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prostoalex writes "Seattle Times section on Personal Technology compares Xandros and Lindows as two alternatives to Windows for desktop computing. Their verdict: installation - excellent; OpenOffice - good enough; digital cameras, printers and other peripherals - excellent; CD burning - no problems; video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats); digital camcorders - poor; burning audio CDs - poor; Net access and Web browsing - no problems."

prostoalex writes "Earthlink dedicated $500,000 to delivering broadband connections over power lines by launching a test drive of the technology with Progress Energy in North Carolina. 500 homes involved in the projects can sign up for promotional pricing of $20/month, which after 3 months will be changed to $50/month. No word on bandwidth provided, but Ambient Corp., which provides technology for the project and accpeted EarthLink investment, claims data rates exceeding 10 Mpbs."

prostoalex writes "British Internet provider Telewest Broadband is testing a system, which allows people to attach specific smells to their e-mail. It works with air freshener cartridge that one plugs into PC. The technology is developed by a US-based company Trisenx, which features the products and pricing on its Web site. A 20-channel serial port device costs $269, the same price for optional software package allowing the user to author specific smells. The replacement cartridges are $48 each." They're hardly the first attempt at adding smell to the computer experience. Digiscent didn't work out so well.

prostoalex writes "Rob Enderle is typing away (perhaps even on his very own Ferrari laptop) at Intel Developer Forum, noting that Intel gave up on IEEE Ultrawideband and decided to switch to Wireless USB derivative. This, in Mr. Enderle's opinion, signifies the end of life for Bluetooth standard, although Enderle calls Bluetooth 'dead' in the title of the article and 'all but dead' in the actual text."

prostoalex writes "MSNBC covers the Academy's Scientific and Technical Awards, which generally take place before the Oscars, but recognize companies and individuals that helped the advancement of film-making with technology. This year's winners include DigiDesign, the creator of Pro Tools audio package, Bill Tondreau from Kuper Controls for robotic camera systems and Peter D. Parks, with a lifetime achievement award."

prostoalex writes "The ActiveState Perl Haiku Poetry Contest has ended. The results are in and here's the page with all the entries." Here's the original announcement.

prostoalex writes "AnonX allows Kazaa users to connect to its own VPN, effectively obfuscating their original IP address that certain association has been using to subpoena the file-sharers. The company is created by a Texas ISP employee, but is registered in Vanuatu, and already has 7,000 users paying $6 a month."

prostoalex writes "Andy Beal from SearchEngineGuide.com interviews Robert Scoble from Microsoft. Scoble tells the audience what current search technologies Microsoft is working on as part of its Longhorn/WinFS development as well as in the field of Internet. Scoble also discusses current problems with local drive and Internet searching, such as absence of metadata for a lot of files out there: "When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information) but that metadata isn't useful for most human searches. For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""

prostoalex writes "Bruce Eckel (from the Thinking in C++/Java/Patterns/Enterprise Java fame) and Bill Venners have interviewed programming legend Anders Hejlsberg. After 13 years in Borland and joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg now leads the development of C# language and talks about the development process, reasons some things exist in C# and some not, as well as future directions."

prostoalex writes "Japanese subscribers will be able to get 70 television channels with a new cell phone, currently developed and tested by Samsung. Using an ARM microprocessor, Samsung makes it possible to receive satellite TV transmissions in 2.6 GHz range. No dish is required, however, for clarity of the signal the company is currently installing a network of repeaters. This could substantially increase the number of satellite TV subscribers, which in the United States is still a distant second to cable television."

prostoalex writes "British Next-Generation Security Software discovered three vulnerabilities in popular Real Player. A malicious attacker can execute arbitrary code by offering corrupted RealAudio stream. Real Networks posted the instructions on dealing with security flaws."

prostoalex writes "The topic of starting your own software company was recently brought up on Ask Slashdot as a way to fight current employment trends. Eric Sink from SourceGear, who shared his software company-building experience before has written a new article published on MSDN. Getting started with your own software company suggests several simple steps to evaluate your abilities, count your estimated expenses and then start the software company, if the idea still seems feasible."

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Before Sun monopolized the notion of 'write once, run everywhere,' those who enjoy programming in C++ had the choice of using Qt libraries that provide cross-platform GUI support. C++ GUI Programming with Qt3 is written by the employees of TrollTech, the company that created and currently distributes the Qt environment." Read on for the rest of Alex's review. C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 author Jasmin Blanchette, Mark Summerfield pages 464 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 9 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 0131240722 summary Practical introduction into GUI programming with Qt

The first question that came to mind when I got this book - is there any need for it? Qt's Documentation is detailed and extensive with how-to's and an API reference available online for free. I have done GUI development in .NET (with C#) and Tk (with Perl) environments, and even though I've never tried Qt, the site with tutorials looked like a sufficiently good resource to start.

However, after getting through the first few chapters, religiously trying out the code, my opinions on whether a separate book is needed have changed. Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield's book can take a sufficiently clueless newbie with some C++ knowledge and guide him through the intricacies of GUI building, providing practical advice and some bits of experience on the way. You learn about the practicality of this book by turning to page 3 (with page 1 being the title) and seeing a code example as the second paragraph of the first chapter. Writing a basic GUI application in C++/Qt is attractively easy, to win you over and make you read the rest of the chapter, as well as finish the basic introduction by creating a windowed application with SpinBox and Slider widgets.

The table of contents is available on the publisher's Web site and looks fairly simple. Each chapter takes about 20-30 pages, with screenshots and code examples provided as part of the text. Reading the first 5 chapters, which comprise the "Basic Qt" section and take up 110 pages, should be enough for any C++ developer to build a sufficiently complex GUI application if all that's required is some graphical interface slapped on top of the functionality that's already there.

The rest of the book -- "Intermediate Qt" chapters -- take the reader into the common problems of GUI development, providing some insight into more advanced topics as well. Supporting networking, working with graphics and images, internationalization of the software application, interacting with help, reading XML through SAX and DOM APIs, accessing databases and doing inter-process communication are all covered here. The authors tended to avoid inserting huge amounts of reference material into the book, and, for example, in the XML chapter when working with Unicode you will be told to go online and download the numeric values of the Unicode characters instead of dedicating valuable book pages to it.

The language of the book is simple to follow; there are plenty of code examples (with discussion following each), and when the authors make certain choices, they also explain why. The diagrams and screenshots are clear (although not in color), and the code examples can be easily separated from the text. This is the first official TrollTech guide to Qt 3.2 programming, and the authors promise that the techniques will work with Qt 4.

Perhaps part of the positive impression that this book left is the fact that programming in Qt is easy and straightforward. At the early stages of my education, I started learning GUI programming with MFC, which left an indelible image of complexity and will probably increase psychiatrist bills in the future (to be fair to Microsoft, Windows Forms with .NET is a huge step forward). The book and the Qt library made some complex things sound quite simple and enjoyable to program. As Matthias Ettrich notes in the foreword to this book, the most important point in reasoning why Qt is so popular is "because programmers like it."

The book comes with a CD that contains non-commercial version of Qt 3.2 for Windows/Mac/Linux, Borland C++ 5.5 (Non-Commercial) and trial version of Borland C++ 6.0 compilers, SQLite database engine and book source code. The non-commercial version of Qt 3.2 for Windows can be installed for Borland C++ 5.5, Borland C++ 6.0, Microsoft Visual C++ 6 and Microsoft Visual C++.NET environments. The examples are quite conveniently located in folders with chapter numbers, followed by subfolders with example names.

Whether you're looking for general introduction to GUI development with C++ or trying to learn Qt, having worked with other libraries and toolkits before, this book is a good source of practical information and reference. The book is part of Perens' Open Source Series.

Alex Moskalyuk enjoys reading and reviewing books on programming and tech industry in general. You can read his other reviews on his personal site. You can purchase C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Performer Guy writes "This SCO press release indicates that they are offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest & conviction of the MyDoom DDoS worm authors. Let's hope they catch them. Not merely because MyDoom is one of the most mindless attacks on our internet infrastructure in memory, but also when they pay up it'll be less cash for SCO's litigation engine." Thanks to Tin Foil Hat and prostoalex for pointing out links at ComputerWorld and CNET, too. Related to this: stealth.c writes "Bruce Perens has written a letter to the Open Source community, discouraging us from cheering on the MyDOOM virus, as it would falsely implicate the FOSS communities and almost certainly cause the success of the virus writer's mission of discrediting these movements. This letter is also posted on NewsForge and on Groklaw." Unfortunately, with columns like this one blaming the worm on "some ticked-off Linux fan", it needs to be said.

prostoalex writes "We've read about Justin Frankel, but what are the other heroes of the MP3 revolution up to? News.com.com.com tells the story of Shawn Fanning's new company. SnoCap (which changed its name from Open Copyright Database) is currently developing file-sharing mechanisms that would allow the music industry to earn money."

prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech published a review of 4 Linux live distributions that do not require installation and run off a CD. Knoppix, Feather Linux, Gnoppix and MEPIS Linux were researched, with Knoppix winning the competition (and Gnoppix not graded, since it's still in beta)." One more (of the seemingly infinite number of live distros) I've recently tried and been happy with is called Slax, and is what it sounds like -- a live Slackware distribution. Slax worked great with my finicky older Toshiba laptop. (However, slax.org appears to be down.)

prostoalex writes "Associated Press suggests that the United States might be on the move to create a centralized animal database that would track all sorts of information about the farm animals, including their origins. RFID technology comes into play, apparently, with cheap tags that could be assigned to animals right after birth and special scanners capable of retrieving the RFID and fetching the data from the centralized database."

prostoalex writes "Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States. The Gucci G-Spot turned out to be too risque, video for Drug-Free America was deemed too disgusting, Internet's favorite Honda "Cog" commercial won't air due to the high prices for a 2-minute spot, and Japanese commercials with American actors have contracts preventing the companies to run the same ads in the US. AdAge provides a link to the pictures and video (Windows Media .ASF format, alas) of the 10 best unaired commercials." I can get the ASFs working under VLC.

prostoalex writes "Eric Sink from SourceGear, well-known in the open-source world for AbiWord Suite, shares his thoughts on starting and running a software business. One of the keys to a successful business, as Thomas J. Watson once said, was to double the rate of failures. Eric Sink tells the story of what mistakes he personally made, what could be avoided, and what's important for geeks to know when starting a software company."

prostoalex writes "Gloriad (Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development), a scientific data network, will unite academic institutions in China, Russia and the United States with a 100 MBps link. National Center for Supercomputing Applications received a $2.8 mln grant from NSF, and both Russia and China will match this amount to contribute to network build-up. Later this year, as the Associated Press article notes, a new plan will be launched to move the international network to 10 GBps capacity."

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Remember those 'how-to' and 'home improvement' books that you enjoyed reading as a little kid? In the first half of the last century there was a variety of books, with names like 'Boy Mechanic' or '1,000 Projects for a Boy,' which would give a teenager a variety of projects to work on productively. Building bird houses, creatively reusing helmets from World War I, and later different projects that had to do with radio and transistors - in the pre-television age all that guaranteed some creative time for geeks (whether kids or adults) and allowed them pick up skills, necessary perhaps in real life." Alex reviews below a book that fills a similar niche for the present day, outlining all 13 projects in Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment. Whether you'd consider all of the projects toys is up to you. Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment author Chris Negus. Chuck Wolber pages 360 publisher John Wiley & Sons rating 9/10 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 0764525085 summary Variety of Linux-based projects for home, business or just for fun

Things changed in 21st century, so what's a geek to do? As for the household products, you can probably always get stuff cheaper at Wal-Mart than build it yourself. Radio-related projects just don't seem that much fun anymore, since there's little sense of discovery.

Linux Toys is just the book that fills that void.

What's covered Chris Negus (author of the Red Hat Linux Bible) and Chuck Wolber (from Tacoma LUG) came up with 13 different projects that one can do at home. All of them require a PC running Linux (the authors use and recommend Red Hat Linux 9, since that's the environment where the projects have been tested) and a variety of hardware (including none besides the PC), depending on which project you decide to go with. What are the projects? The entire listing is at the book's Web site, but here's a list of all thirteen with short descriptions of what's accomplished in the end (not necessarily in the same order as the chapters):

1. Digital Picture Frame: excellent endeavor if you have an old useless laptop with nice LCD screen lying around. The book has detailed step-by-step guide with pictures on how to turn an old laptop into a fancy picture frame playing a slideshow of digital images stored on the hard drive locally or uploaded from network (in case the old laptop has a network card and you decide to keep it when assembling the picture frame). By the way, these things do cost a lot commercially, while P200 and lower laptops are virtually free.
2. Arcade Game Player: how to turn an old computer with a good monitor into the arcade game player running XMame. Your house guests can then use joystick to play Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Asteroids at your next Blast from the Past party.
3. Digital Answering Machine: using the Red Hat Linux box as an answering machine that listens for incoming telephone calls (via vgetty), converts the voice messages into digitally compressed sound files and notifies the receiver about new voice message via e-mail.
4. Home Music System: have an old PC with fairly large hard drive and some good home entertainment speakers? This project allows the reader to build a jukebox used to play Ogg Vorbis files. The authors use ltJukebox and freedb for music management and information retrieval. The ltJukebox software (which comes with the book's CD) automatically rips the music CDs into .ogg files, though digitizing your collection (if you haven't done it yet) might take a while. After that, however, a standalone computer nicely tucked somewhere in the room behind the speaker system can provide for hours of music. And if you plug it into the network, you'll have the ability to change settings and playlists via telnet.
5. Home Video Archive: ever wanted to digitize your VHS collection? This chapter uses ffmpeg and nvrec for capturing and xawtv for adjusting television input. The authors then use Hauppauge WinTV Go and WinTV Theater TV capture card and then record the videos off the TV input into an AVI file. The resulting file is then burned to a CD/DVD (still using Linux tools) as well as into the VCD format that's recognized by most DVD players.
6. Personal Video Recorder: ever dreamed of cutting TiVo's market share with your own devices? Well, perhaps, maybe within just one market -- your house. The authors use the same nvrec utility to record the TV input, XmlTV and WebVCPlus for downloading the data on television shows and using Web interface to choose the ones you would like to record. Unlike TiVo though, this home-built digital PVR can only play the recorded shows on a Linux PC in AVI format, but if you followed the previous project, you can burn the resulting file into VCD format.
7. Providing dial-up access: this basic project is perhaps familiar to all those who bear the title Network Administrator or used to work for an ISP, but for beginners in the field (and especially for beginners with Linux) it provides a detailed step-by-step plan on how to setup your own dial-up server and become a small ISP. A computer permanently connected to the Internet with a static IP is required for this project.
8. Web hosting business: assuming that a computer with static IP address from the previous project and a domain name are available, this project takes the reader through the details of becoming a Linux hoster. This project is especially interesting, since it's applicable to those who have pretty good knowledge of the OS. Numerous online how-to's and manuals take you through separate processes, like adding user accounts, configuring Apache, setting up disk quotas, but few are "turnkey" solutions, where after closing up the book on the last page you can start the hosting business right away.
9. Home network with a Linux box: rather detailed description of properly configuring iptables, NAT, as well as DHCP and Samba servers to run the home network with a Red Hat Linux 9 box as a server with the firewall and various Linux/Windows clients connecting to it.
10. Video streaming server: set up a camcorder, Web cam or security camera to broadcast the video to the Internet. The authors use a camcorder and ffserver software to stream the video.
11. Temperature Monitor: here a temperature sensor kit from DigiTemp needs to be purchased and connected to the telephone cable, which, in turn, will connect to the parallel port. Apparently the ordering page is down as of writing this review, but DigiTemp developer uses Dallas Semiconductors temperature sensors. Then the software provided with the book (ltweather) allows you to look at the current temperature, log it consistently and display it on a Web page if needed.
12. Linux and some games on a single floppy: re-using that 3.5'' drive for something practical is the purpose of this project. Although the result - single-floppy with some essential Linux and character-based games on it, can be hardly practical in the modern world, perhaps it's worth playing with just to see how little you need to get the whole OS going from scratch.
13. Controlling RC cars from Linux: if you have a large collection of RC cars (and according to the spam messages I am getting, they're the hottest trend this Christmas), there's a variety of things you can do when suddenly instead of using the remote control you engage a Linux PC. Unattended races, testing your AI algorithms for entering DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge, writing some complex artificial life, where species of all sorts can see how well they can survive in a crowded world. The authors use a LynX-PORT board, a fairly expensive, but according to the authors, quite useful I/O board that could be re-used for all sorts of projects.

The Book With 274 pages of useful information (excluding the cover pages), the book creates a very favorable impression. The writing is clear and succinct; each chapter follows the same structure with an overview of the project first, the list of things needed for the project second, a step-by-step guide third, some additional information for those willing to go further fourth, and summary of the project fifth. Each step that requires interaction with a Linux box has the exact command-line instructions spelled out, no matter how basic. (On page 44, for example, the authors provide the mount /mnt/cdrom command, even though knowledge of this step is expected of a Linux user at the command line). Where interaction with the GUI is required, a screenshot is provided. The Troubleshooting section explains what might go wrong with a Red Hat Linux 9 box and how to react to it.

Furthermore, there is no dependence on previous chapters, making each project independent. You will not be told to "start up the video capturing as you have learned in the previous chapter" or refer to "previously described procedures". Theoretically, you could rip out the pages for a single project and give them to someone with no previous knowledge of the project and expect them to complete it.

Pictures are indispensable. Granted, they wouldn't be very useful for the Linux on a Floppy project, but for something like a digital picture frame, where you're required to disassemble an old laptop and play with the parts, it's essential. The pictures are all black-and-white, and by "pictures" I mean real photographs, not diagrams explaining how things should be done in theory.

The authors' sense of humor permeates the book, which makes it an enjoyable read. For example, on page 255, when completing the Linux RC toy car project, the photo of the race has a caption about every Linux car crossing the "Finnish" line. (Tip: Linus didn't always live in California). The layout of the book also makes it convenient to read and follow. A bar across the top of the page always tells you which project you're on. When enumerating the things required for the project, the authors use bulleted lists with clear explanations.

Another thing worth mentioning is the book's integration with the Web. The book's Web forums allow you to post questions and impressions from each specific project. The authors are also accepting submissions for new Linux Toys from the readers. The Web site in this sense is remarkable, as with too many technical books the so called "companion Web site" is not truly a companion, but a marketing pitch followed by a bookstore link.

Overall, I think Chris Negus and Chuck Wolber have done a very nice job. If I had more time, I would explore more of the projects personally (so far I am started on rebuilding my home network, but I do want to try out the digital picture frame, being a proud owner of Compaq LTE P100 laptop). The book would be a good read for anyone looking for some cool hobby projects, and perhaps would be a good gift for technically inclined kids, who are interested in technology.

Speaking from a different perspective, Linux Toys is the book needed by the open source community. While the usual arguments of being able to look at the OS's source code and concepts of Free software only vaguely interest most individuals, a book like this would spark interest in Linux OS as providing the opportunities to create a variety of cool toys and have fun doing it.

Read more of Alex's reviews of technical and tech business books. You can purchase Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit a review for consideration, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

prostoalex writes "Scott Hanselman shares a document from Microsoft Research internal Web site on Gina Venolia's latest research in user interface design. Since half of the e-mail conversations require reply and then further replies, the model is not too different from current Web forums. Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations." Gotta say, that'd be pretty nice to have.

prostoalex writes "According to iWon/AP, the FCC has approved a range of radio frequencies to be used on US highways for transmitting important traffic information. The technology is still 5-10 years away from being implemented in cars and on the roads, but the FCC has set aside a special area of the spectrum instead of sharing the frequencies with other applications and devices. As for uses, there's currently a test running at an intersection in McLean, Va., where sensors can automatically warn a motorist when another car is approaching, thus helping to avoid a collision."

prostoalex writes "It was recently reported that Microsoft will integrate its own XML-based language for application programming into the next edition of Windows (codename Longhorn). This Introduction to XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) provides an insight into how it's possible to build a Windows application with Microsoft's brand-new XAML language."

prostoalex writes "Qwest Communications International, a local phone operator covering 14 Northern and Western United States, launched its first Voice-over-IP trial in Minneapolis/St.Paul area. 'The future of voice communications will be based on the Internet', Qwest's CEO was quoted as saying." Also in the news: some vague plans by AT&T to use VoIP as well.