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Even the Gates family probably hates being ripped off by region coding. jmcmurry writes: "I just tried out my daughters Winnie The Pooh from Poland, which can only be played (until today) on my Mac Cube running OS X (I did the region free crack when running OS 9). I own an Xbox with DVD player and thought, hey wouldnt hurt to try it out, since I was in the market to buy a Region Free DVD player (which can cost $400 an up) I plugged everything in, put the DVD in, and lo and behold, it plays the DVD from Poland (region code 2) This makes up for the cost of the Xbox ..."

Nein! Nein! Speaking of things that do (or don't) work by region, several readers submitted information which indicates the pooh-poohing of alleged censorship-by-DNS manipulation in Germany's state of Nordrhein-Westfalen was premature. It turns out that some interesting redirects which seemed to be a technical error or a misguided proof-of-concept, and which were quickly turned off, were reinstated shortly thereafter.

Thorsten Hornung was among the several to write on this topic. "Meanwhile ISIS has reblocked the sites, as Heise online reported (German!) due to pressure from the president of the local Government Mr. Büssow.

The local government of Düsseldorf which is responible for media services in North Rhine-Westphalia has posted a statement on its site (German) about the initial lift of the blockade saying that it believes the censoring meassures have been lifted due to complaints by users. Much worse is that furthermore public accuse people complaining about the censorship to be Right Extremists: 'The local government believes, due to the content of many emails it received today, that they [People Complaining] are users of Right Extremist Internet Content.'

The German Constitution (Grundgesetz) does not allow censorship however there are some restrictions on free speech especially regarding Nazi propaganda."

Winners sometimes use Gnomes. Prashant writes: "Cygwin is turning out to be a breeze of fresh air for people stuck on windows for one reason or another. I can use the familiar bash shell on any platform(win, *nix) I am on, and don't have to deal with the DOS prompt. I use all the gnu tools from cygwin distro. rcs, cvs, vim, perl, python, ruby, apache the list goes on. Not only that, I successfully ran postgresql on Cygwin. The XFree86 port of Cygwin itself can be huge cost saving over commercial X-servers for Windows. I have tried KDE on Cygwin version 1.1.2. I was impressed with it. Here is something new: GNOME ported to Cygwin as well. Let the rivalry ontinue on Windows.

It's all about having options. I would love be 100% Linux user but again sometimes it's not you who decides what os runs on your machine. So till Windows gets replaced by Linux by the authorities, happy cygwining."

This addition brought to you by ... Solar Power! basfromasd writes "The winner of the 3000 km World Solar Challenge race from Darwin to Adelaide has reached the finish in a record breaking time. The winning car, Nuna, was built by the Alpha Centauri team, consisting of 10 university students of TU Delft and University of Amsterdam. Some technical details can be found at their site and at ESA. Results and pictures of the race are at the Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering of UNSW website. Well done for a first time contestant, showing that skill and intelligence can match the resources of factory sponsored teams. They found some good sponsors though: GaAs solar cells are not cheap. Neither are Li-Ion batteries. Some of the solar cells were used in the Hubble Space Telescope before and brought back to earth in 1993. The other cars did not make it before today's curfew. The runner up, Aurora, stopped just outside of Adelaide for the night and is expected to finish tomorrow morning."

"Can this be done effectively? Is there any good documentation on connecting Access to Non-Microsoft DB servers in general, and MySQL in particular? No 'ODBC RTFM' flames, please; I'm looking for something a little deeper here."

I'm not very familiar with ODBC beyond it's basic use, so I really can't answer this question, but might this be possible if the MySQL server were somehow treated as an ODBC source? It would be tremendous coup if somehow the power of the Access front end could be used with MySQL (or PostgreSQL, or mSQL or any other open sourced RDBMS)? MySQL does have some ODBC functionality and as well as other ODBC related links on their site.

For those of you who want to immediately play around and see if this is possible, you can find the MySQL ODBC driver, here and a PostgreSQL ODBC driver here.

(My apologies. The story went live right as I was still editing it to include links in the last two paragraphs...)

"These are some of the questions that come up to my mind:

• Be able to migrate IIS to Apache first, and still be able to access the MSSQL databases (FreeTDS?)
• Use a scripting syntax similar to ASP so that the programmers don't have much of a headache learning new stuff (PHP looks like a solution).
• Migrate MSSQL 7 to MySQL, PostgreSQL or other (Which one is better for web development?)
• Web log reports (I need to generate reports on the web site usage. What weblog report generators are available for Linux? Which ones do you use? Are there any that generate graphs, charts, etc..?)

Once upon a time, there was a neat technology called ANDF: Architecture Neutral Distribution Format. It even merits a place in the GNU Project's task list: provide a decompiler for ANDF. (I'm not sure whether this item is still there; it's probably not high on the list of tasks!)

I haven't seen it mentioned much in years, however.

ANDF is a format: it's a flattened representation of the abstract syntax tree for a program. Programs are compiled using a number of tools:

1. A producer, which produces target-independent ANDF from source
2. A linker, which links together some target-independent ANDF capsules
3. An installer, which combines target-independent capsules and target-specific ones, and knows how to produce target-specific code.

Much of 3 can actually be fairly portable. Many optimizations can be cast as portable manipulations of an abstract syntax tree. What's more target-specific is which of these manipulations you use. More than that; ANDF can represent a range of levels of detail, so even quite low-level things can be done using code that is shared between targets.

So, if you want to draw a line between developers (who compile code to produce binaries) and users (who just want to use the code), you have a range of places where you can put it. Somewhere between 2 and 3 seems obvious, but it might fit somewhere inside 3, depending on what optimizations the developer wants to make, and what kinds can sensibly be left to the user to do on installation.

To make all this properly work, you need to abstract APIs. A C program which #included stdio.h would tend to include lots of details about the size of FILE (and probably internal details, assuming some functions were macros which delved inside FILE). That's going to be hard to install on a completely different target.

So, such APIs are represented explicitly. #include stdio.h makes available tokens like FILE and so on, with well-defined properties, but with undefined implementation. When installing, the installer provides implementations. Tokens are nodes in the abstract syntax tree (with subtrees as arguments, possibly), and these are substituted at installation time with their implementation on the specific target.

And, obviously, the installer may be able to perform further optimizations on the subtituted tree (since it's still a well-defined abstract syntax tree).

With suitable coordination and standardisation, binaries could be distributed which users could install wherever they wanted. The substitution of macros for the various paths (prefix and so on) could be deferred, to be provided by a simple capsule which gets linked on installation.

Different implementations of some things could be provided. For example, programs could use MMX style operations (using a suitably defined API), and users with suitable processors could install with a capsule which uses the MMX features of their processor. Users without such processors wouldn't lose anything, since they'd install with software implementations of the API. These would not (necessarily) be function-calls, they'd be proper macro-like things, so further optimizations could be performed. Thus, there'd probably be no disadvantage for people without MMX processors compared to native compilation (with conditional macros, say).

Portability could be greatly improved; people would program to well-defined APIs, and users with those APIs available would be able to use the results. They'd even be able to get and use the results in binary (without having to compile it themselves). In a different operating system. On a different processor (with different endianness, with a different word-size, even).

Wouldn't this just encourage concealing source? After all, the Windows world has lots of "freely available" programs. The catch is that they're binary only, so you can't improve them, or learn from them.

Possibly. But there are good, pragmatic reasons for wanting to share source, and these would remain. Apache would still have been developed, and would still be being distributed in source, even if we'd had this technology years ago. And people will sell binaries without source, regardless of the obstacles you put in their way; this technology would simply change things a little.

The format isn't much like previous universal intermediate languages. Largely, they were abstractions of machines; this is an abstraction of programs, or of programming languages. i.e., it retains all the interesting information that you need for performing optimizations; it just loses details like variable names.

"This could be cool. But it doesn't exist/costs money/is proprietary and closed source."

Judge for yourself: TenDRA. I'm not a lawyer, but that copyright looks pretty Open Source(TM) to me. (There are probably patents covering it, but who can tell, with software patents?)

• You can download source, documentation, tools
• APIs for ISO C, POSIX, XPG3/4, X11R5 and probably a few I've forgotten
• Producers for C and C++; installers are claimed to be good for Intel ELF and SPARC, and a number of others (possibly of lesser quality) are included; performance seems acceptable compared with egcs on my Linux box

What it doesn't include is a C++ library. (A port of libstdc++ would be nice, if anybody wants something to do.) The C++ looks pretty complete in other respects, however, although I'm not a C++ expert, either. The whole thing looks cleanly written. The C checker is worth the download on its own (IMHO).

The C and C++ producers can write out their symbol tables, in a documented format. Such information would be helpful when writing a source-navigator (!), which is what I'm (slowly) working on at the moment. (I'm writing a Perl module which will read in and parse such files, which people could then process in wacky ways. (My plan is to write the information to a relational database like PostgreSQL, but I'm a little way off that.))

I just don't see where this technology fits, given that there's already egcs, which produces pretty good code, on more targets than just about anything else.

The hacker in me feels it darned well ought to fit somewhere, though. This is cool technology; it deserves to be played with.