Slashdot Mirror

DarkZero writes: "After almost every tech site and individual geek banded together to either carry the story about Google's delisting of Operation Clambake or flat-out protest it, Google has apparently relisted Xenu.net. Searches for 'xenu' and 'scientology' list Operation Clambake as the first and fourth results, respectively. The search for "scientology" also lists a story from C|Net about Google delisting Operation Clambake, as well as a protest ad from a Kuro5hin reader (oc3)." Update: 03/22 12:52 GMT by M : We jumped the gun. Google only relisted Xenu.net's homepage (where the copyright claims by Scientology were clearly bogus), not the rest of the pages listed in Scientology's DMCA complaint. Some Google sysadmin is getting aggravated because every 20 minutes, another memo from management is coming down telling him to alter the live database.

DarkZero writes: "After almost every tech site and individual geek banded together to either carry the story about Google's delisting of Operation Clambake or flat-out protest it, Google has apparently relisted Xenu.net. Searches for 'xenu' and 'scientology' list Operation Clambake as the first and fourth results, respectively. The search for "scientology" also lists a story from C|Net about Google delisting Operation Clambake, as well as a protest ad from a Kuro5hin reader (oc3)." Update: 03/22 12:52 GMT by M : We jumped the gun. Google only relisted Xenu.net's homepage (where the copyright claims by Scientology were clearly bogus), not the rest of the pages listed in Scientology's DMCA complaint. Some Google sysadmin is getting aggravated because every 20 minutes, another memo from management is coming down telling him to alter the live database.

Romancer writes "The Naples Daily News has an article about an environmental anomaly discovered by local fisherman: "They've dubbed it black water, and they're demanding that local, state and national government agencies find out what's causing it." With the Ice shelf falling and now this, solutions are helping but might be a bit late."

touretzky writes: "Scientology has used a DMCA threat to force removal of a large number of pages from xenu.net from the Google search engine. Some of the pages Scientology is objecting to contain no material owned by the cult; other pages are clearly covered under "fair use". Scientology's ongoing abuse of Google is documented here. Of course, the Norwegian owner of xenu.net could write a counternotification letter, but that would require him to agree to the jurisdiction of a US court in a district of Scientology's choosing." The posting by Heldal-Lund agrees with what we can observe at Google - the pages listed in the posting aren't in Google's database, though many others are. Update: 03/21 14:16 GMT by M : Paul Wouters of xtdnet.nl (which hosts xenu.net) submits this page documenting Scientology's attacks against the ISP for continuing to host xenu.net.

Cory Doctorow has a article on oreillynet called "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon," which begins "How much ass does Google kick? All of it." (We linked to it a few days ago.) Reader Richard Seltzer writes with a reaction to Doctorow's article, below. Your results may vary, but this kind of skepticism can only make the competing search engines better.

Some people love the results they get at Google, others are often disappointed. To a large extent, both the pluses and the minuses derive from Google's ranking system, which (as the folks at Google explain www.google.com/technology) depends largely on the number links to a particular page and the relevance of the content on those linking pages to the content on the target page, and the quality of the pages doing the linking.

Thanks to that complex and brilliant system, over time, the best pages often rise to the top of search lists. But that takes time -- a lot of time.

It works great for old, established sites to which many other old, established sites have linked. (It works great for my site :-) www.samizdat.com ). But new sites, regardless of the quality of their content, get short shrift. It takes 2-3 months for the new pages to get into the Google index. Then it takes time -- perhaps years -- for other "important" sites to discover the new site and link to it; and then months more for the new versions of those pages with those new links to get into the Google index.

So if I'm looking for content that is likely to have been on the Internet for a year or more, Google is great. But if I'm looking for fresh content, I'll go elsewhere.

For me, for years "elsewhere" meant AltaVista -- for two reasons. AltaVista used to add new pages to its index, for free, within two days of submission, while other search engines typically took weeks or even months. That meant they had the freshest content. In addition, AltaVista provided you with a set of very precise commands that couldn't be matched anywhere else.

Over the last year, as AltaVista has struggled to become profitable, they have destroyed their beautiful free submission process, trying to force Web sites to pay for submission. Free submissions (which typically come from the kinds of content-rich sites that I'm interested in) now seem to take three months or more -- no better than the other search engines and often worse.

Fortunately, the powerful commands remain -- for instance, the ability to exclude as well as include terms in your query. AltaVista lets you use minus signs and plus signs to indicate what you really don't want and what you do want. And for some specialized searches the exclusion is essential.

For instance, say you want to know what Web pages outside of your own site have links to your pages. At Google, I can do a search for link:samizdat.com or get the same results by going to their "Advanced" search and using their "page specific search" to find pages that link to a particular page. But my results are then littered with pages from my own site -- information I don't need and don't want. At AltaVista, I can search for +link:samizdat.com -host:samizdat.com and get exactly what I want -- finding out who thinks enough of my pages to have linked to me without my having contacted them: a valuable list of well-wishers and potential partners.

Similarly, Google lets me restrict a search to a particular Web site. For instance, if I include in my query the term site:samizdat.com or in Advanced search under Domains I choose to restrict the search to that domain, Yes, I get results only from that site. But to use that command, I need to have additional query terms: site:samizdat.com alone generates no results.

At AltaVista, however, I can search for host:samizdat.com and get a complete list of all the pages at my site that are in the AltaVista index. Or I can search for url:samizdat.com/isyn and get a list of all the pages in that directory at my site are in the AltaVista index. Or I can search for url:samizdat.com/consult.html to see if that particular page is in the index.

In other words, AltaVista provides a higher level of precision and the ability to get information that is particularly valuable to people in charge of Web sites and Web-based marketing projects. And if they'd just fix their free submission process and provide the service they used to, they'd kick Google's ass for searches for current information.

P.S. -- The folks at Google are very proud that their system defies human tampering. In fact, what they've done is encouraged the development of bizarre business models structured to take advantage of their link-based ranking system. For instance, Webseed Publishing now has over 1000 sites, all with different domain names. These content-rich sites are each run by different dedicated individuals. (I'm one of them :-) In many cases, the content deserves high rankings for its quality. You might wonder why the umbrella business for all these sites bothers to maintain over a thousand different domain names, when it would be far simpler and cheaper to have them as directories under a single domain. But because the domains are different, the many thousands of links these sites have to one another all count toward the automated calculation of their popularity and quality at Google, giving them all a boost in the rankings and hence bringing Webseed more traffic and hence more revenue.

P.P.S. -- AltaVista appears to be making a comeback. Six years ago, when I was in the Internet Business Group at Digital and Digital owned AltaVista, about a third of the traffic to my Web site came by way of AltaVista. Whenever AltaVista had a glitch, I saw it immediately in my traffic stats. In fact, I sometimes was able to alert the engineers at AltaVista about problems before they had noticed them themselves. Over the years, due to increased competition from other search engines and also due to the business folks at AltaVista making bad decisions and jettisoning great capabilities/services (like 2-day free submissions, their affiliate program, LiveTopics, and newsgroup search), the number of people finding my pages by way of AltaVista plummeted. By January 2002, only 1% of my traffic was coming by way of AltaVista, despite the fact that as a long-standing fan and also as co-author of the book The AltaVista Search Revolution, I had lots of information about AltaVista at my site. I was actually getting twice as much traffic from the International Atomic Energy Agency (part of the UN), when I had no information at all related to atomic energy. But in recent weeks the traffic from AltaVista has climbed sharply. It now amounts to 6% of my total. I wish I knew why that was happening. In any case, I hope that trend continues.

Cally writes: "This post to NANOG summarises Dave Henderson's paper (.ppt: HTML in Google cache, grep for 'Now Really Public') from the Internetwork Interoperability Test Coordination Committee, about the state of security in the public switched (telephone) network: wide open and "very fragile with a tremendous number of vulnerabilities". Apparently, there's $12b in fraud per year, growing interest from blackhat groups, and more, better, intruder tools. We often hear talk of "information warfare attacks that could result in the draining of bank reserves and the cutting off of power sources" from budget-and-PR hungry, but clue-light, politicians and wonks these days. When an experienced engineer uses such language, it's more worrying." We've also had submissions of this AP article speculating about viruses hitting mobile phones.

spoon00 writes: "AOL is collecting information on what Netscape 6 users are searching for on sites like google.com. IP address, the date Netscape was installed and a unique ID number are other bits of information AOL is also collecting."

tramm writes "The FAA, working with the EAA have put together a proposal to release old type certificates and blueprints once the copyright holders no longer exist. Sort of like Abandonware for airplanes. This very closely resembles Lawrence Lessig's idea of a creative commons, into which source code would be escrowed. Once the copyright expired or became abandonded, the sources would be released. "This set of legal guidelines will help the FAA develop a set of procedures to legally release what had previously been unnecessarily protected as proprietary data.". Hopefully the Copyright office will take note of the success here, as well as the Supreme Court's hearing of Eldred v Reno."

Slashback tonight with an mini-avalanche of updates and corrections on Pioneer 10 (it's not a Star Trek series), Canadian copyright hearings, Intel's stance on SSSCA and similar laws, and -- Oh Yes, whether 640K really is enough for anyone. Read on for the details. Update: 03/05 00:19 GMT by T : "Pioneer," not "Voyager." Asleep at the keyboard.

Kudos to the guys behind Pioneer 10! Soft writes: "As a follow-up to yesterday's story, Pioneer 10 was successfully contacted for its 30th birthday, as announced in sci.space.news. The commands that were sent yesterday have been executed by the spacecraft, and more data has been collected by the Geiger Tube Telescope." lostchicken adds a link to Associated Press wire story on Yahoo!', writing "Not bad for a 30 year-old spacecraft. Perhaps those making time capsules could learn something from this?" Several readers also pointed out the SpaceDaily version of the goings on.

What, in the middle of Canadian winter?! schon writes: "An update to this /. story - The Canadian Copyright Board has announced the details of the public hearings on Canadian Digital Copyrights, at http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp00838e.html. Interested parties should register before attending (details available on the page.)"

Sent to you in compliance with the current Federal legislation An Anonymous Coward writes: "Back in June of 2000 Slashdot.org reported a story called ' Taking On A Spammer' about a spammer being hacked by a pissed sys-admin. The Behind Enemy Lines web page talked about a pump-and-dump spam done by Premier Services and Mark Rice."

(See this page for more information on that scam.)

"Well on February 25, 2002 the SEC filed charges against Mark Rice!"

Death of a legend? Jean-Luc writes "The New York Review of Books has published an article that contains an e-mail from Bill Gates denying he ever said the infamous "640K should be enough for anyone" quote. He foists the blame on IBM and claims he tried to convince them to include more address space from the get go. Very technical and fairly convincing, showing that for all his might Bill is still basically a geek's geek."

They hadn't even gotten to the bowlderizing chip yet ... Dan Gilmor pointed out Intel's strong statement Thursday on copy protection front, "much stronger than the letter sent yesterday. Surprising given their history..." Maybe Intel believes they can do a better job of what deciding what goes into Silicon than a committee of bureaucrats steered by the entertainment moguls can.

Reader amoon writes: "With the rise of XML-based RPC (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC, APEX), the distributed computing world is starting to really unsettle from the CORBA-RMI-DCOM oligopoly of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, XML-based RPC is not a panacea (though it is quite cool), especially for those of us involved in the legacy and client-server worlds. Now, what is fascinating: the publishing world is revving up the engines on not only the XML-based RPC stuff, but also the RMI and CORBA stuff -- while rarely applied to the tech industry, the old adage, "what was old is new again," seems to fit well here. This review describes this über-cool trend from the RMI perspective, with a focus on Java RMI (O'Reilly) by William Grosso." Read on for the rest of the review. Java RMI author William Grosso pages 545 publisher O'Reilly rating 8 reviewer amoon ISBN 1-56592-452-5 summary Solid practical insight into the nitty-gritty details of RMI.

The Scoop

Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is the object-oriented remote procedure call (ORPC) facility for distributed programming in Java, since the 1.1 days. RMI also served as motivation and a proof-of-concept for jini, javaspaces, and numerous other solid distributed networking technologies. Of course, anyone from the academic distributed programming world knows Wollrath, Waldo, and Riggs.

Yet, despite a myriad of books over the past five years on network programming, RMI always seemed to be the stepchild: relegated to a single chapter (buried on page 496, of course) that always said that RMI was "better" than sockets and "worse" than CORBA. Now, granted that RMI is operationally rather trivial compared with CORBA and was (prior to RMI/IIOP) a unilanguage distributed ORPC technology -- but still. For those of us who have to interoperate with RMI (whether welcome from the Java world or not), the lack of in-depth technical analysis (beyond the spec) has been a hindrance.

Fortunately, this trend is finally starting to buckle with the release of several in-depth RMI books including: Java RMI, Java.rmi, and Mastering RMI: Developing Enterprise Applications in Java and EJB. As evidence of this problem, Grosso states the same in his introduction – and actually pulls it off without sounding self-serving.

I chose Grosso's text because of the cute squirrel (aka the O'Reilly brand), Grosso's recent series of articles on the hashbelt algorithm, and his unadulterated academic knowledge management and mathematics bent. Fortunately, I was rewarded: this animal returns to O'Reilly's pre-bubble quality. Koodoos to both Grosso and his editors (Knudsen, Loukides, and Eckstein) for getting the train back on the track.

What's to Like

Bottom line is that Grosso simply covers the topics and does so with solid conceptual and code coherence – even by O'Reilly standards (over 40 animals grace my shelves). His prose and explanatory patterns make it clear that he has actually gotten into the real-world of RMI, and doesn't hesitate to highlight both good and bad parts. You cannot be dozing off when you read this (at least not if you expect to understand it) -- this is written by someone with solid analytic thinking skills and it shows. After too many years of "there are no caveats" journalism and publishing, this is a nice reversion. Further, I can only imagine that his current employment is a testament to his real-world knowledge of RMI.

Grosso hits on a vein which is not well-appreciated: when not smoothed over by marketing people, RMI is actually a mostly-capable ORPC technology. Certainly activation and RMI/IIOP really began to make things interesting, from Java2 and EJB respectively. Discussion of reference-counted distributed garbage collection, a feature missing from CORBA and other popular ORPC standards, also contributes a nice bonus (although Grosso's ardent attempt to debunk the "RMI doesn't scale" argument is rather weak, even going so far as to rehash the definition of Threads and threadpools – this complexity mismatch is an ugly giveaway that a well-intentioned editor went astray).

What sets this text apart is the tight focus on nitty-gritty implementation details of RMI itself. After all, these RMI texts are way too late to the game to reteach how to write "baby RMI" code: 5 years after the original spec, you either know how to write RMI or you don't. Grosso simply gives you a solid in-depth analysis of all the obscurities of the RMI runtime, custom sockets, dynamic classloading, activation, MarshalledObjects, and HTTP tunneling. In other words, all the interesting real-world topics whose official documentation is poor and which the various RMI tutorials (written many years ago) ignored.

While canonical, the single banking example followed through the text was well-executed, although authors continue to underestimate the prevalence of readers who consume textbooks non-linearly.

What's Not to Like

RMI/IIOP is shaping up to be a fascinating contributor to the "cleanup the EJB mess" discussion. Dedicating a measly 13 pages (beginning on page 503, no less) to this critical topic seems a bit of an oversight – but maybe that is just my CORBA sentiments speaking. Either way, the mechanics of CORBA are sufficiently intricate in real-world deployments that saying "if you can build an RMI system, you can build a CORBA system" (p. 511) is a bit brazen (or naïve) for my tastebuds. I can only chalk up this oversight to deadline pressure, which is probably a Good Thing, since the book was supposedly in production over almost 2 years.

A minor point: the top-level organization of the book (Part I, II, III) is arbitrary, ignore it -- use the chapter organization instead.

The Summary

Quality: solid practical insight into the nitty-gritty operational implementation details of RMI in the real-world. You simply are not going to find solid O'Reilly-quality coverage of the topics elsewhere.

Relevance: If you are responsible for making RMI actually work in production systems, this might well be the next animal on your shelf – either now or later. If you want a breezy afternoon saunter around RMI, skip this. Instead, google one (of the many) free tutorials online."

You can purchase Java RMI from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

mmaddox asks: "As a software developer, I've consulted on many projects - projects conceived in the twisted mind of management and marketing and cursed with bizarre, often hysterically funny names. Of course, these names lead to the adoption of the dreaded acronym. Most recently, I've discouraged the name selections of a few clients, in particular, the Private Inline Security System (a silly "personal firewall" - the client didn't even THINK of using an acronym) and Cross-section Heads-Up Digitizer (an engineering bit for roadway construction - anyone remember the movie?). There must be millions of these things out there. What is the worst acronym you've ever had the *ahem* pleasure of dealing with?" And in typical Slashdot fashion, it just wouldn't be the same without taking a dig at Microsoft. If you click here and look at the #2 result (of 44), then you may see one of funniest acronyms I've ever seen come out of the corporate culture. Of course, if you click on that particular link it looks like someone at the Borg have recognized their error and is trying to rewrite history, changing the "tool" into a "utility". God bless the Google cache! If you think you've seen acronyms to beat this one, please share!

Computer-quincyME asks: "I am very interested in forensic computing (using computers to help forensics, like in blood spatter analysis, geographic profiling etc.) but despite some extensive Googling, I'm not able to find any decent site that contains information on current forensic problems that don't have yet an acceptable computing implementation (I'd like to try my hand at writing some forensic software in my spare time, and I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel, but to create something useful). Any forensics experts in the Slashdot crowd that could give me a hand? Do you know of any tasks you have to routinely do these days by hand that you would kill to have more automated? Also, how did you end up in your current job?"

JPawloski asks: "When I bought this computer, it came with 6 months of AOL for free. Being notoriously frugal, I have used AOL and will continue to until my free time expires; however, the one disadvantage is it does not have a NNTP server. I find using Deja by Google cumbersome and have a number of problems (updating every 9 or so hours is one of them). I started a search of public NNTP servers on the Internet, and tried literally 50 of them, but none of them work. I even looked a directories of public news servers and fared no better. Are public news servers a thing of the past now that most ISPs offer it standard? Does anyone else out there still use a public news server, and, if so, how does it work compared to the alternatives (deja.com, etc.). Any other recommendations?"

wka writes "This Usenet post, by J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5 ), outlines his new TV series Jeremiah . Based on a graphic novel series, it's a show 'about beginnings' after a killer virus has wiped out most of Earth's population, and it premieres on premium-cable channel Showtime Sunday night (regular airings to follow on Fridays). We can hope that the executives who interfered with Stargate SG-1 don't mess up this show."

primal39 writes: "The Mozilla Project is hosting a developer days on March 1 and 2 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Registration Here." Only $50 registration, but dress warm.

biwillia writes: "According to this heise article (in German, or Google translated), free versions of Star Office will now only be available to Solaris users. Free versions for Linux and Windows users will no longer be offered. A homemade translation of the first paragraph reads, 'With version 6.0 of Star Office, scheduled to be released in May, Sun has changed the product politics of their Office package, which had been freely distributed since the aquisition of Hamburg-based Star Division. In the future, Sun wishes to charge license fees for usage of the Windows and Linux versions. Only the version for Sun's own operation system Solaris will remain free.'"

polymath69 asks: "Living on the edge of Debian unstable means that updates sometimes break stuff, occasionally to an extent that is difficult to recover from. This got me thinking about treating the entire set of mounted filesystems as a transactional database. Mark state, try something which might be dangerous, test, and approve (commit) or panic (rollback). Obviously some filesystem support would be required, but with ext3 and reiserfs available, maybe the potential is already there. And such a system would need lots of disk space, but these days that's a demand easily granted. There's lots out there on process-level checkpointing, and even some stuff about system-level checkpointing, but all I've found on that was in the context of saving and restoring processes for a system freeze and restore. But I couldn't find anything on Google or SourceForge about doing this sort of temporary branching in the filesystem. Is this idea feasible? Is anyone working on it?"

AccordionGuy writes: "Google has just announced its first annual programming contest! The objective is to write a program that will do something "interesting" with the about 900,000 Web pages' worth data that's Google provides. In addition to writing the program, contestants also have to convince the judges why their program is interesting (or useful) and why it will scale (that is, handle a constantly increasing load of data that grows as the Web grows). The prize is US$10,000 in cash, a V.I.P. tour of the Google facility in Mountain View, California and possibly a chance to run their program on Google's complete billion-Web-page store."

Flammon writes: "Linus has been overloaded with patches for a while and recently the issue started to become hot again. In an unprecedented move, Linus has started using BitKeeper, as reported by Linux Today. The benefits of BitKeeper are already showing from the large amount of detail provided in the latest unstable kernel pre-release." eirikref adds: "Read Linus' own statement and take a look at the BK web interface."

Flammon writes: "Linus has been overloaded with patches for a while and recently the issue started to become hot again. In an unprecedented move, Linus has started using BitKeeper, as reported by Linux Today. The benefits of BitKeeper are already showing from the large amount of detail provided in the latest unstable kernel pre-release." eirikref adds: "Read Linus' own statement and take a look at the BK web interface."

Anonymous Coward writes "Harmony Central has a NAMM article about FinalScratch which is a digital audio controller technology for Linux/BeOS, so DJ's can play digital audio and keep the tactile control of the turntable. Some interesting technology there, and a further push for digital audio." Another one for CowboyNeal's birthday list.

AnalogBoy asks: "I figure, with the diverse backgrounds offered here on Slashdot, at least 1(,000) of you would have an astronomy background, in some way, shape, or form. I've always had a passing interest in all things space, in particular, i've always been captivated by whats 'out there'. I was wondering if any of youse guys had suggestions on books, programs (Windows or Unix), and especially GOOD telescopes (Sub-$500-range). I've looked through Google, etc - but I want a community opinion! "

vasah20 writes: "ZDNet.com has this article saying that Yahoo is starting a pay-per-search service for 'premium documents,' in attempt to offset some of its revenue losses. Maybe it's just me, but if people can already find the most relevant results on Google, what are the chances anyone's gonna use this service?"

rjk191 writes: "Darren Reed, the author of IPFilter, has created his own release of OpenBSD which puts IPFilter back in. IPFilter was removed from OpenBSD 3.0 by the OpenBSD team due to license issues. See his newsgroup posting that announces it here." Here's the whole thread for some more information.

rjk191 writes: "Darren Reed, the author of IPFilter, has created his own release of OpenBSD which puts IPFilter back in. IPFilter was removed from OpenBSD 3.0 by the OpenBSD team due to license issues. See his newsgroup posting that announces it here." Here's the whole thread for some more information.

jerryasher asks: "I get a kick out of examining my logs to see who downloads my software, and from how far away. I was downloading md5summer one night, and came across this suggestion from its author, Luke Pascoe: 'So if you like MD5summer, send me a postcard.' Well this is a brilliant suggestion, and one that nicely borrows from our Ham radio heritage. This is what Ham operators do when they make contact with each other: each Ham operator designs a QSL card that describes himself and usually his location. On making contact with someone on the air, they exchange these postcards. So let's start sending QSL cards to each other!" Interesting thought. Might some of you be interested in doing this?

"It's always encouraging to receive a thank you for your work, and that's what a QSL card would be, a personalized thank you and memento from each downloader. It would be good for the community too: if we are working for our egos, then QSL cards would be an inexpensive way to boost a developer's ego. (Considering how few of you are clicking on that PayPal button, perhaps you might be motivated to buy a stack of QSL cards and to send them out)

It would be good for the economy: buying, printing, sending QSL cards will help developers, printers, and the post office. And it can be good for our projects: we might find that in addition to tee shirts and coffee mugs, our development projects can sell a variety of promotional QSL cards to developers to send to others.

So how do we turn this into the meme for 2002?"

Wrinkled Shirt writes: "If you want to be able to work either as or with a systems analyst, you're going to have to speak the same language as everyone else in your team, and in the tech industry that language is increasingly becoming the UML. The Unified Modelling Language provides ways of modelling every sort of system that you can imagine, covering everything from the relationships of your different objects to the dynamics of the system in action to the way it'll look when you physically set it up." He's reviewed below the SAMS-published Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours; read on below for his reactions to the book, both good and bad. Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours, 2nd Edition author Joseph Schmuller pages 397 publisher SAMS rating 5.5 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 0-672-32238-2 summary Useful enough as an introductory text, but likely needs companion texts for anyone who wants to design complex systems.

Introduction

The UML was adopted by the OMG (Object Management Group) as their official method of visually representing an object-oriented design, and as such is particularly well-suited to working with CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). Now, the OMG believes in their acronyms the way the Irish believe in their whiskey, and if you're hoping they'll give you introductory material on how to use the UML without broadening the context to all the other standards the OMG is responsible for, well, good luck. Addison Wesley has an entire series dedicated to the UML and different aspects of it, and O'Reilly's got the requisite Nutshell book, but there's definitely a void for good low-cost beginner texts, and it is this void that Schmuller's book attempts to fill.

Does it succeed? Well, sort of.

The Good

Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours is a very thorough introduction to the language. The first fifteen chapters alone cover practically every structural and behavioural element, all the important relationships, static diagrams and dynamic diagrams, and even a little object-oriented design theory. As far as computer books go, it's not very expensive at its full price, and is even available at some discount stores. It is also loaded with sample diagrams throughout, and has a large seven-chapter case study going through a sample project design process, terminating with a couple of chapters on miscellaneous applications of the UML.

Understanding the subjective element of design, this book tries to help the reader gain their own personal take on the UML by providing lots of sample exercises to perform, and the sum total is a book that gives the reader a good idea of the effectiveness of the UML as a modelling language. In fact, if I were a systems analyst and I needed to give my team a crash course in the UML before getting them to implement my specs, I could do a lot worse than making them all read this book first.

Unfortunately, here's where the accolades stop. A book that teaches people how to read another person's diagrams written in the UML is one thing, but as an effective reference on how to design using the UML, the book comes up short in a few ways.

The Not-So-Good

Part of the power of the UML is that even though the OMG really needed to it to get their CORBA spec to make sense visually, you can basically use the UML to describe any old sort of system you want. Unfortunately, Schmuller takes a little too much advantage of this, and a disproportionate amount of the examples and diagrams involve physical systems instead of software systems. It's as though software design is a bit of an afterthought, which is fine, but the book could have been richer had it focused more on this aspect of UML implementation rather than, for instance, how to use the UML to model a soda machine.

Another shortcoming is that the book tantalizes us with the odd example proving that part of the power of the UML comes from the flexibility to combine elements from multiple diagrams into a single diagram, and yet these examples are used so sparingly and with no substantive explanation to the methodology involved that you're left with a feeling that even though the UML can do a lot of things, you're not quite sure how to make it do all those things for you.

It's admirable that Schmuller devoted so much time to the case study, and made sure that the scope was broad enough that all of the topics explained to that point got an appearance. However, one of the pitfalls of trying to come up with a case study that outlines a fundamentally subjective process is that some of the design decisions are going to seem arbitrary to some people who don't have a psychic connection to the author. It's not something unique to this book, but this book falls victim to it. Schmuller would have done better to have used those seven chapters to describe two different systems to give a broader idea and more than one context to the process of UML design. He also took a little too much creative license with scripting the hypothetical interview process. A reference book on the UML isn't the best place to try out your best David Mamet impression.

And then there are the really minor problems. Some of the diagrams could use a little cleaning up, and sometimes the basic diagram is represented a little differently in the summary section as it is in the chapter dedicated to it. Some of the more complex diagrams are handled first and the simpler ones later. There's no real explanation that makes sense to a newbie about the difference between an aggregation and a composite. And finally, even though one could argue that learning about the UML itself should be kept as a separate and distinct process from learning about how to program off a UML design, I think such a chapter would have been far more beneficial to a neophyte than the chapter on modelling for embedded systems, which is likely to be the domain of people who are far beyond the level of UML familiarity that this book is going to give you anyway.

Conclusion

Now, even though as individual criticisms these might seem minor, as a whole it adds up to a book that's going to need a couple of companion references for the reader to truly feel ready to start diagramming with the UML in a professional environment. However, as said before, it isn't too expensive and is pretty much alone in the world of introductory manuals to the UML, and even if you're hoping to become a full-fledged analyst you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk, and this book will help you do just that. Just don't expect to be running marathons by the end.

Table of Contents

( exploded version here)

Introduction.
Hour 1. Introducing the UML.
Hour 2. Understanding Object-Orientation.
Hour 3. Working with Object-Orientation.
Hour 4. Working with Relationships.
Hour 5. Understanding Aggregations, Composites, Interfaces, and Realizations.
Hour 6. Introducing Use Cases.
Hour 7. Working with Use Case Diagrams.
Hour 8. Working with State Diagrams.
Hour 9. Working with Sequence Diagrams.
Hour 10. Working with Collaboration Diagrams.
Hour 11. Working with Activity Diagrams.
Hour 12. Working with Component Diagrams.
Hour 13. Working with Deployment Diagrams.
Hour 14. Understanding the Foundations of the UML.
Hour 15. Fitting the UML into a Development Process.
Hour 16. Introducing the Case Study.
Hour 17. Performing a Domain Analysis.
Hour 18. Gathering System Requirements.
Hour 19. Developing the Use Cases.
Hour 20. Getting into Interactions and State Changes.
Hour 21. Designing Look, Feel, and Deployment.
Hour 22. Understanding Design Patterns.
Hour 23. Modeling Embedded Systems.
Hour 24. Shaping the Future of the UML.
Appendix A. Quiz Answers.
Appendix B. Modeling Tools for the UML.
Appendix C. A Summary in Pictures.
Index.

Related Links SAMS
Object Management Group
OMG's UML Resource Page
Google Search for Case Tools

You can purchase Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

The BSA is running (until January 31) a "Grace Period" for "voluntary compliance" in the cities of San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, Houston,Norfolk/Richmond, Nashville, Indianapolis, Bozeman, and Orlando. Small businesses recieve a card in the mail, having been assigned a tracking number, so you know you're in their files. In previous press releases they state that they send out up to 700,000 of these cards simultaneously. Scanning their reported settlement victories, they then seem to pick 2-4 business to destroy. If the businesses don't go along, the BSA hires the Federal Marshals as mercenaries to help ensure compliance with their extortion. Microsoft, unsurprisngly, is a big supporter of this and pushes it to vendors as a chance to strengthen customer relations. (this is a powerpoint document, but thankfully you can also have it: translated via google). CD: Here is a link to the press release on this matter.

WalterGR asks: "There are plenty of resources available for writing operating systems, e.g. Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, the Dinosaur Book, and countless web sites. For those of us who aren't interested in low-level issues, and prefer focusing on human-computer interaction, what resources are available for designing windowing systems (a la X Window)? Issues like the object hierarchy, event management, modularity, redefining behavior at runtime (e.g. for skins) etc. Any suggestions?"

Danese Cooper is Manager of Sun's Open Source Program Office. A Google search on Danese turns up more than 1000 results. She's a frequent speaker at IT industry events and conferences, and is, without question, Sun's staunchest internal Open Source advocate. Sun is moving toward Open Source in fits and starts, and Danese is behind a lot of that motion. Feel free to ask her anything you want (one question per post. please) about the trials and tribulations of being an Open Source person within a company that hasn't yet fully grasped the concept, and how she goes about trying to change that. We'll post her answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions within the next week or so. The only question she can't answer is whether/when Java might be Open Sourced. I already asked her, and she replied, "Sadly, I have no news on that..."

DerekLyons writes: "Yahoo is carrying a story about a Japanese scientist who plans to use giant orbiting lasers to extract H2 from seawater. The interesting part of the scheme is that design uses solar pumped lasers, which avoid the loss of efficiency (and increased launch weight) from powering the laser with electricity from solar cells. Is the way to finally break the main dilemma of the hydrogen economy? (That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it.)"

Mechel Conrad writes: "Heise Online(German) writes about a Virus called SWF/LFM-926. It consists of a Macromedia Flash movie and seems to be the first of its kind. It uses Flash's scripting language in order to open a debug terminal creating and executing a file called V.COM, which infests other .SWF Files. Although the virus is not very dangerous and not widespread yet, it suggests clear security holes in Flash." The translation of the Heise article is quite readable, too. Update: 01/08 22:47 GMT by T : bdavenport adds: "this report on Yahoo lists a new Shockwave virus as low grade due to the need of manual downloading. infoworld is reporting that McAfee has upgraded to high risk after several Fortune 500 firms have reported it in the wild, arriving as an email attachment."

abartlet writes: "Samba is celebrating its 10th birthday - initally released as Andrew Tridgell's humble 'Server 0.5' 10 long years ago. Tridge has made some notes on the past 10 years. And Samba is still going strong, becoming a cornerstone of the Linux community. Samba 3.0 is on its way and promises many new features, including for the first time support as a server in an Active Directory domain! But the biggest thanks goes to all those who have contributed code, bugs, testing, docs and feedback in general. We could not have come the last 10 years without you! -- Andrew Bartlett, Samba Team."

fm6 writes: "Google has suplemented their usual weekly Zeitgeist update with a lovely 2001 Timeline. Particularly interesting to see how the usual queries about celebrities and sports suddenly disappeared in favor of searches about recent event -- although people seem to put Nostradamus in the later category."

fm6 writes: "Google has suplemented their usual weekly Zeitgeist update with a lovely 2001 Timeline. Particularly interesting to see how the usual queries about celebrities and sports suddenly disappeared in favor of searches about recent event -- although people seem to put Nostradamus in the later category."

jimharris submitted a bunch of links about flying on Mars: "X-Plane's author Austin Meyer is working out the details of flying on Mars. Meyer has taken his system and adapted it for the conditions on Mars and has discovered a lot about what it would take to fly on Mars, where the atmospheric pressure is 1 percent of Earth, and gravity one third, but laws of flight remain the same. Flying becomes difficult, and landing almost impossible. Other people are working with NASA to create Entomopters engineered to meet Mars conditions. More ideas about the concept can be found at PBS's Scientific American Frontiers. A quick search at Google will reveal many people are thinking about flying on Mars." It's a beautiful challenge - how to fly in a situation where everything you "know" about flight is wrong.

Slashback with ever more on ... the massive bust of illegal software producers reported on last week, the gaping security hole moaned at by those confined to the Microsoft asylum, another review of the new Linux+Java Zaurus from Sharp, and how to get the binary watch you've always wanted. Enjoy!

Too bad there isn't a lot of good Free software. aka-ed writes: "A small update on the "Drink Or Die" busts: Apparently, the feds' move has borne preventative fruit. According to this post from one of the major commercial Usnet services, binaries traffic on Usenet has taken a noticeable hit since the bust, for reasons speculated upon in the post itself."

Open wide, and say "mmmmghrfgghfgr." atreus42 writes: "Microsoft has released a patch to fix the Gaping Security Hole(TM) in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0. This security bulletin details the file extension/content header spoofing bug that would allow bad people to disguise a downloadable executable file as text. The internet isn't doomed after all..."

How to make my Visor look slow and lowly. Sindre Lia writes "Sharp's new Zaurus SL5500 is the first PDA device from a major manufacturer in a long time that uses a new operating system and a new user interface.

According to preliminary reports from infoSync staffers Larry Garfield and Janice Karin that attended the launch of the SL-5500 and got hands-on experience with the new device, the GUI still needs polishing and to some degree also the hardware, but the device has according to them a lot of potential if some first-generation problems can be fixed.

See all the pictures of the new OS here!"

At least this letter is not in binary ... Dog and Pony writes with a lengthy letter (informative, if you have odd taste in watches). "Slashdot recently ran a story about a pretty silly binary watch. Well, anyways, being a silly person, I thought one would be cool to have, even though I normally don't wear watches.

Problem was, they only shipped inside Norway... so I sent them a polite mail, asking them to notify me if they would start shipping internationally. And today I got an answer.

Too bad it seems a really cumbersome process to get that watch... have these guys never heard of PayPal? And offering payment via the www in 2003? 'Course, you gotta have goals...

Here is a copy of the mail:

> Dear Customer

> Please note the binary watch is released World-Wide Sale

> To be able to expedite your orders please follow instructions below

> 1.0
> Order Your watch by using or online home page:rsi-digital.com

> 2.0
> US$ 35 must be transfer from your local bank to

> ATT
> NORDEA BANK NORWAY
> Middelthuns Gt 17
> Postboks 1166.Centrum
> 0107 OSLO

> ACCOUNT NUMBER: 6527 05 04641
> Research & Supplier International A/S
> Postboks 236
> 4201 Sauda
> Norway

> 3.0
> Original receipt must be faxed to +47 52 78 88 01 or send scanned and send by mail to arramsta@online.no

> 4.0
> Your order will than be expedite from our sales office

> Delivery time is estimated to be 10 to 14 days after received confirmed payment by fax or mail as stated above

> 5.0
> Note: RSI will from 2003 offer payment by using WWW.

> 6.0
> Payment 35USD cover cost of watch 28 USD handling and postage 7 USD
> Total:
> =35 USD

> Best Regards

> Tone Yven
> Sales engineer

I am still thinking that black one....

On a side note, to us non-native English speakers, that has spent too much time in Dilbert-land, "Sales engineer" really sounds like an oxymoron."

Cryptnotic writes "Sony has decided to instigate legal action against companies distributing two new Playstation 2 modchips, the Messiah and the NEO4. Sony has previously ignored modchip makers who made products which were only capable of playing CD-R copies of games. These new modchips, however, have legitimate uses, such as playing original import games or out-of-region DVD's. Aparrantly this is what has angered Sony." If I could read Kanji I'd probably care a bit more ;)

Kurt writes "Yet Another Society, through its newly formed Perl Foundation, is launching yet another fund drive to help support the Perl community. This year we will be supporting Damian Conway and Dan Sugalski. Damian will continue to work on a variety of Perl 5 modules and the design of Perl 6. Dan will continue his work on the implementation of Perl 6. More details are available at the Perl Foundation web site. Contributions are tax deductible, so donate today!" Many people will remember when we did this last year. I think it's been a roaring success. So go donate!

no_nicks_available writes "An article on The Register points to some of the highlights of Usenet history. " First mention of Microsoft, GNU, Madonna, the Compact Disc, and more. It's worth a look if only to read the first kibo post to alt.religion.kibology.

Diarmaid O'Loughlin writes "It's the 100th year since the first comunications over the pond The Marconi Radio Club and The Falmouth Amateur Radio Association Amateur Radio operators are making plans to celebrate a Marconi world historical event. December 12, 2001 will mark the 100th anniversary of the first Trans-Atlantic radio transmission." The BBC is also carrying the story as well. Embedded Geek adds a link to coverage on stardate.com, pointing out that "there will be events in the ham community to commemorate it, including a reenactment broadcast (look here under 'Marconi's Celebrations' for others)." This would be a nice day to swing by the Cape Cod station, too.

akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The Feds have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my burned Linux CD's. They might think it's some weird hacking tool."

Paul Boutin writes "The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past has returned to haunt many more of us: Google just announced the expansion of their Usenet archive back to May 3, 1981."Check out the past on Groups.google.com

Paul Boutin writes "The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past has returned to haunt many more of us: Google just announced the expansion of their Usenet archive back to May 3, 1981."Check out the past on Groups.google.com

The ever curious AtariDatacenter asks: "I'm finally going to get my wish, and upgrade my two car garage to an 80's style arcade room. I've found some good ideas in the RGVAC newsgroup. But for those who aren't hardcore into collecting, what are major aspects of an arcade gameroom that you'd put into your own home? Would this make a home more or less marketable?"

Karma 50 writes: "What is claimed to be the world's first school for "hackers" has recently opened in Paris. Run by the magazine hackerz voice, for $60 or so you will be taught the fine art of breaking into systems. Google will do some translation of the course details. The local police are said to be "watching the school with interest"."

Robotron2084 writes "Just goes to show that the best animated tv show around has some of the savviest producers around. Futurama producer/co-writer David X. Cohen posted this message on alt.tv.futurama recently. Interesting tidbits for futurama addicts to munch on while we await the season premiere on Dec. 9th. David talks about the prestigious awards they've received, upcoming guest appearances, and the banned christmas episode. I guess the fox executives were a bit scared of 'kwanzabot' at first, but they'll finally be airing a double-Xmas dose on Dec. 23rd!!"

Dr. Edward Felten is in a funny position -- or perhaps not so funny. He's the Princeton researcher who took up the challenge posed by the music industry to find flaws in the SMDI watermarking scheme, but didn't enter into the 'no-telling' bargain (here's the click-through agreement [pdf]) which would have made him eligible for a reward, so wasn't bound by non-disclosure terms. When a scheduled academic presentation on the weaknesses [pdf] that he and his colleages found in SDMI became the object of lawsuit threats from the RIAA, and caused him to cancel the planned presentation, Felten decided to turn the tables, and in cooperation with the EFF, sue them instead, for interfering with his scholarly research. Though he did eventually get to present his research, the legal action is still going. Dr. Felten is at a hearing today in Trenton, NJ, but he's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. Please confine your questions carefully (one per post), and we'll pass the highest-moderated ones on for his answers.

Dr. Edward Felten is in a funny position -- or perhaps not so funny. He's the Princeton researcher who took up the challenge posed by the music industry to find flaws in the SMDI watermarking scheme, but didn't enter into the 'no-telling' bargain (here's the click-through agreement [pdf]) which would have made him eligible for a reward, so wasn't bound by non-disclosure terms. When a scheduled academic presentation on the weaknesses [pdf] that he and his colleages found in SDMI became the object of lawsuit threats from the RIAA, and caused him to cancel the planned presentation, Felten decided to turn the tables, and in cooperation with the EFF, sue them instead, for interfering with his scholarly research. Though he did eventually get to present his research, the legal action is still going. Dr. Felten is at a hearing today in Trenton, NJ, but he's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. Please confine your questions carefully (one per post), and we'll pass the highest-moderated ones on for his answers.

Pilchie asks: "Just wondering if anyone knew of a decent IRC client that supports VI style keybindings. ircII is now just about the only application I commonly use that doesn't support them, and it would be great if I could find an IRC client that does. After spending hours searching on both Google and Freshmeat, I have been unable to come up with anything."