Slashdot Mirror

A reader writes: "While Cisco is still runs the world of routers, apparently they have ended up on the short end of the stick when it comes to WiFi. Aruba Wireless Networks announced today that Microsoft has selected them over Cisco and would be "integrating Windows wireless clients" software with the Aruba gear. This could impact everyone that uses wireless with Windows. Aruba's Access Points aren't your traditional AP since they offload most of the functionality to a back end controller thus making for very low cost APs. They have even released their AP boot code on Source Forge so that anyone with a controller can convert their APs to Aruba APs. It also should be noted that Cisco, after realizing their wireless equipment wasn't up to par, tried to buy the deal by first by first approaching Aruba and then after being rebuffed bought their competitor Airespace for $450M in desperation and still lost."

Mister Furious writes "First, Apple switches to Intel, and now, equally shocking: Debian Sarge is released! Hell has officially frozen over! The scoop is from debian-administration.org: "The new Debian stable release, codenamed Sarge, has officially been released today. Several years of development since the last stable release, Woody, was released on the 9th of July, 2002 over a thousand developers around the world have helped make this release possible." Changes include Gnome 2.8, Firefox 1.0.4, Thunderbird 1.0.2, Apache 2.0.54 (1.3.33 is still available, too!), Postgresql 7.4.7, and more. The news hasn't hit the main Debian GNU/Linux site as of this article's posting. Congratulations to all of the Debian developers and contributors. Thanks for all your hard work and for a great distro!" Here's a link to the Debian Stable "Release" file.

Espectr0 points out an article about the release at Linux Compatible, writing "It is available on 14 (!) CD's or 2 DVD's. It includes XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, Kernel 2.4.27, GCC 3.3.5, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 and much others."

ValourX writes "Remember GPLFlash, the free software project that was supposed to replace the proprietary Macromedia Flash plugin? Well it's back in active development according to this NewsForge article. GPLFlash is half of the proprietary duo that the Free Software Foundation is rallying to replace with free equivalents. The alpha release isn't far away, but the development team could use some programming help, if you're available."

tilleyrw writes "From ZDNet Blogs: 'Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It's released under the General Public License (GNU). Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called "bouncing." That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C's IP address, not A's. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C. Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls and LANs using Network Address Translation (NATs), something most home gateways have.' "

HunterD writes "PCGen, the premier Open Source D20 RPG character generation application has released it's new 5.8 version. The 5.8 release of PCGen comes from over a year of hard work adding new features such as the ability to preview characters, a new plugin system, and the ability to use pcgen to run games over the internet via the new networking plugin. Eleven new datasets in this release mean that there are now almost 100 free data sets for Pcgen, which represents a substantial percentage of the available D20 books on the market. Usability has increased dramatically, as countless bugs have been fixed to increase stability and application speed."

Njaal writes "With BitTorrent going trackerless, searching for and distributing .torrent files is a natural next step. The Socialized.Net (TSN) is a pure P2P search infrastructure which facilitates P2P searching and distribution of .torrent files. It comes complete with an Azureus (and Firefox) search plugin. TSN is written in Python and is made available under the GPL. Note that this is part of my PhD thesis, and is as such meant as a technology demonstrator."

jgarzik writes "BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta."

Martin Ecker writes "Following up on last year's first installment of the "GPU Gems" book series, NVIDIA has recently finished work on the second book in the series titled GPU Gems 2 - Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation, published by Addison-Wesley. Just like the first book, GPU Gems 2 is a collection of articles by various authors from game development companies, academia, and tool developers on advanced techniques for programming graphics processing units (or GPUs for short). It is aimed at intermediate to advanced graphics developers that are familiar with the most common graphics APIs - in particular OpenGL and Direct3D - and high-level shading languages, such as GLSL, HLSL, or Cg. The reader should also be proficient in C++. As with GPU Gems, GPU Gems 2 is not for beginners. For professional graphics and game developers, however, it is an excellent collection of interesting techniques, tips, and tricks." Read on for Ecker's review. GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation author Matt Pharr, Randima Fernando (Editors) pages 814 publisher Addison-Wesley Publishing rating 9 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0321335597 summary The second installment in NVIDIA's GPU Gems series shines with more "gems" on real-time graphics and general-purpose computation on GPUs.

The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of GPU programming. Compared to the first book, more emphasis is put on the quickly evolving area of general-purpose computation on GPUs, an area that is commonly known as GPGPU (General Purpose GPU; for more information see http://www.gpgpu.org). To my knowledge, this is the first book to contain so much information related to this relatively new field. In particular, three of the six parts of the book are about GPGPU and its applications. The first three parts, however, are about real-time computer graphics.

The first part of the book contains 8 chapters on photo-realistic rendering that mostly deal with how to efficiently render a large number of objects in a scene, which is a necessity for rendering convincing natural effects, such as grass or trees. Two chapters in this part of the book discuss geometry instancing and segment buffering, two techniques to render a large number of instances of the same object, and another chapter focuses on using occlusion queries to implement coherent hierarchical occlusion culling, which is also useful in scenes with high depth complexity.

Other interesting topics in this part of the book include adaptive tessellation of surfaces on the GPU, displacement mapping - an extension to the popular parallax mapping used in some current games - that allows to render realistic bumps on a simple quad, and terrain rendering with geometry clipmaps. Geometry clipmaps can be used to render large terrains almost completely on the GPU. They were first introduced in a SIGGRAPH 2004 paper by Frank Losasso and Hugue Hoppe, and the algorithm is discussed in detail by Arul Asivatham and Hoppe himself in chapter two of this book. This technique will most likely find wide application in next generation games.

Part two of the book consisting of 11 chapters deals with shading and lighting. I found chapter 9 by Oles Shishkovtsov on deferred shading in the soon-to-be-released computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. quite interesting. The game features a full deferred shading renderer, which is probably a first for a commercial game. In his chapter Oles describes some of the tricks used and some of the pitfalls encountered while developing that renderer. Also highly interesting is Gary King's chapter on computing irradiance environment maps in real-time on the GPU. These dynamically created irradiance maps can be used to approximate global illumination in dynamic scenes.
Furthermore, this part of the book has chapters on rendering atmospheric scattering, implementing bidirectional texture functions on the GPU, dynamic ambient occlusion culling, water rendering, and using shadow mapping with percentage-closer filtering to achieve soft shadows.

The third part of the book consists of 9 chapters on high-quality rendering. Most chapters in this part deal with implementing high-quality filtering in fragment shaders. For example, there is an interesting chapter on filtered line rendering and another chapter on cubic texture filtering. In chapter 23 NVIDIA also provides interesting insights into the inner workings of their Nalu demo, which was the release demo for the GeForce 6 series that displays an animated mermaid underwater. In particular, the chapter describes the techniques used to implement the mermaid's hair. Finally, Simon Green of NVIDIA presents his GPU-only implementation of improved Perlin Noise.

Whereas the first three parts of the book cover techniques for real-time computer graphics, the three final parts deal exclusively with GPGPU. Since GPUs nowadays offer a high level of programmability and because of their wide-spread use in commodity PCs, GPUs can be used as a cost-efficient processor for general computation in addition and parallel to the CPU.

Efficient usage of the GPU for general computation, so that conventional CPU implementations can be outperformed, requires special care when mapping algorithms to the highly parallel architecture of the GPU pipeline. Part four of the book mostly deals with exactly this and represents an introduction to the fantastic field of GPGPU. The 8 chapters of this part first describe the general streaming architecture of GPUs, with one chapter going into the details of the architecture of the GeForce 6 series in particular, and then move on to show how to map conventional CPU data structures and algorithms to the GPU. For example, textures can be regarded as the GPU equivalent to CPU data arrays. There is also a chapter on how to implement flow-control idioms on the GPU and a chapter on optimizing GPU programs.

The 6 chapters of part five of the book are on image-oriented computing and describe a number of GPGPU algorithms for performing global illumination computations, for example by using radiosity, on the GPU. There is also a chapter on doing computer vision on the GPU, which I found to be quite exciting. Because of its high parallelism, the GPU can be used to do the tedious tasks of edge detection and marker recognition required in computer vision in a very efficient manner, thus elevating the CPU to do other tasks in the meantime. James Fung, the author of this chapter, is also involved in an open source project called OpenVIDIA (see http://openvidia.sourceforge.net) that is all about GPU-accelerated computer vision. he final chapter in this part of the book explains how to perform conservative rasterization, which is important for some GPGPU algorithms to achieve accurate results.

The final part of the book has 6 chapters that present GPGPU techniques to perform a variety of simulation and numerical algorithms on the GPU. One chapter shows how to map linear algebra operations onto the GPU and develops a GPU framework to solve systems of linear equations. In other chapters the GPU is used for protein structure prediction, options pricing, flow simulation, and medical image reconstruction. These chapters show good examples of how the GPU can be used for non-graphics-related tasks. Furthermore, Peter Kipfer and Rüdiger Westermann present algorithms for efficient sorting on the GPU. Since sorting is such an important building block of many higher-level algorithms, it is important to have an efficient implementation for GPGPU algorithms.

The book contains many illustrations and diagrams that visualize the results of certain techniques or explain the presented algorithms in more detail. All images in the book are in color, which is definitely advantageous for a graphics book. In my opinion, the excellent quality and also the quantity of images and illustrations is one of the strongest points of this book compared to other graphics books.

The book also comes with a CD-ROM with supplemental material, videos, and demo applications to some chapters. Most of the applications include the full source code, which makes it easy to experiment with the techniques presented in the book. Note that most of the applications run on Windows only and many of them require a shader model 3.0 graphics card, such as a GeForce 6600 or 6800. The latest ATI cards, such as the X800, are not sufficient for running some demos because they only support shader model 2.0.

I highly recommend this book to any professional working as graphics or game developer. It is a valuable addition to my library of graphics books and I will come back to a number of articles in the near future. The focus on GPGPU in the second half of the book is a welcome addition and we can expect to see more and more non-graphics-related applications make use of the processing power in today's GPUs.

Martin Ecker has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a game developer for arcade games. In his rare spare time he works on a graphics-related open source project called XEngine http://xengine.sourceforge.net.You can purchase GPU Gems 2 - Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

vertigo72 asks: "What's the best way to find sponsors for an open source project? Is there some people or foundations that give grants for the development of free software? We develop an open source (GPL) box office software: phpMyTicket. At our knowledge at the moment this is the only open source software of this kind. The program is in advanced beta stage and was already used in production environment by us and by other people. The program is rather complex and big: we support online ticket shop, box office with thermal printer and control at doors with barcode scanner. Smarty, PDF and email template engines are used. Paypal and some other gateways are supported. Now we want to continue and to add more professional features, but alas this requires more funding." "We tried to finance our development ourselves, but that didn't work. We tried support, installation and customization, and also a commercial license, but there are just not enough requests. We also had few donations (to the tune of around $50) via Sourceforge. Now, we searching for alternative solutions like sponsoring. Is there someone out there who can help us to keep the software free?"

Kerbo writes "Seems every few days there is another news item about Asterisk PBX or Asterisk@Home, the open-source PBX system and associated installer package. You may have even been wondering what equipment you need to get started. The Geek Gazette has posted a review of the Sipura SPA-3000 ATA/Gateway with a complete setup guide on configuring it to work with Asterisk. This makes a very cost-effective way to get started by using your existing phone line as a trunk into the PBX."

ARSDeveloperGuy writes "Fourth generation languages are cool, but there seems to be little to no effort being spent to standardize them. The current state is commercialized pseudo-languages are created to allow vertical apps to be expanded. (ARS Remedy, Siebel, Oracle JDeveloper) The concepts of a form, field, and workflow can be standardized, and when you look at many of these languages they aren't terribly different. Why don't we create a standard and start writing "workflow converters" for these powerful languages? That would allow conversions to happen more readily, maybe even to an open source offering like OpenSourceCRM."

BobPaul writes "While the eXeem project to decentralize Bittorrent remains in open beta, the Azureus Java Bittorrent project has recently released a major update that, among other things offers 'a distributed, decentralised database that can be used to track decentralised torrents. This permits both "trackerless" torrents and the maintenance of swarms where the tracker has become unavailable or where the torrent was removed from the tracker.' It doesn't contain the search functionality of eXeem, but it's also not a beta product and is licensed under the GPL. Could this and compatible clients be the replacement to SuprNova and Lokitorrents, or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?"

BobPaul writes "While the eXeem project to decentralize Bittorrent remains in open beta, the Azureus Java Bittorrent project has recently released a major update that, among other things offers 'a distributed, decentralised database that can be used to track decentralised torrents. This permits both "trackerless" torrents and the maintenance of swarms where the tracker has become unavailable or where the torrent was removed from the tracker.' It doesn't contain the search functionality of eXeem, but it's also not a beta product and is licensed under the GPL. Could this and compatible clients be the replacement to SuprNova and Lokitorrents, or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?"

Goyuix writes "In their latest commercial venture, Maui X-Stream, the now infamous company behind Cherry OS, has recently launched a suite of tools that once again takes advantage of GPL'd code to get their dirty work done... This time it is a set of video encoding, streaming and display tools. A choice quote from SourceForge: 'There are boundled dshow filters, string, toolbars, dialogs, command line switches, etc..., which can be verified easily by just running the applications and taking a look, or a bit harder by analysing the memory dump'. Is the situation getting worse or is community just getting better at finding the violators?"

An anonymous reader writes "Many of us have fallen in love with the convenience of dockapps through fvwm2, Windowmaker and Afterstep. Now, it looks like dockapps are finally coming to OS X at last. It's not Dashboard, but it is very cool."

OneSeventeen writes "As mentioned earlier on slashdot, the Bruce Perens Open Source series has expanded its selection with PHP 5 Power Programming. As with all of the books in this series, electronic copies are offered free of charge several months after its printed release. While it is always nice to have even more PHP books on the bookshelves, this has been officially released on the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series for download in the form of a 720 page PDF file. Better PHP programming is only 9.3MB away!"

the.admin.man writes "There's been quite a bit of buzz around using PHP as a backend to AJAX-based web applications (the same development methodology on which some Google applications), lately, particularly after the release of JPSpan, a framework that helps building XML-based interfaces between Javascript and PHP apps. Just yesterday, Joshua Eichorn gave a presentation to the Arizona PHP Group on developing AJAX applications for PHP--he's posted the slides online, and will give his presentation again through a free webcast hosted by php|architect."

refactorator writes "We have a lift-off! The NASA Ames Research Center has open sourced Java PathFinder , a JVM that is an explicit state software model checker, all written in Java. For the first time, the complete master development site of a live NASA software engineering project is hosted on SourceForge. Read the official press release for details. The team around John Penix, Willem Visser, and Peter Mehlitz fought long and hard to get the development hosted outside of NASA, to enable true collaborative software development. Now show the government that it works - join the fray. May Java PathFinder boldly go where no NASA program has gone before." (Both Slashdot and SourceForge are part of VA Software.)

refactorator writes "We have a lift-off! The NASA Ames Research Center has open sourced Java PathFinder , a JVM that is an explicit state software model checker, all written in Java. For the first time, the complete master development site of a live NASA software engineering project is hosted on SourceForge. Read the official press release for details. The team around John Penix, Willem Visser, and Peter Mehlitz fought long and hard to get the development hosted outside of NASA, to enable true collaborative software development. Now show the government that it works - join the fray. May Java PathFinder boldly go where no NASA program has gone before." (Both Slashdot and SourceForge are part of VA Software.)

prostoalex writes "Can an open source project be acquired? ZDNet's Between The Lines says yes, one just did. Software startup JasperSoft acquired Sourceforge-based project JasperReports, which involved acquiring the copyrights and hiring the lead developer for the project." I guess the point he tries to make is that the new corporate overloads can essentially have a free and non-free version of the code, and more or less orphan the free version. The problem of course is that if the non-free version gets good, others will simply fork.

thgreatoz writes "While attending Penguicon 3.0 in Novi, MI, I came across an interesting project. Matt Switlik of Swittech aims to do for robotics what the GPL did for Open Source Software - a completely open robotics platform. Dubbed the Open Robotics Peripheral Platform, or O.R.P.P, Switlik and his partner Jason Hunt have taken a completely modular approach to robotics, with the goal of making robot development as easy as homegrowing a PC. Will we see fleets of ORPP robots plowing our streets and mowing our lawns in the future?"

mandrake*rpgdx writes "I'm looking into downloading/purchasing some map making software for my Table Top RPG group. I've heard about the free (GPL'd) AutoRealms and wondered if anyone with experience can compare it to commercial products like Campaign Cartographer, and if there is any Linux based map-maker I can grab?" The one I've been most impressed with, and might pick up at Gen Con this year, is Dundjinni. Anyone else have any software favorites?

Peter Willis writes "Looking at Freshmeat today (a part of OSTG) it seems Andrew Tridgell has released the BitKeeper-compatible source code management client mentioned on slashdot recently, called SourcePuller. As part of the downloads available for the project you can also get dump files which detail how to pull data from BK trees without the use of libsp. From the README: 'SourcePuller is not intended to be a full replacement for BitKeeper. Instead, you should use SourcePuller as an interoperability tool for situations where you cannot use bk itself. SourcePuller is missing a large amount of core functionality from BitKeeper, and thus is not suitable as a full replacement.'" Article available about the release on The Register.

rjw57 writes "There is an article on OSNews I wrote about how the guy behind Desktop Manager goes about reverse engineering APIs from Mac OS X with a brand new example not revealed anywhere else. From the article: 'I am often asked in email how I uncovered the API calls I use in Desktop Manager which are, unfortunately, undocumented. This article aims to give a little insight into the techniques I use to reverse engineer Mac OS X in order to provide extra functionality to users and extra information to third-party developers. In this article all the utilities I use are a standard part of Mac OS X's developer tools which are freely available.'"

repking writes "I'm reading on Brian Madden's Thin Client Web that Microsoft is about to release (don't know exactly when) two new versions of Windows XP targeting the thin-client market (This products ARE NOT the Lite XP versions that Microsoft is about to release on certain countries like Brazil). Codenamed Eiger and Mönch, these two new releases would let you 'convert' old PC into thin-client Devices. Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

repking writes "I'm reading on Brian Madden's Thin Client Web that Microsoft is about to release (don't know exactly when) two new versions of Windows XP targeting the thin-client market (This products ARE NOT the Lite XP versions that Microsoft is about to release on certain countries like Brazil). Codenamed Eiger and Mönch, these two new releases would let you 'convert' old PC into thin-client Devices. Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

macemoneta writes "The blueflops floppy-based distribution may be just what many Slashdot users are looking for, to revive old hardware. This is a 2.6.11-7 kernel based tiny distribution, that runs very well on my ancient 486sx25 with just 8MB of RAM. It's text-mode only, at the moment, but it does support hard drive installation, and includes an ssh2 client (dropbear)! Many distributions have moved away from boot floppy support, indicating that the 2.6 kernel is just too big. This distribution proves that where there's a will, there's a way."

deadsquid puts forth a worthy follow up question to last week's query on audio codecs: "I'm about to re-rip my entire CD collection for the fourth time. I don't want to do it again, so have decided to invest in a small(ish) array and use a lossless codec to create a reference set of my music. From the reference, I plan on transcoding to a variety of bitrates (depending on where the final product will end up) and whichever format of the week suits the device(s) the transcoded content will ultimately sit on. I don't particularly care about encoding time, but would like something that transcodes nicely to MP3, WMA, OGG, and other formats in a reasonable length of time. I would like to ensure that track metadata is maintained in the reference, and is easily transferable when transcoded. I also want something that's not proprietary to an individual's or small group's whims. I'm thinking FLAC, but was wondering if other people had better experiences with other codecs. If you were to use a lossless encoding format, which would you use, and why?"

skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.

renai42 writes "An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix that aims to utilise the unused nightly processing power of corporate desktops. Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk. CHAOS is designed to provide dumb node power to a cluster run by existing full-featured clustering distributions such as Quantian and ClusterKnoppix."

CaptScarlet22 writes " VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened are the many libraries and projects which VLC is built upon, like FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software multimedia players, which include MPlayer, xine, Freevo, MythTV, gstreamer."

Linker3000 asks: "I'm a great fan of Open Source software (I just wish my programming skills allowed me to give something back) and I have already impressed my boss by implementing a company intranet based on eGroupware, our broadband connected servers are monitored by Nagios, staff can participate in online surveys using PHPSurveyor and they can also attend online learning using Moodle, but so far I have not found anything to take care of our Personnel/HR requirements - a simple tool that would keep employee details, allow the Web-based booking, signing off and tracking of holiday requests and act as a repository for personnel-level correspondence and activities between staff and Area Managers. I have had a look through Sourceforge, Freshmeat and Google without finding anything even near to ideal (there's a few things in various states of readiness and planning), so am I missing that 'one' Open Source HRMS (Human Resources Management System) that 'everyone talks about' or do I need to start looking at commercial apps? Either way, your advice and experiences would be appreciated."

aberkvam writes "MacWorld is reporting that CherryOS is "On Hold - until further notice." Does this mean that they are going to confirm that they used PearPC's code or is this just a delaying tactic due to the potentially pending lawsuit? Slashdot has covered this saga before."

Alexis Boulva writes "Tonight, Ole André Vadla Ravnås of the Farsight project (LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the GNU Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarks that 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is 100% legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts."

goose69 asks: "I was looking at the various options available to migrate Visual Basic applications on to GNU/Linux , as usual the choices were many from Free Solutions like wxWindows, Gambas, vb2py, to proprietary ones like Phoenix, and so on. Unfortunately, Mono was too much with its multiple licenses. I want to know if anyone out there has done a successful migrations from Visual Basic on Windows to any application framework on GNU/Linux."

goose69 asks: "I was looking at the various options available to migrate Visual Basic applications on to GNU/Linux , as usual the choices were many from Free Solutions like wxWindows, Gambas, vb2py, to proprietary ones like Phoenix, and so on. Unfortunately, Mono was too much with its multiple licenses. I want to know if anyone out there has done a successful migrations from Visual Basic on Windows to any application framework on GNU/Linux."

robotsrule writes "Robosapien Dance Machine, a free, open source program hosted on SourceForge, now uses the CMU Sphinx 3.5 speech recognition engine. The Sphinx 3.5 engine is also a free, open source program on SourceForge. You can now control your Robosapien robot using just your voice as well as build fun complex scripts to make your Robosapien robot dance, do comedy skits, and other performances. Currently the software uses the USB UIRT infrared transceiver to talk to the robot. Support for other infrared devices is being added this month. There is a short unrehearsed movie of the robot responding to voice commands that you can watch."

robotsrule writes "Robosapien Dance Machine, a free, open source program hosted on SourceForge, now uses the CMU Sphinx 3.5 speech recognition engine. The Sphinx 3.5 engine is also a free, open source program on SourceForge. You can now control your Robosapien robot using just your voice as well as build fun complex scripts to make your Robosapien robot dance, do comedy skits, and other performances. Currently the software uses the USB UIRT infrared transceiver to talk to the robot. Support for other infrared devices is being added this month. There is a short unrehearsed movie of the robot responding to voice commands that you can watch."

Qa1 writes "Seems that Python is moving into the enterprise. At the recent PyCon it has become apparent that it's not just Google, GIS, Nokia or even Microsoft anymore. The article points out that Python is increasingly becoming a perfectly viable and even preferred choice for the enterprise. More and more companies are looking at Python as a good alternative to past favorites like Java. Will we finally be able to code for living in a language that's not painful? Exciting times!"

ckdake writes "In a move designed to stun the market, the Gallery team has publicly announced its plans to merge with the Coppermine project. 'After Yahoo bought Flickr we started feeling a little bit left out! Why do those corporate droids get to do all the acquisitions?' asked Bharat Mediratta, co-founder of the Gallery project, in a joint press conference. Joachim "GauGau" Müller, the lead developer for Coppermine, added 'It's time for us open source guys to get in on the fun of burning money by making senseless acquisitions!' Get the full story at coppergallery.org (Coral link)"

toadlife writes "A group of prominent Internet providers are teaming up with a security vendor Arbor Networks to form the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance. Through the use of Arbor Networks Peakflow SP internet appliance (which is an OpenBSD box with some secret sauce mixed in), members of the alliance can share internet threat information with each other in real time. It sounds a bit like Razor, doesn't it?"

mpeg4codec writes "OSNews reported earlier this month that the lightweight Blackbox window manager has been updated to 0.70. Among the new features are EWMH compliance, anti-aliased fonts, unicode support, and backwards compatibility with previous versions' styles. Of course, it brings you all these new features (well, some are optional) while retaining its small binary size, small memory footprint, and short list of dependencies. I for one think it's about time."

Masa writes "ONLamp has an insightful article by Stephen R. Walli about Microsoft Shared Source Initiative and some thoughts, what it would really mean if Microsoft would open-source their operating system. The article gives a nice perspective on the Shared Source Initiative and what it is meant to be. It also shows that even if it might look that Microsoft doesn't understand the value of open source, there actually are some projects under the OSI-approved licenses, for example the WiX Toolset, which is a good example of a successful open source project by Microsoft."

teslatug writes "IBM has released a preliminary alpha version of its History Flow Visualization Application that shows how collaboratively created documents evolve. The tool is written in Java and it's available for download along with plugins for MoinMoin and MediaWiki. They have some interesting screenshots of the Wikipedia articles on abortion, Brazil, and love."

Zphbeeblbrox asks: "Our Company is looking to set up a central proxy/gateway for several of our Networks. We would like to investigate some of the Open Source Antivirus Proxy solutions and AntiViral Network Scanning, however the information we have on them is rather sketchy. Have any of you had experience setting up DansGuardian with the Clam-AV plugin or similar such solutions. Additionally the mail proxy with Clam-AV solutions? If you have, what advice and recommendations would you have for us. Do they work and should we consider using something like snort-inline to scan our network traffic for viruses? I have found little by way of comparisons or reviews on them so I'm hoping you will be able to share some of your experiences on their effectiveness."

mrfibbi asks: "/etc is a mess, plain and simple. Each program has its own (incompatible) config file format and the naming scheme/hierarchy is left almost solely to the author. Furthermore, package updates are a mess, either choosing to replace the entire config file, reject any updated versions (which leads to inconsistencies), or, as is the case with etc-update, asking the user to manually merge the files, which takes forever after a big update. We've revamped /dev with udev, but we've still failed to come up with a universal, duct-tape-free solution for the problem. Though solutions exist, there has been little or no adoption, either due to a personal dislike for the idea or API, or just an indifference to the problem. Should we work toward migrating to an Elektra-like system? Something else? Or do most simply find it not worth the trouble?"

jcr13 writes "OCaml is nearly as fast (or sometimes even faster) than C, right? At least according to the Computer Language Shootout [alternate] (OCaml supporters often point to these shootout results). My results on a real-world programming problem (optimizing a garden layout using dynamic programming) disagree. On one particular problem instance (a garden of size 7x3), my C++ implementation finished in 1 second, while the OCaml implementation was still running after 16 minutes. Bear in mind that my OCaml implementation was dramatically faster than my equivalent Haskell code. It seems that if you program using a functional style in OCaml (which I did, using map, filter, and other recursive structures in place of loops), it is quite slow. However, most of the shootout OCaml programs rely heavily on OCaml's imperative features (unlike Haskell, OCaml doesn't force you to be a functional purist). If you write OCaml code that is isomorphic to C code, it will be fast---what about if you use OCaml the way it was meant to be used?"

Nuclear Elephant writes "After a grueling five months of development, DSPAM Version 3.4 has been officially released. Among the major changes include full LMTP support, client/server support (dspamc), Bayesian Noise Reduction v2.0 technology (as previously introduced at this year's spam conference), many improvements to speed and accuracy, and support for the Streamlined Blackhole List, a machine-automated true-time collaborative blacklist that has tweaked the interest of filter authors from other filtering projects including Death2Spam and Bogofilter. Version 1.0 of the streamlined blackhole list client/server software was also released this weekend. If testing spam filters is your cup of tea, some testing tips for this new version (and statistical filters in general) have also been published on the website."

Node and Edge asks: "Many interesting problem domains involve some form of graph-based or graph-like information: network activity visualizations; social software; workflow management; P2P software development; and version control with branching, just to name a few. It is notoriously difficult for people to visualize a graph structure - unless it happens to be a strictly hierarchical tree-like structure, such as what we know from file-system explorers. Now, with all of that said, what graph libraries can you recommend? The following criteria apply, though they're not absolute: Java or Java bindings; simple to use for simple applications; and polished, extensible UI components. I'm familiar with JGraph, JUNG, Prefuse, OpenJGraph, Tigris GEF, Eclipse GEF, Graphviz, but have not had a chance to evaluate them all. Have you used any of these extensively? If so, can you provide any constructive advice? If not, can you recommend something else, ?"

Node and Edge asks: "Many interesting problem domains involve some form of graph-based or graph-like information: network activity visualizations; social software; workflow management; P2P software development; and version control with branching, just to name a few. It is notoriously difficult for people to visualize a graph structure - unless it happens to be a strictly hierarchical tree-like structure, such as what we know from file-system explorers. Now, with all of that said, what graph libraries can you recommend? The following criteria apply, though they're not absolute: Java or Java bindings; simple to use for simple applications; and polished, extensible UI components. I'm familiar with JGraph, JUNG, Prefuse, OpenJGraph, Tigris GEF, Eclipse GEF, Graphviz, but have not had a chance to evaluate them all. Have you used any of these extensively? If so, can you provide any constructive advice? If not, can you recommend something else, ?"