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Gorgonzola writes "It was reported that Virex 7.2 and Fink were conflicting, it turned out that Virex 7.2 was overwriting libraries in Fink's default directory, thus hosing Fink for those who had it installed, and preventing Fink from installing for future users. Also, one user pointed out that of Virux's included packages, several (CURL, OpenSSL, and DLCompat) had license terms that Virex was ignoring." It is strongly recommended you don't install Virex 7.2 until this issue is resolved.

Casey West writes "Version 0.25 of the award-winning POE networking and multitasking framework has been released. This version is mainly a bug fix release." Read on for more... Thanks go out to everyone who helped make this release happen, especially our new committers and testers.

• ActivePerl 5.8.0 is supported.
• Gentoo Linux is supported. Previously Perl would segfault.
• TCP clients and servers now support different kinds of sessions (Session, NFA, and custom types).
• TCP servers now gracefully handle aborted connections. This prevents them from stopping under heavy load.
• TCP clients and servers are more configurable in general.
• Several unimplemented features in Wheel::Run have been completed.
• POE::Kernel's call() honors array vs. scalar context now.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented POE::Kernel from returning.
• Fixed a leak in signal dispatching. Terminal signals now destroy sessions at the proper times.

POE's web site contains detailed changes for every public release.

http://poe.perl.org/?POE_CHANGES

The latest tarball should be heading towards your favorite CPAN mirror. It is also on the web, and so is a Windows PPD. Users who need advanced notice of changes can follow it via anonymous CVS or POE's mailing list.

http://poe.perl.org/?Where_to_Get_POE http://poe.perl.org/?POE_Support_Resources

Thanks again to everyone who helped with this release.

About POE

POE is an award-winning networking and multitasking framework. It has been in active, open development for over four years. Its developer community has created a large and growing list of reusable components.

http://poe.perl.org/?What_POE_Is http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=PO E::Component

POE's robustness and performance have made it an integral part of mission critical applications since 1998. It is used in a wide variety of fields and in projects ranging from just a few lines of code to tens of thousands.

• Financial:
  Market servers, clients, billing systems, and automated trading agents.
• Web:
  Commerce servers, content management systems, application servers, data warehousing, WAP proxies, ad exchanges, web crawlers/spiders, and a variety of specialized agents.
• System Administration:
  Large-scale host monitoring and maintenance, distributed load testing, a distributed file system (InterMezzo), radius monitoring, system log management and reporting, and spam detection.
• Entertainment:
  Interactive TV servers; mp3 jukeboxes and streaming servers; multi-server multi-game server monitoring, management, billing, and tournament control; and a plethora of IRC applications and agents.
• Software Development:
  Compile farm management, build management, distributed testing.
• Monitoring and Automation:
  X10 home control, weather station monitoring, alarm monitoring.

We look forward to hearing how POE has helped you.

-- Rocco Caputo / troc@pobox.com / poe.perl.org / poe.sf.net

"

Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly. Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format. Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager. Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."

the_real_tigga writes "OpenMag features a benchmark review of the Intel C/C++ compiler as opposed to gcc on linux and Microsoft Visual Studio compiler on Windows XP. Not surprisingly (for me at least), icc beats them both, with dramatic performance improvements. Too bad they chose to review gcc version 2.95, and not the 3.x series, which is known to produce faster code. What is surprising, even AMD CPUs benefit from the icc-compiled code. There is another version of the article here, and they provide a download of the used tools , so you can try it at home too!"

Harpreet writes "It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. AnandTech's review has got everything you could want, including pictures galore. It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to." Update: 01/08 21:06 GMT by T : Read on below for a different (Free software, CD-based) approach to computer-A/V integration.

Trunkboy writes "There are a lot of PVR projects out there (Freevo, TiVo, Dave&Dina, etc... but MoviX is a little different. MoviX is an entire distribution (linux of course) that is designed to play avi/mpg/mp3/etc files from a computer. Upgrading is easy, because it boots from a CD! Videos/music can be stored on a local hard drive, or on a network share. This project is incredible, but needs more developers. Stop in and give Roberto a hand -- MoviX shows some great potential!"

Harpreet writes "It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. AnandTech's review has got everything you could want, including pictures galore. It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to." Update: 01/08 21:06 GMT by T : Read on below for a different (Free software, CD-based) approach to computer-A/V integration.

Trunkboy writes "There are a lot of PVR projects out there (Freevo, TiVo, Dave&Dina, etc... but MoviX is a little different. MoviX is an entire distribution (linux of course) that is designed to play avi/mpg/mp3/etc files from a computer. Upgrading is easy, because it boots from a CD! Videos/music can be stored on a local hard drive, or on a network share. This project is incredible, but needs more developers. Stop in and give Roberto a hand -- MoviX shows some great potential!"

Harpreet writes "It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. AnandTech's review has got everything you could want, including pictures galore. It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to." Update: 01/08 21:06 GMT by T : Read on below for a different (Free software, CD-based) approach to computer-A/V integration.

Trunkboy writes "There are a lot of PVR projects out there (Freevo, TiVo, Dave&Dina, etc... but MoviX is a little different. MoviX is an entire distribution (linux of course) that is designed to play avi/mpg/mp3/etc files from a computer. Upgrading is easy, because it boots from a CD! Videos/music can be stored on a local hard drive, or on a network share. This project is incredible, but needs more developers. Stop in and give Roberto a hand -- MoviX shows some great potential!"

Harpreet writes "It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. AnandTech's review has got everything you could want, including pictures galore. It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to." Update: 01/08 21:06 GMT by T : Read on below for a different (Free software, CD-based) approach to computer-A/V integration.

Trunkboy writes "There are a lot of PVR projects out there (Freevo, TiVo, Dave&Dina, etc... but MoviX is a little different. MoviX is an entire distribution (linux of course) that is designed to play avi/mpg/mp3/etc files from a computer. Upgrading is easy, because it boots from a CD! Videos/music can be stored on a local hard drive, or on a network share. This project is incredible, but needs more developers. Stop in and give Roberto a hand -- MoviX shows some great potential!"

texus writes "The Adelphia PowerLink Cable Modem Internet Service Provider, that serves 5.5 million customers nation wide, was found to be vulnerable of a major security flaw that allows cable modem subscribers to spy on each others traffic, as well as the ability to modify other users internet packets in realtime. The severity of a potential attack could allow a malicious subscriber to gain access to the customers private activity on the net, as well as the capabilities to hijack connections, intercept SSL/SSH/VPN encrypted sessions, hijack and poison dns servers, and perform a Denial of Service on the entire subnet. The advisory on BugTraq officially states that it didn't seem like Unix machines that logged onto the network were affected, but reports from other Adelphia subscribers indicate that this was inaccurate and Unix users are vulnerable as well."

texus writes "The Adelphia PowerLink Cable Modem Internet Service Provider, that serves 5.5 million customers nation wide, was found to be vulnerable of a major security flaw that allows cable modem subscribers to spy on each others traffic, as well as the ability to modify other users internet packets in realtime. The severity of a potential attack could allow a malicious subscriber to gain access to the customers private activity on the net, as well as the capabilities to hijack connections, intercept SSL/SSH/VPN encrypted sessions, hijack and poison dns servers, and perform a Denial of Service on the entire subnet. The advisory on BugTraq officially states that it didn't seem like Unix machines that logged onto the network were affected, but reports from other Adelphia subscribers indicate that this was inaccurate and Unix users are vulnerable as well."

unix-coder asks: "How can a small software company get to 'rent' accounts for short times on a wide range of machines running different commercial Unixes with different CPUs? SourceForge's compiler farms are great for open source projects (and besides, open source projects will get ported/tested/fixed on all the platforms that matter to the people that use them). But what about commercial projects where you want to port/build/test for a wide range of architectures and OSes (AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, ...) but don't want your several server rooms full of weird hardware of your own?"

Miguel de Icaza writes "We have just released the new version of Mono the new version includes a working version of ASP.NET. The release includes a sample web server that "hosts" the ASP.NET runtime (it can be hosted anywhere, for instance in Apache, with mod_haydn). The web features of ASP.NET would not be very useful without the support of a backing database. The new version of Mono includes database providers for Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, ODBC, OleDB, Gnome Data Access, SqLite, MySQL and of course, Postgres. The C# compiler is now 37% faster due to some nice optimizations on the JIT engine and in our class libraries. You can use it to develop GUI applications using Gtk#. Screenshots for mPhoto and the GUI debugger (which can debug both JITed apps and native applications). "

benh57 writes "The binary release of Fink for Mac OS X 10.2 has finally been released! This release includes over 700 binary packages for Mac OS X 10.2 as well as over 1800 source packages of all kinds. Fink ports Unix software to Mac OS X and makes it available using debian tools like apt-get, as well as a build from source package manager." I'll be selfupdating tonight ...

EyeTV from El Gato Software is a USB peripheral housing an MPEG-1 encoder, a TV tuner, and coaxial and RCA inputs, and accompanying Mac OS X software to operate the tuner and record and playback programs, saving the data to your local hard drive. In less geeky terms, it is a digital video recorder for your Mac. Boffo. OK, there's nothing exactly unique about a DVR for your computer. But this one is made for Mac OS X, and it works with any Mac OS X box that has USB.

I've been using it for a couple of months now. I schedule it to record The Daily Show four nights a week, along with all my Sunday political shows, so I can watch (er, listen to) them as I work. I turn the news on in the middle of the day. I watch hockey games while I am working late. And because I have a big ol' 160GB FireWire hard drive, I can save a lot of programs without worrying about deleting (one hour takes 650MB at standard/VCD quality, and 1.3GB at high quality). And if I have Toast, I can burn VCDs directly from EyeTV for posterity.

The performance is fine. Because the MPEG encoder is in the EyeTV box, most of the performance drag is where it has to be: playing back movie files, and writing them to disk. I keep EyeTV hooked up to my house file/web server (a PowerBook G3/500 which also serves as MP3/CD/DVD player and -- now -- television), and when I go on the road, I merely copy a bunch of programs to my laptop. Warning: watching Trigger Happy TV on the subway can be a bit dangerous; people think the abandoned aluminum foil hat under the bench belongs to you.

To view a recording on another computer, you Save to QuickTime Movie from EyeTV, or you can install another copy of the EyeTV software on another computer, and copy the EyeTV files over.

If you want to copy individual recordings, either bypassing Save to QuickTime Movie (the movies will play just fine in QuickTime Player), or copying selected recordings to your other EyeTV folder (instead of all of them), it can be difficult to locate the right files: the filenames don't really tell you anything about what's inside. So, I wrote a command-line utility to search the recordings.

Also, it is difficult, but not impossible, to edit programs. QuickTime tools don't allow for editing MPEG-1. You can "export to QuickTime", but you won't be able to edit the resulting file. What you'll need to do is demux (I use bbDEMUX) the file into separate audio and video streams, then convert the streams and merge them back together.

I convert the demuxed audio to AIFF with SoundApp (under Classic) and then put that file in the same directory as the demuxed video, one called "movie.aiff" and the other "movie.m1v", and when I open the video in QuickTime Player, it merges them together automatically (a nice time-saver). Then I export it to MPEG-4 format. This process can be very tedious, and is prone to failure for large files, but it can be done.

I did have problems for awhile with EyeTV not saving recordings. I had set my drive to spin down, and EyeTV wouldn't properly spin it up; I changed my Energy Saver prefs to not sleep the disk whenever possible, and the problem was solved. There are some other minor glitches: for instance, the software allows the screen to dim and screen savers to come on during playback, and there is the occasional crash (which happens less with the latest release of the software). Also, as the resolution is 352x240 (regardless of quality setting), I don't want to use it to watch programs that demand high resolution. I'll record those on the DirecTiVo.

But really, the only serious problem I have had with EyeTV is the scheduling. You can use the TitanTV service via a web browser, which is a nice idea, but it is often incredibly slow, such that finding the program and manually adding it can be less frustrating, if not faster, than going through the browser.

The service has improved recently, so maybe it won't be much of an issue anymore for some people, but for me, a better solution is Karelia's Watson, which is similar to Apple's Sherlock, but better in most respects (more and mostly better tools, and faster). The new version of Watson (1.6, released Tuesday) has new buttons in the TV Listings tool, one for "watch," one for "record," and even one for adding the program to iCal. I use Watson to quickly find the program I want, I hit the right button, and EyeTV is ready to go. You can't beat that with a stick, although it will cost you another $29 for the privilege, if for some insane reason you've not yet purchased Watson.

I also use EyeTV to digitize other video sources; you can play back something from your TiVo or VCR and record a copy to take with you on your next trip. I have a Meade telescope with an electronic eyepiece, so I can record the moon. Mmmmmm, moon.

EyeTV isn't perfect; the software could use some improvement, it could be easier to convert to an editable file format, and the resolution could be better (which will require updated hardware, perhaps using FireWire). In the meantime, I could live without EyeTV, but I wouldn't want to. It's a nice device to have.

prostoalex writes "After MIT's decision to put the course materials online free of charge, seven other universities expressed similar goals. With the grant from Hewlett-Packard the universities of Washington, Rochester, Toronto, Cornell, Columbia, Ohio State as well as MIT will provide their courses online at a single location. DSpace was launched with a $1.8 million grant from HP. MIT expects to spend about $250,000 annually to maintain and operate the archive. The page is available here." We also have an update on MITs courseware offerings, so read more if you care about such things. In related news, dchud writes "DSpace, which has been in production use at MIT Libraries since September, is now available under a BSD-style license as version 1.0 at sourceforge. DSpace is a repository for capturing, persisting, and providing access to the digital research output of the MIT community, and will be the long-term archive for OpenCourseWare materials. Now it's available as an institutional repository platform for the rest of the world. See also coverage from the Boston Globe, CNET, and the AP (via NYT, reg req'd)."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

bbum writes "Today, Ronald Oussoren and I patched the PyObjC (PythonObj-C) bridge to allow for completely standalone Cocoa applications that are implemented in Python. My 11-Oct-2002 weblog entries provide more detail and includes a link to a PyObjC Cocoa app that can be downloaded and hacked upon (with the app, you can actually create other apps without using the dev tools at all!). As the days pass, I'll be updating the 'blog with new software, updates, etc. A Fink package will be submitted shortly. (In reality -- Ronald did the hard stuff in that he figured out how to subclass ObjC classes in Python!!)" Nifty. Note there is also a PerlObjCBridge module included with Jaguar, and there's also CamelBones for Perl-Cocoa; what other scripting frameworks for Mac OS X are out there?

ilsie writes "Numbnut says it all in his post at xboxhacker.net. To quote his post, 'On behalf of the Xbox Linux Team, I am proud to announce that at 10:45BST the 'v1.1' secure version of the Xbox was proven to be running arbitrary BIOS code in a normal 256KByte modchip - with no additional hardware required. In short, in under a week we were able to normalize the new box to enable it to interoperate with Linux properly.'"

chromatic writes with the review below of Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, which explains at a level "between novice and intermediate user" (and in a minimum of space) how to contribute to Perl's own Library of Alexandria. Writing Perl Modules for CPAN author Sam Tregar pages 288 publisher Apress rating Recommended. reviewer chromatic ISBN 159059018X summary A guide to the use and production of Perl modules, from start to finish, in C and in Perl. The Scoop

Besides Perl's abilities as a rapid development language, it's widely believed that the CPAN is its most valuable feature. This network of freely distributable code allows competent developers to achieve great heights of productivity, reusing the work of a generous community of programmers.

Of course, just as some will argue that Perl's copious documentation (spread over two thousand pages) is not immediately obvious to beginners, neither is how to use and even to contribute to the CPAN. For every coder who's successfully published a module, how many more would jump at the chance? How many registered CPAN authors would like to improve their skills?

With that audience in mind, Sam Tregar's Writing Perl Modules for CPAN plants itself firmly in the gap between novice and intermediate user. While much of the book presents information present in a multitude of FAQs, manpages, and the bittersweet experiences of those of us who did things the hard way, he's collected much knowledge into a short and readable guide.

What's to Like?

Tregar starts by describing the history and usage of the CPAN itself. This includes the three most popular approaches to building modules: through the CPAN shell (including its configuration), by hand, and with ActiveState's PPM tool. Next, he explains module development in forty pages. This is pretty dense stuff for the intended audience and might require several passes by newer coders. Only after re-reviewing the chapter for this summary did I realize how much he covered. The next chapter covers design and style, from naming schemes to appropriate laziness through code reuse. It's more philosophical and more important.

The next two chapters cover bundling and submitting modules to the CPAN, as well as being a good author and maintainer. The general tone is quite similar to the impressive Open Source Development with CVS. While manpages usually describe the mechanics of making a distribution, for example, they rarely explain the reasons why things are done that way. As with previous chapters, several code examples illustrate the concepts under discussion.

After a brief chapter discussing a few very effective CPAN modules, Tregar dives into XS (the interface between Perl and C). In 60 pages, he describes just enough of XS and the Perl API to teach careful programmers how to be effective at extending Perl. This introduction compares favorably to the first few chapters of the new (and excellent) Extending and Embedding Perl. As expected in an overview, he provides links to more information. The writing and example style is clear enough that a decent coder with sufficient C knowledge should be able to write a Perl wrapper to a C library with relative ease.

The last two chapters describe Inline::C, an abstraction layer that makes XS much easier, and CGI::ApplicationC, a state machine framework for Perl CGI applications. It's not quite clear why the last chapter was included (besides Tregar's desire to see more CPAN modules extending CGI::Application), but it serves as an example of using and extending a CPAN module. Perhaps a future version of the book will elaborate further.

What's to Consider

The book's code samples are generally good. In the first half, they are all related parts of a larger project. The rest of the book moves away from this approach. Perhaps it would have been worthwhile to continue the theme, though the nature of the material makes it difficult to see exactly how to accomplish this.

Tregar also avoids the use of strictures and warnings in his code examples, claiming that they would make the examples too verbose. I disagree with the given reasoning -- teaching is the best time to enforce good habits, especially when encouraging the students to distribute their code to the world. This is a minor issue, though, as the code is readable and reasonable.

In the past few months, two projects have gained a great deal of momentum in Perl space. These are the CPANPLUS (disclaimer: I am contributing to this project and have contributed to CPAN.pm) and Module::Build. They may become the new standards, replacing CPAN.pm and MakeMaker as early as Perl 5.10. The book omits mention of these. This is understandable, given the time frame -- and the current tools will not be disappearing any time soon. Potential replacements for h2xs are described in a sidebar, though.

The Summary

This is a readable book. It took only a couple of hours to read (though I'm assuredly not the target audience), and is well packed with good advice. Fresher Perl programmers who aren't yet comfortable enough with packages and interfaces will get the most benefit, but there's plenty of information for intermediate hackers as well.

Table of Contents

1. CPAN
2. Perl Module Basics
3. Module Design and Implementation
4. CPAN Module Distribution
5. Submitting Your Module to CPAN
6. Module Maintenance
7. Great CPAN Modules
8. Programming Perl in C
9. Writing C Modules with XS
10. Writing C Modules with Inline::C
11. CGI Application Modules for CPAN

You can purchase Writing Perl Modules for CPAN from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

There are a few new product announcements recently: MATLAB for Mac OS X is available; fink for 10.2 is available for testing; Intuit has announced QuickBooks for Mac OS X; and PowerLogix has announced even more upgrades, including dual processor upgrades. And one user notes, "I wonder if the /. effect could drain the batteries of this Newton quickly?"

Sterling Hughes writes "It is now possible to embed MSIL bytecodes into Apache using the mod_haydn module. This means any language that can be compiled into MSIL, now has access to the Apache API, and can register Apache handlers (theoretically at least). Currently content, translation and authentication handlers are supported. mod_haydn is released under the BSD License."

Sterling Hughes writes "It is now possible to embed MSIL bytecodes into Apache using the mod_haydn module. This means any language that can be compiled into MSIL, now has access to the Apache API, and can register Apache handlers (theoretically at least). Currently content, translation and authentication handlers are supported. mod_haydn is released under the BSD License."

Craig Maloney writes: "Bram Moolenaar's Vim editor has quickly become the clone of choice for users of the venerable vi editor. Unfortunately, until recently finding documentation for the features of Vim meant spending quality time with the help files that come with Vim. While the help files are very good, a manual/tutorial of the Vim editor was needed. Other vi books included scant pages about the improvements of Vim over standard vi, but Vim isn't only a slight improvement to vi. Vi IMproved -- Vim is the manual Vim users need to help them get the full benefit out of Vim." Read on for more of Craig's review of this book below. Vi IMproved -- Vim author Steve Oualline pages 572 publisher New Riders rating 7.5/10 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 0735710015 summary The first and only published book covering the basic and advanced usage of Vi IMproved.

Learning to crawl

Books describing editors generally fall into two categories. The first category of books will describe a particular function (like moving through a file) with all the known ways for performing that function, ad nauseum. The second category distills the myriad of ways to perform that function into a handful of the most common or most useful ways. Vi IMproved -- Vim combines both methods with good results.

The first section of the book is entitled Basic Editing; this section introduces the reader to starting and using Vim effectively without getting too bogged down in the gory details of Vim's vi heritage. In the chapter on moving around, the author begins with two methods of movement. In the details portion, the author has the reader performing more complex movements. This is a good approach, much like learning how to walk before learning how to hop, skip, jump, and dance through your document. Unfortunately this approach makes using this book as a reference very difficult. I would read sections that I wanted to use later, only to realize I couldn't find the section again. Vi IMproved -- Vim more than makes up for this shortcoming with a generous appendix detailing the Normal Mode, Command Mode, and Visual Mode commands along with a well-designed quick-reference section.

Made to Order

One of the strengths of Vim over other vi clones is Vim's ability to be used as a regular GUI application, and not just as an xterm-enhanced application.

Vi -- IMproved Vim shows not only how to use the GUI, but also how to customize the GUI to fit the reader's preferences. A good portion of this book deals with customizing Vim to suit the reader's style through the various parameters, menus, and GUI elements. Users who like their editors as stock as possible will find themselves skipping a lot of pages in this book. However even they will be tempted to try out some of the neat functions that pop up as they flip through the pages. The author conveys a sense of exploration, inviting users to experiment and try out new things with Vim.

Errata

Unfortunately, with vi and its clones, a single letter can mean the difference between moving through the document and deleting half of it by accident. Vi IMproved -- Vim is plagued with typos and errors, making this a difficult book for newbies to get into without having the errata sheet from http://vim.sf.net handy. It's understandable why a book like this would have some errors, especially with vi and Vim's terse keyboard commands.

Conclusion

Users of Vim will no doubt be thrilled with Vi IMproved -- Vim. Having a reference outside of the help menus in the program is a godsend for any user of Vim. Unfortunately the errors in this book mar what could have been the definitive book for Vim users, but for those who are starting out with Vim, or who would like to know more about Vim, this book is the perfect starting point and reference. The book covers the 5.x series of editors, but that shouldn't be a problem for most people looking to get started with the 6.x series.

If you're using Vim, you need Vi IMproved -- Vim.

You can purchase Vi IMproved from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes: "Brand Huntsman (the creator of the Bochs Front-End, among other obscure things) has been developing an integrated language/operating system for the past few years now. The Operating System is called BRiX, and it uses a language called Crush, which is woven tightly into the core of the OS. On his project web page he has posted the source code to his preliminary compiler, which runs in Linux and outputs optimized assembly from Crush source code. The Crush language itself is heavily influenced by Forth, LISP, and Ada, and provides strong typing and extensive namespace security." Update: 08/19 00:03 GMT by T : Note, the project page URL has been updated, hope it now works for everyone :)

bsharitt writes "Mark Pazolli has ported Freecraft to Mac OS X, making this popular open source RTS game avalble on the three major platforms (it's been on Linux/*nix and Windows for a while). The complete download is here."

Anonymous Coward writes: "Seems LucasArts finally noticed ScummVm although they seem to be confused about what it is. ScummVM is a 'virtual machine'(yes like Java) that allows you to play scumm games (Monkey Island, for example) in modern OS (Linux, BSD, err Windows XP) and weird machines like PDAs and the Dreamcast, but Lucas have confused them with an abandonware site."

Jonathan Corbet at LWN has posted a terrific summary of the first Day of the Ottawa Kernel Summit, and you should expect the second day soon. In it he relates the greatest hits of the first day's talks, including the AMD Hammer Port, Block I/O, Modules, and more. For mp3s or oggs of this event, check out the Kernel Summit MP3 Repository on SourceForge. The big news is the desire to feature freeze 2.5 within 4 or 5 months. Halloween. I've posted a very small gallery of the group pictures from the summit on my site.

Pivot writes: "With the release of Xine v0.9.11a, it is now possible to play back Quicktime movies encoded with the Sorenson SVQ1 encoding natively. There are still some minor issues with sound, and still no support for SVQ3 encoding, but overall this is a major achievement. Downloads are at xine.sf.net. I wonder what apple will do about this." Note: you may have to cut and paste that "movies" link into a new tab or browser.

Dave Hansen, the IBM programmer who organized this interview (questions were posted on May 28), says, "Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough during the call for questions, but myself and my group are kernel programmers. But, we were able to dredge up some responses for answers that we couldn't do ourselves. We haven't been able to get an answer to the ViaVoice question yet, but if there is real interest, I'll make sure that we do get some kind of answer back to Slashdot. IBM Kernel Hackers:

A note: we answered these questions individually, but in the interests of Slashdot's disk space, we decided to coalesce the answers into a single, unified one. You might say we "became one voice". (the IBMers in the audience will get that one) These were edited by management, but they mostly corrected our spelling mistakes and cleaned up our dirty language :)

Remember, if you're interested in Linux on large systems or if you have more questions, be sure to check out the LSE site, find us on LKML, or look for us at OLS (we're giving lots of talks).

1) Multi-CPU Scalability
by morbid

Now that Linux has been ported to run on high-end machines under virtualization, when will we see a kernel tuned for (e.g.) scalability to 64-128 processors natively?

IBM Kernel Hackers:

Assuming you're talking about single systems running one instance of Linux, we are focusing on 8 way scalability this year, 16-32 scalability next year. After that, we'll do whatever the hardware people can produce ... there aren't many 64-128 processor systems around.

The open source community is tackling the complexities in getting multi-cpu systems to scale well, and with that understanding also comes a realization that sometimes entire subsystems are bottlenecks. Major rewrites of some of these are underway in 2.5 (not just by IBM people mind you). The scheduler is being wrestled to the ground, the I/O subsystem is being dissected, and virtual memory implementations are creating rhetoric worthy of the Cold War. All of these efforts have had contributions from IBM people in Beaverton and other parts of the Linux Technology Center.

2) OS Blending
by 2names

As Linux developers inside IBM, do you get to see the AIX source code? If you do, are you allowed to "steal" some ideas from AIX and implement them in Linux? If not, why not, and what's the IBM official line?

IBM Kernel Hackers:

First of all, before any of us were allowed to contribute to Linux, we were required to take an "Open Source Developers" class. This class gives us the guidelines we need to participate effectively in the open source community - both IBM guidelines and lessons learned about open source from others in IBM.

We are definitely not allowed to cut and paste proprietary code into any open source projects (or vice versa!). There is an IBM committee who can and do approve the release of IBM proprietary or patented technology, like RCU.

That covers "stealing" code, but what about ideas? We might talk to an AIX programmer and comment we're seeing performance issues in Linux in this area or that area and she tells us they discovered that they really needed to profile the network routines when they saw that. Having solved the problem once, our non-Linux peers can help steer us without spelling it out for us, allowing us to still develop solutions that can then be open sourced.

It's a fine line to walk, especially as an engineer who just wants the answer :)

3) The Open Source model
by larry bagina

IBM will be using linux to help sell their hardware. Other companies have tried this (VA Linux, which owns Slashdot, once had linux hackers on their payroll). Obviously, IBM's hardware is in a different league as an x86 clone, but do you have any thoughts on Open Source business models and their validity? Once the kernel is running smoothly, will you be disposable since the "Open Source community" can continue development for free?

IBM Kernel Hackers:

We think the Open Source business model is more than just valid, it is revolutionary. Linux has become a real "killer app"; the ability to run Linux on IBM hardware is increasingly high on customer's lists. Being able to run it doesn't really hurt AIX or VM, but not being able to run it would cost hardware sales.

As far as our disposability: don't get too concerned on our behalf, Linux will always have bugs and there will always be room for improvement.

4) Getting your changes accepted?
by korpiq

Is Linus accepting your changes well? How directly do you submit patches, and what are your experiences on the overall Linux kernel development style?

IBM Kernel Hackers:

Linus himself is wonderful about accepting patches on technical merit alone. He doesn't "grade" them differently if they come from ibm.com or mit.edu. We submit patches the exact same way that everyone else does: append the patch, mail to Linus and CC linux-kernel. If it's good, it gets in. If it sucks, you get flamed.

However, the submission process can be more complicated than first appears. Often, you need to figure out who is maintaining a particular area of code, followed by talking to them to gauge if someone else is already working on the same thing. Once you submit your code to them and the appropriate list, (isn't always lkml..) you may not get a response. This can be discouraging, but you have to find out why, or just simply resubmit, over and over and over. But, once you have a reputation, it does get easier to get quicker responses.

Sometimes it's frustrating when you've put a lot of effort into something that doesn't get accepted, but there's normally a good reason for it. Even work that doesn't get accepted can influence other people's thinking and development in the future. On the flip side you can also just point out problems and other people fix them for you, so in general you win more than you lose ;-)

5)linux on thinkpads
by Olinator

IMHO, IBM makes some of the best mobile hardware out there -- one of the professors I support raves about his ThinkPad 600, that went with him into the Israeli desert for several months and is still running strong, no service required -- but the linux support for that hardware has been, um, erratic at best. Yes, we've been occasionally been able to purchase the odd model with linux preinstalled (usually it's more expensive than the comparable model with MicroSoft preinstalled, grr) but an awful lot of the hardware (mini-pci modems, etc...) is rather difficult to drive with a penguin behind the wheel. Why does IBM's linux enthusiasm fade so quickly at the small (physical) end of the hardware scale? Is there momentum underway to change this?

IBM Kernel Hackers:

All of the people in our group and most in the LTC have Thinkpads for their daily development and run Linux on them (I'm writing this on one as I sit in my apartment). There may not be as much corporate support there as you want, but there is plenty of grass-roots support. We had to learn all the quirks to get Linux installed and get all of the little things working (just like you). I've always wished that we shared more of this information, but there are usually people who are farther ahead than we are. I've uploaded the meager information that we put together during a meeting once. If you're curious, take a look: http://www.sr71.net/slashdot/thinkpad/linux-desktop

People don't buy many small computers just because they will run Linux (the geek population just isn't that large). People do, however, blow large chunks of cash on big machines just to run Linux. Mom-and-Pop can almost always undercut IBM on prices for small machines, and geeks are thrifty. You don't have to sell many million dollar machines to justify being involved in Linux development.

6) Issues with middle management
by Consul

When you were starting out as a group, did you encounter a lot of friction and resistance from middle and/or upper management about your wanting to work on Open Source projects for IBM? If so, what did you do to overcome the objections and become the team you are now? I think the answer to this would help a lot of other people in other companies get mainstream acceptance of the idea of OSS in corporate environments.

IBM Kernel Hackers:

The management chain from engineer up to VP has been surprisingly a non-issue. We believe this is mostly because of the way the Linux Technology Center was founded. You might think the LTC evolved "up" from renegade engineers, but the truth is that our first Linux corporate strategy in 1998 called for the creation of a team, composed of some our best OS engineers, that would join the community to

1. Learn from doing,
2. Grow Linux skills
3. Give back to the community
4. Help make Linux better.

The LTC was founded then with full corporate backing already in place. Boring!! The early funding story for the LTC did involve renegade behavior and a table outside the BOFs at LinuxWorld in 1999, but that's a different story. Our director, Dan Frye, is owed much of the praise for the LTC's existence and smooth operation within IBM. The critical thing here is that engineers shouldn't be fighting corporate political battles, you need management that will go to bat for you on those issues (and win ;-)) We have that, and they do a good job of keeping that stuff off our backs. On the whole, our only work in this arena is to inform the management of what we need, and to feed them with the ammunition they need from a technical standpoint to fight these battles for us.

7) When do you estimate Linux can surpass Solaris?
by wytcld

Solaris 9 is getting great reviews. Between the strengths of the traditional open source community and IBM's resources, do you see a point in the next several years where you expect Linux to surpass Solaris in all of its core strengths? Or does Solaris have some unique values which will allow Sun to continue to position itself to advantage, at least for some applications? Please answer this as a technical rather than marketing question.

IBM Kernel Hackers:

We don't have a Solaris machines to back up any claim we may make, nor do we want to stir up another epic Linux on mainframe battle. It is safe to say, however, that today Linux/x86 is able to outperform¹ Solaris/Sparc in many areas that Sun has a long history of success. If your core business was threatened, wouldn't you make some serious changes?

¹ I know, I know, outperform is a very vague term. Just think price, performance, stability, etc...

8) OS/2 Developers
by reaper20

I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed the OS/2 desktop and its features. Have any of the former OS/2 developers been contributing to Linux?

Specifically, the user interface and accessibility people - OS/2 was very polished - does IBM see a benefit by offering this expertise to the GNOME/KDE projects?

If so, how does this tie into IBM's vision of Linux of the desktop, if you have one? :)

IBM Kernel Hackers:

Yes, there are a number of former OS/2 developers in the LTC including the majority of the teams working on: JFS, EVMS, and Print, as well individuals contributing in the areas of networking, security, RAS, performance and other projects. Remember, OS/2 had JFS support and EVMS supports the OS/2 partitioning scheme.

While IBM is not actively contributing code from the OS/2 user interface, we are supporting and sponsoring both the GNOME and the KDE projects through our involvement in the KDE League and the GNOME Foundation. And as you mentioned, we place a high level of importance on accessibility and so are participating in the community efforts in that area as well.

10) IA64
by sabre ...

Do you think that IPF64 line will see any kind of broad industry adoption? Will it become just like rest of the (non-embedded) processor architectures designed since the x86 -- constantly fighting for 5% of the market? Do you think the AMD Hammer architecture will be a meaningful player in the field?

IBM Kernel Hackers:

Quite possibly, never underestimate the importance of being able to run the huge installed base of ia32 apps natively, and at high speed. But IA64 has lots of industry backing as well. The good news is that Linux runs well on both, so we the community don't have to choose. The market will do that for us.

Additional questions and answers:

What features do you find linux most lacking in? (If we don't examine our weaknesses, we will be crippled)

Linux on the desktop still doesn't really cut it for some of us (though we do use it). Applications are not nearly as robust as they should be, and though we are perfectly capable of configuring X, we'd rather spend the time coding. Though it's fun to throw stones at Windows and the Linux OS is more stable than the Windows OS, as a whole desktop package with the apps, installation, usability and everything rolled together, Linux is not always preferable.

There are thorns in our side daily because of the lack of debugging and profiling ability in the kernel. We're always patching kernels for kernprof or lockmeter and porting them around to new kernel versions. Although Linus has pretty much said that debuggers are for sissies, the built-in facilities are much better than they were during the old days (think readprofile). So, there are advances being made.

...I'm not surprised that your responses have to be vetted by management. But, I'd love to know what guidelines IBM has for hackers' interaction with the rest of the GNU/Linux/Internet community. Are you allowed to criticize IBM management, or other IBM products, for example?

This is the Internet. We are hackers. Our management has been great allowing us to resolve many of our own problems involving certain email systems and desktop OS rules. Working in the kernel group of the LTC we have free reign to do our work on the kernel in the Open Source community.

There's no day-to-day vetting of anything we post or say, they trust us to be sensible. We would not say "IBM product X sucks, and you should buy competitor's product Y instead" in a public forum, but if we don't think something works well, I'm not going to endorse it either. We're engineers who get paid to work on Linux by IBM, not IBM corporate drones ;-)

From the brief bios, and Sequent pedigree, it looks like there is a lot of focus on high-end features like NUMA, async I/O and the like. Other commercial organizations, notably SGI, are also putting forth effort in those areas. There is actually quite a bit of overlap.

Since these are "open source" projects, do you collaborate with your traditional "enemies" such as SGI and Sun on Linux? What is your management's attitude toward that type of collaboration? If not, do you "look" at the work \ the others are doing in comparison to what you are doing?

We have been working smoothly with engineers from HP, Intel, SGI and many other companies through the Linux Scalability Effort Open Source Project. Whatever legal issues there might be within each company, it appears to me that the engineers who are working on open source are allowed to do their work with no problems. Hanna runs the bi-weekly LSE Conference Call and can say the biggest percentage of attendees are from either IBM, SGI or Intel every time. This is nice, but we want more members from the Open Source community to join: (http://lse.sf.net/mtg).

Management doesn't really care too much who actually writes the patch at the end of the day, they want to see Linux work well in their focus areas. Persuading other (external) developers of the correct approach or solution to a problem is just as important a part of our jobs as writing code.

Why isn't IBM making more of an effort to recruit developers directly from the Linux community, as opposed to hiring people who have very little if any working familiarity with the platform?

IBM has hired lots of existing Linux developers such as Rusty Russell, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Ted Ts'o. There are also others that post to LKML and don't even use their IBM email addresses because they were firmly established community members (with those email addresses) before they were hired. We do have a site where you can view many of our patches, or a list of developers. Keep in mind that there are still developers who don't submit patches here.

What are your opinions regarding the shrinking number of women in the industry? (actually I believe the numbers are rising again in schools)

This is a tough field and many young women are discouraged from sticking it out through all of the math and science classes, as are many young men. Companies, like IBM, help by hiring bright women who move up the technical chain. This shows the less experienced that there is a future for women in engineering.

Shrinking? The numbers seem to be increasing based on what we see at work every day. IBM is active in programs that introduce young women to engineering in an attempt to get them interested in pursing careers in engineering. An example of these programs is Camp EXITE, check this site out for more info: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ibmgives/grant/education/camp.shtml

An interesting interview regarding the number of women in industry is available at: http://www.nspe.org/etweb/16-02viewpoint.asp

Questions Rick Lindsley liked that didn't make the top 10, plus answers:

Best way into the Professional Linux world?

As many people here, I am a huge Linux fan, but I am so much so that I am trying to figure out how to get into the professional Linux world when I graduate.

I attend Clemson University and am in the Computer Information System (CS + business) program (and doubled in Political Science). My goal is to become a Linux sys admin, or perhaps some other Linux guru type job. The work that IBM is doing with Linux is also very appealing to me.

So, how did you get your job, and what would you recommend as the path to follow for us geeks just getting started in the professional world as to how to get into Linux? How can I become as entrenched with Linux as the professionals at IBM? I have had two internships (not with IBM, nor with Linux, but with other CS stuff), but how can I get an entry-level job in a Linux intensive environment like IBM? How can said job lead me into a career where I can be deeply involved in the Linux world?

Rick:

First: I've done recruiting at a "significant Big 10 university whose mascot's name is Bucky" so let me tell you what I look for in a college candidate.

Knowledgable -- your resume should reflect what you know, but don't puff it. Just because they make me dress up when I'm on campus doesn't mean I can't tell perl from shell scripting. Accentuate your strong points. You gain points for knowledge, but you lose them for lying or "overstating."

Communicative -- a person who cannot talk about what they know might as well know nothing. Seriously consider taking a public speaking course your junior or senior year. Also: it's ok to say "I don't know."

Grade point -- Personally, I really don't care so much about your GPA as you might think. Unfortunately, you will be judged by it by far too many people, right or wrong. So if you're not 3.9 or 4.0, you might be ready to spin it a bit. "Yes, it's 3.2, but I've buckled down and have 3.84 in the last three semesters." "Yes it's 3.1, but you'll note it's 3.6 on courses in my major." Don't get surreal but make that number say something good about you.

Work experience -- you get a big edge for doing something other than a teaching assistant. Internships, co-ops, and summer jobs can help you more than you think in the end.

Second, how did I get my job at IBM? Luck, in part. Right place, right time. Sometimes it really does work for you. Along with that luck, though, was the fact that I'd established a reputation as a smart coder and a fast learner. While I knew far less about Linux then than I know now, that reputation made managers believe that "coming up to speed" would not be a problem, and they judged right. Your reputation, as reported by your colleagues and not yourself, will be your greatest ally (or enemy.) This is never more true than in the Linux community.

Third, advancing? Once you get your foot in the door, work at interacting. Nobody really advances very far without interaction. At first this is with your cubie neighbor or office mate, but pretty soon it's chatting with people down the hall, and then in other projects. Eventually, you have opportunities to help organize informal seminars with the local user's group, and then it's helping out with conferences, and then you're writing papers, and chairing sessions, and before you know it you're standing puzzled in front of a thousand people, wondering how troubled their life must be that they would want to listen to <em>you</em> speak.

Dave Hansen's answer -

Purdue University's Computer Science program. I went to one of the CS job fairs where someone in the large IBM booth saw "Linux" on my resume. I handed my resume off, had a nice chat, and got a sit-down interview a couple of days later. That was followed soon by a plant trip and a job offer. The moral of the story: if you want a Linux job, put Linux on your resume! Make it bold. Make it half the page if that is really want you want to do. Most importantly, you have to learn to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. Engineers usually have better BS detectors than most people and you won't fool them for long.

Advancing - This is probably evident to anyone who has gone through an engineering program at a large school, but the most successful engineers are those who can teach others. You'll notice that there are lots of brilliant engineers and lots of teachers, but those who can do both are a rarity. Learn as much as you can from your colleagues then share as much as you can. The more people who know your name and come to you for help, the more visible you are. There is probably a fine line between getting noticed and being annoying and I have the feeling that a Slashdot interview may be WAY beyond the line :)

chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."

jvmatthe writes "Jens Owen of Tungsten Graphics (mostly former VA Linux/Precision Insight employees) posted to the DRI developer's mailing list with some excellent news about the future of DRI drivers for the ATi Radeon 8500 video card: "The Weather Channel is funding TG to develop an open source 3D DRI driver for the ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. The driver will be released to the XFree86 Project around Q4 of 2002, to be distributed to the public in future versions of the XFree86 X Server." Presumably this means that this Weather Channel is the one footing the bill for the development. Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card, the delivery of an open driver is excellent news. This is also listed at the bottom of the TG project page."

Ryan writes "Apple recently published an article on using CVS with Mac OS X. 'This article covers some of the most commonly used features of CVS, with emphasis on using CVS with static and interpreted web files (HTML, PHP, Perl, etc).'" It's a decent article, a good primer on how to get started, and it's nice that Mac OS X comes with a CVS server. Personally, I really dig maccvs for my CVS client, and there are plenty of other clients for Mac OS out there too.

benh57 writes "KDE has finally been ported to Mac OS X, by the Fink team. Source packages and pre-built binaries are now available. Read the announcement and instructions for installing. Woohoo!"

hysterion writes "Just came across the nice Unix Porting Guide (pdf) posted by Apple earlier this month. Topics include NetInfo, using Project Builder with gnumake, autoconf, XFree86, Tcl/Tk, Qt ... it is a bit short on scripting languages, and they speak as if KDE were already ported, but other than that I found it an informative read." They also didn't mention fink, and they put "Unix" in all caps. However, they were honest about the shell scripting limitations of AppleScript, although they didn't mention that AppleScript -- especially via osascript -- is pretty buggy in Mac OS X right now (this is my annoyance of the week, so allow me to indulge myself).

Mister Snee writes: "As of the latest WINE release, the developer who's been working on the ActiveMovie and DirectShow code for the last nine months suddenly pulled it all from the source tree, citing fears of trouble under the DMCA." And an anonymous reader submits: "TransGaming Tecnologies is offering much of its own proprietary code up for exchange if Codeweavers are willing to relicense some of their code under the less restrictive (more free) X11 licence (eg contributing it to the X11 fork of wine, Rewind). Details can be found at this post by CEO Gavriel State. This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money)." Your attitude toward these license machinations may vary; Codeweavers seems unlikely to oppose people making money from WINE development.

jpsc was kind enough to send in coverage of the Linux Accessibility Conference at CSUN: "There was a flurry of activity in the Linux accessibility world at CSUN 2002, one of the most widely attended, well known, and longest running conferences on technology for the disabled. Accessibility, for those who do not know, is the practice of making software accessible or usable by the disabled (e.g., blind or low vision); under United States law, software, including Linux, must be accessible for it to be used by the government. Similar laws exist in other countries. " Coverage continues... On Thursday, March 21st, Sun Microsystems presented the UNIX Accessibility sessions, which ranged in subject matter from panel discussions about the general importance and state of UNIX accessibility, to overviews of the structure of GNOME 2 and the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, to presentations about new Assistive Technology (AT) for the platform. Most notable were demonstrations of Gnopernicus, a GNOME screen reader, magnifier, and Braille outputer and GOK, the Gnome Onscreen Keyboard. Sun also announced that a team of engineers in China is working on making Mozilla accessible through the GNOME Accessibility Architecture and that several engineers are doing the same for Nautilis. Overall, Thursday?s sessions were representative of the great progress made in the last year in the Linux and UNIX accessibility world, specifically in the GNOME, GTK+, and X Windows arenas.

The next day the 2nd Linux Accessibility Conference, also at CSUN 2002, served as the stage for more in-depth and technical material as well as group discussions about the community?s direction. Presentations were given on subjects such accessibility checklists and guides for application developers, modifying the Linux kernel to speech-enable console applications, and Linux accessibility in the United States government. Among the most prominent parts of the conference was a roundtable on interoperability and collaboration, which lead to the formation of lengthy and detailed TODO list. As with the 1st Linux Accessibility Conference, this year?s meeting allowed developers to share their work and plans for the coming months and hopefully better coordinate them.

Overall, in two days at CSUN, UNIX, Solaris, and Linux showed themselves to be increasingly capable platforms for disabled users. The Linux accessibility community continues to grow and is looking, now more than ever, for new developers and volunteers. E-mail JP Schnapper-Casteras and with your skills and experience (experience with accessibility not required) and he will put you in contact with the appropriate people and projects.

URLs:

• TODO items
• Notes from the conference
• Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group (FDAWG)
• GNOME Accessibility Project (GAP)
• Gnopernicus - An integrated screen reader and magnifier for Gnome
• Gnome Onscreen Keyboard - Aims to enable users to control Gnome without a standard keyboard (with alternate input devices).
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)

"

jpsc was kind enough to send in coverage of the Linux Accessibility Conference at CSUN: "There was a flurry of activity in the Linux accessibility world at CSUN 2002, one of the most widely attended, well known, and longest running conferences on technology for the disabled. Accessibility, for those who do not know, is the practice of making software accessible or usable by the disabled (e.g., blind or low vision); under United States law, software, including Linux, must be accessible for it to be used by the government. Similar laws exist in other countries. " Coverage continues... On Thursday, March 21st, Sun Microsystems presented the UNIX Accessibility sessions, which ranged in subject matter from panel discussions about the general importance and state of UNIX accessibility, to overviews of the structure of GNOME 2 and the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, to presentations about new Assistive Technology (AT) for the platform. Most notable were demonstrations of Gnopernicus, a GNOME screen reader, magnifier, and Braille outputer and GOK, the Gnome Onscreen Keyboard. Sun also announced that a team of engineers in China is working on making Mozilla accessible through the GNOME Accessibility Architecture and that several engineers are doing the same for Nautilis. Overall, Thursday?s sessions were representative of the great progress made in the last year in the Linux and UNIX accessibility world, specifically in the GNOME, GTK+, and X Windows arenas.

The next day the 2nd Linux Accessibility Conference, also at CSUN 2002, served as the stage for more in-depth and technical material as well as group discussions about the community?s direction. Presentations were given on subjects such accessibility checklists and guides for application developers, modifying the Linux kernel to speech-enable console applications, and Linux accessibility in the United States government. Among the most prominent parts of the conference was a roundtable on interoperability and collaboration, which lead to the formation of lengthy and detailed TODO list. As with the 1st Linux Accessibility Conference, this year?s meeting allowed developers to share their work and plans for the coming months and hopefully better coordinate them.

Overall, in two days at CSUN, UNIX, Solaris, and Linux showed themselves to be increasingly capable platforms for disabled users. The Linux accessibility community continues to grow and is looking, now more than ever, for new developers and volunteers. E-mail JP Schnapper-Casteras and with your skills and experience (experience with accessibility not required) and he will put you in contact with the appropriate people and projects.

URLs:

• TODO items
• Notes from the conference
• Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group (FDAWG)
• GNOME Accessibility Project (GAP)
• Gnopernicus - An integrated screen reader and magnifier for Gnome
• Gnome Onscreen Keyboard - Aims to enable users to control Gnome without a standard keyboard (with alternate input devices).
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)

"

tal197 writes: "More than two years since the ROX desktop (a desktop based around the filesystem) was last mentioned on slashdot, the second stable branch of the central ROX-Filer component has just been released. It's still pretty light and fast, despite all the changes, and integrates well with other desktops too."

Eugenia writes "A new, Linux-based operating system released recently, called Simply GNUstep and it is based on the GNUstep architecture, originally built by NeXT (OpenSTEP) and is now also used by MacOSX (Cocoa). The alpha version of the x86-based OS is available for download and boots off the 110 MB bootable CD. The cool thing about Simply GNUstep is its partial source compatibility with MacOSX programs (further compatibility is still worked on) and its clean infrastructure, as it only includes GnuSTEP graphical applications like WindowMaker, Mail.app etc. You can read an introduction article of the OS at OSNews."

chizor asks: "My programming team is considering making some sweeping changes to our code base (150+ perl CGIs, over a meg of code) in the interest of consistency and reducing redundancy. We're going to have to make some hard decisions about code style. What suggestions might readers have about tackling a large-scale retrofit?" Once the decision has been made for a sweeping rewrite of a project, what can you do to make sure things go smoothly and you don't run into any development snags...especially as things progress in the development cycle?

A reader writes "There's an interesting project at SourceForge, called, "Vipul's Razor", that uses a gnutella like system to let users exchange spam "signatures" to filter spam. I work at an ISP in Ottawa, we have been using it for last two weeks to stop bulk of spam coming to our POP3 accounts. More impressively, it hasn't tagged any valid mail as spam yet. Here's the scoop from its webpage: "Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation. This catalogue is used by clients to filter out known spam. On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter out or deny transport in case of a signature match."" Cool idea. I'm up around 80% spam a day on my main mail account. Might be worth a try.

DShadow noted that the Fink maintainer Christoph Pfisterer has resigned largely because of GPL violations by openosx and macgimp, as well as macosx.forked.net. There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable, but hopefully great projects like this will continue, and commercial vendors will be able to play nice without alienating developers. The good news for Macheads is that fink will continue just fine.

Captain Zion writes "A portable, SDL-based SCUMM interpreter is available at sourceforge. With AGI and SCI interpreters available, do we have alternative interpreters for all major adventure systems?" I never got as hooked on the SCUMM games as the other systems, but Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle were smooth back in the day.

DrInequality writes: "For those of you out there who admire the portability of Java but want something faster or open source, the answer to your prayers is finally here. The Internet Virtual Machine is open source, fast and supports C, C++, Java and ObjectiveC. There are some cool demos for Linux (requires Redhat 6.0 or above, and OpenGL 1.2 or Mesa 3.41) here (1.5MB) and for Windows (requires glut32.dll, here) here (1.5MB)." We mentioned this last year; perhaps it has improved. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in a language as portable as Java but speedier.