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The rendition at http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/style/0013.h tml professes to be the "unabridged version". Sadly, it isn't: It's considerably edited down from the full article, which can be viewed at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/ultimate-linux -box/.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

I was reading the Linux Journal 2001 Readers' Choice awards and it places Debian at #2 behind Redhat. Kinda interesting page, I thought.

Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

this article mentions java-based smart card readers that work with Linux. Does anyone know of a similar biometric product?

It's four years out of date, so I'd hope the numbers are larger now, but
Linux at the USPS [LJ.com] counts 900 boxes....

Just because the majority of readers think that Mesa/DRI is only useful for games, that doesn't mean it's not crucial for several other markets. One of the would be in engineering and scientific visualization. Remember that it's becoming more often for huge Linux clusters to be used in big data crunching applications. But after all the data is processed you want to be able to visualize: how air moves on a new wing design or turbine, a 3D volume visualization of the brain, meteorological patterns, stellar formation, how a car would react on a crash, etc. It would certainly be better for some people if they mantained the whole process under one platform.

The other one is Digital Content Creation (DCC). The most recent example has been the production of Shrek. Though most of the Linux use in DCC and particularly FX have been in renderfarms (which don't require interactive OpenGL accelarated graphics), there is an increased use of Linux as animation workstations. PDI is making the switch, and also their co-workers at Dreamworks feature animation. Many other facilities are doing the switch to use Linux for interactive workstations: Pixar (their next movie Little Nemo will use Linux), ILM (by October they move 20% of their workstations, and 20% of their renderfarm to Linux, and the next movie after Episode 2 will mostly be done under Linux), Double Negative and many others. In October there is going to be a meeting organized by VES to discuss more of the FX technology and Linux. And of course several vendors already or are planning ports of their products to Linux: Maya 4 from Alias/Wavefront, Softimage 3D and XSI by Softimage, Houdini from SideFX already out, Rayz from Silicon Grail and several others.

I guess it depends if you prefer a closed source but vendor supported solution. In oprder for Houdini to be released it was only available from HP workstation with their FX10 cards and they even provided their own X and OpenGL implementation (no XFree or Mesa/DRI). But I'm sure other customers or vendors might prefer an open solution.

Just check the september issue of CGW for the Linux coverage in Hollywood. The current and past issue of LinuxJournal also have some coverage.

Nor do I think that anyone will object too much about it.

Don Marti's take on a pertinent issue.

Exactly what it's doing. Linux is taking over the animation market, why? Because artists are more productive with Linux.

OK there's more we can do: keep focussing on making the gui interface better, port more tools, keep improving the rendering quality, dual head support, etc., but believe me, artists are not dummies. Artists use the best tool, artists are willing to put in the effort to perfect their skills to use that tool.

The article can be found online here

It's a good read, and highly recommended.

A quick reference for that assertion:
Salon article

Another article

There's an article (one of two) on the Linux Journal website about GNU Privacy Guard for PGP functionality for us *NIX folks.

-yb

There's an article (one of two) on the Linux Journal website about GNU Privacy Guard for PGP functionality for us *NIX folks.

-yb

This is almost completely false. Pixar used many Sun computers as their renderfarm, but I doubt Sun donated 1000 computers to them, and I didn't see a credit at the end. As for SGI's not being used in render farms .... http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/ind ex.html There is a picture on that page which proves you very wrong.

Yep. Linux Journal just did a cover story on the rendering for Shrek. Went into pretty good detail on the custom tools that Dreamworks is using.

Why are they acting like this is something new?

DreamWorks Features Linux and Animation /me wants one of those renderfarms (try and keep up with my seti packets :) )

The person who submitted the story (Troy Baer) is also the admin of the beast. Troy had an interesting article on the current (previous?) cluster setup at OSC in one of the recent Linux mags (Linux Journal, 2001 July). To call Troy a proud father of this setup might not be too far off. ;)

I knew Troy from school, admin-ed with him in the Ohio State engineering labs. Ask him what he's doing with that Aero Eng. diploma nowadays.. ;) Overall, a pretty damn sharp guy. He gets to play with Linux/SGI clusters now, I'm stuck with Alphas & an O2000 in a back room somewhere.

-'fester

As if we should believe him? I'm well aware of the current state of today's media. Journalistic integrity is a word that most media reporters and editors seem to have forgotten.

However, this is totally out of line, even by today's standards. Someone looking at his apology would think that he had just committed minor infractions. No, he was busily posting nastygrams about competitors and rivals.

He should just resign and get the heck out.

'crow

Your perljvm - The Perl to Java Virtual Machine Compiler is impressive. I believe you've the authority to answer this question.

Sun has its sole control to their Java VM, and the control is extended to other JVM versions. As Richard said, free software build on non-free platform/program is useless to Free World.

We had much expectation on kaffe. However, it has halted its development long time ago, since Microsoft made business deals with Transvirtual. The only free JVM is basically dead now.

I'd like to have your opnion on this: do you have Java in your vision of Free World?

Thanks!

"Lets make Gnome look and feel like Windows." - Gnome, 1996

"We're not trying to copy Microsoft.." - Gnome, 1998

"Lets make Gnome look and feel like Windows." - Gnome, 2000

"We're not trying to copy Microsoft.." - Gnome, 2001.

Mmmmkay. Glad to see Gnome is sticking to the same ideology that brought such revolutionary advances like "The Foot Menu". I'd be hard pressed to find a bigger waste of effort than to clone .Net...Its the same basic beef i've had with Gnome for years. They steadfastly refuse to do anything new or unique... They just want to play catch-up to everyone else, and thats all Gnome will probably amount to in the end anyway. A self-imposed rule that keeps them second best at everything. The same luke-warm boredom that made all of us flock to Linux in the first place.

The world is filled with with flea market knock-offs and ultramundane ideas. There are better flags to march under than this one, i'm afraid. If only a fraction of the effort that will be undertaken to make a clone of .Net were put toward researching new ideas and putting them into use, within 6 months Linux would be leaps and bounds ahead of anything Microsoft could come up with.

Nobody seems to want to do that anymore.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

The review.

I give a short quote:

In the developing world--where most of the population still cook with firewood and carry water in buckets--the practical value of focusing foreign assistance on IT projects would seem negligible, if not ludicrous entirely. Given the more serious fundamental issues facing developing nations--health care (AIDS, TB and malaria), nutrition, sanitation, education, poverty, pollution and political corruption--providing the means to surf the Web should probably fall fairly low on any reasonable scale of human priorities.

I give a short quote:

In the developing world--where most of the population still cook with firewood and carry water in buckets--the practical value of focusing foreign assistance on IT projects would seem negligible, if not ludicrous entirely. Given the more serious fundamental issues facing developing nations--health care (AIDS, TB and malaria), nutrition, sanitation, education, poverty, pollution and political corruption--providing the means to surf the Web should probably fall fairly low on any reasonable scale of human priorities.

Well, I'd start here.
and then maybe go to here.

Vertical
9 out of 10 men who have tried Camels prefer women!

The AIDS epidemic is the current cause-de-celebre, and is a modern day equivalent of relating someone to a Nazi. If you don't fully agree that we should airlift hundreds of tons of AIDS drugs over the entire continent, you are a slime, and if you disagree with my moronic analogy, you are just a capitalist stooge at the hands of the power elite in Dover, DE.

But I digress. That comment came totally out of left field. As did the recent article in Linux Journal that, while touching, seemed to lack either a central, well-defined thesis, or relevance in a technical magazine.

The fundamental question is: should these kids be learning fundamental CS--algorithms and data structures--or should they be learning something practical, with which they can also learn fundamental CS (albeit applied)?

If the former, then go the way of MIT and teach Scheme (a clean, older dialect of Common LISP). See *The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs* (or, colloquially, SICP) for more info.

My guess is that many of these kids will go on to other disciplines. Some will just want to be hackers. Do we really want to unleash bright, potentially excellent Open Source hackers on the world with a working knowledge of Scheme only?! What might they do? Could they tweak the Linux kernel's scheduling algorithm? Hmmm.

I think the best way to teach how computers work is to use a language that talks directly to them: C. People who propose ASM have their hearts in the right place, but ASMs come in as many flavors as ice cream (and from a productivity POV, they're about as nutritious).

A course should start with 2-4 months of C. Students can learn, for example, how the instruction pointer works, how arguments are passed on the stack, and how registers are used to do various things on whatever platform they're coding to. All of this is learned as a natural result of debugging simple problems.

Having learned the basics, the course can then shift gears and talk about OOP and how C++ implements its special variety. At this point they can learn, for example, about the extern "C" linkage specification and name mangling. These things are actually very easy to understand if you've used C--and are if the utmost practical importance; many libraries are still only available in C.

Algorithms and data stuctures can act as the landscape that these kids paint with their new knowledge and tools. Learning a language like C++, that is close to the hardware, they will be able to pick up any language with much greater ease.

WRT the Java vs. C++ issue, the answer should be clear. C has been around for 30 years, C++ almost 20. There have been hundreds of compilers written. Java? Not even a standard. Oh, and let's not forget that it was patterned after C++, along with several other languages (though to a lesser degree) like Perl and <ahem> UnrealScript.

If the rationale for using Java is that they want a simpler, cleaner, don't-show-me-the-hardware-messiness language, then why choose a C++ spin-off (that retains much of the syntactical messiness)? Use an elegant, open, intuitive language. The only one out there that I know of is Python. For a good description from Eric Raymond see Why Python?

First, a personal opinion: I believe that learning how to program is so valuable because through it, one learns problem solving skills.

On that note, if you want to teach programming, here are some ideas. I have use none of these for teaching, but I am intrigued:


Scheme/LISP - I learned Scheme from The Little LISPer (the most recent version is called The Little Schemer ), a great book! I already knew how to program when I learned Scheme, but this might be a good way to learn.

Other resources for learning programming through Scheme (with which I have no experience, but sound interesting):

http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/Teaching/
http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/drscheme/
http://www.teach-scheme.org/ (doesn't seem to be working right now)


Starlogo is very cool, you might also want to look at the book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick, the creator of StarLogo (in the book he talks about working with kids on StarLogo projects)

I don't even know Python, but I have read several things about using it as a teaching language:

Article at O'Reilly on Python as a first language
Computer Programming for Everybody - a proposal by Guido van Rossum
The Official Python Tutorial
Why Python? - by Eric S. Raymond
Learning to Program - uses Python


I hope this is helpful!!!

Quite easy actually. I've been doing a lot of ncurses programming lately. You can do some amazinly elaborate things with it if your a good programmer. A good technique really pays. If you start running into situations where you're brute-forcing it, I advise that you back off and do a little work on a good "framework" for your app(that's one minus about ncurses, there's very little "flamework").

Some key points about ncurses:

o It's very fast - Text mode applications are great for productivity. Their GUI counterparts always turn out to be slower for some reason.
o Menus and Forms - The menu and form libraries are standard on UNIXes. You can fairly easily create fields for data entry that have built in validation routines ...etc.
o Tables - Well, not exactly, but a clever way to make a very snappy table is to just use a menu. In text mode you can't tell the differnce. Ncurses menu-tables are more than what the Java 1.1 AWT library provides
o Well established - Curses programming has been around for a long time. The characteristics of many terminal types has been worked out(by ESR) and abstracted into the terminfo database. Its quite portable.
o Works Anywhere - You can run it over telnet, ssh, or just dump bulky X alltogether and run on the Linux console.

Here's some links:

Ncurses Intro by Eric S. Raymond and Zeyd M. Ben-Halim
Linux Journal Artical by ESR
Fujitsu ETI Programmers Guide
SCO ETI Programming

I really wish people would concentrate more ncurses programs. They're just damn efficient. Anyone who uses mutt and slrn and such knows what I'm talking about. If you're really clever, you'll librarify whatever it is that your working on so you can hook on a GUI version later after you've tweeked the behavior of the app without wasting a lot of clock-cycles on graphics programming.

Copyright (c) 2001 The International Government of Microsoft All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in executables, without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of executables must be obtained at an outrageous price, must retain this license, and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions of executables must also be kept away from sites like 3r33t eReEt, 1337, and 31337, as they may be pirates of software which take away from our trillion dollar business.

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgment:

This product is the best product you could ever buy. You are getting sleepy, BUY MORE MICROSOFT.

4. Neither the name of Microsoft, Bill Gates, or any other Microsoft employee may be used in the
same sentence as Open Source, Linux, BSD, or Anti Trust lawsuits, else they'll feel lethal wraith.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF MICROSOFT AND THE KINGDOM OF BILL GATES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE BUGS, SECURITY LEAKS, COSTS, SERVICE PACKS, THOSE SERVICE PACKS' SERVICE PACKS, AND THE PATCHES TO THOSE SERVICE PACKS. THE IMPLIED NOTION OF OBTAINING A STABLE PRODUCT ARE FRUITLESS AND SHOULD YOU COMPLAIN, YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE WILL RESULT IN YOU CALLING OUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT LINE AT THE RATE OF 599.99 PER MINUTE WHERE YOU WILL BE PLACED ON HOLD ONLY TO LISTEN TO YANNI, KENNY G, AND BARBARA STREISAND. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. ALL YOUR SOURCE CODE ARE BELONG TO OUR PATENTS.

The Linux Journal had a great article by Alessandro Rubini on how to build your own parallel port audio device for Linux with just a couple of chips. The article was on page 70 of LJ issue number 53, September 1998. There is a listing of the driver at available at the LJ website.

With having invested $1 billion on Linux development, IBM has met expectations for the second quarter in a row. Now, they are purchasing Mainspring and Informix.

Who said that working with open source software wasn't profitable?

Sorry, but that didnt sound very intelligent.

I would rather go to python.org and read the docs, download the interpreter and play a bit with it... I've done it with a couple of languages I didnt eventually like, but now at least I have first person experience and not just bias.

If you want somebody elses opinion on Python, you would perhaps want to hear Eric S. Raymond's , published on Linux Journal.

------
C'mon, flame me!

Download: http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/
License: http://www.research.att.com/sw/license/ast-open.ht ml
LinuxJournal Article: http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue27/127 3.html

So why does this still qualify as "Stuff that matters?"

Peril n.: A sysadmin with a screwdriver.

From my personal trials with Abiword, I've found that it doesn't hold a candle to a polished, full-featured word processor like Word or WordPerfect (StarOffice comes close..but it's just way too slow!). The article commented about tables not being supported, and with plans to implement them right after 1.0. For this reason alone many of us simply cannot switch to Abiword for our main word processor - I use tables in almost every document for effective formatting.

Then again, vi is enough for the writers of Linux Journal, so I guess that makes Abiword overkill :).

Remember when they used Linux for some of the FX in Titanic? And this article in LinuxPlanet discusses Linux in perspective with the history of computer-assisted special effects in the film industry--an interesting read.

The July 2000 issue of Linux Journal had a story about a prof at the University of Tornoto had created a watch in 1998 running linux that has a video camera. Here's the article: http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue75/399 3.html.

• Sensoray's frame grabber index
  • PC/104 frame grabber (page has link to Linux Bt848 driver)
  • PC/104 image capture with MPEG encoding
  • SBC with frame grabber (picture shows "Bt" on grabber chip)
• Arvoo grabbers (several PC/104; Linux support) [EMJ catalog page]
• 1997 LJ article mentions JPEG image capture on Ajeco board within a Space Shuttle experiment.

While I don't think either of them were really overtly trying to mentor me, I owe a lot of credit for what I know and what I can do to a couple of brilliant programmers that I've had the privilege to work with. Both of these fellows are very kind, pleasant people and went out of their way to help me. They also both go out of their way to write correct code, as opposed to, say, just screwing around with it until it sort of works.

I met Haim Zamir at Live Picture (now MGI Software) in 1997 where I really began my C++ effort in a serious way (I tried it in 1990 to write test tools at Apple but didn't really enjoy the experience). Have a look at Haim's Resume, particularly under "Skills" where he lists:

Well grounded in disciplines of software engineering for correctness, robustness, performance, and longevity

Another brilliant programmer is my friend Andrew Green. Andy spares no amount of effort to get his code just right - he devoted nine years to developing the ZooLib cross-platform application framework before releasing under the MIT License. (Not five years as I say on the page.)

If you think being correct, as opposed to merely working ok isn't important, imagine trying to get platform-independent reference counted smart pointers to work in a multithreaded application framework. Andy did.

For an archive of anecdotes of interesting, funny and sometimes tragic technology quality problems, please read:

• The Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems, with such anecdotes as:
  • The Sinking of the USS Gitarro (because of either poor training, poor UI, or both)
  • The scary MSWord residue feature - exchange Word documents during legal negotiations?
  • Also see the book Computer Related Risks by Risks moderator Peter Neumann

If you write software, another good investment (more important than your hardware investment), is buying and reading good books. As a software consultant I keep the canceled checks and receipts for my technical book purchases; in 1999 I deducted about $750 worth of technical books from my taxes and about $250 in 1998.

But there are a lot of bad software books out there; much as there was a gold rush due to the Internet, there was a smaller-scale gold rush for technical book authors over the last couple years. A really good source of straight-talking book reviews by people who have good reason to know what they're talking about is maintainted by the Association of C and C++ Users at:

• The ACCU Book Reviews Section

(Note to CowboyNeal - writing C-sharp with the pound sign set off the lameness filter, driving me damn near out of my skull. How about adding something to the preview to let us know which characters are lame, exactly?).

And good news for those of you across the pond (but bad news for me), it's a British organization and holds regular technical conferences. I believe they also send observers to the ISO standards bodies.

If you program in C++ you should read these two books by Scott Meyers and put them to practice in your code. Read each item one at a time and then go through your code from beginning to end to see how you can apply it:

• Effective C++ - ACCU Review - be sure to get the 2nd Edition
• More Effective C++ - ACCU Review

-Weffc++ (C++ only)

Warn about violations of various style guidelines from Scott Meyers' Effective C++ books. If you use this option, you should be aware that the standard library headers do not obey all of these guidelines; you can use `grep -v' to filter out those warnings.

C++ is not the problem language it's often said to be if you follow Meyers' advice, but if you prefer C you certainly can have problems there too - and note that the preferred language for Gnome is C (while KDE is an extended C++), for C programmers you should read:

• C Traps and Pitfalls - ACCU Review

• The Elements of Programming Style

Back to the topic of compiler warnings, remember reading about lint in Kernighan and Ritchey's The C Programming Language? When I started out in my first real programming job, doing Sun system administration and writing image processing software back in the late '80's, I learned to write "lint" targets in my Makefiles, and I'd type "make lint" after editing but before compiling to actual machine code. This made my code much easier to debug and quicker to develop.

Much of lint's function is now available in the warnings of GCC (but I don't think all of it), but there are some proprietary products that will do extremely rigorous statis analysis of your source code. I haven't yet used either (although I plan to) but the two I know about are:

• PC-Lint and FlexeLint
• CodeWizard - Linux Journal Review

• Insure

You can search by patent number here.

And speaking of web programming, many Slashdot readers write web applications (Linux being a "server OS" as they say). How many of you validate the HTML that's generated by the web applications you write?

Your HTML should work well in any browser and it should be well designed for easy usability. I don't mean attractive graphics. I mean it shouldn't suck. Two links on design:

• Useit
• Ask Tog

• By uploading static files from your browser - most convenient during hand composition
• By entering its URL in a form - best for dynamic pages and final tuning of static pages

Mike

Just before I saw this article I was reading an article in the latest Linux Journal about the history of MPEG, an interesting read on video and audio compression.

Anyway, the site looks interesting enough. The files are big, to be sure. I'm downloading right now a movie shown to Cold-War elementary school children about atomic warfare.

My cable modem usually gets 50-100 K/sec, but I'm getting about 16 K/sec from this site. I think it's definately a candidate for several good mirrors if it gains any sort of popularity - the 10 min. movie is 246 MB.

So if Microsoft is so against this horrid O/S because of security problems.. why are they using some Linux DNS Services?

Look Here For The Info

Let's see which name servers Microsoft is using right now: microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS4.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS5.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS7.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS DNS6.CP.MSFT.NET.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z1.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z2.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z6.msft.akadns.COM.
microsoft.com. 1d20h7m8s IN NS z7.msft.akadns.COM.

Let's do a queso on the last four.

$ sudo queso z1.msft.akadns.COM:53
216.32.118.104:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z2.msft.akadns.COM:53
32.96.80.17:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z6.msft.akadns.COM:53
207.229.152.20:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx
$ sudo queso z7.msft.akadns.COM:53
213.161.66.158:53 * Linux 2.1.xx/2.2.xx


It's Linux, all right.

Actually, if you want maildir support, you don't have to go with qmail. Postfix does it as well. While I haven't used qmail so I can't compare the two, Postfix is very easy to configure and get up and running. I gave up on sendmail after two weeks when I couldn't get it do what I wanted. Postfix on the other hand took me maybe four hours to completely install and configure to my liking. It also has the same benefits of qmail from a discrete module standpoint -- definitely not the big behemoth-all-in-one that sendmail is. Anyway, check it out at here. An article that I found to be helpful when getting started was here.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Can someone compare this to the MySQL filesystem, or perhaps point me to a place where pgfs can still be downloaded?

Having an open-source embedded solution is important to engineers, who often need to optimize thier software solutions to custom hardware devices, especially when one considers that most of the growth in electronics in coming years will be on the embedded markets.

About embedded systems: Linux is used on many of these because of its modularity, but if you're into it, try using other things on them...

My karma's bigger than yours!

Linux and Windows that is. A lot of the astronauts have win95 laptops, but
Linux Journal has an article about two programs developed and run for the ISS on Linux.

Check Linux-Equipped Astronauts Project for more info and a way to help.

It pronounces as Force Entity

Check out Hedrick's proposal for a disable command (AC 4C pronounce as....):

http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/briefs/0074. html

"New Command Pair:

Set Features CPRM Lock. 0x4C and 0xAC
(Yes I cleverly picked the pair to reflect their true nature)"