Slashdot Mirror

Anonymous Coward wrote to mention a Wired article about the rise of Pokerbots in online gaming venues. From the article: "Smart, skilled players are rewarded in the long run, especially online, where there are plenty of beginners who would never have the nerve to sit down at a real table. But WinHoldEm isn't just smart, it's a machine. Set it to run on autopilot and it wins real money while you sleep. Flick on Team mode and you can collude with other humans running WinHoldEm at the table. For years, there has been chatter among online players about the coming poker bot infestation. WinHoldEm is turning those rumors into reality, and that is a serious problem for the online gambling business."

Uttles asks: "In reference to this previous article asking about HomePNA support, does anyone out there know of any support for HomePNA 2.0 on Linux that is good for USB PNA devices? I have a 2Wire PC Port and my roommate has a Linksys PNA device and we both have to use Windows for them to work. Needless to say, we'd really like it if we could use Linux. Also, for those that say the companies aren't providing support, The HomePNA 2.0 PCI card drivers are in the Linksys beta area."

jwunderl writes: "Just a quick word to let you know that Rebel, who took over the NetWinder line from Corel has gone the way of the dodo. Claining a failed partnership with Fuji, the company informed it's creditors it could no longer continue. The full story is available at the Ottawa Citizen's page." Linux appliances don't seem to be the sure-sell that everyone thought they would be.

Moderator writes: "Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft ported Internet Explorer to FreeBSD? Apparently, someone else thinks so, and set up a petition for Microsoft to port IE to FreeBSD. Hey, I'm no Microsoft lover, but IE is better than Netscape." Hmm. Personally, I'm more of a "xterm -geometry =120x50 -e w3m" man, but to each his own I suppose.

Jayakrishnan has returned with another review of a Java book. This time around it's Matthew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev's Swing. Published by Manning Publications, this book is designed to give information to both beginners and advanced programmers. Swing author Matthew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev pages 917 publisher Manning Publications, 08/1999 rating 10/10 reviewer Jayakrishnan (JK) ISBN 1884777848 summary Unique examples and the exhaustive coverage of Swing make this a valuable book for both beginners and advanced programmers.

How many times have you opened a book in search of a solution and found not only an answer, but also an elegant enhancement to your application? How many times have you ignored an O'Reilly book on the same subject lying on your table? The answer is Manning's new book Swing authored by Mathew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev. And that is my final answer.

The book (with just a 5-character title) is 917 pages long and is divided into four parts containing 23 chapters, an appendix and a bibliography. The first part, "Foundations," introduces Swing, its architecture and the key mechanism underlying Swing. Part II, mysteriously called "The Basics," explains the most commonly used and simpler classes of the Swing toolkit like labels, buttons, menus, list boxes, progress bars and sliders. The third part of the book, "Advanced topics," deals with using complicated components like trees, tables, text components and layered panes, as well as creating pluggable look and feel. The final part, "Special topics" introduces printing and the Java2D API.

Only two chapters of the final part are included in the book. The remaining four chapters which discuss accessibility, JavaHelp API, CORBA and some examples contributed by experienced Swing developers are available on the book's Web site.

The structure of each chapter is the same. Let's look at the chapter on tables as an example. The JTable class is introduced followed by related classes and interfaces. This is followed by discussions on row and column selections from JTable, column width and resizing and customizing the appearance of the table. The important methods related to these issues are discussed and short code samples are used to demonstrate the main features.

Then comes the meat of the chapter -- the examples. The first example shows how to display stock market data in a JTable. Complete code for the example is given and important sections are discussed. The examples that follow are enhancements to the first example. In the JTable chapter, they include adding custom renderers, customizing the data rendering, retrieving and displaying data from a database.

Each of the examples builds upon the previous one and as promised on the cover of the book, is production-quality code. While most other Swing books serve as expensive javadoc dumps of JFC with trivial, forgettable examples, Swing provides code that saves lots of time for the developer. The other applications that are developed in the book include a JPEG image editor, an ftp client, an X-Window-style desktop environment and a word processor.

This book is for the developer building applications using the Swing components of the Java Foundation Classes. The large number of examples make this a great cookbook providing code samples that will vastly reduce your development time. The language is simple and the examples are well defined. All the Swing components are discussed in detail with several screen shots.

The part I liked the most in this book is the section in each chapter about extending the Swing components to create custom components. These include creating an oval shaped border, polygonal buttons, and a tabbed pane which takes an image as the background. These examples provide knowledge to extend the components in ways limited only by your imagination.

The book is sprinkled with UI design guidelines by David Anderson related to usability and presentation. There is no reference to the Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines issued by JavaSoft. So I would recommend referring to that book (published by Sun Microsystems) if you want to design applications with consistent appearance and behavior.

The only minor annoyances in this book are the figures which display the component hierarchy, as they have an unprofessional look. But there are only a few of them.

To summarize, the unique examples and the exhaustive coverage of Swing makes this book very valuable for both beginners and advanced programmers.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Dark-Helmet writes "YETI@Home, the search for the missing link? Or something else? Anyway, a very good parody of places like SETI@Home." One thing lacking on this site is Team Slashdot's ranking. We spot strange human-like creatures all the time (usually in our mirrors).

calibanDNS pointed us to unOfficial H4X0r'$ Guide to Slashdot. This is one of the funniest bits I've read in recent memory. It's nice to get a good belly laugh on a friday afternoon, and this one will provide it.

Bryan Crowl writes "Only yesterday all australians got to have their say in the historic referendum on becoming a republic. The Australian Electoral Commission have been using a Virtual tallyroom to allow people from all around the world to view statistics. Last night they posted some statistics about the amount of visitors , 6 million in the first 3 hours, or about 556 a second. And what was this server running to handle this sort of load, Linux(Redhat) and Apache(1.3.6) Check it out @ link "
You can also check it out for yourself by using the Netscape Poke. As we've always said, it's real world benchmarks that mean the most :) .

Finally a chance to break in my cheesy little "Quickies" icon *grin*. First up is Miguel "Mr GNOME" de Icaza who wrote in to point us at Open Resources which looks like a pretty nice site. NiceGuy wrote in to say that Propaganda 6 is out if you happen to be sick of your desktop- some of the finest textures I've seen yet. Rob Biggs wrote in to say that Transmetta has opened up their website. *cough*. Aurik sent us linkage to some geek toys like a plasma fire saber and mass drivers and rail guns Jowey wrote in to say that ReBoot has been bought by the cartoon network and will be re-aired. Now I gotta get a dish. broken sent us a link to the Pig Dance. Is anyone else really sick of these? Brian Fair sent us linkage to a sticker that I guess you could put on your big truck if you have one. Those things amuse me. I've seen them with Ford Logos and stuff, I guess it was only a matter of time. Ah well, thats it for me. I'm gonna wail on some badly tuned power chords, watch Futurama and just take it easy for a bit.