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I'm glad these guys are doing great things to combat spam, but when the submitter of the article stands to benefit from posting of the article on Slashdot, then full disclosure (not stealth disclosure) is warranted. No surprise that the "donate" link is right up at the top of their page.

Jonathan, don't get me wrong. I really appreciate what you're doing here. But failure to disclose your relationship of the project you're promoting is on the level (though not the same extent) as the deception that spammers employ.

-S

I forgot to mention, there is a very powerfull webbased administration tool available for firebird. It's called ibwebadmin.

That's why languages with paradigms that don't translate well onto von Neumann-y notions (eg, LISP or Prolog) are interpreted as a rule.

• CMU CL: natively compiled
• SBCL: natively compiled
• MCL: natively compiled
• OpenMCL: natively compiled
• Xanalys LispWorks: natively compiled
• Allegro Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Corman Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Scieneer Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Embeddable Common Lisp: natively compiled, via GCC
• GNU Common Lisp: natively compiled, via GCC
• GNU CLISP: bytecode compiled
• Armed Bear Lisp: Interpreted, only used as an extension language for an unpopular editor

That's why languages with paradigms that don't translate well onto von Neumann-y notions (eg, LISP or Prolog) are interpreted as a rule.

• CMU CL: natively compiled
• SBCL: natively compiled
• MCL: natively compiled
• OpenMCL: natively compiled
• Xanalys LispWorks: natively compiled
• Allegro Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Corman Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Scieneer Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Embeddable Common Lisp: natively compiled, via GCC
• GNU Common Lisp: natively compiled, via GCC
• GNU CLISP: bytecode compiled
• Armed Bear Lisp: Interpreted, only used as an extension language for an unpopular editor

That's why languages with paradigms that don't translate well onto von Neumann-y notions (eg, LISP or Prolog) are interpreted as a rule.

• CMU CL: natively compiled
• SBCL: natively compiled
• MCL: natively compiled
• OpenMCL: natively compiled
• Xanalys LispWorks: natively compiled
• Allegro Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Corman Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Scieneer Common Lisp: natively compiled
• Embeddable Common Lisp: natively compiled, via GCC
• GNU Common Lisp: natively compiled, via GCC
• GNU CLISP: bytecode compiled
• Armed Bear Lisp: Interpreted, only used as an extension language for an unpopular editor

If you go to the Firebird Project website, you'll see they feature, quite respectfully, Mozilla's recent decision to change their name to Firefox. Remember that the Mozilla team has gone through a lot of name changes. Camino was changed to Chimera, and Phoenix was changed to the rather unfortunate "Firebird" which was already a project name. So it's not like the name "Firebird" was all that entrenched.

I think it's a symptom of Mozilla both try to brand, and being an Open Source project in which one monolithic product was split into various and sundry projects, each of which got bizarely named. I mean, there's nothing about any of the application titles that indicates its use or purpose.

I myself vote for MozillaMail and MozillaBrowser or something of that ilk instead of Thunderbird and Firefox. Then the package now called "Mozilla" could be renamed to MozillaComplete or something like that.

I tried building the Firebird code a few months ago, and found out that step 1 is...

...start with a running version of Firebird!

Bootstrapping might seem like a K00l trick, but there is something uncomfortable about self-referential build procedures (not to mention that it was a pain in the ass to find a preexisting version of Firebird to run).

Gimme a pile of c/cpp & h files and let me build it from scratch, dammit!

Is that possible today? Dunno...the build guide appears to be still under construction.

and neither can terminal.app! lord, it's the worst terminal program i've ever used. there are, however, some good replacements.

• iterm - fast and light with tabs and other neat things. my current favourite.
• glterm - it uses opengl to render fonts. no, really. results in way better performance (although at some window sizes the text is fuzzy)

1. Install Vim.
2. Click the vimtutor script
3. Spend about 30 minutes
4. You're up and running

I have installed Outclass, an Outlook plugin for running the outlook mail through POPFile. It comes with a nice "Safe View" button that displays the entire email in notepad, allowing me to do whatever I want with it without fear of triggering a spammer's web bug (or a cow-orkers stupid dancing signature line.)

For what it's worth, for me POPFile is down to about one misclassified email a month, either way. It's a very, very smart filter.

There are quite a few programs that are officially not part of KDE but are excellent KDE based programs nevertheless. For example KPlayer is a superb mplayer based media player I use on a daily basis, and I heard good things about Kaffeine as well (but that one is xine based).

I was,just like you, looking for a replacement for xmms, and I found it in amaroK which is a nice audio player centered around a very good playlist editor.

Where should I begin?

I recently resigned from my position in the management of a very large free-as-in-beer mud. I will not go into details or even mention the mud's name/genre or my alias. However, I would like to share some of my thoughts on MUDs. Please forgive the rambling style of this post, and please forgive me for posting as AC.

Mud developer coding style

In a mud there are typically no formal code reviews or automated regression tests. Testing is done by the players, and often even the most disciplined coder can be reduced to the mindset of "if it doesn't crash, it's not broken." This philosophy typically leads to ugly spaghetti code, and that's really not something most people want to show off or publish for public scrutiny. A lot of the coding done for a mud is in the form of one-time hacks. Personally I'm embarrased by some of the hacks I've made. :(

Open source and muds

Mud developers don't release their source code for various reasons including coder pride (see above), fears about the competition stealing features and a desire to keep the players from finding cheats/exploits by reading the source. Open source is primarily useful when the end user needs to be able to modify his/her personal copy of an application. However as other posters have mentioned, MUDs are run on the admin's server. Users only interact with the game via established web protocols, so asking a game to release its source code is actually like asking Google to show us its private OS and file system.

What is a mud?

From two steps sideways, the mud experience is really a lot like a shell account on a unix box. You connect via telnet/ssh and issue single-line commands to interact with the game. Moving from room to room is *a lot* like changing directories, and most of the other commands could actually be implemented with shell scripts. The more interactive features like combat and responsive NPCs would require a bit more glue, so you would probably have to modify the shell for those.

Taking two steps back, we see a user database with at least rudimentary access control, an extensible command parsing mechanism, a scripting language, a database for game content, a combat framework and means of processing user events. Note: Admins will likely want tools to modify the scripts and database content, a means of generating various game stats and some mechanisms for dealing with trouble users.

What parts of a mud should be private/unique?

For obvious reasons, the user database should be private. The content database also clearly belongs to the mud. This includes textual descriptions, vital statistics and special behaviors of all the objects, NPCs, rooms, custom quests and scripts.

So what does that leave for open source?

It excludes all of the content and leaves all of the framework -- the stuff that's generic enough for use in any MUD. If you're just looking for an open-source framework, check out Sourceforge. It looks like there are a few active mud projects there. I plan to post my framework there when it's done (don't hold your breath; I'm stalled at the point of only having a server, a command parser and a custom scripting language).

Some final thoughts

If you're looking for a complete open source game, you're probably confusing mudding with FPS or RTS games. Mud designers put in a lot of work to ensure consistency in the game. While we may be willing to give you a framework, you're on your own when it comes to the content.

btech.no-ip.com 3049

btech.dhs.org 3030

http://btech.sourceforge.net/ The main Source Forge site.

Here's a historical archive of Battletech MUSE info:

http://hpgx.net/btmuse/

There's a few more out there running that I can't remember (like the 3056 Sim site), but 3030 is still very much alive, and the people there should be able to expand this list.

True, but LambdaMOO's server code is now hosted on SourceForge. I think they require some sort of open source license for all hosted projects.

The LambdaMOO admins occasionally make dumps of the live Lambda database and give away the core bits.

I haven't used this but using this to loop back as a local filesystem, you should be able to access the latest snapshot transparently. Saves time on checkouts ^.^

envfs is a good place to start.

But at it is a little expensive with a Price: starting at US$21,000.00 .

A pat on the back however for the AutoPilot SourceForge project

True. It's also true that Fedora is driving SELinux into their product, and I know the Snare guys are working on integrating syscall-level auditing into Linux.

The security options for Linux will continue to get better, the only question is whether that will dominate over the increasing number of naive Linux users.

Sounds like hotwayd which does much the same thing for Hotmail. I think hotwayd also works for Lycos and a few other webmail providers.

I've got it set up and it works fine, though it only picks up mail from your inbox, not your junk mail or anything. If you want it picking up from multiple folders you just have to set up multiple copies of the daemon to look in each folder.

If you have a fairly advanced toolset of software knowledge, you can download YahooPOPs! over on the SoresForge page.

What is it? Well, YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! E-mail accounts. It works in both Windoze and Unix.

What it does is emulate a POP3/SMTP server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, IncrediMail, Calypso, etc., to DOWNLOAD AND SEND emails from Yahoo! accounts.

It's amazing, bro. I had NO idea it'd even work. I had to download it to believe it. There are also other similar programs out there for MSN, Lycos, etc.

No self-respecting webmail user should be WITHOUT it.

Yes, grain is a side effect of the mechanism. However, it's still important that it be preserved. I'm not talking about recording the value of every single grain on the negative; that'd be ridiculous. Rather, I'm talking about preserving the same amount of grain one would see in an 8x10" print.

When it comes to those "extra bits", you're missing the point. Color accuracy is only part of it. The negative carries more image data than is seen in the print. Those extra bits are for holding that data.

For an example, just look at this page on the OpenEXR website.

Basically, while on the print a certain area might appear to be totally white or totally black, on the negative there's more image information in that area. If you're trying to do a true archive, you'd want to preserve that information, at which point you need an image format that can store overrange data. Although .png can store 16 bits per channel, none of that is overrange, so it can't be used for this purpose. You'd have to go with Cineon or a floating-point format.

Also, if you think 16 bits per channel is overkill, then I guess everyone at those Hollywood VFX studios just doesn't know as much about the subject as you. ILM developed OpenEXR, a 16-bit floating-point per channel, high dynamic range image format. Just think of the time they'd have saved if they had only known that 16 bits was overkill. Or think of the effort Rythm & Hues could've saved by not starting Film Gimp, which eventually became CinePaint. And what about Digital Domain? If they knew as much as you, then their in-house compositing program Nuke wouldn't internally represent image data with floating-point numbers. The evil Kodak would never have developed Cineon and convinced so many studios to use it and virtually every compositing and 3D rendering program to support it.

In all fairness, Cineon only uses 10 bits per channel, but the data is logarithmic rather than linear. To linearize a Cineon image without having to throw out any data would take about 14 bits per channel.

Some are late bloomers, to be sure, or just weren't around for the days of the Tandy 1000HX or QBASIC. Still, the best techies I know of are those who would be hobbyists in their chosen "techie" profession if they couldn't get a job doing it for a living. Indeed, many are hobbyists, in addition to professionals.

Building your own PC from parts and enjoying it is a start, but doesn't necessarily make one a true techie. These days that's really basic stuff. If you find yourself quickly progressing beyond that, you may just be a true techie.

But you have to really have a passion for these things. Even if you do, it may still be best to find another field in which to earn your living, and keep techieness as a hobby.

When I was working in IT, for example, I'd get home and not want to go near a computer for a while. Since I left the field, I'm rediscovering my passion for computers and electronics in general as a hobbyist. My latest little weekend project is this. $35 in diodes, resistors, capacitors, and other components from the local Radio Shack. Half a day with a soldering iron, and half a day compiling software, and the K5-166 machine I built from my spare parts bin becomes a rudimentary oscilloscope. That is, assuming I can get the sound module to successfully load and I don't fry the sound card when I test it this weekend!

The player system.

If you have a robot which supports some form of connectivity (IR, wireless, tethered.. protocol isn't all that important), you can make player connect to your robot. Player is a TCP server which then allows you to write your robotics code in whatever language you see fit, provided it has the ability to connect via TCP. It abstracts away hardware in much the way a driver does, and provides a uniform way to access sensors and effectors.

It's a nice system.

I'm still hoping someone will pick up the torch where Catalyst Recruiting dropped it and develop a Free alternative to these lame job portals. So much of the work is already done. You can see a demo here. All the code is GPL.

I'm still hoping someone will pick up the torch where Catalyst Recruiting dropped it and develop a Free alternative to these lame job portals. So much of the work is already done. You can see a demo here. All the code is GPL.

Since I'm running Debian GNU/Linux stable (yes, that's right, I'm on woody), I had to install a newer version of iwconfig and modify my /etc/network/interfaces file to make it work well:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up modprobe wlan0 || true
pre-up /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
pre-up /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 enc 1234-789A-EF
pre-up /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid WIRELESS

This space is reserved.

Surprisingly even to myself some days, I haven't pirated a game since I started earning income. I'm always happy to support the people who make things that I enjoy. Even when they're bitter disappointments, which so many have been recently. *cough, MOO3, SimCity4*

Similarly to how I approach music these days, when I start getting too cynical to "waste" money on a game, I'll start looking for free alternatives like Chromatron or return to my old favourites, often using things like Exult.

With DRP hardware, you no longer have control over the computer - or at least the decryption process.

You could use Jasper Reports to design and create reports based on any JDBC datasource.

To work on your apache server you will need to install apache-tomcat. Of course if you have never programmed in Java you might be better off looking at one of the PHP solutions mentioned elsewhere.

There are tons of Perl, PHP, and other packages out there for creating PDF files from some sort of input. I found everything you'd need here at http://sourceforge.net/search/. Just do a search for "PDF" like I did. I *know* you'll find something there. Sourceforge.net and google.com are your friends! Hope this helps!

There are tons of Perl, PHP, and other packages out there for creating PDF files from some sort of input. I found everything you'd need here at http://sourceforge.net/search/. Just do a search for "PDF" like I did. I *know* you'll find something there. Sourceforge.net and google.com are your friends! Hope this helps!

There's at least one dialect in which you don't have to stop your thought process.
Humane Python, a (former?) part of THE (The Humane Environment), by Jef Raskin (Macintosh anyone?) has some changes that help you write more comments.

The idea is that you write what you want to do, in clear text, and you insert the snippets of code indented directly in the documentation.
Looks like:

----------
Blah blah blah
I need do some stuff with the thingy if the guy pressed the A key
if (guy.pressedKey("A")){
thingy.doSomeStuff();
}
If the guy pressed some other key, some other stuff should happen.
if .....
-------------

The idea is that you think in your own language, and write some snippets, but your mind is in the comments, as it is easier to write comments than code. Given that yo write everything you think, your documentation will rock, and reading the code or finding bugs, would be really easy. It would take longer, but could make better code.

You mean like this?

Isn't this what Vipul's Razor and DCC are supposed to do?

Shameless Plug: I explained my own spam problem on my website here It's only gotten worse in the last month. Yesterday alone I recieved 108 pieces of spam. Luckily I can attest to the abilities of SpamBayes

• Python - Get the Python interpreter, base libraries from here. The default install includes the IDLE editor.
• Win32All - Windows extensions package that includes the excellent Pythonwin editor.
• wxPython - Wrapper to the cross-platform wxWindows window manager library. It's a better windowing system than the TCL/TK library that is the default Python install.
• Boa Constructor - GUI builder that uses the wxWindows library.
• Psyco - x86 runtime compiler. Transparently improves the performance of most Python code - for performance-critical apps, it's often a much better solution than a C rewrite.
• Py2Exe - Builds Python scripts into Windows executables. Perfect for distributing programs to systems that do not have Python installed. Use with Psyco for the best effect.
• PyOpenGL - Use OpenGL from within Python
• Python Image Library (PIL) - Package for easy image loading and manipulation
• Plone - Web applications, built on top of the Zope framework.

• Python - Get the Python interpreter, base libraries from here. The default install includes the IDLE editor.
• Win32All - Windows extensions package that includes the excellent Pythonwin editor.
• wxPython - Wrapper to the cross-platform wxWindows window manager library. It's a better windowing system than the TCL/TK library that is the default Python install.
• Boa Constructor - GUI builder that uses the wxWindows library.
• Psyco - x86 runtime compiler. Transparently improves the performance of most Python code - for performance-critical apps, it's often a much better solution than a C rewrite.
• Py2Exe - Builds Python scripts into Windows executables. Perfect for distributing programs to systems that do not have Python installed. Use with Psyco for the best effect.
• PyOpenGL - Use OpenGL from within Python
• Python Image Library (PIL) - Package for easy image loading and manipulation
• Plone - Web applications, built on top of the Zope framework.

• Python - Get the Python interpreter, base libraries from here. The default install includes the IDLE editor.
• Win32All - Windows extensions package that includes the excellent Pythonwin editor.
• wxPython - Wrapper to the cross-platform wxWindows window manager library. It's a better windowing system than the TCL/TK library that is the default Python install.
• Boa Constructor - GUI builder that uses the wxWindows library.
• Psyco - x86 runtime compiler. Transparently improves the performance of most Python code - for performance-critical apps, it's often a much better solution than a C rewrite.
• Py2Exe - Builds Python scripts into Windows executables. Perfect for distributing programs to systems that do not have Python installed. Use with Psyco for the best effect.
• PyOpenGL - Use OpenGL from within Python
• Python Image Library (PIL) - Package for easy image loading and manipulation
• Plone - Web applications, built on top of the Zope framework.

I suggest Boot and Nuke.

step C could be frustrating, is there a quicker way to go about it?

You could making your changes to a User-mode Linux kernel to avoid the reboot. Or running it inside a virtual machine. That way you only have the kernel's boot time, not the main system BIOS, ATA-100 BIOS, SCSI BIOS, etc.

Also, what is the likely() and unlikely() functions you speak of. Google shows a lot of unrelated info.

They're macros that tell the compiler if the expression contained within is likely to be true or false. There's an article about them here. If you've ever seen any code that mentions __builtin_expect, it's the same thing with better names:

#if COMPILER_SUPPORTS_BUILTIN_EXPECT
#define likely(condition) __builtin_expect(!!(condition), 1)
#define unlikely(condition) __builtin_expect(!!(condition), 0)
#else
#define likely(condition) (condition)
#define unlikely(condition) (condition)

A new method would be cool but speed is more what I'd look for. Using SpamPal http://www.spampal.org for intelligent white/black listing and DSNBL with the http://spampalbayes.sourceforge.net/ Bayesian plugin seems to be working 99.9% for me. I'm still convinced that the Bayesian text based filtering methods are THE BEST way to filter spam. A well trained filter with some inteligent rules to whitelist & blacklist email address works wonders.

What does concern me is how MS is running after those who are obtaining the leaked code. Is an FBI group standing over every P2P system, and then providing user information to MS? Please! Or is the media running multiple reports on behalf of MS, about those receiving warnings, while in fact this entire affair is a media stunt?

is kazaa one of the vendors? is there anything they can do about emule or edonkey users?

the latter seem to traffic especially in things like leaked source RARs, and since most of the central servers are overseas and operated independently (and 'overnet' seems truly peer to peer with no central servers), it would be tough to crack down on them, besides having a bunch of fake clients that harvest IPs. anyone know if they do this?

(i imagine the same concept would apply for bittorrent downloaders -- except BT relies on central tracking servers which would be comparatively easy to shut down.)

seems like a natural, uh, application, for the freenet project ;)

ah well. it's kinda scary that even the largest/richest software co in the world can't stop the spread of their IP, and that it takes only one person.

-fren

*anything* We will have to use pwgen to create names for products

Boy, did I ever bork that. Here goes again:
I know it comes up all the time when spam comes into the conversation (what's that, like 50 times a day?), but you should check out TMDA. It's not for everyone, but it's pretty much what you're describing. Whitelists and blacklists. Unknown senders get a message back telling them to reply if they want you to recieve their mail. When they respond, they get added to the whitelist. Spammers don't get that, since they spoof their from address anyways. I use it at home and I *never* see spam.

I know it comes up all the time when spam comes into the conversation (what's that, like 50 times a day?), but you should check out . It's not for everyone, but it's pretty much what you're describing. Whitelists and blacklists. Unknown senders get a message back telling them to reply if they want you to recieve their mail. When they respond, they get added to the whitelist. Spammers don't get that, since they spoof their from address anyways. I use it at home and I *never* see spam.

It is almost ready. It seems that gcj from the pre-3.4 GCC suite is getting quite usable; it is also capable of compiling IBM's Eclipse IDE properly.

And will be available on Fedora Core 2 soon. Yum.

Slashdot is pretty readable with w3m.

Let's see -- Microsoft just bought a license to do an online version of Settlers of Catan, and there's already an excellent GPL implementation in the form of Gnocatan. I have a bad feeling that the poor maintainer may be llooking at a lawsuit. :-(