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Robin Rowe of the Film Gimp project has a piece running on NewsForge (also part of OSDN) that says "Film Gimp has recently been adopted by ComputerCafe, the fourth motion picture studio to use it in making feature films." Check out this recent post about Film Gimp to see some great screenshots of behind-the-scenes use. (And Rowe is also hoping you can get to the Linux Movies Track at Creative Cow West 2003, starting Tuesday in Los Angeles.) Update: 02/17 04:04 GMT by T : Brain rebooted, so I added the missing link.

Dan writes "The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD."

Kevin P. Lawton writes "Plex86 has been completely overhauled, and simplified to be a user (application) code only Virtual Machine technology. For running user code, many of the heavy weight x86-VM techniques are unnecessary. But the bonus is, Linux can easily be made to run inside the plex86 VM, so that the kernel is actually 'pushed down' to user privilege level. This has been demonstrated on both Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels. Thus, Linux can run in a plex86 VM without the need for any heavy virtualization. My goal is to keep the code base trim, tight, auditable and get to usable releases quickly. And to favor those goals over adding unnecessary complexities. The first milestones have just been reached, so it's still early in development. There are email lists available on the main plex86 site."

Kevin P. Lawton writes "Plex86 has been completely overhauled, and simplified to be a user (application) code only Virtual Machine technology. For running user code, many of the heavy weight x86-VM techniques are unnecessary. But the bonus is, Linux can easily be made to run inside the plex86 VM, so that the kernel is actually 'pushed down' to user privilege level. This has been demonstrated on both Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels. Thus, Linux can run in a plex86 VM without the need for any heavy virtualization. My goal is to keep the code base trim, tight, auditable and get to usable releases quickly. And to favor those goals over adding unnecessary complexities. The first milestones have just been reached, so it's still early in development. There are email lists available on the main plex86 site."

Kevin P. Lawton writes "Plex86 has been completely overhauled, and simplified to be a user (application) code only Virtual Machine technology. For running user code, many of the heavy weight x86-VM techniques are unnecessary. But the bonus is, Linux can easily be made to run inside the plex86 VM, so that the kernel is actually 'pushed down' to user privilege level. This has been demonstrated on both Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels. Thus, Linux can run in a plex86 VM without the need for any heavy virtualization. My goal is to keep the code base trim, tight, auditable and get to usable releases quickly. And to favor those goals over adding unnecessary complexities. The first milestones have just been reached, so it's still early in development. There are email lists available on the main plex86 site."

Kevin P. Lawton writes "Plex86 has been completely overhauled, and simplified to be a user (application) code only Virtual Machine technology. For running user code, many of the heavy weight x86-VM techniques are unnecessary. But the bonus is, Linux can easily be made to run inside the plex86 VM, so that the kernel is actually 'pushed down' to user privilege level. This has been demonstrated on both Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels. Thus, Linux can run in a plex86 VM without the need for any heavy virtualization. My goal is to keep the code base trim, tight, auditable and get to usable releases quickly. And to favor those goals over adding unnecessary complexities. The first milestones have just been reached, so it's still early in development. There are email lists available on the main plex86 site."

TuringTest writes "LinuxGames reports this news update at the Soul Ride game site. Soul Ride is a snowboarding game with real character physics, and its engine is now released under GPL and available for download. You may see its beautiful screenshots until it gets /.ed. Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data. Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?" I hope this release spawns a Linux-friendly snowboarding simulator -- Soul Ride is limited to Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.

Screaming Lunatic writes "There seems to be a big security hole in the Unreal engine that has been around for about 5 years. It affects servers for a number of games and operating systems, including Linux (which accounts for about 40% of UT2003 servers). Epic has been working on a patch for about 3 months. Imagine the bad publicity games would receive if a worm on the scale of Slammer had been created." A Bugtraq post from Thor Larholm of Pivx, says that Marc Rein of Epic threatened PivX with "getting our lawyers involved with this"; the TechTV article Larholm cites (the same one linked from this submission), however, contains no mention of legal action. Rein nonetheless apologized for "those completely unfortunate comments" in a followup message to Bugtraq.

mliu writes "Xbox Media Player, the GPL application that turns everyone's favorite hackable console (the Xbox) into a set-top-Divx/Xvid-playing- Shoutcast-radio-streaming- lean-mean-Mp3/Ogg-music-playing-all-while- sporting-a-pretty-user-interface-machine is holding a contest. They're in desperate need of help in terms of more developers and are holding a giveaway of 25 top of the line X2 Pro modchips for the 25 best patch submissions between now and March 31. If you don't know what Xbox Media Player is and/or feel the need to ask why bother hacking the Xbox, you have definitely gotta check it out. It turns the Xbox from Bill Gates' insidious plot to get into the living room into a set top box that can play practically everything even while sporting a sleek black look that won't stick out in your home theater system, and a user interface that your grandmother could use. And you can even run Linux on it in your spare time. It's no $100,000 but it's for a cause that is both more practical and useful if you ask me." The X-Box has proven itself an entertaining platform for hackers, and the XBMP is really excellent. When it has visualization plug-ins, I think it'll be a great way to put MP3s in your stereo.

Jeremy Lee writes "There are some 'educational' apps that transcend the merely interesting, and expand you mind with the force of a crowbar in the cerebellum. Celestia is one. Atom in a box is another. I keep it handy on my new iBook to blow the minds of chemist friends. It only runs on PowerPC Macs, but it's almost a justification for getting one. It should be used in schools to teach chemistry." Celestia is also great (and available for other platforms) ... I couldn't download it from the main link on the page, but was able to get it from SF.net. But if you really want to amaze your friends, turn your Mac into a Desktop Cray.

An anonymous reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime files in Linux, splitting automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless importing the files to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This requires that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in this version. Read on below for a few notes about the submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing tools.

"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."

An anonymous reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime files in Linux, splitting automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless importing the files to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This requires that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in this version. Read on below for a few notes about the submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing tools.

"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."

An anonymous reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime files in Linux, splitting automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless importing the files to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This requires that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in this version. Read on below for a few notes about the submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing tools.

"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."

An anonymous reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime files in Linux, splitting automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless importing the files to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This requires that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in this version. Read on below for a few notes about the submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing tools.

"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices reports that Linux now runs on an Apple iPod. Further information about the project can be found on the Linux on iPod Website." Still lacks features like power management and firewire support, but it's still a cool project. CT Ok it's a dupe. But it's still neat!

ucdot writes "Here is the announcement for a port of uClinux to the Apple iPod, checkout the project page for extra details. Currently the frame buffer, audio and IDE devices are working. Still plenty of work to do."

I've just recently returned from Linux Conference Australia 2003, held in Perth, Western Australia. I've had an incredible time, and this has easily been the best technical/Linux show I've been to since ALS was still operating. I've got a write-up below, and some notes on what happened, what's the plan for next year (It'll be in Adelaide, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!), and a photo round up. A number of other articles have appeared, and Kate MacKenzie's write up in The Australian was good as well, in addition to Telsa Gwynne's excellent write-up and Linux Magazine Au has some articles as well. Update: 02/04 02:42 GMT by T : ilovestuff points out ZDNet Australia's coverage as well.

I was actually invited to come to present the hacker survey that OSDN had done in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. However, upon looking at the conference plans, it was quickly apparent that that would be one of the few non-technical presentations, which was a pleasant change from my normal conference regime, in which the technical stuff seems crammed into one half day. I've heard that OLS is quite similar, but have not had a chance to attend. Nonethless, obviously my work withstanding *grin* the presentations were excellent - read the program to see for yourself.

I was able to attend Tridge's keynote, having only arrived Wednesday morning, a ARQuake presentation done by Wayne Pierkarski (we've mentioned it before). The afternoon was spent at Conrad's presentation on sweep, which is a hella cool audio app. Finally, the Q&A was Rusty, BDale, Tridge and Linus. Some of the typcial questions were asked, but there were some other questions 'round about DRM, IPv6 and some of the more social questions that were interesting. I think the DRM issues is one of the areas that some people are greatly concerned about, while other people have adopted a more Pollyana approach to it.

Unfortunately, on Friday, while I was presenting, there were two other presentations that I wanted to attend, but alas, had to speak myself. Rasmus, as usual, did a number of talks, and I was able to catch part of PHP printing with PDF, which was informative. Alex Reeder, part of VA Linux Japan also did a presentation on his work with bioauthentication, and my final piece of the show was Horms' presentation on Perdition, a mail retrieval proxy he's been working on.

But presentations aside, which were as a rule exceptional, I think one of the best parts was the relaxed feel, and the amount of interchange between just about everybody here. Almost every one that you talked to was fluent in Linux, programming or what not, which made for easy conversation with everyone there. The Perthites who really managed to put this together also did an exceptional job. To be frank, this is the only show I'd ever consider travelling 13,500 miles for.

I'd encourage anyone who attended or was part of it to post below -- and here's to looking forward to next year. One of the most amusing pictures though has to be the Linus in the penguin suit. The hats are off to the organizing team for their hard work -- and the speakers who traveled afar to be part of this. And from the wonderful uses of pizza box - yet more zaniness.

You can also check out some of photo round ups from Leon, Noel, and, of course, Marc Merlin's done a great round-up, as well as group round-up and one final one.

Overall, I highly highly recommend this show -- probably one of the best on the planet -- and for those in know, 23 will fall.

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."

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."

Fred Nowicki asks: "If you have ever used the P2P client Direct Connect (or DC++) to find media on the Internet, you know that the best hubs have ridiculous sharing requirements, i.e., over 100GB. It isn't too difficult to amass a collection of 100GB of illegal movies and MP3s with all the crap that's out there, but I'd like to play it straight: I want to collect 150GB of pure legal stuff. So here's my million dollar question: What is the best and fastest way for me achieve this? I want to offer interesting, neat stuff (movies, music, programs, etc.), not just Linux distros, mind you. One thing I've found so far is a mirror of the Prelinger Archives on archive.org, which offers over 37GB of wacky, interesting stuff on divx format (in MPEG-2, it's over 350GB, but that seems like cheating if I take that route). One downside of this site is that it's not a very fast connection (about 50KB/sec through their FTP via my cable modem -- I'd like a throughput of at least 100KB/sec). I've considered mirroring the Gutenberg project, but there are all sorts of redistribution issues with a bunch of their files, and I don't want to go through all that hassle. Come on, Slashdot. Give me some URLs!"

someguyintoronto writes "This article from the Globe and Mail states that an Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled 3-0 that infrared surveillance is subject to the same laws that exist for obtaining warrants. The ruling came under a case where RCMP conducted aerial surveillance on a suspect's personal residence for production and trafficking of marijuana. The court commented: 'The nature of the intrusiveness is subtle, but almost Orwellian in its theoretical capacity.'" The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling has held much the same thing.

Lours writes "OzXChip, an Australian company, has a new Xbox chip which comes preinstalled with the new (Cromwell Linux BIOS. Previous chips came without (or simplistic) BIOS for obvious legal and hardware-related (HD-key) reasons you had to go through a lot of manipulations in order to install a patched version of the original Microsoft BIOS or ask the vendor to do it which obviously he was not willing to do for free (when he was willing to). Since the new Cromwell BIOS is fully open source it can be shipped with the chip without any legal risks, gaining you a lot of time, sweat and money. Plus the chip has a very useful feature: by using software based on Andy Green's -- one of the maintainers of the XBox Linux project -- Raincoat, it lets you flash a new BIOS very easily: burn the BIOS file onto a blank CD, put it in the Xbox, boot and you are done. With such beasts there is not much left in the way of want-to-be Linux Xbox hackers who might have been affraid until now to have to deal with delicate hardware intricacies or reluctant to run the whole town for a vendor willing to mod their Xbox at the smallest fee. With important linux distributions also incoming (Debian and Mandrake are underway if not completed) it won't be long before everyone can write code for (and on!) the machine only a few minutes after receiving the chip in his mailbox. Hopefully we are going to see a zillion things running on the machine that Microsoft would only have dreamt of making (and selling)." Update: 01/23 16:07 GMT by T : The company's name is actually OzXChip, rather than OzChip (as originally rendered); thanks to reader Michael Muir for pointing this out.

Lours writes "OzXChip, an Australian company, has a new Xbox chip which comes preinstalled with the new (Cromwell Linux BIOS. Previous chips came without (or simplistic) BIOS for obvious legal and hardware-related (HD-key) reasons you had to go through a lot of manipulations in order to install a patched version of the original Microsoft BIOS or ask the vendor to do it which obviously he was not willing to do for free (when he was willing to). Since the new Cromwell BIOS is fully open source it can be shipped with the chip without any legal risks, gaining you a lot of time, sweat and money. Plus the chip has a very useful feature: by using software based on Andy Green's -- one of the maintainers of the XBox Linux project -- Raincoat, it lets you flash a new BIOS very easily: burn the BIOS file onto a blank CD, put it in the Xbox, boot and you are done. With such beasts there is not much left in the way of want-to-be Linux Xbox hackers who might have been affraid until now to have to deal with delicate hardware intricacies or reluctant to run the whole town for a vendor willing to mod their Xbox at the smallest fee. With important linux distributions also incoming (Debian and Mandrake are underway if not completed) it won't be long before everyone can write code for (and on!) the machine only a few minutes after receiving the chip in his mailbox. Hopefully we are going to see a zillion things running on the machine that Microsoft would only have dreamt of making (and selling)." Update: 01/23 16:07 GMT by T : The company's name is actually OzXChip, rather than OzChip (as originally rendered); thanks to reader Michael Muir for pointing this out.

Dr.Ruud asks: "What would be good ways to build a multichannel VCR? Think of a cluster of 4 PCs, each having 4 TV-cards (with MPEG-hardware on each) and (if necessary) a separate harddisk per TV-card, and maybe a 5th PC that controls the others, holds a DVD-writer and any other necessary hardware. Could it be done in a simpler and cheaper way? See also linuxtv.org, linuxmedialabs.com and of course SouceForge-vcr-projects like Freevo." What would be the best way to go about cutting down the number of machines such a cluster would need? Could this be done by building an all-in-one-wonderbox without it getting really expensive?

An anonymous reader writes "The new stable version of Umbrello UML Modeller 1.1 was released on 20 January. Currently only source and SuSE packages are available. Is there a better UML modeller for Linux?"

Ploum asks: " Like some folks, I like to take my mini-dv camera to make films. First, I was using Premiere, then Avid Xpress on Windows. But now I want to make [a movie] on my Debian box. Everybody says that video under Linux is not possible but I want to do it! I want to write the scenario on Linux (maybe with a set of Latex commands or SGML?). When all is in the box, I want to put it on my computer. Dvgrab does a perfect job! Now I'm looking for a video editor. Cinelerra is nice but it doesn't read files from dvgrab. When it's time to have fun with FX, I was using Adobe After Effect, but [are there similar programs for Linux]? Film Gimp? Jahshaka?"

bigcitymike writes "Well it might be vaporware, but it appears Dreamix is trying to turn the Xbox into a PVR with a TV guide like scheduler. They also state PC as well as Mac/Linux support down the road. " Project Dreamix will turn the Microsoft Xbox into the ultimate home entertainment center." I presume it requires a mod-chip installed." The xbox media player really goes a long way towards this goal already. MSFT may not be the friendliest of companies, but for $200, the x-box makes a helluva stereo component.

A semi-anonymous reader writes with this account: "Kyley and I drove up to Austin for the Linux top gun hacker challenge event. We weren't sure what to expect, but looked forward to seeing a theatre with wireless internet, meeting security geeks, and learning new tricks at this hackfest. In the end, most people left early and unhappy, but I'm still glad we went." Read on for more on what was worthwhile about this event, and what left some of the audience disappointed.

We heard about this from a slashdot article ("Computer Attack and Defense As Spectator Sport").

Tough Audience The event was held at the Alamo Drafthouse, a movie house with tables and a wireless network. The theatre was packed, and there was a waiting line going out the door. I talked to an admin who had driven in from Brownsville (South Texas) for this event, so obviously there was a lot of interest, although we didnt know what to expect. Many attendees, maybe 10%, had computers with them.

The event was supposed to start at 7 p.m., but because of technical difficulties, it didnt start until 9 p.m. In the outer lobby were vendors selling metal bras and edgy political/sex books. Very Austinesque.

The Event Itself When the Top Gun event itself started, it went like this: there are a few registered teams; each team is given the 'target' box, and has ten minutes to secure it. After that, everyone in the room has thirty minutes to try to hack into the box. A few services had to be enabled -- http, https, ssh, smtp, and ftp. The defenders start with 100 points, and points are deducted if any of the services seemed unavailable, or if judges determined the box was compromised. DoS attacks are not allowed.

Already the idea sounded weak. On the big screen, they were running a homebrew GUI app that showed the score, time, IP addresses, and the services on the target. The services were being polled by a monitoring machine, and the response time was displayed. If the response time increased, i.e. the service was laggy, then points were automatically deducted from the defender's score. Laggy web server performance? That's a strange definition of 'hacked', but it is (or should have been) easy to monitor, which is probably why they did it.

Part of the draw to this event was that they were going to use "video animation" to "show how network attacks happen." I didn't have my hopes up for this, but I was still disapointed. They used their (Linux-based) homebrew GUI, which looked like it just used some libraries from etherape to draw lines from ips to the services on the target they attach to. That was it for the visualizations. The list of services was supposed to turn from green to red when they went slow, but for most of the night they stayed red and displayed just zeros, no readings. Their software appeared very buggy, hardly ever working, and windows in the background showed them fixing it as they went.

The commentary was sparse and uninformative. "Yes, that line shows connections to http, and it is taking a beating!" There was no discussion of exploits, security, concepts, attacks, what is currently happening, etc. After the attack session ended, the defenders were brought up for a brief Q&A, which reminded me of a post-fight boxing interview. "Uh, yeah, we felt good, we had a plan. A lot of things happened, and we applied patches."

Before, during, and after the attack session, no one knew what was happening. It seems that despite hours of trying by different teams, the target box was NEVER compromised. During the second Q&A session I stood up and asked, "Was the box hacked in any way whatsoever?" The reply? "Probably." But no one knew. If it had been hacked, I believe the person doing it would have said something, or at least bragged on the irc channel for the contest.

The entire operation seemed very amateurish. Technical difficulties occured during the event, giving one team a higher score becuase the monitoring software wasnt working to remove points. Most attendees left early, and a highlight of the evening was when someone posted ascii porn to the irc channel.

On the upside, the DJ had a good stream of music, there were more women than you'd expect, and some in small metal bras. And it was a gathering of a lot of smart geeks, a great opp to meet people.

Room for improvement. The longest topic of conversation in the audience was how to fix this mess. We came up with some ideas:

Visuals

They should have used proven, off-the-shelf network visualization and monitoring tools for the event. We were _dying_ for some snort output, to see what exploits were being attempted. A tool like Demarc would have been perfect to show the events as they happened. Or at least snortsnarf or acid. The screen should have rotated between different monitoring tools to give an idea of what was happening.

Contest Format

The format of the event was flawed. The truth is most hackers take advantage of easy targets. Defending a box is not that hard. Simply applying the latest patches and configuring a basic iptables firewall about does it. After those steps are taken by the defending team, only truely leet hax0rs with 0day exploits are going to get root in thirty minutes.

A better format would be this: Bring an unpatched or lightly patched Linux server for everyone to attack. As soon as someone gets in, stop the show. The hacker gets a prize, and has to explain/show what they did. Then that vulnerability is patched, and the contest starts up again.

All in all, the event was a let down. Austin is a cool town, and lots of smart geeks came out. There is obviously interest in an event like this, but the execution didn't result in any entertainment or learning. If this is a PR event to generate publicity for the sponsors, I think it failed, because if this is an example of their organizational and technical skills, I would not hire them myself. But then, they're probably better at security than they are at public events.

Slashdot welcomes reader-submitted features; thanks to marc for this one.

cavac writes "At the 19th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin/Germany developers showed their newest developments for the closed-down Blinkenlights-Project. One of the projects was the Blinkenlights Fileserver Project. Members of this team developed a protocol and some tools similar to ftp, which you can use to share Blinkenlights-Movies. Today, a first Beta-Version was released. You might want to check it out. (It also includes the famous Telnet-Blinkenlights-Player). We are still searching people willing to help us developing this software even more or to work with us on "Phase II": Implementing Soft- and Hardware for a Hardware-Based Blinkenlights Player. This will most likely based on one of Zilog's new Development Kits - the "Z8 Encore!"."

Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible. The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."

phyxeld writes "RubyCocoa 0.4.0 is out. From the sf.net page: 'RubyCocoa is a Mac OS X framework that allows Cocoa programming in the Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby. RubyCocoa allows writing a Cocoa application in Ruby. It allows creating and using a Cocoa object in a Ruby script. In Cocoa application, mixture of program written by both Ruby and Objective-C is possible.' It's always nice to see more GPL software in the Mac OS X world."

elohim writes "The kind souls at QT Components have released an ogg vorbis component that allows playback of oggs in quicktime 6.0.2 and itunes. Hopefully we'll see ogg encoding integrated in itunes soon. This is a big step forward for vorbis fans! I can hardly wait to pick up a shiny, new powerbook and start blasting my oggs!" CT Yeah, this is a dupe. Whatever. It's the holidays- nothing else is happening ;)

rael9real writes "Jeff Raskin, developer of the MacOS and author of The Humane Interface [ed.: which was reviewed last year], has been hard at work with several others coding The Humane Environment. They have a developers edition out for Christmas. It runs on Mac OS 9/X. Reading the manual, it is basically a text editor/Python IDE, but it does seem to incorporate some neat ideas in the field. I can't wait to get home and try it out!"

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.

GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.

Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.

PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.

LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.

FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.

FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).

DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.

SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.

PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.

Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.

The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.

And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.

GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.

Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.

PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.

LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.

FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.

FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).

DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.

SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.

PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.

Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.

The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.

And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.

GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.

Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.

PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.

LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.

FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.

FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).

DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.

SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.

PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.

Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.

The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.

And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.

GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.

Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.

PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.

LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.

FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.

FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).

DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.

SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.

PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.

Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.

The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.

And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.

GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.

Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.

PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.

LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.

FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.

FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).

DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.

SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.

PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.

Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.

The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.

And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.

GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.

Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.

PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.

LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.

FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.

FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).

DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.

SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.

PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.

Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.

The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.

And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."

Jas Sandys-Lumsdaine writes "Bochs 2.0 has just been released - project lead Bryce Denney writes: "It's been a busy 6 months since our previous release! Bochs is now about twice as fast as version 1.4.1. Also, we can now emulate MMX instructions, SSE/SSE2, and even AMD x86-64 instructions if you turn on the appropriate configure options. The emulation improvements have paid off; several people have been able to install Windows XP recently." Excellent stuff."

Johnny Mnemonic writes "MacSlash is reporting that the Gnu-Darwin ports project has taken issue with some of Apple's current policies, to the extent of: 'GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc. There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add suffices). Second, we will be moving our operations to x86, and we are putting the ppc collection into maintenance mode.' Astonished reaction on MacSlash, and recognition of the Fink alternative. Is this a worthy principled stand, or is it more like Kruschev banging his shoe in the UN? Will this help or hurt Apple's adoption of GPL technology?"

Johnny Mnemonic writes "MacSlash is reporting that the Gnu-Darwin ports project has taken issue with some of Apple's current policies, to the extent of: 'GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc. There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add suffices). Second, we will be moving our operations to x86, and we are putting the ppc collection into maintenance mode.' Astonished reaction on MacSlash, and recognition of the Fink alternative. Is this a worthy principled stand, or is it more like Kruschev banging his shoe in the UN? Will this help or hurt Apple's adoption of GPL technology?"

Strog writes "We are securing our administrative network and one thing we decided to implement is allowing only known MAC addresses get an address from the DHCP server. The techs aren't very Unix-centric so we would prefer to keep them out of the server directly. A web-based admin tool is what we are looking for. I've used webmin for a while but it likes to give each host a nice little icon which wouldn't be so good once we get all ~750 machines entered. Dixie looks good too but leaves a few too many options for techs to look at. I'm in the process of hacking webmin into what I need but wondered if anyone out there has some good options to offer. What we really need is boxes for hostname, MAC address and apply button and a list of current entries and a delete button." This was recently asked on a mailing list, but so far, no answers have been given. Might someone here have experience with such software that they would like to share?

bergeron76 writes "It's been just over a year since the DashPC/Dashboard Linux project initially got jump started. Since then, the project has grown by an order of magnitude. The initial codebase has been released on freshmeat and sourceforge, and we're working with several other developers on integrating projects such as Linux GPS Navigation, wardrive mapping, and ODBII automobile interfacing. The potential is endless, considering just a couple of recent news headlines, and how we'd love to eventually bring them to both new and existing automobiles."

bergeron76 writes "It's been just over a year since the DashPC/Dashboard Linux project initially got jump started. Since then, the project has grown by an order of magnitude. The initial codebase has been released on freshmeat and sourceforge, and we're working with several other developers on integrating projects such as Linux GPS Navigation, wardrive mapping, and ODBII automobile interfacing. The potential is endless, considering just a couple of recent news headlines, and how we'd love to eventually bring them to both new and existing automobiles."

zonker writes "January 17th will be the first (annual?) meeting of the Spam Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The informal meeting will feature Paul Graham, John Graham-Cumming, John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper among others (possibly including ESR though he hasn't yet confirmed). The free conference will consist of a number of talks about new ways to combat the growing spam problem, after which everyone's going out and getting some Chinese food. Should be an informative and fun meeting and a chance to meet some interesting people."

axehind writes "There's a article on Newsforge about the conference titled "Linux Cluster: the openMosix Approach" that took place in Italy on Nov 28th. It's really interesting to see what openMosix clusters have been used for. From game clusters to scientific research . It includes links to the conferences slides and some of the papers."

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

Perlmonkey has written a summary on the latest Everquest Expansion, and Sony's efforts to thwart those who might wish to to tap into the packets and do things that maybe aren't exactly fair to other players. Or they just want a map that should have been in the first place. In anycase, hit the link below to read his piece on the subject.

The most recent expansion for EverQuest (Planes of Power) adds a lot of problem-solving quests to the game, so Sony beefed up the (long-since broken) encryption that they used for the client protocol. The expansion has been a major hit, pleasing some of the most critical voices in the EverQuest world, but one week later, the anonymous development team of ShowEQ had broken the new encryption. Read on for details of the ongoing battle over keeping secrets in plain sight.

First, the skinny on the latest EverQuest expansion, Planes of Power (PoP). Because this is an expansion chock-full of content for only the highest level characters in the game, Sony added some features that everyone would want (and thus, pay for): the ability to progress to level 65 (60 was the cap before); a new zone called the Plane of Knowledge which allows characters to moved freely to all of the old game areas and a feature that allows large groups to coordinate more easily. That's the carrot for the lower-end users, but really this is the first expansion to lock out even moderately experienced players in favor of large, strong in-game guilds.

Even so, the response has been almost all positive. Some players complain about the last-minute changes (especially the changes that made monks and druids less powerful in the high-end game), but those who are taking advantage of the new game areas are happy with the reduced time required for encounters and the fact that the game rewards strategy more than ever.

Planning, attention to detail and a fanatical focus on getting past every challenge that Sony presents are important in-game, but Sony is less than pleased by programmers who are just as happy to approach those challenges from outside of the game. Using Linux and Qt, ShowEQ is a packet sniffer that watches the EverQuest client protocol and displays a map of everything that the Windows client is privy to, but may not disclose to the player. Years ago, the ShowEQ developers discovered a weakness in the encryption that the client uses, and they have been able to reliably interpret the data ever since.

With the PoP release, Sony improved the encryption so that it used a larger key which was more securely chosen. At first, the talk on the ShowEQ IRC forum was gloomy and the normally secretive developers cloistered themselves off from the the group, returning only rarely to proclaim the difficulty of breaking this new scheme. The protocol is not unlike that used by ssh or SSL. A public key is sent from Sony to the client, and the client uses that key to encrypt a random session key and send it to Sony. Theoretically, this approach is open to only a limited number of attacks, all of which run the risk of being detected by the client.

A former ShowEQ developer who was hired by Sony was reported to have said it's over, "you'll never break this"... One week later, the new version of ShowEQ was available via CVS and was working again. The new keys were vulnerable, it seems, to an even simpler form of analysis and the result was simply that ShowEQ worked significantly faster. In many ways, this seemed to simply be a "bonus quest" that Sony threw into the PoP expansion, and it had been beaten.

On Thursday, October 31 ShowEQ broke once again. The protocol now compresses key data to prevent the analysis that was limiting the keyspace that has to be searched. As of this writing, ShowEQ no longer works passively, but this escalation is not over. The latest version allows a user to input the key directly, and developers are hard at work, trying to find further weaknesses in the key generation and/or exchange. The developers are even starting to question the long-held, unwritten truce that they maintained with Sony. The idea was that if Sony did not make decryption require a Windows-side component, there would never be a Windows version, limiting the use of ShowEQ to those capable of getting ShowEQ working under Linux. Now, the party line is, "there is absolutely, positively no reason not to have a WinSEQ."

The technical details are interesting, but the social and legal details may take center-stage for a while. The seq team is trying to figure out what they could put on the client-side without being detected and that brings into question the legality of Sony scanning running processes and reporting back. There's also the matter of Sony's rather astoundingly harsh EULA that tries to preclude activities like this in every way that it can (though the legality of click-through EULAs is still a hot topic).

One problem with this escalation is that, like another product (TiVo, which is partially backed by Sony) the very people subverting the product and making it more than the creator wants it to be are the best customers. In terms of EverQuest, they are often the ones maintaining several accounts and/or spending extra money for the "Legends" service. How does a company contend with a market where your best customers are also your most resourceful? With the TiVo, there was an uneasy understanding between the company and its modders. Sony has broken that balance with EverQuest.

Now that Sony has crossed this Rubicon, it is quite likely that ShowEQ will be ported to Windows and hundreds if not thousands of new users will be introduced to it. Was that Sony's goal? Certainly Prof. Felton showed us that such a battle is ultimately futile. Why does Sony want to fight it again on yet another front (remember that they are an RIAA member)? Is there any financial justification, here? Does mapping software really threaten the game more than the many in-game exploits that the high-end encounters suffer from?

PoP is a finely crafted fantasy gaming experience, but Sony has once again chosen to spend extra time and money hurting themselves and their market. Perhaps their competition will not make the same mistakes.