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A number of people have been wondering what's going to happen to TPJ ^[?] in light of Earthweb's (the owner of TPJ) sale of most of its properties to Internet.com. Many rumours have been flying around and Jon Orwant has decided to clear things. I've put his status update below.

From Jon Orwant:

"January 2, 2001

Some folks have been asking me about the status of The Perl Journal #20, and prospective authors have been asking me about deadlines for future issues. The answers: TPJ #20 is in press and ready to print, but EarthWeb (the owner of TPJ) has told the printer to stop the presses until further notice. I am currently responding to proposals sent to me with approximately "I don't know if there's going to be another issue, but when I do I'll respond to your proposal."

Since the future of the magazine is in doubt, I can't in good conscience greenlight proposals; I will not encourage an author to spend weeks writing an article when I know that it might never be printed. So I've told people who've asked what I know about the current situation: while EarthWeb has sold many of its properties to internet.com so that it can focus on "career services", it has not sold TPJ. However, EarthWeb has also made it clear that they don't want to publish TPJ any more.

This story has started to leak out to the Perl community and has already mutated a bit in not-quite-correct directions, so I wanted to write this note to set the record straight. Or as straight as I can, given what little I know about EarthWeb's decisions.

While TPJ's future is very much up in the air, people shouldn't take this as any indicator about Perl itself. TPJ was doing just fine back when I ran it, there's no shortage of content out there, and the magazine could easily go bimonthly and then monthly -- indeed, when EarthWeb acquired TPJ I had thought that was the plan. I still enjoy the editing, the authors enjoy the writing, and the designers enjoy the designing. What happens now is up to EarthWeb. And no, I'm not suggesting that people bombard them with e-mail. Heck, they just laid off 100 people, so I'm not even sure who to bombard. Eventually there will be some resolution, and when there is I'll write again to let everyone know.

As of December 27th, this matter is now in the courts, and so I have to adopt the "just the facts" tone of this letter without portraying my opinions. Someday I'll be able to talk more about what is happening in these strange days; until then, you'll have to conjure up your own adjectives on my behalf.

Cheers,

Jon Orwant "

Faw writes "In an interview at Stomped Bioware's CEO Ray Muzyka mentioned that its next game Neverwinter Nights will be available for the PC, Mac, Linux and BeOS. I think this is the first time I have heard BeOS mentioned by a mayor game company. You can check the interview out as well." For those of you who don't know, Neverwinter is supposed to be the sequel to Baldur's Gate II ^[?] - and will have functions that allow DMs to make dungeons, and much better multiplayer support. Update: 12/29 06:53 PM by H :I've been corrected - NN doesn't have anything to do with the BG2 storyline. Must have been wishful thinking on my part. *grin*

Virtual communities that only offer information, data and text-based messaging are sometimes fragmented, brittle and cold. They don't allow the kind of sequential communications and storytelling vital to any community, work or personal. Those that emphasize human contact are too limited. The Virtual Community of tomorrow may have to incorporate both. (This is the third in a series.)

So where does that leave the Virtual Community, alive or dead or in between?

The idea remains as powerful as ever, flamers, spammers, vandals, dotcoms or no. Lots of people, from medical patients and programmers to gay teenagers to gamers and quilters are seeking and finding small communities to attach themselves to. But the virtual community clearly needs some serious re-thinking, both in technological and human terms.

Many people online are nostalgic about the idea.

E-mailed chauf:

"I look back to the days of BBS's and the one I frequented the most was like its own neighborhood. You usually knew the various folks... of course some were more visible than others, much like real life. I use the analogy of a local bar.. a la 'Cheers'. That's what many of the local BBSes were like...

" Even though there was this computerized place there was still an emphasis on meeting in person at various GT's or Get Togethers. When I was in high school it was one of the local roller rinks. Often we'd have a weekend barbeque at a park where everyone could attend. We also had more deviant activities like Electric Jello parties. Electric Jello is Jello made normally but you'd take out a 1/4 of the water in the recipe and put in Everclear...

" So here you'd have these hammered, underage computer folks! It was a riot ... One of my favorite people I met during these years was a gentleman named Al ... Al was a old biker. He had to be in his mid-thirties when I met him. He was extremely articulate and intelligent and it came across in his postings. He was also an avid game player ... with a bend towards computer war games/simulations. None of us know what he looked like in person so it was QUITE a shock when we met in person. Here was this large, tattooed, long haired biker. It sent my perception of how people are on its ear. I learned to never really truly judge folks by what they look like, rather by their actions ... Virtual communites are possible. They will never replace face to face meeting but they can open the doors to such meetings and communication."

Chauf's experience is typical of many people's feelings about virtual communities. They may work best as a cross between the WELL model and the later information-swapping exchange. The new virtual community has several primary obstacles to overcome:

First, as predicted by almost every sci-fi writer, the megacorporations are moving to dominate the virtual community. the corporate world sees the Net as its primary communications medium, and the key to participating and prospering in the global economy. They have the money, political clout and legal acumen to dominate the network, as is already becoming clear. The Net is not viewed by the outside as being healthy or weak in terms of the strength of its virtual communities, but the rise or fall of NASDAQ on any given day. The idea of a tech boom or, more recently, a tech decline is entirely related to corporate earnings in tech industries and elements online.

The function of the corporate virtual community has tended to emphasize sales, period, and corporations seek to control access, content, intellectual property and usage. But the original notion of the virtual community was very different. Businesses may not actively try to eliminate other kinds of virtual communties, but they end up supplanting or marginalizing them anyway, in much the same way Microsoft or Wal-Mart eliminates its competitiion. In any contest between corporatism and community, the former seems to win hands down every time, which puts the idea of the virtual community in particular danger.

Despite the pressures of the blessedly waning dotcom era, there are things the virtual community can take from business communications. In The Social Life of Information (Harvard University Press), John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid talk about the importance of office communications, especially face to face stories. These kind of human-to-human narrative involves constant story-telling; about problems and solutions, disasters and triumphs and, say the authors, serves a number overlapping purposes. Workers "tell stories about unsolved problems in an attempt to generate a coherent account of what the problem is and how to solve it. They may do this individually, putting their own story together. Or they can do it collectively, as they drawn on the collective wisdom of the group."

F2F stories, Brown and Duguid remind us, are good at presenting things sequentially (this happened, then that). They are also good for presenting them casually (this happened because of that). "Thus stories are a powerful means to understand what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes of those events)." This kind of storytelling is indispensable for workers for whom these are critical issues of concern.

The virtual community is just beginning to experiment with the online equivalent of the real-life office environment, mostly in live chat and messaging forms. But the kind of sequential, coherent narrative describe by Brown and Duguid is still difficult online, especially in the text-based, asynchronious communications forms most people use.

In addition, adolescent flamers -- almost invariably young males -- continue to disrupt and distort efforts to create online communities. Rarely as numerous as they seem to be, they cause others to lurk rather than participate, and create the sort of mistrust and tension that make community nearly impossible. They almost demand some form of censorship and moderation, which makes noxious restrictions on speech easier to justify. Successful new weblogs (camworld.com is one of the best weblogs online) are created with an eye towards limiting membership, controlling submissions and the nature of disagreement -- the sort of change that's both sensible and tragic.

The dilemma is that younger Net users are among the smartest, most technologically-sophisticated people online. If they bring hostility, they also bring creativity and energy. Losing them would be an enormous loss. Still, there needs to be a heightened sense of responsibility for the words people post. If the posters don't acquire one themselves, then the operators and members of virtual communities have to start doing it themselves, challenging hostile communicators more directly.

There's also a possible silver lining. Since technology is the most powerful social and cultural force in the contemporary world, ascendant virtual communities have tended to focus on it.But if the tech world really is in a slump, if the explosive growth and pace of technological change slows and dwindling venture capital winnows the dotcoms, advocates for virtual community might once more find some breathing room.

The new online community may have to draw from some of the most traditional, non-tech elements of society: the water cooler, the backyard fence, the tavern, the neighborhood park, even the office itself. All of these gathering spots tend to cement community, forge relationships, provide the human and contextual cues that help people resolve disputes, receive information,communicate in a civil way, learn new ideas. It is precisely these kinds of one-on-one communications forums that are missing in so many VC's (though increasingly, applets for live chats are popping up on places like AOL and everything2).

Maybe online communities of the future could work this way: Napster or a site like this one would exist as an information exchange, but would also build into its architecture a face-to-face component -- perhaps video-conferencing, chat and messaging rooms, local or state chapters that actually meet.

Members would encounter other members when they joined and when they participated in online discussions. Sites could also organize face to face gatherings and activities so that the two major goals of the new virtual community -- community and information -- would both be available. As with any successful community, members would be asked to participate in the functioning of the site -- moderating, writing, reviewing, suggesting topics, relaying information, working on software design, trouble-shooting and problem-solving. Membership committees could consider and respond to complaints and suggestions, which might reduce the instinct for flaming.

The virtual community of the future seems likely to be some version of a weblog that uses the Net's distributed architecture to provode access to information. But communities are more likely to succeed, grow and endure when human elements are also incorporated into their structure. Chat rooms, IRC's, video-meetings and human contact are ultimately as essential to a virtual community as data. Notice that Chauf recalls his friend the biker more than the topics on his BBS. People connect with humans in a way they don't yet connect with data, an idea overlooked in Web design and architecture.

In part, Rheingold's dream of the virtual community -- as embodied by the WELL -- seemed posible because there wasn't all that much to do online. Today, people get overwhelmed with e-mail, chat forums, entertainment and hopping online. The virtual community seems almost an afterthought.

For all its problems and failed expectations, the Virtual Community, one of the most compelling ideas to emerge from cyberspace, still seems a fantasy. The VC needs to be rethought rather than abandoned, redesigned rather than nostalgically recalled.

Next: Your thoughts on how to reconceive the Virtual Community.

Things have changed quite a bit since we last posted about the state of Linux Package Management. Over the few months ago, we saw the Connectiva release, which was a RPM front-end to apt-get ^[?] . Now, for those of you running RH6.x, there are a new program called Aduva Manager. It's kinda like using apt-get update/apt-get dist-upgrade, but checks dependecies and such for RH6.x based systems. They've got screenshots as well as a FAQ/download site. It's designed more for new users, but it looks like a step in the right direction for RPM.

We had an extremely interesting submission from Ted T'so,, Linux kernel developer, who also has an obvious interest in security, given his work with Kerberos ^[?] . He wrote in concerning the release by the NSA (Yes, that NSA) of a high security version of Linux. I've included his comments below.

tytso writes: "I recently attended a DARPA workshop which focused on high security open source operating systems. It turns out that parts of the U.S. government are really interested this topic; having an operating system with the necessary high-security features which they need, and for which source code is available, would be a really good thing for them. Among other things, for example, it would mean that they wouldn't have to live in terror about what might happen if Sun, IBM, SGI, et. al decided to pull the plug on Trusted Solaris, Trusted AIX, or Trusted IRIX. And they're serious enough that DARPA's willing to throw money at the problem.

While I was at this workshop, I met some folks from the NSA and they told me about a really neat project that they've been working on, called Security-enhanced Linux. One of the cool things about it is that it separates enforcement and policy. So selinux can easily support many different security policies, from the old (some would say outdated/silly) Multi-Level Secure/Bell-LaPadula model, to Domain-Type enforcement and Rule-Based Access Control models. So if you think that high-security features means the old silly, Secret / Top Secret / CMW bullshit, and needing to make sure that Secret windows don't get expose events from Top Secret windows, think again. A number of folks have found Domain Type Enforcement and Rule-Based Access Control systems very useful for securing Web servers and other real world systems.

The NSA folks just recently got permission to make their stuff available on the Web. It's just a proof of concept, and no doubt a lot of changes will need to made before people will accept integrating it into the kernel, but they have released a working system (both kernel and userspace patches --- RPM's aren't quite ready yet) based on Linux 2.2 and RedHat 6.1. So it's definitely worth a look, and in fact some folks with specialized needs might find it useful, even though it's a prototype.

Of course, the source code is all there, and we're encouraged to look at and audit the code. So paranoiacs who think that the NSA is trying to infiltrate trap doors into the Linux kernels needn't worry. (Besides, it's a different part of the government who's interested in spying on U.S. citizens, and it's much more efficient for them to break into your house, and insert a wiretapping device between your computer and your keyboard as part of a black bag job. :-)

The Web site is http://www.nsa.gov/selinux. I think it's really great that some folks at NSA's Information Assurance Research Office (IARO) have made this contribution to the Linux community. They're really nice folks (even if they can't talk about a lot of what they do at work :-).

P.S. Apparently it's not easy to get stuff published by the NSA, since their entire culture, not surprisingly, is based around not letting stuff out. This Web page went up a few days ago, and then some bureaucrats made the folks in the IARO take it down temporarily, much to their disappointment. At the moment it looks like they've finally crossed all of the bureaucratic t's and dotted all of the bureaucratic i's. But just in case, it might not be a bad idea if someone mirrored the entire tree just in case some flack in some other part of the agency tells them to take it down again....

"

halcyon7 writes: "My MIT research group has spent the last two months studying Infocom ^[?] , Inc. (the creators of Zork ^[?] ) in great detail. We have talked to many of the original founders and employees, studied board meeting minutes, looked through source code, and done everything we could to tell the story of Infocom's history in a fair and accurate way. As of Friday, our project has concluded. Our report and presentation, entitled "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.", is available online in both PDF of the paper and a PDF of the presentation. The presentation was given on December 13th in a quasi-public forum to members of EECS, STS, the MIT community, and some former employees of Infocom." Ah, Infocom. Many a day was whiled away trying to figure the syntax for the next command *grin*.

halcyon7 writes: "My MIT research group has spent the last two months studying Infocom ^[?] , Inc. (the creators of Zork ^[?] ) in great detail. We have talked to many of the original founders and employees, studied board meeting minutes, looked through source code, and done everything we could to tell the story of Infocom's history in a fair and accurate way. As of Friday, our project has concluded. Our report and presentation, entitled "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.", is available online in both PDF of the paper and a PDF of the presentation. The presentation was given on December 13th in a quasi-public forum to members of EECS, STS, the MIT community, and some former employees of Infocom." Ah, Infocom. Many a day was whiled away trying to figure the syntax for the next command *grin*.

keskoy writes: "David Cantrell is a core team member for the Slackware ^[?] Linux Project. In this interview you will learn how David got his start working on Slackware linux, what his role as a Slackware developer is, he will explain to us about his two new applications protopkg and autoslack, plus other various topics of interest are touched on."

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "I've got a spiffy Canon Digital Elph camera, and have been wondering if I can control it from my PC - that, is can I trigger it to take a picture remotely via the USB interface? If so, it seems a logical next step to turn it into a very (very) nice Web cam for stills at a fairly low frame rate. 1600x1200x24 bit. Also, I'd love to try my hand at digital astro-photography (put it on a telescope that is). Seems to me there ought to be some way for me to control it thru the USB again. Anyone with good leads/info on how to hack a Canon digital camera? Seems a worthy hack to me." Some cameras have command line utilities that can be used in scripts to do this. I know Kodak-compatible cameras can do this via ks or the DIGITA ^[?] scripting language, however I'm not so sure about Canon's Elph series. This also might not be too hard a capability to hack into gPhoto.

I enjoyed reading the robot diaries which are an account of building some BEAM ^[?] robots from kits. BEAM bots are interesting in that the design sense behind it is much more building from the ground-up (IE, build a robot to resemble an insect) rather then trying to build from the top down. Basically a more evolutionary approach to things.

It appears that the Konqueror ^[?] browser has been ported to QT/Embedded. The entire Konqueror takes between 2.1 and 2.8 Megabytes. You can read more details (with some screenshots) on the porting site. Although it's not completed yet, from the screenshots it looks very promising - good work, Simon.

A reader wrote to us with the news that Linuxworld is currently running an interview with Dennis Ritchie, Unix guy, C author, and Plan 9 ^[?] proponent.

mirko writes "After some time with almost no news about it, Doctor Dobb's journal finally choosed to break the silence and to deliver quite a comprehensive article (also available here) about the forthcoming Debian Hurd ^[?] operating system."

SueZVudu writes: "In an announcement yesterday, the National Infrastructure Protection Center said that there has been an increase in hacker activity aimed at US e-commerce sites. They're mainly exploiting three known vulnerabilities in Windows NT systems, but Unix systems have been targeted as well. Basically, they point out the holes in MicroSoft's SQL system and warn that such attacks are on the rise. You can see the story here." There've been a number of stories like this lately -- not just Microsoft, but the number of attacks is continuing to rise, and some people have been talking about more CERT ^[?] s regarding "super" DDOS ^[?] attacks.

SueZVudu writes: "In an announcement yesterday, the National Infrastructure Protection Center said that there has been an increase in hacker activity aimed at US e-commerce sites. They're mainly exploiting three known vulnerabilities in Windows NT systems, but Unix systems have been targeted as well. Basically, they point out the holes in MicroSoft's SQL system and warn that such attacks are on the rise. You can see the story here." There've been a number of stories like this lately -- not just Microsoft, but the number of attacks is continuing to rise, and some people have been talking about more CERT ^[?] s regarding "super" DDOS ^[?] attacks.

geophile asks: "Is it still supported? Are there new applications being written in it? Has it been extended? Did it die? When and why? Whatever happened to those funky keyboards?" APL ^[?] has the distinct reputation of being one of the most cryptic programming languages ever invented, due to the fact that it's a language based entirely on symbols. Is anyone out there still using it? If so, for what types of projects?

A reader writes: "This editorial has been just published on freshmeat: 'After full integration of the RPM ^[?] patches into APT ^[?] , it will have the potential to become the standard package management frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions and reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least one important system administration tool. (...) The temporarily-forked version of APT is already fully functional and actually works. Conectiva Linux 6.0 -- the first RPM-based distribution to support APT -- currently ships with it, and has some repositories that are available for use with APT.' It can be downloaded here."

A reader writes: "This editorial has been just published on freshmeat: 'After full integration of the RPM ^[?] patches into APT ^[?] , it will have the potential to become the standard package management frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions and reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least one important system administration tool. (...) The temporarily-forked version of APT is already fully functional and actually works. Conectiva Linux 6.0 -- the first RPM-based distribution to support APT -- currently ships with it, and has some repositories that are available for use with APT.' It can be downloaded here."

Hades- writes: "I'm a dual major at Penn State in a dual major consisting of Computer Engineering and the IST. In one of the entry-level courses of the IST program we have been discussing the Meyers Briggs Personality Indicator and its usefulness. I've written a brief paper on the subject over the past week and now I wanted to see what you, the Slashdot community thinks of this test. The test judges your personality type by answering quite a few questions. The result is a 4-letter personality type. These results can give you some sort of guidance towards a career. However, in this class we've been concentrating on group work. These tests can show who the leader, and what parts other people should be fitting to in the model. My real question is, are any of the technology companies actually using these tests? Are they optional or required? It also brings up a good point in how it would work on different kinds of open source projects by placing some people into positions and the like." Meyers-Briggs Type Indicators ^[?] have been around for quite a while, however I'm not aware of anyone using the results of these tests in any form of project management. Do you think these tests have any value and should they have any impact on the direction of one's career?

Commander Mike asks: "Sony's Web site has a big disclaimer [see footnote #3] about not relying on the Firewire ^[?] port on the Picture Book being compatible with anything. I'm thinking about buying a Picture Book and would like to see if anyone has had any luck in hooking up a DVD or CDR/RW to it using Firewire. I'd rather not have to resort to using USB if possible. Also, is there a docking station out there for the new one yet?" Just about every article I've read on FireWire also talks about Sony i.Link being compatible, so why is Sony now backpedaling on the compatibility issue? Is this another attempt at "Embrace and Extend" or does Sony have a valid reason for this behavior?

BigWhale asks: "I used to follow things that were happening on the Old School demo scenes a few years ago, then after a failed hard disk, I moved on and lost track. So, for old times sake I started poking around a little bit. What's happening with the scene, is it still alive? Indeed it is. Coding style is much different with DirectX, and hardware accelerated demos, but I'm 100% Linux oriented right now and I want to start a Linux Demo project. SDL by Loki Games is pretty neat, but is this the only thing that one could use to write a demo, what about ClanLib? How is with the sound support, I know about Midas and MikMod, is there anything else? I checked www.scene.org and there is one link there regarding Linux, but it's not working. So my question to /. is where would an old school demo coder, that wants to work with Linux, look for resources or scene hangouts?" I've watched demos ^[?] (small multimedia shorts) on just about everything from the Amiga Desktop to DOS and now Windows, does Linux have a similar subculture?

bbosilje asks: "I had a brainwave today and was wondering if anybody knows of any 'enhanced' digital dictaphone devices? Ideally the device would be small, use MP3 as the storage format, timestamp each voice recording outside of the audio stream, sync up to a desktop computer and have an organizer that you could use to keep a database of your dictated notes. This would be an awesome (read: lazy) way to keep a personal or work journal. The MP3 recorders that I have seen are primarily geared towards near CD quality playback without much said about recording. Does such a device exist? Is there a market?" Interesting thought. I've seen personal dictation devices on the market, but I don't know if they have any kinds of integration with a desktop PC and the appropriate PIM ^[?] software. Has anyone seen such an animal? If so, please comment about your experiences here.

Gnutella News sent in an excerpt from a clip2 DSS report about gnutella's evolution and condition. "the network has neither smoothly scaled nor catastrophically collapsed since average traffic grew to regularly exceed dial-up modem bandwidth in August 2000. Instead, the network persists in a fragmented state comprised of numerous continuously evolving responsive segments, the largest of which typically contains hundreds of hosts. We estimate at present that unique Gnutella users per day number no less than 10,000 and may range as high as 30,000. We suggest that further technical innovation and wide adoption of this innovation are necessary for the Gnutella network to scale beyond its present state."" Read this if you're interested in p2p ^[?] .

Andy Smith writes "This BBC story reports on efforts by the World Health Organisation ^[?] to improve the quality of health-related web sites. They want a new TLD -- .health -- to be introduced. All .health sites would then be regulated by the WHO. Here's the press release, which predicts that 'dot health could soon be as well known as dot com'." It's quite an issue - do you want to be able to "trust" the health sites, assuming that's what regulation means, or do you worry more about the innovation of the sites being quashed by an organization?

Makila writes: "I'm working on a project to digitize all the company marketing content, enabling us to re-use data for paper publishing, CD-rom, and Web publishing. The idea beyond that, as we are distributors, is to make suppliers contibute electronically their product descriptions, including technical specs and pictures, all elements that would be edited by us afterwards." To make a long story a bit shorter, Makila is looking for opinions on putting his company's DTD ^[?] under a free license. What pitfalls and advantages are involved in doing this?

"Writing a DTD is a challenge in itself (my company had never tried to go to the Web before, and never heard of XML until my project). To make the system work, we should then write software to adapt our supplier's data model to ours: for n suppliers we would need 2(n-1) correspondences (import and export) from their data model to ours which gets to be expensive on a large scale. Having a common model would help, especially for small companies not on the Web yet (those which rely only on paper data sheets for instance). My opinion, as there is no standard on our industry like RosettaNet, is that we could speed up things, and avoid babelization of XML tags by releasing our model with a Copylefted licence, lowering the cost and hassle for others on our market to build electronic publishing tools. Of course, there is a lot of money invested in our DTD, so what if competitors try to steal it?

Would the Copyleft of our DTD be a good idea?"

kchayer writes "JWZ ^[?] 's current obsession includes an audio webcast. Recently he added to the site a description of what it takes to broadcast music over the Internet. Makes for an interesting read, and a good summary of the DPRA, DMCA, their relationship with the RIAA, and other issues involving music copyright and the recording industry in general. His summary at the end says it best: "What's going on here is that the music industry establishment are absolutely terrified of the internet...and are trying to ^[?] force things to continue to be done as if turn-of-the-century technology was all we had to work with.""

kchayer writes "JWZ ^[?] 's current obsession includes an audio webcast. Recently he added to the site a description of what it takes to broadcast music over the Internet. Makes for an interesting read, and a good summary of the DPRA, DMCA, their relationship with the RIAA, and other issues involving music copyright and the recording industry in general. His summary at the end says it best: "What's going on here is that the music industry establishment are absolutely terrified of the internet...and are trying to ^[?] force things to continue to be done as if turn-of-the-century technology was all we had to work with.""

Meltr writes: "NewsForge has an interesting sneak preview of the 3rd version of the GNU Public License. Among other things, RMS will make V3 more business friendly and will close the ASP loophole in V2. Check it out here." Now, take things with a grain of salt - RMS ^[?] doesn't feel comfortable calling this even a "draft" so there's much work still to be done. But's a good article, and interesting to see what's happening.

wiredog pointed out an article that's currently running in Dr. Dobbs that talks about Hurd ^[?] , what it is, and what it is meant to do, as well as what's cool about it. The article starts off slow, but then gets into some good info.

starvo writes "Looks like Douglas Adams, and the BBC are teaming up again.. This time for the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Future" On BBC radio, premiering October 4th. The Hitchhiker's Guide site has more information. " It looks like you can listen to snippets of it in RealAudio. The interview stuff with Brian Eno ^[?] looks to very interesting as well.

Chris DiBona, a man of many titles (Linux Community Evangelist, VA Linux Systems; President, Silicon Valley Linux Users Group; Grant Chair, Linux International) passed to us this reminder that for all the (occasionally legitimate) claims of standards compliance out of Redmond, subtly breaking standards in the name of "improvement" can be far worse than more blatant attempts. Hint: supplanting ASCII is a bad idea. (More below.)

Chris writes: " So here's an interesting feature from our friends at MicroSoft. They've decided that Outlook 2000 users by default really don't want to communicate with the rest of the world, preferring to communicate only with other OL2000 users.

Now, while I don't have any problem with people extending the content of an e-mail with attachments, i.e. sending html-ized version and v.cards, it seems downright stupid to make the default behavior of ol2000 to send it's e-mail only in MS's proprietary TNEF format.

Now, It's clear that they've had some support calls on this, as proven by this KB Entry. So that means that they caught some flak for it. But they haven't changed it.

Fun Quotes from the KB entry:

• In addition to the receiving client, it is not uncommon for a mail server to strip out TNEF information from mail messages as it delivers them. If a server option to remove TNEF is turned on, clients will always receive a plain text version of the message. Microsoft Exchange Server is an example of a mail server application that has the option to remove TNEF from messages.

This means in essence that unless you are using a 'TNEF Aware' server -- like, say, hmm, MS Exchange -- you may not be able to read your mail. I may be reading a bit much into this paragraph, but it seems to me that this paragraph says 'if your friends can't get your email, it's their servers fault, not yours.'

And to take this the further, go join the EFF if you haven't already, step, suppose somone were to circumvent the protections on the TNEF format and write a program that could understand it, would you be liable under the DMCA section on anti-circumvention? Admittedly, I'd be surprised if MS took this route, but it's worth considering every single time you think about decoding proprietary formats. Does this mean strings is now a circumvention tool?

Anyhow, if there are any microsofties out there, do the right thing and cut down your support costs by making ascii the ol2000 default transmission behavior for text. And for anyone using Outlook 2000, you should switch to a program that your friends can actually recieve email from. Or at least shut off that option."

Dracos asks: "Some friends and I are developing a tabletop fantasy RPG. The concept for our magic rules is based on a fourth generation language ^[?] , combined with an object model. I've spent the last few days searching the net, but all I've found is information on how to design data structures for use with 4GLs, not 4GLs themselves. The related alt.lang.* newsgroups appear to be dead.Does anyone know of any resources on how to design a 4GL? Information of our game, as well as the rules, can be found at http://www.thedragonsforge.com."

mholve wrote to us about an interview with Larry Wall ^[?] regarding Perl 6. Wall is, always, interesting to read. Warning - the text bit is short, most of it is video.

jhughes wrote to us with the report that Debian will be including KDE2 within Woody, and according to the article, backtracking it into Potato. Of course, you've been able to get the packages by editing your sources.list ^[?] , but apparently this will mean including it in the "official" list.

aibrahim asks: " I recently found out about W3C Specification for Scalable Vector Graphics from the Adobe SVG site. So I was looking around for programs that would allow me to work with SVG on Linux, or any OSS system for that matter. Adobe plans on making almost their entire product line work with SVG, including Photoshop. Corel has released an SVG Filter. Yet, I couldn't find a single product with a Freshmeat search that mentions SVG. Looking on SourceForge reveals two projects: Gill and Savage. Neither of these projects have posted any files as of 9/2/2000. Are there any free software projects with a usable SVG product? Can anyone comment on when any such project may come to fruition? Lastly, since Adobe is including SVG features in Photoshop has anyone even mentioned it to the GIMP ^[?] develeopers?"

tonys1110 was one of the first to tell us that Python ^[?] 1.6 Final has been released unto the world. They've got a bit about the license, and of course, the obligatory "What's New".

infodragon sent us a Linux Today story by RMS ^[?] where he weighs in on the recent news about the GPLing of Qt. I'm sure that there will be a lot more about this over the week.

Palisade writes "NASM (The Netwide Assembler) is an open source assembler that can generate code for many platforms/operating systems and is portable to many operating systems. There have been debates in the past over the NASM licence to which NASM itself and all code contributed to the NASM effort is licensed under. The original authors created a license which claims to be compatible with the GPL ^[?] , but which requires unusual restrictions making it incompatible. For developers to continue developing on NASM would mean they would be contributing to a "black hole". A full synopsis can be found on the NASM website at SourceForge." Update: 09/05 04:57 PM by S :It seems the problem is resolved.

jjr writes "An article over at Infoworld say that a former exec of Novell is creating a open source(GPL) netware compatible OS. you can play with it over at www.timpanogas.com" The operating system is named MANOS, so I keep expecting to see a lot of hands involved.

martin asks: "Just saw this page on WebML. Looks quite interesting for spec-ing out a Web site and its navigation, how does this compare with the more general UML ^[?] and WML ^[?] ?"

martin asks: "Just saw this page on WebML. Looks quite interesting for spec-ing out a Web site and its navigation, how does this compare with the more general UML ^[?] and WML ^[?] ?"

Johnathon Walls writes: "BioWare, the developers of the recently announced Star Wars role playing game, has posted a job offer for art director on the Star Wars game via IGN PC. 'Applicants must have industry experience and a strong art foundation. Submit resume with portfolio demonstrating skills in 3DSMax, Photoshop, Drawing, painting, graphic design. Superb scheduling and people skills required.' Undoubtedly you'll have to move to Canada, but I can't imagine that's going to stop anyone!" Mmmm...playing Icewind Dale ^[?] ...want Star Wars.

Aaditya Sood asks: "I'm working on a DSP ^[?] project and am currently hacking away at the JPEG ^[?] algorithim. However I can't find the technical specs for it even though I have IJG's pseudo-C code. I hail from India so net time is not cheap for me. Could someone please point me to some resources on the Web which pertain to JPEG information?"

Aaditya Sood asks: "I'm working on a DSP ^[?] project and am currently hacking away at the JPEG ^[?] algorithim. However I can't find the technical specs for it even though I have IJG's pseudo-C code. I hail from India so net time is not cheap for me. Could someone please point me to some resources on the Web which pertain to JPEG information?"

A couple people wrote in regarding the ZD article talking about Gnome taking the battle to Windows. Having talked with Nat Friedman ^[?] and Miguel de Icaza ^[?] , I can definitely say that is their intent - and with how good both Gnome and KDE look, Windows should be getting some serious desktop competition.

A couple people wrote in regarding the ZD article talking about Gnome taking the battle to Windows. Having talked with Nat Friedman ^[?] and Miguel de Icaza ^[?] , I can definitely say that is their intent - and with how good both Gnome and KDE look, Windows should be getting some serious desktop competition.

Patrick McAllister was one of the folks who wrote to us about a report talking with John Carmack [?] regarding id's sales of Linux games. Apparently, it's been pretty absymal - enough to cover costs, but "they wouldn't make a bean-counter blink". I wonder what Loki's experience has been.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier ^[?] of Counterpane fame for sending in this tidbit. The US Patent Office has granted William Friedman a patent for an Engima-like device - the catch is that he filed in 1933. Still it's a cool vintage piece of crypto - and I also noticed that a gallery copy of Bruce's new book is on eBay. 'Course, you could wait just a few weeks and buy a new one, but hey - if you gotta have it now, you gotta have it.

dhammabum asks: "I've just installed a machine with a copy of Red Hat 6.2. I thought I would use the squid RPM that comes with the distribution to save time, etc. All went well until it tried to set up delay pools as this configure option had not been set in the RPM. So I then had to stuff around for quite some time working out how the RPM differed from the distribution. It even turned out the install options they used were broken -- they had to link a directory to get it to work! This begs the question -- why not have the configure options included with the RPM, say in /usr/doc, so that when one has to change something you simply add or subtract whatever you need to change, rebuild the package and reinstall?" I've always wondered why source-handling package managers like dpkg ^[?] and RPM ^[?] haven't implemented such schemes, allowing users to pass flags to configure and preserving them for the next time the package needs to be built. Does anyone have any ideas as to how such a system would best be created? Are there package managers that already do such things?

Many times, when I build packages from source, they are done so outside of the package management system because it's easier to do "./configure options; make; make install" than it is to figure out the myriad of parameters available to RPM(8) or dpkg-buildpackage(1) to properly do what I want. This also means that said packages are most often installed in /usr/local and must then be uninstalled by hand.

It would be nice (and essential for Linux novices) if packages could be built from source, and customized, but still remain under the umbrella of the distribution's package manager with the customizations saved for later use. Are there any efforts to bring this kind of functionality to the current distributions?

dhammabum asks: "I've just installed a machine with a copy of Red Hat 6.2. I thought I would use the squid RPM that comes with the distribution to save time, etc. All went well until it tried to set up delay pools as this configure option had not been set in the RPM. So I then had to stuff around for quite some time working out how the RPM differed from the distribution. It even turned out the install options they used were broken -- they had to link a directory to get it to work! This begs the question -- why not have the configure options included with the RPM, say in /usr/doc, so that when one has to change something you simply add or subtract whatever you need to change, rebuild the package and reinstall?" I've always wondered why source-handling package managers like dpkg ^[?] and RPM ^[?] haven't implemented such schemes, allowing users to pass flags to configure and preserving them for the next time the package needs to be built. Does anyone have any ideas as to how such a system would best be created? Are there package managers that already do such things?

Many times, when I build packages from source, they are done so outside of the package management system because it's easier to do "./configure options; make; make install" than it is to figure out the myriad of parameters available to RPM(8) or dpkg-buildpackage(1) to properly do what I want. This also means that said packages are most often installed in /usr/local and must then be uninstalled by hand.

It would be nice (and essential for Linux novices) if packages could be built from source, and customized, but still remain under the umbrella of the distribution's package manager with the customizations saved for later use. Are there any efforts to bring this kind of functionality to the current distributions?