4th Edition for the hardcore Interactive Fiction community that resides mostly at the usenet groups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, but if anyone else is interested, feel free to pre-order a copy of the DM4. This is a non-profit project. The author is Graham Nelson, a mathematics professor from Cambridge and has licensed both Inform and the DM4 for public use. The PDF version of the DM4 is currently available, but with so many current users of the Inform language, many people were seeking a printing solution. I volunteered to handle the logistics and Graham is currently finalizing a printed version with the cover art. The printer should receive the final cut in a week or so and begin printing shortly thereafter. Anyway, if you've ever played Zork, Adventure, or Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, you might want to try writing something of your own. This manual would not only help you get started, but there is a great deal of background information into the genre as well. David Cornelson, dcornelson@placet.com."

EccentricAnomaly writes: "David Cash has some interesting pictures of the International Space Station made with a Celestron telescope and webcam. This makes me want to get back into amateur astronomy ... in part, as a fun way to learn image processing." The resolution Cash achieved with consumer-grade equipment (Celestron Ultima 9.25 telescope and Philips Vesta Pro camera) is amazing. Demanding a slightly more visceral approach to space is "Rocket Guy" Brian Walker, who plans in the near future to launch himself to around 30 miles up in a home-brewed rocket. An unnamed reader points out the current feature on Walker over at space.com.

Duncan Lawie rides again with this review of the audaciously titled (and written) new book from Paul McAuley, The Secret of Life. It's another entry on the bookshelf of Science Fiction works designed to provoke thought, not merely entertain.

The Secret of Life author Paul McAuley pages 390 publisher UK: HarperCollins Voyager rating 8 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 076530080X summary Summary: A fascinating dissection of the values of science stirred into a near-future peregrination across Mars and America. Paul McAuley has been reviewed on this site before. In the years since Pasquale's Angel was originally published, he has switched publishers and dropped the middle J. More significantly he has become a writer full time, nurturing the continuing growth in breadth and complexity of his work. His last three novels formed the Books of Confluence, a powerfully woven trilogy set about five million years in the future. Just released in the UK, The Secret of Life has more immediate aims, and is set only a quarter of a century from now.

There is considerable potential for hubris in such a title -- and the book itself is something of a chimera, perhaps offering in its own appearance a resonance with the Chi molecule at the centre of its plot.

In the first portion of the book McAuley tempts us to believe that this is his NASA novel -- a common enough route into the near future for authors who wish to discuss conditions off Earth. This section is filled with politicking in the offices and anterooms of Washington, descriptions of NASA facilities around the USA and matter of fact inclusion of astronauts as highly qualified truck drivers.

As the plot heads for Mars the NASA guise morphs and the temptation arises to compare the book with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy - that icon being almost unavoidable when treating Mars in a near future hard science fiction manner. However, McAuley has been to Mars before (in Red Mars) and on this occasion he sets a slingshot trajectory rather than being trapped by the KSR trilogy's mass. The book re-engineers its characteristics yet again in the final third, careering through a portfolio of political positions and potentials and echoing some of his own earlier works in the process.

Nevertheless, this book is really about science and scientists. It soon becomes apparent that the protagonist, Mariella, is a brilliant scientist but not a dedicated labcoat. Neither is she a forgetful, shock-haired eccentric, though her genius has its fair share of arrogance: her strength of self-belief almost makes the world conform to her expectations. The author's tendency to ineffectual protagonists has been rebuilt slightly closer to the model of American science fiction: Mariella is trapped as much by conspiracy as by co-incidence; by her wilfulness rather than her inaction. Having departed an anti-science Europe, she is constrained by an American model where Big Science is tied to Big Government and Big Money in an unstable bond. The volatility of this instability generates much of the action.

It also leads into arguments that have been rumbling through the research world for years and which have been brought into sharp focus again regarding research on the human genome: how much science belongs in the public domain and what rewards should be available to private research. The more obvious line of reasoning is analogous to the Open Source argument: good science is dependent upon peer review; the constraints of commercial confidentiality act against dissemination of information; compartmentalisation of science reduces the opportunity to see the Big Picture.

The Secret of Life does not go so far as to say that information wants to be free, but it does suggest that (good) scientists want all possible information. This is almost a restatement of the purpose of science -- to learn everything there is to learn. It is this mission of science which many, disparate elements of the modern world object to; though riddled with internal conflict, various Green and radical groups hold to the belief that there are things of which humanity should not wot. This anti-science cant is the subject of McAuley's second line of attack on scientific secrecy: demystification is essential to the public acceptance of the products of science. If the primary perception of scientists involves lab coats, incomprehensible equations and arcane equipment then how do they differ from white-robed druids with their incantations and ritual?

Perhaps sometimes science likes to be seen as being beyond the ken of the average individual, but such an approach can lead to fear as easily as awe. Scientists who fail to interact with such realities are almost as much a subject for Mariella's contempt as are those who allow science to be contained and controlled by commercial and political agendas. She has sympathy with the disenfranchised but she clearly believes that the solution to any practical problem involves more science, not less.

It is tempting to hang much of the thesis of this book on McAuley himself. He was a professional biologist for many years and clearly the almost anthropological insight into this tribe is a product of that time. Whilst the Chi molecule is carefully and intelligently realised, the pacing of the novel has the rhythm of scientific research. Deep discussion and demonstration upon the themes of the book fill out the flat spots in the plot. Mariella is a fascinating character, fully rounded to the degree that she can seem self-contradictory and probably very frustrating for a reader who cannot identify with her -- though such a reader will find much to disagree with in a book so thoroughly embedded in the 21st century world view. On the whole, the book does not quite manage all it sets out to achieve. Given the height at which McAuley aims, this is hardly an extreme criticism. It is a well written and engaging book with considerable food for thought.

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.

Teach writes: "If my calculations are correct, on Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 04:25:21 UTC (00:25:21 EDT and late Wednesday at 21:25:21 PDT), the UNIX clock will read 987654321, which is pretty cool. This will be the first of two such "significant" events in 2001, the second being 01:46:39 UTC on 2001-09-09, when the clock will read 999999999 (and then of course "roll over" to 1000000000 one second later). Use the Time Zone Converter to help you figure out when this will occur in your area, or read up on other critical dates (such as when the 32-bit signed UNIX clock overflows in 2038)."

Salsaman writes "The company which cloned Dolly the sheep has now apparently succeeded in turning cow skin cells into heart cells."

DrGoon writes: "The BBC has reported that "After docking, the shuttle crew of five astronauts delivered supplies and gifts to the Alpha crew, including a computer, cables for the laboratory, food, water, clothes and about 20 DVD movies. " in this story, which raises the interesting question: what DVD region is the International Space Station?" So, either they have a region-free DVD player - which is theoretically illegal according to Hollywood - or only the U.S. crew gets to watch movies.

richw showed us an excellent story talking about why language advocacy is bad. Its an excellent piece, and although many of the points he writes about are specifically related to Perl Programming, many of them can be equally applied to the irrational ways that people approach things like politics or Slashdot discussions.

Last week I came out in favor of electronic voting. Over the weekend, it turned out that its opponents' worst fears came true. Not only was some computer software buggy, but it actually threw a state election the wrong way. And though not very likely, it's even possible that this state will determine our next president! Have I changed my mind about electronic voting?

No, because the punchline is: New Mexico still uses dead trees. The bug was in the software that counts paper ballots.

New Mexico was given to Gore on election night by 6,800 votes because of buggy computer software. That software "failed to read" straight-party votes (oops!), and worse, it "also chose at least one candidate from another party."

If computer flaws had thrown an electronic-vote election, you'd be reading about it on the front page of every newspaper across the country, and pundits would be telling us (sometimes in ways very funny) how foolish we were to trust our votes to those nasty computers.

How many presidential elections does our 19th-century technology have to nearly destroy before the alternatives get serious consideration?

A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America. Maybe by the 21st century we can have 20th-century voting machines installed at our polling places, what do you think?

(New Mexico could decide the election if Florida's votes are thrown out, Oregon goes to Bush, and one or two more improbabilities occur.)

Voting, right here in River(side) County Riverside County, California, used touch-screen voting in this last election. This is very different from internet voting since there was no network to the outside world. I think this is an important step and certainly should be done first.

ABC News's report describes Riverside's system and shows a photo. Randall Gardner points out that the local paper has a great story with an overview of the system and reactions from voters -- glitches, yes; late tally, yes; but all in all it sounded like a positive experience.

With a capital V and that rhymes with C and that stands for Canberra Dracophile points out an article from the Fairfax IT News website, which:

reports that voters in the Australian Capital Territory (in which our nation's capital, Canberra, lies) "could be the first in the nation to trial electronic voting at next year's territory election", according to the territory's Chief Minister, Gary Humphries. They're hoping to pass legislation next month to bring this about. Sounds cool, but the article goes on to quote Humphries as saying, "You might as well be doing it from your own home." Is it just me, or does this raise the possibility of voters being coerced into a particular vote where this sort of thing can't be seen? I'd prefer to see electronic voting available only from polling booths.

No grunge typefaces please User-interface wonks should enjoy this pure-and-simple design contest. Web Memes, Inc. is asking you to design a ballot, preferably one as unconfusing as possible while still using (spit) paper. You also get to make up your own candidates and issues.

(If the competition were digital, instead of paper, it would be a tough call between Amazon.com's new user interface and AmIPresidentOrNot.)

Busily coding your next election... ...is Jason Kitcat, who says "I'm working really hard on the next release and haven't given it the PR time it deserves." Allow me.

FREE is "Free Referenda & Elections Electronically," "the first open source system for conducting electronic votes." We're now jumping from mere electronic tallying of votes in polling places to actual internet voting, so please keep your hands inside the browser at all times.

Originally an academic thesis, FREE is now GPL'd, written in Java, and its design background is available in whitepapers. I haven't tried running it. Someone let us know if the project could be useful.

See also thebell.net, which comments:

...the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than once, which means that election officials lack the means to objectively distinguish between fraud and error under these circumstances. ...we should in fact be looking to Internet voting systems in order to try to reduce those faults and thus provide for more security than what is available today -- not less security.

The seriously skeptical view Let's end on a sobering note. Scoffing at The Bell's claim to have tackled the subject a mere six months ago, Rebecca Mercuri points out (on Dave Farber's IP list) that others have been thinking about internet voting for over a decade. She writes:

Internet systems indeed DO promise FAR LESS in the way of auditability (recounts) and anonymity (privacy) than do the paper and other manual systems presently in place. To promote the belief that Internet voting, in any way provides a SAFE VOTE, is wholly erroneous.

She has an intimidating collection of links to (mostly) academic papers on the subject on her Electronic Voting page.

And in conclusion The only viable form of government is perl-based: we need a bicamel legislature with an eclectoral college. Thank you and good night!

And now for something completely the same! A note from timothy: The next piece in our continuing Hellmouth Revisited series is online. Feel free to go read it.

Malkthulhu writes "Artist Tom Kemp has created a huge new work of art with a Palm Vx. It is a staggering 4 feet by 17 feet and consists of one thousand tiny paintings all made using the TealPaint application. As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm."

Malkthulhu writes "Artist Tom Kemp has created a huge new work of art with a Palm Vx. It is a staggering 4 feet by 17 feet and consists of one thousand tiny paintings all made using the TealPaint application. As far as we know, this is the first serious, large-scale painting produced on a Palm."